He worked from my waist up to my chest, then from my shoulders down to my hands. I felt warm like a rock in the sun, even though the sun had set. It was only the weak light of our fire that flickered against our naked skins. Orien put his hands over my face, almost touching, and in an instant my cheeks grew warm. I smiled at him, appreciating this gift more than any other he had shown me. Orien smiled back, then bent down to kiss me.
It was the sharing of breath. I had not felt it before – that kiss that brings more than two sets of lips together, but two souls. I felt the need in Orien then. His body still cold, perhaps even colder than before, he wanted my warmth. I wanted to give it to him. My arms curled around his back and he hissed as slowly he lowered his body down onto mine. Our lips were locked together and thus, our souls. Hungry, yes he was, and wanting warmth.
Lying beneath him, I felt his Wraeththu organ pressed against mine. What a strange sensation, our petals touching. I felt suddenly that I had woken up, remembered something I’d forgotten. Since that fatal night, I had turned away from that part of myself, burying it not only in grief but in the myriad other matters to consider: food, shelter, Orien and then the special powers Orien so enthused about. Orien woke as well and soon, us kissing, tangled together on the cardboard, his ouana-lim came alive against me.
Something happened then, something I will never forget so long as I live. It is a moment most every har remembers. Pressed on my back enjoying (yes, enjoying!) Orien’s attentions, I suddenly felt a shifting and then, to my surprise, I had become female, soume. Orien propped himself up on his arms immediately, even as I felt his ouana-lim grow yet more firm. He looked into my eyes with an ineffable look of wonder. “Can we?” he asked.
I felt so strange at that moment. I had always known I was different. Certainly the doctors had told me so often enough, My parents had held it against me. I was a girl and a boy, a hermaphrodite. I had a cavity like a female; it was the way I was built. Still, I had never felt my male parts disappear. I had never felt a hot burning not only between my legs but deep inside. It was a craving, as vicious as the hunger of the starved. I pulled Orien back down to meet my lips. “We can,” I told him, speaking in a growl like a hungry she-cat.
Orien wasted no time, but slid into me easily, the feel of him an inner caress. Our parts were perfectly matched; they knew one another, completed one another, became one. That night we created a great heat, if not a fire. Souls and bodies merging, this for me was the real first Grissecon, no matter the later more public success with the group. On that cold dark night Orien and I discovered the knowledge of that great magic, aruna, and in so doing, took the first step in truly understanding the great magic that we are.
A Sickle Blade
Christopher Coyle
Boline, a white-handled ritual knife, used in the tradition of witchcraft for the cutting of herbs and cords. Complement to the Athame, the ritual blade.
In the beginning, there was darkness. The darkness of the womb and the darkness of creation. I think there is a connection between the two: seeds sown in the night that blossom in the dawning of the light. I was brought forth from the gloom of creation almost sixteen years ago and tonight, I will once more be thrust back into the darkness, awaiting my rebirth.
I am naked and shivering, lying on a cold stone platform, somewhere deep beneath the city streets. Tight leather bands cross my chest; they dig into my flesh, prevent me from rising or moving. Shadows press in against my skin, and the only sound I hear is the breathing of at least twenty others, all about to undergo the same transformation as myself.
We had been locked together in a dank cell for three days; blind in the darkness, denied food or water. We had become weak from hunger and dehydration. The only way we’d known time had passed had been through the smallest fraction of light that had crossed the wall; sunlight that had somehow managed to find its way down below.
Then, after those three days of incarceration, the door burst open and they’d come in. Tall, beautiful, and terrifying, they called themselves the Uigenna. I had believed them to be the stuff of tabloid tales, stories told to frighten children into behaving, or characters taken from some book or movie. I was wrong, they were all-too-real, and I was to become one of them.
I’d been too weak to struggle as they’d dragged me down a hall into a large room filled with stone tables. I’d seen that other people, who must have been in that cell with me, were already being laid out on the tables; leather bonds strapped across their chests and legs, pinning them down. It was the first time I’d seen the others clearly, outside the darkness of our cell, but my mind didn’t want to focus on anyone else’s troubles but my own.
I’d been pulled towards one of the tables by two Uigenna, where they’d laid me out and tied me down securely. Other figures had come into the room, moving about the bodies on the tables and doing something that I couldn’t quite see - at least not until one of them came up to me. In his hand, he’d held a wicked-looking knife. I hadn’t been able to see his face, but when he’d suddenly slashed the blade across my wrist, it wasn’t his face I looked at. I’d yelled in shock at the sudden pain, but my tormentor had not finished. He did the same thing to himself, slicing open his wrist without making any sound of pain. As the blood had flowed down his wrist, he’d reached down and pressed his open cut against me, mingling his blood with mine. Then he’d moved on, leaving me there alone.
A few moments later, they’d turned out the lights and left us in the dark. The wound on my arm started to itch, then it started to burn, spreading up my arm and through the rest of my body.
As I lie here on the cold stone, my mind wanders down the twisting corridors of memory, filling my head with a million thoughts and images dragged from the depths. The pain of my metamorphosis begins; fiery blades seem to carve away my flesh, and icy needles sliver their way through my insides. My psyche seizes upon the events that have brought me to this place, deep below the city.
The day began like any other: the same routine playing itself out in the same pattern. I woke up, got out of bed and hurried through my morning ritual of getting ready for school. Jumped into the shower, quickly cleaned myself, avoiding looking into the mirror for I knew and hated what would be staring back at me. I had not been an attractive child, and wasn’t an attractive teenager either. My face had been attacked by acne for years now; my hair was stringy and unkempt; my body was flabby and fat. My mother said it was genetic, that I had glandular problems, but it was more psychological than anything else. When you hate yourself, it’s easier to find comfort in food and the cycle becomes self-perpetuating - you make yourself even more unlovable. It even becomes something of a sick sort of twisted pride, a sign of how much you don’t care about your body (even though you do).
After throwing on whatever clothes first came to hand, I grabbed up my backpack, stuffed my half-finished homework inside and ran to catch the bus. I hated going to school. Not because I hated learning. I was actually good at school; perhaps too good. Being fat, ugly and smart were three things almost guaranteed to ensure that you were amongst the least popular kids at school. This in turn meant you were ready prey for those higher up the social hierarchy than you. Needless to say, I was near the bottom of said hierarchy, quarry that even other prey could hunt without many feelings of remorse or pity.
For all prey, there is a certain safety in travelling in numbers; the protection of the herd. Of course, the slowest was often culled by the predators, while the others scurried for safety. He or she became a sacrifice to the rampant sadism of humanity. Unfortunately, over the last few months, my herd had been culled. One by one, they had either transferred to different schools, moved on to other herds, or had run away. Some kids had even killed themselves in despair over everything that had happened over the last few years. The world was changing around us, quicker than anyone could account for. Despite what they say about the resilience of youth, kids don’t like change all that much. Too much change and we have little to groun
d ourselves. So, perhaps it was no wonder that kids were either killing themselves or disappearing at an alarming rate.
Adam, one of the latest to disappear from my herd, was the only one I had truly considered my friend. His disappearance struck me particularly hard. Adam had disappeared about a month before, apparently running away without leaving even a note or message to say why or where he had gone. There had been only a token effort made by the police to track him down, but in the last few months the reports of runaways and missing persons had drastically increased. If they were not found within 72 hours, the police just gave up, almost as if they knew what had happened to them, yet were afraid of admitting the reality of it. The usual explanation in the police reports was that it was most likely that the individuals had run off to join one of the strange new gangs that had been cropping up in the seedier parts of the city. Perhaps it was no coincidence that these gangs had been increasing in number and strength over the same period of time as the disappearances of kids and teenagers had escalated. These gangs had been spreading rapidly, yet although they seemed to be forming in large numbers, no one seemed able to find out anything about them. They disappeared at the first hint of danger, apparently possessing some instinct that warned them of journalists or cops.
I hoped that Adam had found a place among one of those gangs, and that he was safe, although a part of me resented him for getting away and leaving me to deal with everything here on my own. More than anything, I wished he had taken me with him. I was too cowardly to try running away alone and just as scared of the idea of committing suicide. As much as I may have hated myself and my life, I didn’t want to die. So I remained where I was, living each day as I had the one before it. At home, I was safe and provided for. The only downside was the darkness, depressiveness and monotony of my life.
As usual, school seemed to last forever. I hurried from class to class, waiting until the last moment to dart through the throngs of students, to minimize the chance of running into any of my tormentors. Thankfully, that day, I managed to avoid any undue encounters and I thought I had made it safely through another week. I had grown to anticipate Fridays perhaps more than was normal for most kids, as it meant at least two days of relative safety and peace, where I could lock myself in my room and not see another living soul.
The bus let me off a few blocks away from my home, and I saw that my mother had yet to arrive. Usually, she picked me up at the bus stop after school as she passed by on her way home. She must have been running late at her office that day, but I dreaded she had been in a car accident, or some other calamity had struck. Normally, if she wasn’t able to make it, she’d send one of the family’s security guards to bring me home. Like most other well-to-do families in the area, with all the disappearances and gang related incidents increasing, my family had taken to hiring security guards whenever we went out. Of course, the security guards didn’t seem to like me any more than the kids at school did, and probably for the same reasons. All I know is that I was standing out there, alone on the street, without any cover to hide from what might come. A sudden fear overtook me, a premonition that I was too vulnerable at that moment, and that it was all too likely I would be viewed as easy prey by any passing threat.
I am dragged from the comfort of my memories by an intense sensation that I cannot ignore. I think I’m screaming, although it’s difficult to tell whether the heart-wrenching sound comes from my throat or from one of the others in the darkness around me. It feels as if I’m being burned alive, yet the next moment my insides are freezing cold. Wave after wave. The process repeats itself, dragging me through one world of agony after another. Each time I’m sure I’ll die from the pain alone, but always something within me resists the temptation to surrender. The cold stone beneath me digs into my back. Each small grain of dirt feels like a blade. The fine grains of sand and gravel abrade my flesh like nails, tearing it away to reveal the bone beneath. My jaw is clenched tightly, my eyes are squeezed shut: quiet explosions of colour blossom before my mind’s eye. From those explosions, more memories emerge. To escape the pain, my mind retreats once more into events that happened only a few days ago...yet seem more than a lifetime away.
Over time, through evolution, herd creatures develop a sort of sixth-sense about danger; an instinct that warns them of the approach of a predator. Whether it’s catching a hint of musk on the air, hearing the rustle of the underbrush, or feeling an inexplicable urge to flee, this instinct has enabled herd animals to survive. Unfortunately, my own instincts and intuition were not quite as finely tuned as those possessed by other creatures. By the time I realized that I was vulnerable, standing alone in the open with no one else around, it was too late.
Just as the hairs on the back of my neck began to tingle, an explosion of sharp pain burst in the back of my skull. The shock of it nearly drove me to my knees. It sent my backpack skittering across the sidewalk and my glasses clattering to the road.
‘Hey, Piggy, good to see ya!’ A sickeningly cheerful voice came from behind me. A voice I recognized all-too-well. If I was near the bottom of the social hierarchy in school, then the voice belonged to a guy who stood near the top: Jamie Brown. You know the type: captain of the varsity football team, face and body of a Hollywood actor, personality of a barracuda. I’m sure that every school around the world has one of those types. One of those people who have been given everything on a silver platter, yet who decide for some reason that those less fortunate needed to be reminded of it constantly.
Jamie never went anywhere without his pack, all predators like himself, although he was clearly their Alpha-male. And I had the misfortune of being the prey they had cornered this day. There was no reason for them to be out where I lived, except for the corner store across the street from my bus stop where they were remarkably lax about carding people for cigarettes or alcohol. From the reek of beer and tobacco surrounding those guys, it wasn’t too hard for me to figure out why they were around here. I just had the bad luck to be in the area at the wrong time.
Jamie and his pack were infamous amongst the herd students for the strange types of entertainment they enjoyed. No one who’d been forced to entertain them ever said a word about it, but there was a strange sense about these victims, as if their spirits had been totally broken. I had always believed that my friend Rick had committed suicide because of something Jamie’s pack had done to him, and that was probably the same reason Adam had run away as well.
‘What a great way to finish our Friday, eh guys?’ Jamie crowed to his friends.
They crowded around me, jostling me from one body to the next until I was dizzy. The world around me was a blur of washed out colours, yet somehow Jamie’s cruelly smiling face was crystal clear. ‘A case of beer, some cigarettes, and now we have a little Piggy for some entertainment. Who could ask for a better way to start the weekend?’
Before I knew what was happening, before I could say anything in protest, I was manhandled into the back of Jamie’s car, pressed between two of his friends. They had decided to take me someplace more private for their entertainment. The fear in my stomach churned acid that scalded its way up my throat, yet fear also kept my lips clamped shut. I was terrified of what would happen if I were sick. They were bigger, stronger, and meaner than I was. If I protested, or made any commotion, I would be beaten - and beaten bad. The further we got from my home, the sicker I felt. If there was any point in my life that I’d wished myself dead, this was the time.
Suddenly, I am awash with a coolness that spreads through every part of my body, soothing away the fire and ice, and the pain that has been my torment. Once more my wandering mind returns to my body. I gasp involuntarily at the unexpected release. Tears of relief fall down my face, even if this reprieve is only temporary. Around me, some of the others are weeping too, while still more moan and scream in the throes of agony. My body feels different somehow, as if it’s too tight and too small to contain the energy that’s building up inside me again. A thin blade of light cut
s across my face, burning my sore eyes. I can hear myself groaning.
As I close my eyes against the light, a strange, dispassionate voice speaks over the cries. ‘Three have already died and it looks like two more won’t make it through the night. I want the bodies removed and tossed into the pit; we can burn them before dawn.’
I try to rise and open my eyes, to see who’s talking and what he’s talking about, but the straps hold me fiercely. The sweat-soaked leather is slimy against my skin, yet although I’m still bound, the straps feel a bit looser than before. Odd, considering leather tends to shrink when it’s soaked, becoming tighter not looser. It almost makes me laugh: my mind attempting to rationalize the looseness of the leather straps instead of worrying about the talk of people dying and not making it through the night. Then my body once more explodes with pain. The fires within me flare hungrily back to life, feasting upon my insides with fangs that dig deep enough to scorch my soul. It’s as though someone or something is trying to disembowel me from the inside out.
I don’t know how long I was in the car, or to where exactly we were driving. Jamie seemed to be taking a convoluted route through the city and Carmine has never been the easiest of places to navigate. Within minutes, I was hopelessly lost and gave up trying to watch where we were going. I realized fairly quickly that trying to find my way back home would be hopeless. All I could hope for was that I would be able to get hold of my mother somehow, after the evening’s entertainment was completed, because I knew already that this was a one-way trip as far as Jamie was concerned.
Paragenesis: Stories of the Dawn of Wraeththu Page 4
