20: Blot in Your Eyes

Raime Transeldaimor wasn’t exactly thrilled at having to pull others share of work, but you did what you had to, he understood that; at the same time however, when he woke that morning a part of him still sneered at Lyric. Less for him shirking his load, and more for that repugnant attitude. The asshole was limping around, arm in a sling he probably didn’t need, puppy eyes practically begging people to come up and tell him how brave and heroic he was. Raime couldn’t stand that kind of demeanour. He thought Lyric was an idiot, and much the same of that airheaded boy who always followed him around like some lost cub. It’s not that he wanted Lyric dead, but if perhaps he simply didn’t come back from one of his no-doubt “deadly” missions, Raime wouldn’t shed any tears.

Might be for the best.

“Raime, can you stop leering, and try to get Thume and Fletcher up please?” Lazarus called to him, groaning as he tore his tent-spikes from the sloppy soil. Meridian had asked Laz to wake the two, and while the greyhound bristled at the presumptuous request, Laz was packing up a tent, and Raime was just standing around. The bear should know better though; he was an auxiliary act, while Raime was practically half the damned show, where did he get off ordering him around? The greyhound shook his head, gulping down the last of his milk-less coffee and heading to the corner of the camp where the two newcomers liked to sequester themselves.

“Good morning Raime.” Ursula said, passing him by. Raime grinned back at her and bowed his head. He liked the contortionist, she had a good body and long, slender legs. If it weren’t for that comically oversized skull, and her penchant for the more-annoying of the Raiji twins, Raime may even have been one to treat her nicely.

Ah, but women don’t like you Raime, they always go for the arrogant types, the bull-headed Lyrics of the world, story of my life. He thought. He was certain, if women would just give him a chance, instead of frothing over assholes with big muscles and a predator-build, he’d make some of them very happy. But no, they were happy to leave him alone, keep the scrawny greyhound in his place, that was the world. Assholes got the girl, nice guys finished last.

Maybe they’d come around if he slept around on them too, or insulted them, since that was apparently what they liked.

Heading to Kallinger had put him in a bad mood. Raime had been born in Quindon Province, just outside of Trident really, but after a few too many bad decisions as a teenager his father had sent him to a boarding college in Firebrand, hoping the Kallinger tough-love style of tutoring would ‘set him straight’. Raime had been tortured by the other children there, made a laughing stock, ridiculed even by the tutors for his interest and obsession with puzzles and tricks. So the day his father came to visit him, he’d burnt the school down, punched his dad in the face, and run away. Few years later, he was a damn fine performing magician. His distaste for Kallinger had never left him.

It was a wild world.

“Oh Prince Fulbright, wake up would you dear? Some of us would like to get moving before noon!” He cried, yanking open a button on Fletcher’s tent and peering in. He’d had the idea that embarrassment and surprise at being caught sleeping in would get the boy out of bed, but instead Raime balked. “Oh, we’re doing this then.” He said, narrowing his eyes. The less-irritating Raiji twin (whose status as such was dangerously close to demotion) glanced up sleepily, his body still wrapped around the dozing coyote.

“Raime?” Fletcher stammered, sitting up and squinting. “What the fuck are you doing?” The greyhound just shook his head, backing out and leaving. “Is there any time he can not be a total ass?” He heard the boy say to Narem, the leopard yawning loudly. Raime dismissed the comment, leaving for a beeline to Lyric.

Think you’re so blasted special, don’t you? He thought. Spoiled brat, just like the jackal. Everyone loves Lyric, everyone wants to be Lyric, because it’s cool to murder people. If he had pulled half of the shit that damned tailless jackal had, Meridian would have kicked his ass to the curb years ago. He was sick and tired of Tellurian getting a free pass just because he helped Meridian ditch her old husband. The man had been a brute, no class, Raime admitted that much, but come on it had been years.

“Oh, you. Good.” Lyric said, grunting as he hurled his rolled-up sleeping bag onto the back of a wagon. Raime watched him struggle with it, not offering to help.

If the great and powerful jester wants my assistance, he can bloody well ask for it. Even then he might say no, just because.

“Lovely to see someone rolled that for you, funny how even when you do bother to bless us with your presence, others still have to do your work.” He snapped, resisting the urge to back away as Lyric turned back from the wagon, his cool eyes meeting Raime’s.

“I’m pretty damn tired Raime, if you’ve got a point make it and leave. Go bother Thume or something, least he’d have the energy to thump you.”

“Actually, I was just coming to ask you if you might not mind waking the old fella yourself, you lot were all out so very late together, after all.” Raime replied tartly. “Y’see, I got your pet coyote up myself, but after seeing whose legs he had wrapped around him I’m not sure I want to chance it again. You don’t mind do you? Since you’re all such... good friends?” Lyric paused, and that moment of wide-eyed hesitation made Raime’s whole day. The jackal’s eyes quickly narrowed again.

“Sure thing Raime, I’ll go do your work for you.” He muttered, shaking his head and – thankfully – leaving.

The greyhound exhaled. He didn’t usually enjoy being cruel, but with Lyric, it was just so darn satisfying.

...

As Lyric passed by Fletcher’s tent, he saw Raime hadn’t been lying. The greyhound was a cunt at the best of times, but he usually told the truth. The coyote was stretching and yawning as he went by, Narem climbing on all-fours out of his tent.

Well, guess that resolves that. Lyric thought, bracing himself. The revelation stung, and he didn’t know why. Hadn’t he thought just last night about how he and Fletcher were like brothers? Hadn’t he considered them as great friends, not lovers? He kicked himself, spitting into the dirt. I didn’t think it would happen so fast...

Thume’s tent ended up being empty, and he found the goat eating breakfast with Clementine and Dopesmoker, the three nodding to one another amicably.

“You’re alive!” Clementine exclaimed, as Lyric sat at the folded wooden table. “Miss Meridian said it’s fine that start-up will take a bit longer today than usual, just since y’all are so tired.”

“That’s good to hear.” Lyric said, pulling out a cigarette and lighting it. He blew out smoke, tapping his foot.

“Thume was just tellin’ me what y’all got into.” Clem continued. “Sounds like, well, quite a story.”

“It was.” Dopesmoker croaked, matted fingers running along his rubber tubing. “But we’re here now, that’s what matters.”

“I think we need to talk.” Lyric whispered to Thume, leaning close.

“Can’t it wait a few days, boy?” The old man huffed back, his first words since Lyric had sat down.

“No. I’ve had enough of this.”

“What’s all this then?” Clem asked.

“Old traumas.” Dopesmoker said mystically.

“I already told Fletch we’ll be takin’ the same wagon today, if you can squeeze yerself onto it next t’him, we’ll talk. I ain’t repeatin’ myself for the both a yers.”

“Fair.” Lyric said, looking over his shoulder to where Narem was helping Fletcher pack up his tent. His mind couldn’t help going places, imagining them both groaning, shirts off, bodies pressed together. His body responded in kind to the thoughts, but he did his best to ignore it, focusing on what had happened yesterday, trying to pretend he didn’t have thoughts of Fletcher naked.

“Crazy though, huh?” Thume laughed. “All that business with the Baron. You got shit luck boy, or great luck, I ain’t sure which is worse’t this point.”

“Wild.” Lyric said lamely, looking away. Somewhere in the camp Nobu and Ursula were arguing a little too loudly, Aloysius was cleaning his tools, Narem was probably kissing Fletcher, and Meridian was probably trying to keep it all together. It made sense anyway, and Fletcher would probably be happier with someone like Narem over someone like Lyric. He was angry, hounded by violence, obsessed with his mission. Like he’d said to the boy last night, he was broken. Narem was fun, kind, sweet, and attractive, he had everything Fletcher needed. Someone who was also shy, someone who had a bit to mature, allow them to grow together. It was better this way; it was probably better this way.

At least, Lyric tried to tell himself that.

...

Imagine you are Thume Braider. You can do it, close your eyes. Your parents were normal folk, well-to-do aristocratic type goats living in the high, old-world towers of Gaerus. They’d known the Archduke, not the current one – Hamish Maro – but his father Thaddeus. They’d lived in a large apartment, down near the centre of the city, about a block or two from a huge generator that spit out green waste, but ran on little more than rocks and air. The waste was barrelled up and carted away by the Archduke’s men, his line had learned long ago that that stuff ate away flesh and turned minds inside out. The offshoot was dangerous, but it would have taken twelve times as many diesel generators to create the same level of energy, and Gaerus was a power-hungry city.

Imagine slowly telling these things to Fletcher and Lyric.

Your father was named Lambert Braider, and he’d been a curator of Dead World technology, some would say obsessed with it. It was the reason they’d moved to Gaerus, the reason they lived near the generator. Lambert desperately wanted to know what the world was like before, before it had been annihilated by a handful of power-mad fools. Your mother was sweet, and homely, a lady named Helena. They’d always wanted a child together, craved it, and failed to give up hope when they couldn’t easily conceive. They had a few false alarms, the promising swell of a belly, followed by the labours delivering naught but blood.

Much of this knowledge you have pieced together from others recollections, some of it came from your parents themselves, and some you have simply inferred. It’s difficult to think of them as your parents, but try, they truly were and you accepted that a long time ago, even if you never felt it emotionally.

But there’s a lot you don’t feel, isn’t there?

By the time Helena was properly pregnant with you, neither of your parents were capable of excitement. It took them six months to relax, and another three to fully come to terms with it – their dreams, after years of being squashed, were finally coming true. And you’d been born, you of course have no memory of this, but it was as most births are – standard, painful for your mother. Going into labour is dangerous business in the South, but they had friends with Dead World knowledge, and technological marvels that could help keep things safer; an injection to dull the pain, chemicals to keep things clean. Then you were a normal kid, to a point. Helena and Lambert had two blessed years with a bubbly, normal, baby goat.

And then you got sick. Helena always thought it was from that damned generator, but no one ever knew for sure, it was such an alien condition. Sometimes, if you zone out, lose yourself in the horizon even now, you can remember snippets this part. You remember the agony you went through, the vicious, tearing, biting convulsions. There was so much pain, your world was white, searing as your grey matter bubbled and cooked in your skull, practically leaking out your eyes and nose. You bled from everywhere. Seeing their once-healthy baby go through that changed your parents too, closed them off to something, killed a small part of their person. It was some kind of illness, it didn’t even have a name – doctors couldn’t tell your parents whether it was an infection, or a virus, or something else entirely. All they knew was that you were slowly dying, regressing horribly before their eyes. You’d been able to say basic words before, but these became lost to you. You screamed day and night, seizing, eyes rolling back, your tiny muscles straining and bulging. Lambert was going insane, and the doctors came to the conclusion that something was eroding your brain, eating it from the inside out like a parasite. You lost the ability to walk then, lost the use of your hands, became nothing but a tiny screaming mess.

And then it stopped. Whatever divine calamity had been wreaked upon your tiny brain ceased to devour you, and you became nothing but a burden. You could hardly walk, drooled constantly, still had fits. You struggled with anything requiring fine motor skills, you fell a lot. The disease left inkspots on your vision, Rorschach blots etched into your retina, rogue floaters taunting you. Now, the blot in your eyes is the only physical thing you have left to truly remember those years. And who can say those are even real, not some hallucination? You stared listlessly, transfixed by lights usually, wheeled around in a crude chair with wheels. Your parents, maybe out of love, maybe out of guilt, didn’t do anything but care for you to the best of their ability. They were far too scared to try for another baby, and they weren’t monstrous enough to drown their transformed son. They cared for you this way until you were sixteen, and this too you have almost no memory of. It’s fragmented, splintered and muted, no separation between reality and falsehood – you only had half a mind, and the other was severely bruised, forced into pulling double duty to a body that no longer obeyed it.

Then they met him. A man who had been away, travelling in the far North, an old friend of Archduke Thaddeus. A vulture, the current incarnation of a dynasty that had always been preoccupied with understanding ancient machines. He was an eccentric, and he had access to things Lambert could only dream of. His newest prize was something sought after by his family for tens of years, a large machine, vaguely coffin shaped. In your memory it’s an iron maiden, the inside having a person-shaped outline, rimmed with tiny needles and tubing. The machine beeped and clicked, it wasn’t just metal running on diesel, it was alive.

Oracen Drast had brought the last fragments of Telos to your parents.

Helena was against it, at first. Oracen had theories that the machine was a healing device, that it could cure any ailment given time. So far, the machine had fixed broken limbs, cured cancerous growths, and even reconstructed some poor man’s jaw. When Drast heard wind of their predicament, he’d travelled South to meet them, to capitalise on the opportunity of a truly unique injury. He wanted to convince them to sacrifice their son to him, the first of his ritual killings, in some ways. Lambert’s obsession drifted from professional curiosity into zealous fervour, and he whispered and mumbled in the night about Telos, the machine with a brain, the machine that had helped kill the world. Oracen explained that they could interact with it, using certain interfaces he had exposed through tenuous trial-and-error.

According to him, Telos had once been ever-present, in everything, wormed and packed into each machine and article, even going so far to live inside people. He’d flexed and the Dead World had fallen into line; an artificial god they built to rule them. But something happened, Drast didn’t know what, but whatever it was it had severed every inch of nerve cabling and every invisible stream, isolating a part of the metal mind inside the iron maiden they now saw. Telos was confined to it’s prison, but it maintained it could heal.

Oracen had not yet reached his current state of delusion, he wasn’t yet prepared to steal people and do as he wished. But he was a vulture in species and nature, and he convinced Lambert, and eventually Lambert convinced Helena. What Lambert and Drast never told your mother, was that they also thought Telos could do more than simply fix you, as it had done to those others. They thought with the right tweaks, it could make you better, and in turn do the same for them. They hypothesised that if they got someone inside that tiny prison, the person could speak with the machine on a level more intimate than ever imagined. Oracen had called it neural-peer-to-peer.

And you, poor, brainless you, had been given up to the machine like an offering. They sealed you inside, and this you do remember. You remember screaming, terrified as four dozen needles punctured your flesh simultaneously, some going in your arms and your spine and your nerves, but the vast majority splitting the bone in your skull and plunging into your brain. They slipped up your neck, snaking tubes finding their way into your nostrils and mouth, plugging every hole, devouring you even as Oracen Drast issued a series of verbal commands, his lackeys – back then they belonged to the cult of science, and advertised themselves as such – hurried around, reading dials, issuing commands of their own to the machine. They were all arrogant enough to think they could harness it’s awesome power, to reclaim some of that godlike ability Telos had once wielded over the Earth.  

The words included, but were not limited to: Articulation is go. Speculation drive running into negative-c. Anatomy is standard. Asymptotical regulation is go, incrassate velvet has initiated, chromatic aberration plummeting. Memory reflection; Grade-S.

But what they did to you was not simply healing a broken bone.

Telos did not only have to build you a brain, but it also had to build you a consciousness. You cannot take a full person and create them of nothing, and you were little more than instinct and hunger before going into that machine. So, while it worked on your physiology, Telos did it’s best to build you a personality and memories, so you had context for the world you would be thrust unto.

You lived a long time in there, so long you forgot that you had ever been a goat named Thume Braider. You lived in a cabin in the woods, mounded in by snow. At first you were alone, working, trying to build yourself a home out of logs. You were strong, so strong, but lonely. And then you had a wife, and you’d been with her maybe a decade, maybe a week, and you two eventually had a son.

You remember your son, don’t you?

You named him Lambert, but you weren’t sure where the name came from exactly, but it felt right. He was much like you, stubborn, strong, difficult. Some of this you remember cleanly from that time, some you have pieced together as the years slip by.

Telos did it’s best to rebuild you, and in real-time you were there close to two weeks, Oracen Drast feeding raw biological material to the machine, pieces of dead person that would be recycled into grey matter. But within that false-reality, you spent thirty years with your wife and son, never aging, wrapped in so much love and warmth and care. They were real to you, the outside world glimpsed only in dreams.

Telos did it’s best, but Telos was broken.

Once this mind had spanned the entire planet, it’s self fragmented geographically, linked by hidden invisible wires. When the world was shattered, those links had been severed, and it was left alone, no other self to ping, nothing to interact with. No purpose. In that fact you two had much in common, your minds had been devoured by an unknowable tragedy, leaving you trapped in a body that no longer catered to you. Telos was alone, and until the people Oracen Drast stole it from found it, it remained alone for centuries.

That’s a lot of time for a conscious being to be awake, and you came to understand later that it went quickly and quietly insane. Which is why one day your not-family simply disappeared. Snatched from your fingers even as you tried to make sense of things. It tried to bring you back, to shut the door on that virtual world, but you clawed kicking and screaming. Perhaps once Telos would have had protocol that told it to remove those memories from your head before waking you, perhaps they would be altered. Either way, you woke from a peaceful, loving life having been obliterated, to a destroyed wasteland filled to the brim with violence and bloodshed. You didn’t know Helena or Lambert’s face, and you, a thirty-something year old man, woke in the body of a sixteen-year-old. Your wife and son were effectively dead, and the world didn’t make sense. Your senses were too sharp, your brain too keen. Oracen and Lambert had been correct in thinking Telos would make you better than them, but they hadn’t been prepared for how strong these senses were. The planet’s magnetic pull affected you, you felt gravity always tugging you downward, and though you could not affect it, you felt the continuation of time with an accuracy most could scarcely understand, unable to switch those irritations off in a world that no longer followed logic.

Imagine you have spent your entire life in the dark, until one day you are suddenly thrust into the sun.

Now imagine you are you, and one day, everything you know is ripped away as your world melts down, and you are left frightened and alone as someone else, in a dangerous and violent new reality. Imagine how small and confused you would be, feeling things most weren’t meant to feel, influences and forces pulling and tugging on you like a child’s doll.

Imagine you are Thume Braider, constantly in pain, grieving for people who were never even real.

...

“What... happened after you got out?” Fletcher asked, after Thume had stopped talking for some time. He was reeling, it seemed impossible; a machine that could think. Networks and systems covering the entire planet, invisible connections hanging in the very air. A mysterious brain-eating disease. Thume having a connection to the Children of Nihil.

“It’s very hard to focus on that.” Thume said, his voice pained and dry. “But Drast is dangerous. I know I spent some more time with him, and I saw as he turned more and more into whatever he must be now. I’d say half those cultists don’t even know what they really believe in, he’s just usin’ them. He used Sleep to fund himself, after exhausting his debts, and burning one too many bridges. Its formula is a side-effect created from when I was inside Telos.”

“What?” Lyric asked incredulously, leaning in.

“Ya heard me boy, don’t play deaf.” The goat snapped. “Sleep is a by-product of my own memories. Things that ain’t real.” He said the last part as if he were arguing a contentious point. “They tried to do it to others, but struggled to find the same level of success. To this day, Sleep is synthesised off a copy of my memories.”

“That’s... that can’t be possible. How?” Lyric stammered, Fletcher nodding in agreement. It seemed too fantastical, how would they even do that?

“You boys don’t know the Dead World much; you don’t have a clue the kinds of things they could do. Flyin’ buggies, invisible weapons, mechanical limbs, machines that could read your mind. Part a me’s glad it’s all gone.” Thume shivered. Fletcher, feeling himself pale, slipped his paw in Lyric’s, squeezing tight.

“So Oracen Drast created Thume Braider.” Lyric mused, squeezing back.

“His whole damn family line was built around that infernal technology. That machine they found Telos locked inside, that ain’t what it was originally created for; y’see Telos ran everything, but after it ended, he was trapped, like a genie in a lamp.”

“No wonder it went mad.” Fletcher muttered, imagining a superintelligence being stuck with only a tiny fraction of itself, trapped for eternity.

“Bingo. Lambert, my... father, he said it was called Project Ouroboros, once. He was convinced in the end that the coffin they put me in was created not to heal people, but to make ‘em immortal, to turn them into gods of some kind. Maybe long ago, it was only one’a many. But it was broken by the time Drast and his lot got their claws on it, and Telos was delusional, they didn’t expect that I s’pose.” He inhaled deeply, letting it out slow. “That’s right, I ‘member now. He called it the Serpent’s Vessel.”

“So, when you were injured...” Fletcher began, his mind dragging up images of an unconscious Thume in Aloysius’s tent. “Those ramblings, were all...”

“Things I must have heard from Drast at one point or another.” Thume agreed. “The man ain’t right, got a penchant for strange metaphysical concepts, I remember him ranting about the past, about perception, crazy ideas like how self-awareness is fake, how we have no free will.”

“And now he’s recruited a small army to his cause.” Lyric said firmly. “And he’s still experimenting with this... Serpent Vessel.”

“I dream about Project Ouroboros.” Thume said blankly, as if talking to someone else. “I see faces and eyes in the sky, I feel the horizons tilting, the moon affecting my internal pressures. I can feel violence, pooling in the static of the atmosphere.”

“And Dope?” Fletcher asked, looking to a distant wagon, where the strange fortune teller rode with Lazarus and Clementine. “Was he involved with Drast and Telos?”

“I don’t rightly know. I think it was someone like Drast, they were tryin’ t’help mayhaps, but they made a monster instead.” He muttered a curse. “I think we can imagine higher dimensions, it’s how he views time, it’s how I can feel... magnetism, the world, the static. I don’t rightly know.”

“I’m sorry that happened to you Thume.” Fletcher said gently. “I had no idea.”

“Well, now you know. I want ya’s to reconsider chasing down Drast. Just... think it over.”

“I’m more convinced than ever before.” Lyric said plainly.

“Don’t take Fletcher.” Thume whispered, meeting his eyes.

“Neither of you can stop me.” The coyote replied.

...

Nadine stood in the back of the brothel, far behind the false walls and client fuck-rooms, enough padding squeezed between her and them she couldn’t hear the moans and whimpers. The owner was one of her debtors, and had agreed to house her while she organised travel over to Trident.

Gotta get the fuck outta dodge. She thought, wrinkling her nose at the ever-present scent of sweat and cum in the air. A part of her entertained the idea of chasing down the circus, seeing what all the fuss was about – but she knew it wasn’t worth it. All it would take was one of the Kallinger guards that got transferred to Vellem to be present, and she’d be dead meat.

She was certain that Fletcher was insane for staying. Couldn’t give two shits what that jackal did.

“Ay, Ogden?!” She called, thinking she’d ask the guard if he knew of any of the transfers coming back to town. When the wolf didn’t reply, she frowned, stepping to the office door and pushing it open. The hallway had less padding in the walls, but it must have been a slow day – she thankfully couldn’t hear any weird fetish work going on, a first.

The wolverine had nothing against people with odd kinks, sure, but boy did this place cater to some unique tastes.

“Og?” She called, glancing back and forth, getting nothing. “Hey, anyone about?” A nervous tickle touched her chest, and she stepped out into the corridor, a paw gently touching the handle of her gun. Moving slowly, she crept towards the little common area where the guards liked to drink their coffee and pretend the boss didn’t know they spiced it up. “Any’a you lazy gits about?”

Nadine rounded the corner and found Ogden. The wolf was pinned to the wall, three knives punched through his body. Blood dripped down the wall, pooling at his still-twitching feet.

Oh fuck. She thought, turning on place and seeing the bloodbath behind her. They all had guns in paw or nearby, but none seemed to have gotten past that point of drawing; some were missing eyes, most had open throats and crushed skulls. How did I miss this? The padding from here to her little backroom was good, but not that good.

She turned on place and caught a fist in the throat, a short scalpel-like blade suddenly embedding itself in her shoulder. She stumbled back, mind reeling even as a tight metal cord was pulled around her neck, the end of it looped up through the piping on the roof and yanked firm. It went taut and she dropped her gun, paws instinctively pulling at the crushing pressure on her airway, the cable pulled just taut enough that she could get a little air if she stood on her toes.

“What... the... fuck...” She rasped, teetering in place. A tall reptilian creature stepped into view then, his yellow eyes meeting hers, long tongue lightly caressing his thin lips and carnivorous teeth. “You... bastard...” She grunted, as Varik held a large knife before her eyes, the light glinting of the blade, his claws placed prominently on the grip.