by Rink Wester
Gærüt raised himself up, sliding himself deep in Nänå. Discovering her new world, he penetrated her slowly, with the skill of a lover savant. His length knocked waves of passion around the walls of Nänå’s sweet, wet reservoir. She felt her skin drip back, as his lips peeled away pleasure from pleasure, embarrassing the heat of her breasts. She was lost in his ebony...in the color of her own joy. Her body felt whole. Healed. Creatures of pain and ecstasy churned where his staff parted her flesh...parted her from her flesh. Sensations stirred in her mind, caressing her nipples, cursing her gödhood, celebrating the moist, screaming harlot in her loins. She was his. His göddess. His ümfåzi. His whore. His angel. She could feel his body absorbing hers. She saw herself in his sweat. In his shudder. In the fragile violence of his thrusts.
She liked it. No. She loved it!
She offered him her sweetest liquor in homage. Her body oils clung to him, coating his chest and stomach and member in a sheen of thin, liquid sex. Her soul bellowed his name. Ôlörûn! Screamed aloud, in the language of skin and exquisite self, the extent of her bliss. He moaned and she moaned with him, as he tipped and poured himself inside her. Her body overwhelmed by his offering, she exploded, muscles burning and aching throwing wide the Gâte between her legs. She exhaled for the first time in millennia and she knew him. She now knew Ôlörûn’s ways. His thoughts. And it was in that moment, that diversion of body and pleasure, that phrase running through her mind, that the ache returned. The voice of the Mother and Father whispered and chanted in her head, etching their curse on the skin of her womb, as she screamed, tears burning at what she knew fate would have her commit next. She summoned that hidden fount of The Mother and the Father deep in her womb, tearing at it with her mågÿcks, and with it she formed the Pendant of Ëhiå. She ripped from her own mind all memory of that curse, trapping it deep within the Pendant where it’s dark prophecy could do no harm. Or so she had thought millions of years ago when the morning was just about orgasms and mankynd.
And yet according to Gærüt those words had come back to haunt them all 4000 years ago and get her good and killed.
Those fucking words.
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With seed shall be wrought the beast of light,
And the binding of the seven’s might,
When blood knife joins two halves from one,
And third he comes to gnash and right,
These words with mågÿck seared to life,
To daughters unborn in deep dark’s sight,
We sleep and slumber our son’s travail,
His menace, our pain, gröötslâng’s delight.
We curse and tie with tongue we wind,
And return we shall in that great time,
When all is done and time our tell,
Return to ring Hiklorim‘s bell,
Shall Mother and Father destruction knell,.
To make Father of Sky and all life wail!
42
Vickie stepped down out of her 2018 Lincoln Navigator and was immediately assaulted. Amid the squeal of BBQ restaurants, drunk Braves fans and Chinese tourists hawking spit over every square inch of her adopted city, she and Victor fought their way to the lively Christmas lit doors of that Little Five Points bistro. Atlanta was rootless and tragically urban to her. Its sprawl had always dampened her somehow. That overstimulated fight or flight herky jerky response to permanently and slowly dying of civilized living. Her home was here in this city, but she had grown up in a faraway distant farm town in Northern North Carolina. Just her and Grandma Carrie Tyree. She loved waking up to pick pecans, muscadine grapes and apples and washing off the itch of shelled corn silk. Vickie missed the feel of short spring grass and the musky cling-to-your-overalls all day smell of cow shit.
In the countryside, silence was something visual. Its mood painted the kind of life where even dogs and hogs have the presence of mind to sit and gaze at rainbows. Migrant workers and seasonal pickers sang and hand danced on their 25 acre farm as Miss Ethyl Rene’s cucumber mill and the cucumber season stretched wide and long. Nature had a bright green fever as that wild hair, Ralphie Micholson, who could never hold down a job, would always come around for one of Grandma Carrie’s hot biscuits and a mayonnaise jar of homemade lemonade. Vickie’s summers were a soft oven keeping her puberty warm that only growing up had tamed. Drying roses and hornets buzzing played like an orchestra on the wind. Vickie relished those stray glimpses of childhood and that restless sleepless joy. Like Emily Bronte, no coward soul was hers and country life was her thousand creeds of vanity.
Her past was filled with those memorial corpses. Dead and rotting memories stacked like legos in a junk heap of deception. Mågÿck had now removed the veil. Now she saw it all from froth to foam. None of it was real.
4000 years ago I was born. I died as Victor and was born in death anew.
She wasn’t Vickie. She was Victor. For thousands of years that was her name. Victor. Grandma Carrie Tyree was standing there that day, head wrap dripping in shells and hand carved stone work. Meeting Victor the other night on that ranch had left her unstrung but she remembered all their faces as time whirled around her. Her foot firmly planted in that memory she again looked up at the being with the tusks standing over her, reaching to choke her and calling her Nänå with such pain in his voice. But it wasn’t her he was talking to. It wasn’t her throat he was choking. He was calling someone else Nänå. His clawed hands were choking someone else. From her warm nestled place she felt the jerk and halt of their struggle. She felt the familiar grip of Grandma Carrie Tyree holding and washing her, eyes glowing purple, as she chanted that mantis refrain and held her aloft in a mågÿckal cocoon. A man stood to Grandma Carrie’s side with a face so forlorn he looked cut from sad, cracked goatskin. Grandma called him ûmÿèni. She called him Abdourakhmane the Shepherd. Together they swayed and chanted as the six tusked beast shrank into a man and walked up to join them. He handed Grandma Carrie’s ûmÿèni Shepherd Abdourakhmane a small shard, glowing like starlight and rose colored sunshine. He touched Vickie/Victor’s forehead with that hot bit of supernal matter and she felt her soul rip down the length of her, missing the middle but tearing away something crucial as her body and being split in two. Victor fell away, hitting the ground almost forgotten, as Vickie was surrounded by cast Pörø mågÿcks and Sihiosian love.
She looked down, in her knowing infant wisdom, and saw a miniature version of the one beast moments ago towering over them and the other lying at the mouth of an empty temple, motionless and bloody. Victor lay squirming and helpless and covered in slowly hardening shadow and tar. He was a perfect replica of those who she now knew he only referred to as The One and The Other.
The beast man waved his hand, opening a scar in the atmosphere and picking up that darkly mewling miniature beast, he placed Victor deep inside that blister and incanting words that made no sense to Vickie’s mind that time and space crater scabbed over and closed up. He was gone. They all were. All of them. The One, The Other and Victor. Ripped from her, body and soul, and cast away.
The face of The One was etched on her conscious mind. She knew him. Victor called him The One but she knew his name. Plastered on every newsfeed and magazine cover. The richest man on the planet. It was unmistakeable. Standing over her 4000 years ago, dagger in hand, tusks bloodied and spent was Gærüt S. Lång.
The One.
As she turned to face Victor sitting across from her in that small Peachtree bistro, biscotti and chai lattes slowly cooling, his ignored rant continuing unhindered, a plan began to unfurl.
We can not trust The One, sister. For when he speaks he lies and when he lies he speaks his native tongue. Come the dawn we will find him and The Other. We will taste our wish. Do not fret sister, blood will be shed, holes will be dug and reckonings shall be ended.
Vickie smiled at Victor’s naiveté. He had called her “sister”. Silly rabbit. Trix are for kids. He was as clueless as the rest of them. Bu
t he was right about one thing. Come the dawn, the heels of diamond red slippers covered in shed blood would click, tin men would drown in cardiac tears, emerald cities would burn and she would have her wish fulfilled.
After all, Mr. Wizard. How else should Oz look?
43
Tony looked around the room and immediately wanted to go for his gun. Being the detective he was, he ran through a split second mental checklist. His Glock 43 was a two second draw. Swish. Safety click. Obliterate. Ultra-concealable, slimline and accurate, it was the go-to 9mm for any law enforcement agent worth his or her own self preservation. There were 6 bullets in the chamber. Two six round magazines in his jacket holster. One flush fitting. One with pinky extension. He had a taser and a Puukko hunting knife he kept hidden in a brown leather side sheath for mixing it up close quarter should it come to that. Swedish and sharp enough to cut through reindeer bone, he had had to use it only twice in the field. As he looked at Grynn and the harem of levitating wizards surrounding him he made up his mind. His world reduced to the base, hammer, spring, catch, and holding bar of that checklist. Just as his mental mousetrap was set to spring, the doors burst open sending glass and wizards scattering and Detective Mozee ducking for cover.
Suddenly, from every direction, police burst in guns drawn. 20 or 30 of Atlanta’s finest poured in with his assistant Arshan, heading the charge. They had pinged and traced Tony’s police issued cellphone marker and surrounded the porcelain enameled High Museum of Art building to which Grynn had teleported them from the precinct. They had come for one of their own. Lights blaring and ire stoked, this was a deadly affair and they meant extreme business. They pointed their guns and S.W.A.T. rifles at Grynn and her robed crew yelling variations of Freeze and Hands Up and Get the Fuck Down on the Ground as they advanced, riot shields linked like chainmail.
Wearing Mindanaoan war tattoos covering their entire faces, three Filipino Pörø wizards walked up and joined hands. One from the Central Luzon region of the Philippines chanting in Ilocano, the other from Visaya chanting lock step in Bisaya and the third Manilan sorcerer ululating in perfect Tagalog, their bodies doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled and continued to replicate until they had formed a circle around the disenfranchised cops. Dialects mingling in a cross pollinated soup of mågÿckal intent, they raised words of power and hurled them at the officers. They released a thin hex that spun and fell trailing linen spider webs of mågÿck as it fanned out, netting those officers like beached fish. Their guns melted into gray metallic particles of nanitic dust as their eyes frosted over, consumed by a mystical cataract that delved deep into their amygdalas and suggested things their limbic minds fought to resist. The precuneous regions of their brains wiped clean, they succumbed to icy fear and hypnotic illusion.
Tony watched as some ripped their clothes off in hysteria and thrashed around on the floor in a naked thrall of pain. They screeched and tore long bloody welts in their skin, their minds telling them they were on fire or covered in soldier ants or bathed in biting swarms of crawling stinging things. Others fell down tears of praise bursting blood vessels as they looked up and saw Jesus or Mohammed or whatever it was you saw when once and finally meeting the göd to whom you prayed. They were all slowly being driven mad by Pörø enchantment and phantasm.
Now that that’s out of they way, Grynn walked up, shaking her head and tsking, I have something I need you to see Detective.
She motioned Tony over to a series of frescoes set up in descending order of size, thickness and narrative arrangement, titled, “Dusk and Ife-Ile”. Tony stood transfixed watching the drama of art and violence reel itself out crease by crease in that unfolding water and plaster allegory. Artwork depicting a scene of desert sand mania and rampant universal destruction. Literally. The universe was being eaten and subsumed by a lone figure standing on a bloody mound of deformed beast and göd carcasses, surrounded by two beings draped and hooded in a galaxy of blackest disparate shrouds of night and pitch. There were mågÿckal runes bordering the entire fresco, the largest of which hung in the sky high above all that carnage. Replacing the sun hung a green orb with several small inner circles connected by rings of words spell bound and linked to from concentric spheres and triangles of a hex language Tony could not decipher.
These are reproductions, Grynn interrupted, The originals are locked away and so heavily warded that to look upon it would kill a mere human. I brought you here to see and to know. To see with open eyes. Look closely, detective. Do you see it?
Tony bent and got closer to the largest of the frescoes as his mind tried to reason out what his heart simply would not accept. There in the midst of all that carnage stood Vickie. She stood atop that mound of bloodied göd corpses according to the caption and smiled maniacally. She held in her hand the severed head of a great beast with six tusks, it’s eyes alive and pleading. At her feet at the top of the pile was the pierced and battered figure of a man that looked remarkably identical to pictures Vickie had shown him of herself pre-transition. His eyes were closed almost in supplication as Vickie pressed the heel of her foot into his carotid.
One of the levitating Pörø perimeter guards landed softly next to Grynn speaking in a hushed clipped tone.
-La joie qui anime son coeur est celle de l'amour que le gröötslâng doit pour lui, n’est-ce pas? Il lui connait meme pas.
-Oui, oui. Sa vie est tellement remplir de mystère et de surprise à telle que je me demande parfois si réellement nous sommes toujours sur le monde des hommes vivant !
Tony narrowed his eye, suspicion never having completely vacated the premises.
-What was all that French gobbledygook about?
-We were merely wondering the extent and breadth of your ignorance and the role you have yet to play in this tale. There is a war coming and this prophecy is a marathon of sprints. The Curse has awakened and it is appalling that we find ourselves at this precipice needing the help of someone weak, powerless and non-mågÿckal like you Detective. But you are now an integral piece on her board. On all our boards. You see, Vickie was not completely honest with you that day in our sanctum because there are things that even she does not know. There are scars and lesions on her species memory put there by beings greater than we and the most powerful Pörø soothsayers of the time. Put there for this moment right here right now.
-Weak, powerless and non-mågÿckal, huh? Fuck off then Bewitched. Wiggle your nose and take me back to my motherfucking office. You and your floating freak show can all suck my non-mågÿckal ass out with a straw. How about that, bitch?
-You will keep a civil tongue, Detective! Please don’t piss me off.
-Miss Xanthopoulos, is It? It’s far better to be pissed off than to be pissed on?
No, dear Detective. Its fine to piss on me, she said , her own eyes narrowing to purple serpentine slits, power swirling and grabbing Tony in an invisible fist of crushing pressure, Just use a civil tongue and enough courtesy to call it rain when you do.
In a flash of vertigo and teleportation that turned his stomach and made him evacuate his bowels, Tony found himself hovering 3 feet above his desk a split second before he landed in a 200 pound heap, knocking everything to the floor and almost eviscerating himself with his overpriced letter opener.
As he stood up smoothing out his clothes and taking inventory of which muscle hurt the worst, he looked down and there glowing on the inside of his left arm right before the wrist became palm lines and white meat Grynn had left him a little present.
There in aberrant miniature and frightful detail sat engraved that same large circular rune that filled the sky of Vickie’s fresco. For a moment it lit up red hot and then died out, its fuse blown, leaving Tony to stare and shudder at what it all meant.
Round one goes to you Grynn, he whispered to the room, Let the pissing begin.
44
Yuhuang Dadi. Pale Loki. Taoist Emperor of the Winged Host. The Pure August Jade Lord. TianGong Heavenly Duke. Vermillion Bird of Death. Yuanshi Tianzun The
Primordial Dragon. Demon Phoenix that gulls. Sakra in Buddhism. Hwanin in Korea. Thagyamin in Burma. A crater on Saturn's moon Rhea, discovered by Voyager 2 spacecraft, was even named after him.
He was known by many names and many reactions. Neither had ever met the mark of his true molecular circumstance. Xiao Yu, the great and churlish trickster göd, sat brooding, draped full-length in his vermillion dragon form over the throne chair of the downtown Charlotte office he owned. The chair itself was expansively finished and brought him enormous comfort. An oversized Carlo Bugatti made of walnut and blackened wood, and inlayed with pewter, copper, brass and bone details. With hammered copper reliefs and calfskin upholstery it fit the lazing blue dragon lord far better than his human names. Xiao Yu had always loved Bugatti’s moorish, Islamic and Japanese designs and the idiosyncratic orientalism that made all his furniture so unusual. Unusual was the theme of his entire existence Xiao Yu mused.