Splatterism: The Disquieting Recollections of a Minotaur Assailant: An Upbuilding Edifying Discourse

by Christian Winter

  Written over the entrance in an arching script of straight edged capital letters were the words “Disinterested Critique.” No doors barred us from entering and no sentries stood watch at the gate. I quietly entered the floating metropolis.

  Hundreds of tall white spires loomed over shorter white towers with grey roofing. Groups of two or three raced up into the sky together, then suddenly one ceased while the other two continued to climb. Eventually another tower would cease, leaving only a solitary spire soaring into the blue atmosphere. The tallest white spires were covered at various points in fleecy white clouds. Some even had little rainbows arcing between a cloud perched lower on one tower and a cloud girdling a higher point on another.

  The resplendent white stone amplified the bright sunlight, which shown everywhere. I had to squint everything was so bright. The street we walked on was paved in gold, though it looked like neither feet nor boots of any kind had ever touched it. I soon saw why.

  A towering, slender human—or what looked like one—in a close fitting dark navy robe walked out of a building, though his feet never touched the ground. He walked across the air, making his way slowly towards us. His long head was tilted slightly to the left, like he was speculating on several ponderous hypotheses at once. His skin was a pale brown, his close cut hair was white as the tower stones and his eyes as blue as enchanted aquamarines. As he walked by someone else passed us from behind, gliding lightly across the air in a purple robe, his feet motionless. More and more of the robed metaphysicians floated across the streets, in and out of buildings, all with their heads tilted at slightly different angles. Not a single one touched the ground. And no one spoke a single word.

  As I looked around I realized something else. “Where do these people eat?” I didn’t see a single one coming out of a tower holding a piece of food, or any shop for that matter.

  “They don’t need to,” said Scammander. “Thought sustains them.”

  I stepped back and let my gaze wander across the stunning, irradiated city.

  I saw slender sages in close-fitting robes ascending from tower to tower as though treading on invisible staircases. Some wore purple robes, some wore blue robes, and some wore white. The ones in white seemed to be mostly in the higher realms, and with shoulder length ivory locks. Their skin was dark and black. Some were gathered together looking out of windows, holding their chins and squinting up towards the clouds while other individuals leaned out of solitary windows looking at the next set of high towers. One sage emerged on the top of an ivory parapet, jotted something down in a notebook, and then leaned on the battlements and gazed up at the window a couple hundred feet above him. No one looked down, only up.

  “What is this place?” I said, wiping the tears out of my eyes.

  “Aufhebunghaven,” Scammander said staring down the glowing gold street. “The secret city of the philosophers.”

  “How come no one has stopped to talk to us?” I looked around again right after I spoke. Even I sounded loud up here.

  “They are thinking,” he replied. “The ones in the highest spires are the most erudite. They have dwelt closest to the sun for the longest and are darker than those who are initiates. Initiates spend most of their time in the towers looking out windows, trying to figure out how to get to the next parapet. The more astute can move freely from tower to tower and thus spend most of their time walking and thinking outside and closer to the sun.”

  “You mean—” my voice boomed across the thin air. I leaned in closer to Scammander. “You mean they are simply trying to figure out how to get up higher in the air?”

  “The Academy is notoriously hierarchical,” he chuckled. “The higher you climb the more you learn, supposedly.”

  “Is this where you moved your personal library to?” It made perfect sense, since almost no one could ever get here even once, and to return was nearly impossible since you couldn’t get here the same way twice.

  He looked around. “I have certainly studied here. From what Johannes mentioned back at Hexameter’s, I believe Eidos is here. And the books Simon wants are also probably here. And we might see if those stars are getting closer if we manage not to be thrown out of here before nightfall. But I don’t know if my library is here.”

  “You don’t seem too concerned about getting Simon’s books so you don’t get cursed.” Or remove the one already one you.

  He shrugged. “We need to find Eidos and hold him for ransom.”

  “Didn’t Johannes want him dead so he could grind him into powder for a spell?” I asked remembering the original discussion about the imbruted statue.

  “Yes, that is why Johannes can give me his new completed spell—not this sabotaged draft—in exchange for the statue. I will then kill Johannes and eventually figure out a way to kill Eidos.”

  “It’s a good thing we are such a tight knit brotherhood. I would hate to see what we would do to one another if we were actually enemies.” I suppose I should have realized sooner that Johannes, who had given Scammander a forgery that would have resulted in torture once he returned to the frozen library, would also give the elf a booby-trapped spell.

  “The problem with Johannes’s idea is that Eidos is, as far as I can tell, indestructible,” Scammander replied. “So grinding him into a fine powder is going to be difficult, even for the destructive sorcery that my old companion knows.”

  “The imbruted statue,” I said, holding my forearm across my brow, squinting again. “What are these philosophers using him for, do you think?”

  “Thanklessly, he gives them the power to think I think. What do you think?”

  “About how are we going to get down from here.”

  “Why should we go down from here, is a better question. The answer is up,” he said leaning back and putting his hand over his eyes. I couldn’t be certain, but I thought Scammander was staring directly at the sun.

  “How long does it take them to get all the way to the top?”

  “Hundreds of years,” Scammander said after a long pause, still defiantly staring up.

  “I don’t have that long. So how are we going to get up there?”

  “Think differently.”

  I sighed.

  “Now, where to begin,” he said slowly looking around the spires.

  “Oh I don’t know, how about the beginning,” I replied.

  Scammander stopped searching the sky and tower-tops and leveled his gaze on me. “That’s exactly the sort of thinking that will get us nowhere Evander, which is now where we are.” Scammander suddenly lit up as if he had figured something out. “We’ll start before the beginning! We’ll start at the Preface!” He chuckled smugly and then started heading across the white city of abstraction.

  Thankfully we didn’t have to walk far. Shortly after passing a sign reading “The Preface to all Future Self-Observation,” we came upon a building that looked like an observatory with no telescope. It was a three story circular building with a cerulean dome on its top surrounded by a small lawn. There was a philosophic phrase carved above the entrance which read “All Thoughts Are Welcome,” which surely meant Scammander had never actually been allowed in here, or if he had, had never actually conversed with one of the sages inside.

  We strolled through the bottom of the enormous circular library. The austere silence and the stiff, icy air made it one of the most uncomfortable places I had ever been. Here there were no beating wings of thought; they were free to simply open their wings and glide across the rarefied streams of air into the mind. Directly across from us, engraved in enormous letters were the titles of nine volumes:

  A Bestiary of Consciousness

  On The Reverie of New Born Stars that Appear in the Night Sky During Summer

  Towards Several Geometries of Exploding Stars and Whether or Not Magic Rests Within their Cores

  Encyclopedia of Meteors, Comets, Shooting Stars, and Sundry Natural Phenomena that Occur in the Sky

  On Breathing

  The Encyclopedia of
Lightning

  Collected Scientific Observations on Clouds: Their Origins, Shapes, Movements, and Essences

  A Dialogue Concerning the Geometry of Dreams by Various Lettered Doctors

  An Algebra of a Sunset

  After I finished reading the titles, especially the last one, I looked over to Scammander.

  Scammander considered them for a moment before commenting. “They were the nine original books used to establish this library’s collection.”

  “Smuggling one of those out must have been quite difficult.” I wondered how long it would be before we decided to try and steal another one of them for someone else. “So how many of these books have you stolen and forged?”

  “Only a fraction. The holdings of this library are immense. And mostly uninteresting.”

  I peered up again, squinting my eyes and tilting my neck back. Each floor was packed with books and separated by white balustrade balconies. “Why do they have to construct such enormous, towering structures? Everything up here is so extensive and vast.” I was growing tired of looking up at buildings.

  “So someone will have the opportunity to deconstruct it of course,” he said walking over to a vacant desk sitting under the balcony and rummaging through it. “You might say it is well thought-out,” he said as he continued rifling through the papers and books on the desk. I went and stood in front of the desk, trying my best to block the view from above and positioning myself to intercept anyone who might wonder-wander by.

  Scammander shot by me and scurried across the open floor, disappearing into the book shelves on the other side of the room. I waited a moment, and then slowly walked across and joined him at the end of the row.

  The wizard looked around a corner then plucked a book off the shelf. He thumbed through the Encyclopedia of the System of Philosophical Sciences, Including the Science of the Experience of Consciousness, then shook his head and placed the book back on the marble shelf. “If I were to say that the so-called philosophy of this fellow is a colossal piece of mystification which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed by its success, most stupefying verbiage, I should be quite right.”

  Scammander brushed passed me again and casually strolled around the first floor, peering down isles of books and looking up to the balconies above. When he was content that no one was watching he hurried back over to me and pulled out a book titled Of Grammatology. He opened the cover of the Phenomenology of Spirit and began hastily tugging on the book. His face turned red from the effort and suddenly he tore all the pages out in a single block. He did the same with the other book accompanied by an equally loud and terrifying noise. He immediately set about pasting the pages from Of Grammatology into the cover of the Phenomenology of the Spirit.

  When he saw me staring down at his mischief he decided to speak. “It’ll shake this place up a little, that’s for sure.”

  “How in the world did you find this pace?”

  “I read about it. I thought about it. I discovered it.”

  “Clever,” I said.

  “If I was more than clever I would have found a better way here,” he remarked as he slipped the Phenomenology of the Spirit back into the bookcase.

  “And what would that formulation work out to?”

  Scammander shrugged. “I thought about it. I discovered it.”

  “Of course, if you thought about it too much, you might have never found it,” I replied.

  Scammander’s response was to begin looking through the books again. If An Algebra of a Sunset was here, then he had given up on reading about it and thinking about it, and was simply hoping to find it. There were thousands of books and only two of us. Of course, knowing Scammander, he was probably looking for something else entirely and had simply decided not to tell me.

  “What are you looking for?”

  Scammander leaned against the bookshelf and looked at me. “A soft cheek to caress, long tresses to dance across my face when the wind blows, an ethereal and weightless grace, and a voice as quiet as thoughts.”

  “Meredith,” I muttered.

  “A cloud,” he countered. Though I think he meant a dream.

  It felt like we were wasting time, and that the Bonheuroes were going to be escorted by gryphons to this ethereal archipelago with deadly weapons and wizards licensed to use magic for murder. “I can’t imagine a society of metaphysicians is going to be too pleased to find a minotaur in their utopia, much less a villain of your caliber,” I said rubbing my shoulder where the last lance had punctured it. “How have they not thrown you in shackles?”

  “No one has ever asked me who I am up here, only what I think.”

  “And you’re still free?”

  Scammander’s eyes shot past me and nodded over my shoulder.

  “Ah, there you are,” a voice said behind me. I turned to see a pale, sickly-looking man with close cut white hair. “I’ve returned, unfortunately, without the books you had requested. However, that shouldn’t be a problem since you returned without the books I had requested.” Either the sage had a very odd sense of time or someone had recently impersonated Scammander.

  “We’ve dealt with each other enough to know that I’m fond of a joke now and then,” Scammander said, producing a book from his robe. I immediately recognized the eleventh volume of The Tales of Prince Galeotto. “My companion has the other,” he said holding out his hand.

  I followed Scammander’s ruse. Reluctantly, I pulled out Various Laments, Cries, Complaints, and Distressful Wailings Composed During Culminating Moments of Prodigious Grief, Turmoil, and Dread, by E. B. Allsouls from my shroud and gave it to the thieving wizard.

  The metaphysician nodded. “Yes, I suppose so.” After Scammander gave him the books he lingered for a moment, like he had a second question to ask but was afraid to even venture it. “Have you managed to find…Of Mutability?”

  Scammander shrugged.

  “Well if you do ever find it, I only ask for a copy. The knowledge in that book is legendary.”

  “The knowledge within this library is legendary,” Scammander added.

  “How did you get all these books so far up in the sky?” I asked.

  “Well, when one of our philosophers dies, his corpus is automatically incorporated into our system of books here in the Observatory.”

  I thought about all the books for a moment. “That is quite a lot of…”

  “Yes, and without a doubt we have the most complete collections from all the major philosophers, historians, scientists, and poets in all the libraries of this world.”

  “Do you specialize in any particular collections?”

  “Completeness.”

  I looked over at Scammander for a moment before asking my next question. “If you really specialize in completeness, does that mean you have the most complete collection of spellbooks, and the vibrant magic wielded by the early wizards of this world?”

  The philosopher smirked, like I had asked some childish question. “You could read every ancient wizard grimoir we have and still never be able to cast a single spell,” he said, turning to Scammander. “I should have known you would try to pass a student in your dark and destructive schemes as mere hired-muscle,” he said with a smile. “Are you still trying to create a coup in the fairy kingdom by marrying their daughter and usurping the throne?”

  Scammander deflected the question with silence, as usual.

  “I remember loaning you our first edition of the Historia Plantarum, were you actually able to mix a love potion?”

  “What about the old magic?” I interrupted. “What do you know about that?”

  “You don’t want to bother with the old magic,” the librarian replied. “No one who wants to live very long does.”

  “It already sounds fasci
nating,” I countered.

  The philosopher shifted a little uncomfortably, like he had never encountered an objection like that before. “The new magic is safe, logical, stable, technically proficient, and consciously economical; it can be taught. The old magic was wild—a wizard could burn out in a single spell. The old magic was impossible to reduplicate—”

  “It was also tremendous,” Scammander said. “No single spell was the same.”

  The librarian consented. “It is not that I don’t admire the old magic, or that a certain part of me doesn’t yearn to discover a secret path back to this ancient, lost knowledge; but some of the legends and the legendary sorcerers are…less than plausible.”

  “Don’t you know that what separates the wizards from the philosophers is wonder?”

  “I know of many philosophers in this city dedicated to studying the old magic, who pour over the ancient scrolls, historical accounts, decayed fragments, and old books; none of them have made even the slightest progress towards casting a spell that has the potency of the primordial magic that was cast with such abandon thousands of years ago.”

  “Very well, we won’t go into your archives seeking out exaggerated deeds from the past. But what about new contributions? Which books have you added lately?” Scammander added.

  “A new corpus has come down to us,” the librarian said with a strange smirk. “Are you interested in reading that book?”

  I picked up one of the books on the table. “What is your marking policy?”

  “We encourage marking, as long as the commentary is confined to the margins. We have compendiums of famous marginalia, and we also catalogue all marginal notes so that each book has a corresponding volume of notes, often spanning five or six volumes.”

  “I have a simple question,” I said. “Exactly how high up in the air are we?”

  “We are higher than dragons and eagles have ever flown, and are closer to the sun than ever before.”

  “That can’t be correct,” Scammander interjected. “I’m almost certain dragons can fly up here.”