Paragenesis: Stories of the Dawn of Wraeththu

by Constantine, Storm

  The cries were dying away as Manticker’s faithful scattered. Only now did Wraxilan lower his arm.

  The three cloaked hara stooped down by Manticker, inspected him, but they must have known it was over. Jarad could feel Manticker fading away. The flames of his fire were not so fierce now; soon that too would die.

  One of Wraxilan’s aides had remained. Jarad did not know the har’s name, because he was rarely around and somewhat secretive, but he was older than most; an advisor. Now he glanced to where Jarad and Terzian stood upon the path. He beckoned them with a jerk of his head. ‘Did you see who threw that?’ he demanded.

  ‘No,’ Terzian said. ‘I did not see it.’

  Jarad shook his head. Had he thrown the knife? He really didn’t know. But there was no blade in his belt now. Wraxilan would not approve of this unasked-for assistance. He could fight his own battles. But Terzian must have seen. Why would he protect Jarad now? They did not know one another.

  One of the hara crouching by Manticker stood up, threw back the hood to his robe. He looked to be soume-prevalent, very feminine. His hair was dark, hanging to his waist. He pointed at Wraxilan. ‘You are cursed,’ he said, matter-of-factly. ‘You have my word for it.’

  Wraxilan uttered a snort and gestured at Jarad and Terzian. ‘Kill them,’ he said. ‘We don’t want his witches left alive.’

  Terzian moved forward at once, but Wraxilan’s advisor said sharply, ‘No.’

  Wraxilan turned to him swiftly. ‘No?’

  The advisor nodded once. ‘They are Sulh. Leave them be.’ In his words was the unspoken message: Don’t mess with them. The Sulh were a foreign tribe, their hara often found close to phyle leaders and others of high rank. They were not feared exactly, but they were respected. No one knew who their leaders were. The advisor addressed the Sulh now. ‘Take these remains and be gone from this place. Our quarrel is not with you.’

  The Sulh set about lifting Manticker between them. Parts of him, it seemed, had become detached. Jarad turned away. He felt disorientated. Something huge was finishing in his life, something new beginning. The Sulh were moving away, melting into the darkness. But, Jarad was sure, they would not forget this night. He would not want to be cursed by a Sulh.

  Feeling attention upon him, Jarad turned around again. Wraxilan was staring at him, his expression guarded. ‘Who threw the knife?’ he asked. It was clear it had to be either Jarad or Terzian, since neither of them had joined the pursuit. That in itself was unusual behaviour.

  Jarad simply stared back.

  Wraxilan nodded, sucked in his cheeks. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘it was the Aghama.’ Then he laughed, a little crazily.

  ‘It saved time,’ Terzian said, ‘but the outcome would have been no different.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it, now?’ Wraxilan said.

  Terzian placed a bunched fist upon his own chest. ‘You are Archon.’ He bowed his head.

  ‘Yes.’ Wraxilan stared into the night, in the direction the hunt had taken, but nothing could be heard of it now. Embers popped in the fire, sounding like cracking bones. ‘We must celebrate,’ Wraxilan said. ‘The Archon and his faithful elite.’ He held out a hand and Terzian took it, kissed it. Jarad hung back.

  Wraxilan looked past Terzian, directly at him. And you? His eyes seemed to say.

  Jarad could barely function. He certainly couldn’t speak. Everything had changed. These hara were no longer like mindless gang-boys playing at being hard and street-wise. They had become figures of history, and their words – every word – would be remembered. This night they had begun a new future, one that perhaps they might not have had before.

  ‘It is as it is meant to be,’ Jarad managed to say. But he could not bring himself to bow his head, or to kiss Wraxilan’s hand. He had played his part.

  ‘Come with me,’ Wraxilan said quietly.

  ‘I will be with you,’ Jarad replied, ‘but I need some time. I will come to you.’

  ‘Squeamish, Jarad? Surely not.’

  At the mention of his name, Jarad heard Terzian draw in his breath. That name was known.

  ‘Not that,’ Jarad said. ‘This is... overwhelming. More significant than... I need some time.’

  Wraxilan narrowed his eyes. ‘Very well. But don’t take too long.’

  Velisarius and Lianvis were waiting in a doorway, in a narrow alley not far from the hill. Jarad wasn’t looking for them, but of course they’d been looking for him. Lianvis uttered a sigh at the sight of him, embraced him. Jarad remained unyielding in his hold. He stared at Velisarius over Lianvis’s shoulder. ‘Did you speak to me?’ he asked. ‘In my mind?’

  Velisarius shook his head. ‘No, but I heard... something. Not words, not even an idea, but... something.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  Lianvis let go of Jarad, stepped back. His expression was bleak.

  ‘Perhaps there is a wider interest in what happened tonight than we thought,’ Velisarius replied. He drew in his breath. ‘Our hara are ready to leave. Wraxilan’s inner circle will be occupied this night. They will not notice us depart, and then we will simply vanish into the landscape. Listen...’ He put a hand upon Jarad’s shoulder. ‘You hear that?’

  There were sounds upon the night, not all of them audible with the physical ear. Songs of mourning, songs of victory, songs of yearning, the barking of dogs, the howl of cats, the clamour of metal breaking. ‘They know,’ Jarad said. ‘They all know.’

  ‘The writing of history,’ Velisarius said dryly. ‘It’s interesting.’ He paused. ‘You won’t come with us.’ It wasn’t a question.

  ‘This isn’t my world,’ Jarad replied. ‘There is one, but it isn’t here, nor with you.’

  Velisarius smiled. ‘I know. We will remain allies, though, Jarad. Don’t forget that. One day, hara close to you will question it, but don’t forget.’

  ‘Jarad,’ Lianvis said, so many feelings in the simple sound of his name.

  ‘Be safe,’ Jarad said, reaching briefly to touch Lianvis’s cheek.

  ‘I will always know your name,’ Lianvis said. ‘Whatever it becomes.’

  ‘Go south,’ Velisarius said. ‘If you will take advice from me. There are hara waiting for you. They don’t know it yet, but they are. Uigenna are not the only way, and neither is mine.’

  Jarad laughed coldly. ‘Hara waiting for me? What am I to do with them?’

  ‘You will know,’ Velisarius said. He addressed Lianvis. ‘Come, Viss, we have work to do. We cannot linger.’

  After Velisarius and Lianvis had gone, Jarad remained where he was, unable to move. What compunctions coursed through his flesh? He could barely tell. Something had touched him this night, controlled him... or had it simply been the actions of a part of himself that had become detached from his conscious being? He blinked up at the sky, so full of stars. The sky had come back to the earth as the lights of humanity winked out.

  A sudden breeze came down the alley, scooping up litter and dust in its wake. Jarad would follow it, go where it led him. As he began to move, he felt as if the Jarad he’d been before was left standing behind him like a ghost. He’d stepped out of that shell. And the name came to him then: You are Ponclast. You always have been. Own the name, and bring it to our history.

  The Future of Our Dark, Delirious Imaginings

  Wendy Darling

  I’ve been fascinated with the future, post-apocalyptic world of Wraeththu since the very first day I picked up The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit. Humanity on its way out, decaying cities, electro-mechanical technology falling to the wayside, and of course goth-punk-industrial hermaphrodites with jaded attitudes and magical abilities – what’s not to like? So, really, it’s not surprising that I’d be among those tossing out the idea of a book specifically focusing on those early, after-the-fall days.

  The idea for this book first came up around five years ago, back when Storm and several others were working on the Wraeththu role-playing game book (Wraeththu: From Enchantment to Fulfilment). I was invol
ved as an editor and idea bouncer-offer (“Wendy, what do you think?”) and as the game involved role-playing as hara in the early days of Wraeththu, there was a lot of discussion about those times. How did the first tribes come about? What kind of turf battles went on? What was it like for those first hara, for example those living in cities that were still majority human? And when and how did Wraeththu first start exploring their magical abilities? Eventually the RPG came to include a great deal of background information covering these questions, plus a short story (“A Sickle Blade,” included in this anthology) illustrating and exploring the origin story of one particular har.

  While the RPG book was still in production, talk began of soliciting some of the best writers in the Wraeththu Mythos world to write stories set in the first few years of Wraeththu’s genesis. This went along with an idea we had about creating follow-ups to the main game book focusing on individual tribes. Each book was to include a story set amidst the world of a particular tribe, like the Colurastes, the Sulh, or the Gelaming. And so we began the process of asking around and did receive some entries which, as it turns out, we are now finally publishing in this volume, even though the RPG project itself, along with the original tribal stories project, fizzled out.

  The present collection includes stories created both specifically for this project, works commissioned five years ago for the earlier project, plus a couple of stories which originally appeared online as fan fiction but which demanded the increased exposure and recognition of print. It also includes the short story (“The First”) that appeared in the program book for the original Grissecon convention held in Stafford, England, back in 2003. There was a contest among fan fiction writers for whose story would appear in the program and my entry, written as a follow up to Storm’s seminal story “Paragenesis” (first in this collection and the origin of its title), was selected as the winner.

  But back to my attraction to those very early Wraeththu. Images from the first three novels, the Wraeththu Chronicles, gripped me and set my mind to wild imaginings: Seel with his multi-coloured, rag-adorned hair; Irraka squatting in an old town hall; Cal being called into Wraxilan’s supermarket-turned-tribal-headquarters and asked to host a pearl. I could see it all so clearly, both the characters and their environments, and the images were very appealing.

  In my mind’s eye, I imagined early Wraeththu with the faces, clothes and attitudes of loads of figures out of early 1980s pop culture – Billy Idol, the gangs of Mad Max, musicians in New Wave and Punk bands. If you watch Depeche Mode’s early videos, from their first ones to up to those of 1986 or so, you’ll see Martin Gore gradually growing more and more androgynous. When I first read Swift’s description of Gelaming dress (“skimpy but complicated”), I immediately thought of Gore’s outfit in videos like “Master and Servant.” The eye make-up, the teased, tortured hair, the shiny lips, leather straps and dog collars – to me, that was Wraeththu.

  What’s more, when I got to know Storm and learned more about where and how she’d been inspired, I found that she also had been looking to pop culture, especially the music world. While I got a lot of my impressions from music videos, Storm, back in the day, was working with actual bands, including actual proto-Wraeththu! So evidently I got the right idea of Wraeththu before I even really knew their true inspiration. And while it’s true that later on, in the Wraeththu Histories and in some fan fiction, we see Wraeththu maturing, wearing “grown-up” clothes and such, I think I will always imagine hara, at least first-generation hara, as wild androgynous 1980s young men.

  Just as the idea of the characters caught my imagination, so did Storm’s description of their environment. In The Shades of Time and Memory. Moon’s wanderings in the City of Ghosts (which I later learned was a post-apocalyptic Chicago) conjured up the sort of images featured in the television documentary series The World Without Us: disintegrating skyscrapers, covered in vines, inhabited by wild animals; alleys turned to streams; museum collections turning to dust. Other images came to mind as well: post-plague Philadelphia in 12 Monkeys, post-nuclear ruins in Threads; the destroyed cities that make up The Matrix’s “real” world. There’s even an H.P. Lovecraft short story I recall about a ruin of man, devoured by nature.

  Post-apocalyptic environments have a lot of appeal to me, based largely, I speculate, on a gleeful sort of joy at seeing humanity getting what it deserves. Nearly all of us are in small or large part guilty of conspiring in the rapidly accelerating decline of this planet – land, sea, air, plants, animals, unique human cultural groups. And seeing images or reading descriptions of the potential consequences of this destruction – what the world would be like without us or with most everything destroyed – appeals to me, almost as a sort of self-flagellation in my head. We’re doing this and this is what may happen: a message, a warning.

  But if the near future is to be populated by wild, goth-punk androgynous boys with magic powers and eye makeup, born out of humanity’s downfall, I shouldn’t really be upset, should I?

  Wendy Darling, Co-Editor

  May 2010

  Early Wraeththu Inspirations

  Storm Constantine

  This is an edited version of the article that appears in the printed book, since it includes photos and illustrations that have been removed from the ebook edition.

  I’ve written often about how the Goth scene of the 80s greatly influenced the development of Wraeththu, and this is true insofar as the novels drew upon that scene, but seeing as the concept has been with me since my early teens, its initial influences go much farther back.

  I’ve recently been pondering what first spark set it all off and have been reinvestigating things I was into as a teenager and before – what I can remember. Music has always played a big part in my life and I often think how lucky I was to be young through the tail end of Hippydom, on to the Glam scene of the 70s, later Punk, New Romantics and then Goth. In comparison to what’s around nowadays, which seems a bit dreary to me, that was a heady ride! But despite how those flamboyant scenes inspired and directed me, there was one perhaps more intrinsic influence that I have recently remembered. (Some delving into the hard drive of the mind was required!)

  I don’t know exactly how young I was, but it was between 7 and 10 years old. Every weekend, my parents used to farm me out to grandparents so they could indulge in a hedonistic lifestyle, a propensity for which I inherited from them! My father’s parents lived in a detached house with a big garden, and after my uncle left home, (he was a lot younger than my Dad), I used to sleep in his old bedroom, which was larger than the one I’d been allocated since a baby. I remember one summer day sitting on the floor in that room, poring through my uncle’s book shelves, which contained all the books he’d been given as a child. It was a sunny day, and that quiet time in the afternoon, when all you used to be able to hear was the sounds of kids playing in the distance and bird song. I pulled out a copy of The Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling and began to leaf through it. It wasn’t an illustrated volume as such, but had large chapter headings, which were like wood cuts. In a couple of these illustrations, the jungle boy Mowgli was depicted, but this was a far cry from how he was portrayed in the later Disney movie. He was shown as androgynously naked, with streaming hair. I just stared at these images in absolute fascination. They excited me, which I suppose was in some pre-sexual kind of sense, but as well as making me want to read the book, it inspired me to make up my own stories about this gorgeous being. So began my fantasies of the long-haired androgyne. I really think this must have been a defining moment in the creation of Wraeththu.

  Thus, with my interest in the androgynous dramatically established, when the Glam Rock scene exploded in a maelstrom of glitter and feather boas in the 70s I was naturally drawn to it. But my introduction to it as an ingenuous school girl was another image that brought me up short. It was either in the girl’s magazine Jackie (how many UK 40-50 somethings remember Jackie?), or Fab 208, another required periodical of the fashionable teen. Fa
b 208 was connected with Radio Luxembourg, the then cool pirate station to listen to at night. Anyway, to that image. It was of the band, T Rex, one of their first promotional pictures following the success of their first and second singles in the charts. When I first saw it, I remember actually being surprised, because it so echoed the kind of fantasies I had. For a moment, I experienced a kind of territorial annoyance that other people were tapping into my private dreams. Marc Bolan and Mickey Finn were shown as white-faced and long-haired, with a dreamy expression in their eyes that spoke of mystical secrets. These were the creatures of my fantasies made flesh. I didn’t have a name for them then; they just existed as shadowy entities in my head. But somehow, here they were, externalised and in print, and soon to be drooled and swooned over by a battalion of pubescent females. I can remember vividly the disgust I felt at seeing T Rex gig footage on TV, where thousands of sweaty, hysterical teenage girls were screaming at their idols. I was too repulsed even to consider being part of that. Even at that young age, I felt my interest was more aesthetic. I shunned the reaction of the masses, downright infuriated they misunderstood and belittled the allure of these on-stage personae. It can hardly be contested that T Rex was the first ‘slashable’ band, if you understand my meaning. Right from the start there were rumours about their sexuality and the whispered suggestion that Bolan and Finn might actually enjoy rather more than a musical relationship. How true these rumours were I have no idea, because it’s feasible an outrageously bi-sexual slant might have been deliberately introduced to increase sales and provoke publicity. You only have to rewatch the movie Velvet Goldmine (an accurate portrayal of those times, I think), to see how everyone in the alternative scene of the day suddenly thought it was fashionable to be bi. But I knew nothing of any of that, because I was young, naïve, still at school and my social life revolved around friends who had ponies. (Yes, it’s true, even though it changed rather swiftly after that.)