I kneeled before my master's tomb, ten thousand possibilities in perfect opposition before me. I think I was swaying slightly. I can't remember.
“Obedience is water. Obedience is food. Obedience is water. Obedience is food.”
I did not believe it I only thought it. I was not some giddy young slut, lapping at my master's favor. The motherfucker was dead and I did not care. Was I free? What was freedom? I could stand, I could stand and walk into the world and dress myself in red robes. Whore myself among filthy men. Fuck sailors for my bread and spread the clap throughout the world. An empire of my loins. My colonies of microbes, the genital embrace their sacred passage.
But why? Why not climb the mountains? And in that cold wasteland sink deep into my soul and chant and sing with the monks and stars? The Frost Giants be my guide. Oneness with the all thing. A mind wrecked upon the reef of insipid non-humanity. Deny my loins and my servitude, scream no at the world and yes to the trite and empty moment. And why? No reason. A billion reasons without criterion, all of them arbitrary, none better or worse than any other.
“Obedience is water. Obedience is food. Obedience is water. Obedience is food.”
A holding pattern. A constant loop of meaninglessness. A chant from my childhood. When the priests would check our virginity. Obey obey obey. Check it with their cocks. Motherfuckers. Nothing to think, obey obey obey, nothing to think, nothing to be, obey obey. La da la da. Nothing No One Nothing No One.
There were people around me. I hadn't seen them come in. They were ignoring me. Was I here? They ignore me and I am not here. Bah. They regarded my master's body. Cold cold dead dead. The motherfucker is dead! The motherfucker is dead! Obedience is water. Obedience is food. Obedience is water. Obedience is food. They were talking, I hadn't realized. “..devastated by it.”
They were looking at me. Was I naked? I was.
“...the best, love a master like that...”
Nude naked nude naked. Did I care? I couldn't tell. Did they like my body? They were stealing glances at my tits. Did they like them? Did I care? Was their opinion valid? Does an idiot reading Homer make Homer idiotic? La da, la da. Does it exist outside the mind of the simpleton? Greatness humbled in the mind of an idiot. La la la. Obedience is water. Obedience is food. Obedience is water. Obedience is food. Ta da ta de.
“...waiting for the flames”
“...could take her now, they re-imprint you know?”
“flames fire black dry cracking flesh flesh flesh.”
Would they rape me? Was my body mine to rape? Was it mine to care if they took it? The motherfucker's body. The motherfucker is dead. I could walk out. I could walk out. A billion places to go, a billion possibilities. I was all and none. None none none. Let me be a cautionary tale for you. Child, believe in one thing, or many things, or nothing. But do not believe in all things. La la la.
I shall storm the heavens! Heave my mighty sword into the eye of God and the motherfucker will bleed and bleed and bleed. Ha! Some billions of neurons, some genius exploding colors bright beyond stars and galaxies yet no will to propel them, to guide their rudder. Mired in a too gullible mind, too ready to believe everything and no self to choose among them. A slave then, wanting a master's will to know to wipe my ass. Ha!
We were walking. I didn't remember starting but we were walking. Down down down. To the funeral pyre. What nonsense. Burn a man's objects with his body. So I could suck his cock in the afterlife? Was it suicide that I followed? To limply stumble into the flames when a few hundred steps would easily save me? Well, then I shall be a suicide. Not giddy, like the young suicide I longed to be in my youth, when I would bleed my veins in that cold stone school, a mature suicide now. I shall make no resistance. I will let them lead me to the flames and I will cry out to the universe: Why not!
I stumbled along. Outside now, we were walking down a huge stone stair towards the funeral pyre. The jungle pressed in on three gray pyramids, crumbling and half green with vines. Between the three were piled huge logs, the trunks of whole trees. On top of them robes and carts, the carcasses of horses, a hundred other objects, The motherfucker's objects. They were going to burn the motherfucker's objects. Objects, Objects. Was that what I was? My obedience, my surrender of my will, the surrender of myself as well? What was myself? The will, the mind, the body, vague abstractions of a horny shitting beast. Lack a master's will to know to wipe my ass.
A man was staring at me. I squinted; he seemed to be behind a thick veil of milk. He was a new man. My vision cleared a little as I blinked rapidly. He wore a green and black robe. His face shifted beneath the cowl, shifted between many faces. A face like water, rippling and distorting light, no real face but the refraction of many. He kept looking at me. Had he spoken? He struck me with a wooden stick I had not seen before. He struck me in the knee and I fell, then turned to a crowd of people who had been concealed by the cliff before. They were far below us.
“Oh my flock!” He shouted, his voice booming through the clearing. “Deep, deep in my heart, I feel a great love for you!” His voice was nasal and piercing, his face a mask of many colors with a tall hat of feathers and bugs.
“In my heart and in my gut lives my faith. A thousand armed tree twisting deep inside me. Strutting out like His perfect will! His great spirit shall move through you as it has moved through me! He shall lift thy limbs, and move thy soul! I, Archmagio, arch priest of His great will, He summoned me unto Him. Yea! And I believed I was a sleeping man lost in mad and feverish dreams. And I believed I had gone mad and was raving, naked and savage. And He led that frightened creature, me, that frightened creature, He led me through a great and dark wood! Yes, His perfect will led me through corridors of stone and damp moss until trees, yes mighty trees, they rose up and cracked the stone and like huge pillars of His perfect love they bore me erect into the heavens! And from there, from His kingdom of light, He revealed unto me these true and pure things. The ten laws!”
Here the crowd cheered wildly. I shivered.
“Ten laws to govern our kind and bring law and justice to all men!” The odd man distracted by his oratory, I crept closer to the edge of the great stone slab we stood on. An updraft of wind chilled my naked body and I shivered. My skin tightened into gooseflesh.
The people were cheering wildly and saluting the insipid madman next to me. Thousands of them, but not tens of thousands.
“What is the first law?” He demanded, his voice the shifting of sand. I realized he had turned towards me. The first law? Fucking backwards kingdom. He struck me again, crashing his stick onto my prone back. I felt no pain but felt my body jerk with the impact.
“What is the first law?” His voice rose in a nasally crescendo, full of petty self importance. He struck me again and hissed, quietly so the crowd would not hear, “the first law is obedience.”
“Obedience is water, obedience is life” I muttered, short of breath and sounding more weak and frightened than I felt. His face shifted until he almost seemed blonde and chiseled and stern, then fell back into it's vague meanderings.
“The first law is obedience in all actions, that his perfect will shall guide us. The second law is obedience in all thoughts, for impure thoughts rebel against him as sure as actions.”
Below us men, they seemed little more than toy men so high were we, brought lit torches and set fire to the logs. It lit up in a huge tower of flame for a few moments, then died down to a slow flame that hovered about the logs.
The strange man grasped my shoulder and pushed me back. His face did not make sense, at once pudgy and gaunt.
“Will you obey me in all things? For I am the perfect vessel of His perfect will!” His voice was nasal and irritating. He was clearly a lunatic. The shifting face of madness, a thousand identities bent towards the servitude of some imaginary friend. Shit. Why hadn't the old motherfucker died in a civilized land. I'd be in a harem or whorehouse by now. Not naked and shivering before a fanatical lunatic in some rotting jungle.
“Will you obey?” His voice at once a shriek and the sound of rocks grinding each other down. His face flitted frantically between likenesses, so that it seemed he had no face at all. Would I obey? I could think of a lot of reasons not to. He was clearly a buffoon. Faces of a thousand men yet he could not pick one, contorting himself to please his master. None of them, I bet, the stupid drooling ape he was. And what master? His perfect will he said. Perfect at what? Bah.
Yet, who of us are not imbeciles? How many times has my own brain tumbled through these meaningless balances? To obey or not to obey? What cared the cold indifferent universe? Why not follow a buffoon? Lend my limbs to his petty will. Was it excessive nihilism? To obey or not? Arbitrary either way. To move with the tide or against it? He struck me again and I collapsed.
“Will you obey?”
“Obedience is water.” I heard myself speak and was startled by it. His face rifled through a few aspects, ending in the stern blonde again. He turned back towards the clearing where the logs had started burning in earnest. My suicide to obey. He stretched out his hands towards the mass of tiny toy men below us.
“My people!” He exclaimed, waving his hands in the air, “My people I shall summon him!” He gesticulated wildly, sweeping his arms in great circles and wiggling his fingers.
“A FALSIS PRINCIPIIS PROFICISCI!” He cried it loudly and his voice echoed and boomed like shrill sonic daggers.
The flame about the logs flared up into a huge tower, sparks exploding like great firecrackers. And in the flames flared an enormous beast, a hundred feet high. I staggered backwards and stumbled, so great was the image. Great burning eyes, two dozen horns danced with the flame, intermixing so I could not tell where began one or ended the other. Ears like a tiger, a great sharp beak like a vulture's, clicked and clucked. The monstrosity stood erect like a man. Great feathered wings flapped back and forth slowly, and striped skin like a zebra or tiger pulled tightly over enormous muscles. Two hooved feet, jointed backwards like a goat's, stamped about the logs and spread them asunder. Two great arms, men's arms, flexed as a tongue, long and slender like a snake's, flicked greedily.
“Oh Great Lord! The one and only Child of the Godhead, hear our humble worship!”
The demon, for I supposed that is what it was, who a moment before seemed confused, flames dancing uncertainly about it's great form, relaxed and even swaggard, adjusting it's flowing horns with it's hand as it fixed an expression of haughty godhood to it's face. As the great eyes landed on the strange man beside me, huge flames shot from them and the great beak clicked excitedly.
Below, the people were ecstatic. Women bared their breasts and men held up their wives and daughters, gleefully flinging them towards the beast. They were wild, overflowing with religious zeal. The great beast, seeing the woman stripping and dancing naked before him, grew excited, his massive sex, bigger than a tree, grew hard and rigid, great veins of sickly green and yellow blood throbbing upon it.
“Behold thy master!” Shrieked the man, voice booming, driving the crowd into a mad fury. Many of the women below were naked now, and the beast regarded them, it's tongue flicking about. It crouched suddenly and picked up a woman, who shrieked in fear and in delight.
“For the lord hath give us the one true way!” Shrieked the man. The demon looked at him. It's gaze fell on me. His voice assaulted my mind.
“BLUE FIRE”
It wasn't speech, rather it's odd, reptilian voice echoed through my thoughts with the force of a feverish compulsion.
“BLUE FIRE AND GREAT SHIPS, BITS OF SAND AND MOUNTAINS AND THEY ALL GRIND AWAY GRIND AWAY GRIND AWAY”
The strange man's voice was distant, prattling on, except I did not now understand him. I hardly heard him and the great echoing thought replaced him.
“MOUNTAINS! GROUND AWAY MOUNTAINS. BLUE SILK, A PETTY MAN, A GREAT HORDE OF HORSES AND OPEN PLAINS, ALL DEAD DEAD DEAD.”
The demon's thoughts were deafening in my mind, pain throbbed through my skull. The demon crushed the woman and rubbed himself with the gore, flicking his tongue and squinting his swollen eyes in a grotesque juvenile taunt.
My mind, I suppose, had been overwhelmed with the sight before me, began to move forwards again. The whole thing was deeply absurd, some deranged pre-pubesant's fantasy. The man's face was a formless gray, features only occasionally rippling to the surface. It didn't make sense that it was real. Did my senses deceive me? Did they always deceive me? What matters to me if I follow an illusion or a reality? Does mask wear face? If illusion, did it reveal more truth than the reality underlying it?
“YOU WILL UNDERSTAND ONLY BECAUSE I WISH IT.” The thought was deafening in my mind, and totally foreign. The beast leaned towards me and the illusion broke. I was cold and naked on an exposed rock. The demon, quite real, was only four feet tall, hunchbacked, and snapped two lobster's claws at me.
“QUIET YOUR MIND!” One of it's claws pummeled my shoulder and I fell. “YOU MAY ONLY THINK TO ANSWER ME.”
My thoughts could not coalesce. My mind was still but not peaceful, rather it was the silence of a deafening roar, screaming at a roaring ocean that drowns your voice completely. A thick sharp pain, a thousand needles pricking at my brain. I retched and rolled, a tranquilized swollen hand clutching at a needle to pull it from my skin.
Dimly, through the pain and oppression of my non-thought, images floated in from the world. The strange man was now an overfed aristocrat, with ill fitting hoes that bunched at his ankles. An obvious erection bulged from his well fed gut.
“Stupid motherfuckers!” He cried in a flat nasally tone. “I am your master now! The one true power! The one true power!”
The demon crawled on top of him. My vision blurred, the great loudness of my non-thought throbbed through my temples. Images, suspended from time, drifted through. The demon had knocked the man to the ground, crawled onto his chest and was pinching his cheeks with is pincers. The people cheered and screamed in unintelligible rapture. A great fervor of religious excitement, a swirling unthinking mass, the enormous demon some holy light in their vision, flames and bright light and hope, a hansom young man, bathed in holy light, purified by flame. And then the illusion broke, and they were a filthy mob of toothless and ill fed rabble, diseased as they limped about, the gone.
The demon cooed “My pretty pretty pansy, my pretty pretty mum, my pretty pretty daisy, all dried up and done.” He had shifted now, sitting on the man's face and pinching, but not cutting, his fat legs. The man was struggling desperately for air.
“YOU ARE OF THE WILLLESS ONES.” My head split from the noise and I had no other perception except it's deformed body pinning me, it's claws clamping my wrists.
“THE WILLLESS ONES THE WILLLESS ONES THE SLAVES OF LORDS AND GENTLEMEN THE HAPPY SLAVES HE HAW HE HAW.” The donkey howling in my mind drove all perception from me and I saw nothing but white, heard nothing after it until the roaring of my blood in my ear returned.
“DRINK OF ME AND HAVE MY WILL” It's erection pressed against my thigh. It's beak rent flesh from its arm and thick black blood dripped from the wound.
“DRINK!” I made no decision to obey but had already swallowed. The ritual was done, I was bound.
“STAY.” The deafening roar ended abruptly but I could not move. My head ached badly.
The man groveled on his hands and knees. “Please master, please! I only wish to serve you!”
“SOME GOLDEN LIGHT FETTER AND BRANDED WITH METAL LIKE ROCKS AND SHARP DEAD THINGS. A ROTTING MOUSE. A ROTTING CAT A ROTTING MAN, VILE VILE VILE.”
“I serve you master, please!”
“FIVE MORE FUCKING YEARS.” The demon hissed at him. The man's face, swollen and smeared with filth, showed nothing but terror. He trembled and pissed himself.
The demon was gone. I lost consciousness.