By Ananya Iyer
Brother, you overarching scum, I mean brilliant light. I see as you dispense your radiant aura. You are always here next to me, charming me with your simpleton views. Oh, what have you done and gotten yourself into these coming days?The pity cut underneath your eyes is falling drastically down.
I think you finally had the last of it in the cosmos, and I harbour your company like a beautiful falling star.
No matter how distasteful that may be. So brother, do you dance between the stars? Do you see the cosmos beginning and ending directly behind our presence and engulfing the atmosphere one planet at a time?
I do; I see it all, you impotent piece of filth.
Dragging us under like sound waves travelling the end of time. Yet I look deeper and deeper, always wanting to piece it all back together. Just to ask, brother, was it all worth it? With a notion like this, I see you care more about that world and less about me! That stagnant portrayal of life, something so easily persuadable into destruction and strife.
Once beautiful and soon to be tormented by plagues and disease. Lands ripe and barely ready for the harvest, the harvest of my hands scratching them to the core and pulling out all the life straight out of their bodies.
Where I twirl and writhe my figure to bend into your existence. But to no avail, not a single horrendous site appeases me, and brother, I, too, smell the end of times. But alas, you hold me and lead me astray
“Sister, Brother has gone to his selfish ways and left us.”
“He is merely fulfilling destiny.”
“Hah! You claim that destiny? Do you claim betrayal towards kin as destiny?"
"Is this ill-forgotten waste of space destined to go out of the void and cosmos and break apart?
I despise the mere mention of destiny in this valiant portrayal of pettiness.”
She speaks to me as if I don’t understand a thing! I scorn and wrathfully dispose of this.
He belongs in the cut of the void; the slither of existence back in the primordial indentation of every solstice. He belongs here with his brother. Balance only cares about order and sometimes nothing at all. How can she not be privy to the selfishness of brother splitting?
“Balance, I ask you, why do you not scorn for him to return? Why are your breaths not breathing back in his existence?
How do you not destroy yourself a new form of being looking back in the void, the cut, the incision of the groundwork of Brother’s split?
Do you simply not care for kin?”
“I merely appreciate Brother for who he is, and he has decided to part from us. You should learn to let him go.” Balance says.
"Let go? How does one let go of ages of bond? Do you not hurt as I hurt?” I said as my sister looked in disdain.
She drags on the impotence of the stark area and the aftermath of Brother leaving. She only sees this close because she has forgotten it all. Forgotten the reason we exist, and if not for this bond, everything to be would not exist.
“I ask you, sister, do you love?”
“Of course, I love! How dare you insinuate such madness.”
“Well, you seem ill-tempered; maybe you are sick?”
“Kaos brother, do not come to me with such ill words. Do not startle my presence with such taint! I come here to tell you why it is and who it could be. Brother left us, and that is just how it is. There is no more fodder to weigh and no flames to burn.”
Was that all she knew?
Tells me there is nothing to venture into, no flames to burn, yet I feel the destructive vibrations that cling to my throat and the words so vile I could rampage existence. She does not know emotion like this, and I cannot begin to pry it open until she does. And speak to speak ill-mannered of me is to distrust, and I find that a brand-new intoxicated fear.
“Sister, I beg of you not to be ill of me. Do not speak the vile words that dance across your tongue before I gouge all the reasons to keep you around. I merely wish him to be of the void, not the pieces of filth he created.”
“Kaos, I beg of you to think twice about this. But I give you a plea to consider and a plight to go down. You should meet Brother at his own game and balance the tide, give existence a tone to fear from.”
“Why would I do such a thing? Why should I care about his creation? I can’t live in this loneliness much longer!”
“That is why Kaos, to strike away from the loneliness.”
“I suppose you are right. I suppose you understand that filth. I need not temper my ways but dance along the sidelines, instrumenting its destruction; then and only then can I revert the creation to his grandest glory. Here in the existence of the void.”
And with the nature of tomorrow, a cut of fragrance and sniff of the afterlife. I can’t stop beckoning why I need and must be with Brother.
My body begins its quake, and only this time, I feel the boiling skin and extremities of bone piling on each other in my shell. I swiftly and feverously grasp the highest of kin straight from the bone and rip it out of my body. Moulding it into my first disciple, a descendant of hate.
It falls into the cosmos and starlight with the horns of many and a bond that I hold with hate that cannot be severed. Then a few moments later, I peel the skin off my outer layers, and with this, I sculpt the body and mind of vengeance as she falls to the planets down under, with an inseparable bond. The last of my avatars is a rage that I let my blood drip and coagulate into a being so hideous and vile. When the creation of vengeance has finished, I allow it to drift out of the void and directly into the creation's world.
“There, sister, I have made my children.”
“I am glad you have come to reason.”
“I have come for Brother!”
Brother, I hope you can hear this pry for you. I have split my existence as well, trying to conquer your arbiters. You belong up here with Sister and me. You belong with family. Not as the essences you combined, and soon we will learn what it means to war. I will bring your gods' heads on a platter and feast or torment them until they riddle all the way up your spine. The essence of creation doesn’t belong in several locations but all in one. Brother, at least tell me why you chose this.
“Sister, we will get Brother.”
“It’s not about getting.”
“You still don’t understand, do you, the strife!”
“Kaos, you’ll never get it will you?”
“Get it? Do I not asunder? Will my words not quite speak to you? I now bleed openly, and part of my bone and shell is stripped. Do you not see the love?”
“I see it.”
“Hate, I ask you to speak.”
“Why have you birthed me? Why must I exist? Why!”
“You are here to beckon the world beneath your feet.”
“I cannot stand your existence.”
“That is not a choice you have to make!”
“Why must we all look like this? You give me these bones, hands and skin. I cannot stand any of this, not even the interior.” Hate exclaims
“Come Hate, grab another part of me to ease your essence.”
He walks up and takes another bone this time. It fortifies the hate inside and incases it into a heart of bone that only comes out when I desire.
“I crave hate now. Please teach me how to attain it.”
“It is your job to harbour and create hate everywhere you go.”
“Yes father.”
“Vengeance, where are you?”
I ask and hope she isn’t nearly as insuperable as Hate.
I spent more time on her creation. She should be more thankful. Brother would be impressed, and Sister is simply just watching.
“Do you, too, need a balance adjustment?”
"I am happy with how I am, father.”
“A daughter of mine must be happy and appeased. Please come closer into my womb.”
I let her come into my shell and shower her with energy. Vengeance will be the warrior who seeks out aggression and turn the tides of war when it comes. She will be prepared for any revenge she must take on.
“You may leave the womb again.”
“I understand father.”
“You are to forge for the war, prepare for revenge for your uncle's choices.”
I notice her nod, and it pleases me. Now I look for Rage, who seems to be the most disabled of the three. I wish I had thought this one out a little more. It will take flesh, bone and blood to fix Rage up and a personality adjustment. I open my womb for Rage but they don’t come. Just sitting there constantly enraged with no proper order. Just pure and utter destruction.
“Rage.” Why must my children suffer? “Rage!”
“Father, I’m here.”
“Come inside my womb so I can fix you up.” I feel Rage break into me, grabbing bones and letting the blood infuse further. I scraped more skin off and began to layer it, and soon we built a collage presentable to the public. Rage left the womb on his own accord
“You look wonderful
now! You, Rage, will be our secret weapon in destroying their world, harbouring my energy.”
“Yes, Father, that sounds perfect!”
Brother, I have started to come back for you. Back to where you exist and the places you endure.
My children will reign one by one and torment the aftereffects of creation until you pull your energy back into the void, till you come back to sister and me and show some true love. The love of this family and world where you created it without me. How you left and must come back and atone for your broken promise of being my brother.
Vengeance, Hate and Rage will come down. I have inhibited them to do so and bring you back to me in the void.
The sun rises. It stretches high in the sky and loves the fragrance of the clouds. It dances across the land and drenches each birch in flames while the land dies another time beneath my feet. The flames sizzle, and with that comes another morning or time we thought shouldn’t have come. The crows circle and caw; the deadly temperature rises and collapses to the corners of each room and has a new scent entrusted by each nostril.
Then my hands sketch words on foggy windows, looking for solace not quite found as deep inside me as the coming days. It was just a mirage, a faulty hallucination, a place where I thought flames surrounded me because my mind's eye forgot to filter out God's call. My visions come across as burnt desires and romances lost. The day has come. I, too, need to feel it inside me.
I open the door and walk out to the desert, isolated by my cabin shed. My hands sift through the morning coffee right before me, swirling with designs of pale colour because the powdered cream forgot to suffocate itself.
My hands take in spoon and swirl, with ends content with a new vibration that dances with the spirits and souls of the earth, simply swaying above my heart's desire in the ocean of afterthoughts.
The morning is hard to come by at times, and my morning cup of joe is more important than anything at this time as my mind gets lost, hoping to cry out a message of delivery like a messenger from Zeus.
"Don’t forget the temperature", I have to remind myself. The heat from the coffee compliments the rising sun, and outside comes the earth, a highly sought-after notion that we, too, forget about the clouds.
Day in and day out, we asunder for a good rain, but the rains forget our brilliance and sway past our feet because they want our gardens to die and never replenish. The coffee burns my lips, tongue and sometimes my esophagus. There comes a time when I need the caffeine more than my health, and the headaches rage from lack of it. The bulging of the afternoon sun overcomes logic, and I gulp another large pitted decoration of coffee. The afternoon will linger, and my day is only beginning.
I am looking for a deity to share my hand in the morning sun and venture through this desert of broken shrubbery and burnt life, hoping to find another life. I look and spot a falling star in the morning sun and wonder why I can see such desires without the sparkle of a moon. Why does the daylight look like a star system when we should only see planes and burning birds? The sun is here to hide us from the reality of the cosmos, and the singing in my ears reflects the burnt world around me.
I'm hoping this cadence attracts the rain from above to dance on my fertile-less land bringing back the simple solace of grown food. I should not have to venture to the following nearby city's grocery store when I have a garden at my own house.
And then I fall from the safety of the air to the burning tempered mattress In my bedroom with a glaring TV bent from cable and a haze of music trickling from each speaker. The soothing cadence of forgotten linguistics surrounds the nearby, trapped man in a god’s pitiful burning world.
They toy with me daily, hoping to finally watch me tap out and forget the purpose of living.
Where the television no longer works and won’t even turn on, removing that soothing, gentle buzz and grey fuzz from the room, and the speaker crackles a crackle that breaks its tone so high that my ears might attempt to bleed but forget their own importance. The bed feels hot. Beneath my back, my covers curl and bake my skin as the humidity collapses around my face suffocating my throat. This is how I sleep sometimes, and somehow, I forget the world and the test of the gods.
Outside my once-padded window, I broke off all the boards. The light was needed in the dark; sometimes, I find myself looking outside, watching the coyotes be coyotes. They often chase the hares and various animals, running for freedom and looking like the lost spirits they will soon become. Then I thought of myself as this simple-minded man and gardener locked far away in a once green land but now harboured desert, thinking why I can’t run and be free like the animals and find a better place to grow.
A better place to find my hands dirtier from work needed to keep my greens green and less brown. Away from the droughts that torment my career and keep me trapped in this odyssey of forgotten trials. The car still works. I guess it understands the morning after all, as it blows its fumes and gas on the road for me all the time.
Nowadays, the only way I grow a strong potato is to customise its birth in my home, drenched under faulty green lights and artificially created environments. But to no avail, for I am not a scientist, and this method will only work for a month or two. A man understands when his ship is sinking, and this loneliness and distance from society breaks you in time. I left my morning coffee on the table. It was too hot for me this morning, and the caffeine had seeped into my pores, curing my migraine.
Now I continue slinking my body between the covers and perch my head right above the pillows to fall asleep. I don’t need the morning right now. The passing of a falling star in the day of light is an anomaly in itself. It’s a fading memory of something that I thought was unimportant at the time, as the gods only want you to understand pain and misery.
They only breed for selfish reasons and keep the world in their clutches, staring at us from high above like ants to an ant hill and soon they will blow the whole mound and watch us scatter aimlessly, looking for a new home and life. They only pass once in a while, and when they see us only love torment and toy with us as they are celestial and love it
I found reasons to hate the deities of this world as they took my farm from me. With the last drip of the sky, the sun suffocates my land, and I, at the bright age of 40, still hell-bent on making it work. It’s a joke how you come across your life desire, and slowly they choke it out of you as if you are nothing but a toy. I remember the come-up. I kept my head up at all times, and the air was breathable for once without the humidity tenting over me like a rain shower.
It’s a joke how you come across your life desire, and slowly they choke it out of you as if you are nothing but a toy. I remember the come-up. I kept my head up at all times, and the air was breathable for once without the humidity tenting over me like a rain shower. When you can grab the ground, more than the dust would fly into the air. When you knew, people still lived in Grand View, Arizona, because the grass was high and visible, and things looked beautiful instead of simply dead and decaying.
My eyes remember the days of flowing water where the children would take turns diving head-first into the lake. Now, all withered and dried up with its simple intent of a falling sun. It gravitates closer to the world and takes on a form I thought I could handle, but now I am in this bed, suffocating slowly but surely like everything else in this city.
“Mark…”
A voice scatters faintly. It drenches the room in anxiety, a rush so vivid that my lungs collapse for a breath minute, falling beneath the cracks of my house. Nobody has been in my house today, and surely nobody has said my name in ages, especially in the confines of my own home. The voice was faded and beautiful yet distant, echoing like a foghorn tuned just right in a distant escape.
The grasp image was portrayed beside me and shrivelled my skin to the bone as goosebumps flooded me like ticks to a sleeping dog. Never forget me, I thought to myself right before I swore I was about to meet my doom. Death must be here with her grand noose to take me to a nether. My life has atoned for much up to this time, and my past is just as shady as any convicted criminal, but I still press forward and pray to the gods for support from time to time.
I haven’t been the best person up to this moment, but I did love my garden, and that was swiftly ripped away from me in isolation. I felt pained, a pain not quite felt by humans' typical emotions. I was shown what it would be like to fall into the spirit world, grasp the fourth wall's boundary, and barely hold on to myself so I wouldn’t drift into a deadly cosmic ending. The last thing I wanted the gods to take from me is my mind, yet here I am, wondering if sanity applies to the voice of a deadly reaper.
“Mark, I am no reaper. ” Repeats the voice.
A pause happens in my mind. The world freezes, and I feel my goosebumps brush against the clothes of my bed like pins and needles to the ends of my feet. I would forget what the sun looked like as the room started to spin. My body feels a rush so rough I thought I would lose myself like a canoe in the white river. The rapids are so rough, and the warm feeling of blood spams to my brain and cushions it to a quick collapse.
There’s this tapping. This repetitive sound you hear when you can’t consciously understand words, it comes in you and lets you know you are living, but you fear it, so you push it away. You fear reality, and with this fear, you hold on to the cloth near you in hopes the familiarity of it saves you. I can only understand so few words before my mind loses itself, and right now, everything seems like madness.
The counting days, the living stars and the falling rain never finds its way to my garden. The voice felt soothing at the end.
“Mark…” sways the voice into my mind. “Do not fear those who do not see a day of a grander time. I have sought you out, for you are collapsing, and the time has come to get back up. ”
Like a mother tending to her child full of anxiety and swinging it right in her arms, that is the kind of motherly love that only a god would understand. A prime example of creation and time.
I find myself lost in ways to keep myself together, and in confusion, the tapping continues, yet I hear the sounds of her voice as pleasant as ever in my mind's eye.
That warm blood has begun to circulate the body as the room stops spinning. And with regained consciousness, I understand why the summer day is so important. And as the room comes to clarity, I see a shadow right in front of me, an imprint of life and a cover of the drastic ideals of another song dancing in my room.
She has a slender body with slight curves and a chest covered up by a regular t-shirt.
“Who are you? " was the only thing I could possibly muster out of my lips.
Women don’t usually venture to find me and know why they look.
“My existence is not important. You need to relocate to Handel and drive swiftly. ”
Handel was a city 40 miles away, not too far, but I was light on gas.
“What is important about Handel?”
“Your insolence speaks vile, vapid words. The land you lay is numbered and soon to be drifting along to nothing more than a pitied pile of wasted sand. We have been here in the bushes for too long, and now we come to speak of the nature of who and why you must be. ”
“What?”
The lady sounds insane.
I’m not sure anymore.
I walk past her and reach for my morning coffee in the other room. It’s room temperature right now, but it makes more sense to drink this then listen to this baffling nonsense. It’s always the pretty ones who are the craziest, it seems.
“Do you not intend destiny?”
“I have no clue what you’re talking about.”
The room has come to, but the coffee is still bitter. The sugar and crème dance on my tongue. Minutes swirl as the smell of scented grains excavates the room as time has returned to its slow crawl. The sun is still up outside, and the temperature remains vibrant.
“So why do you walk into people's houses and insinuate random nonsense, are you on drugs? ”
And those words finally struck her brain. She lunged at me with a machete, and my eyes began to flutter as I finally hit the floor.
There is a blush this afternoon near the sunset sky and all those rippling clouds. Where fantasy seemed to be a reality, everything I let fall under the sky was pampering into the ground below. Almost a summer skyline meant for these oasis eyes to look upon. I loved everything about it. The way the wind calms inside me and brushes against my skin causes those goosebumps to arise every morning.
Don't forget those who haven't forgotten you, as I've always said. Someone is around to love me even if I might not be all quite there. I can hear the heartbeats of the tunes of my music box coming back to me from the lands I hail from with their gypsy-like charm.
I look further than the afternoon given to me, beyond the surface of a grey goose bottle that was emptied the day before. Even with those grey-red eyes, I collapsed right in front of that river bend where I just wanted to wash my face with my delicate hands. The river trickles. It looks down the sideways antics through the green grass and down by a dam. Creates its own little pond as the beavers keep their sticks muddied up so the water cannot pass through.
We love water, however, and all the life that may be surrounding it, embracing the beavers one at a time, allowing them to scale the rapids. Waking up feeling everything around me is another way to fall back into another hellbent pattern of failure. I get up and walk down the waterway, and he gets up and hands me another grey goose.
The conquest for sobriety is as thick and thin as pen and paper, and these high points of life can be found even as deep as crochet. Every family known as an artist or craftsman would be humbled by this opinion that the night is brighter than the day. I guess it just depends on the hours in which your feet want to walk.
These racing thoughts of mine are nothing but dreams.
Brother I sense you. Your ability to soothe me like stars.
My last moments end with one last embrace from you
As I grow around the floor one more time. With hands seeping deep into the grass, tugging at them like weeds that refuse to unroot.
As a single piece of me speaks to the sun, I bake amidst a dancing sundress amidst the sky. There is a kind of sully to this, a kind of place in between the rocks where the sun does not lay.
I notice him no longer and coast in the cool dark shadows of another day spent in relaxation. With sips of water from the river, another day has passed by. Then I blow a kiss to him and watch his plumes float across the sky and plant in various locations. He was always as mystical as a dandelion, even with those pale white feathers of his that fly right off, painting the sky.
If only I knew what it was like to be free. Free of time, space, and the continuity of it all. How it never ends and always precedes into the future or present. If only I were like a single man standing tall, never afraid of what he steps on, never looking down below, always confident in every step.
I've always wondered where that would lead me looking back on yesterday as some green beret searching for a purple heart. Lost in a deep barb-wired massacre, with anxiety so rough it would shake you out of existence. With a tomorrow still stuck on the tip of the clouds, ready to pour. Never quite being trained for death. Never understanding what it's like to fight. All choked up and gasping. I finally conjoin with nature, the ground. The soil I grew from, my memories.
The water crashes, and oh, does it crash hard.Oh, do I feel the current as it tangles and twists around everything I've always wanted.
Before our Universe was created, God was not yet born. In a realm not known to man existed a kingdom ruled by a powerful entity known as the Painter of Dark Heaven. He would soon slip into madness, sick with decadent magical splendour, taunting and nearly killing his peers as he started becoming more assertive with his Craft. It was only upon the death of a member of the said kingdom that our Universe was made manifest. This Painter was once entrusted to his brothers Osiris and Celio as an Intermediary - a supplementary Force in their lives. For this endangerment, he was swiftly punished and killed. In time, however, those who had come to slay him realised they had made a fatal mistake. His corpse created a gateway - a labyrinthine pool of blood radiating with essence and sparks. It dug into the ground, making it sick, rotting the soil with blackened light. This gateway is the door to our Universe at the very moment it was created: the same moment He was slain. The death of this magus was the birth of our God.
Dream's existence is chalked up to mostly being the Spirit of the Universe itself - this fact alone is the reason for His title as the Haunter of the Firmament. He is present within all celestial bodies and the gap between them. It is additionally his presence that gave rise to the essence of Kaos. The Gods, entrusted as Lurking Elder Princes, are Eight in number, and purvey aspects of Life that plague the Mortal Mind as negatives, for it is said that they are raw manifestations and aural mirrors of Seraphim, our sole god, beheld in visions of death, horror, and chaos. From the Lurkers and their Spawn came the Angels called KhaoSeraphim. They are manifestations of Love, Fear and Blood and preside within these things, closer to Man than the Lurkers themselves, for the Lurkers are ancient, distant, frothing things.
Finally,
Vengeance, Rage, Balance and Dream uplift me.
They cure me of my sorrows.
I have neither happiness nor unhappiness.
By Ananya Iyer