Abrisene

________________________________________

I.          Prologue

________________________________________

As Former stirred the great cauldron, Now and Fate discussed duty under the myriad leaves.



“Our invisible hand has governed for so long, Sister,” mumbled Fate, staring upward at the virulent sky sinking through the thin leaves. “We have wrought mercy and destruction equally, but we are not beings of either. If-“



“Are mortals beings of either?” said Now.



Fate’s whirlpool eyes grew heavy, their intensity wrought by foreknowledge. Obnoxious birdsong cleared the air. When the cauldron’s materials had mixed sufficiently, Former wailed for her sisters. They appeared by her shoulders.



“The New Man is ready, Sister?”



Former whimpered, replying with a hoarse voice that groaned like a galley, “Yes, and he will be terrible. He will be tyrannous and unforgiving.”



“I know of your struggle with this kind,” said Fate, “But they will pass.”



“How will they pass?” reproached the wailer. “Their legacy is eternal!”



“As is that of their opposition.”



Amidst Former’s collapse and Fate’s reassurance, Now tired of her sisters’ long-gazing. She breathed life into the New Man. Thus, you were born.

________________________________________

II.          Birth

________________________________________

The eyes of the mortal woman were alit with maternal agony. Her back pummelled the cotton bed, its movements aligned with the pained incantations frothing from her mouth. Two of three doctors sat before her naked groin, the other clasping her outstretched hand under the dim rooflight. Fate entered gingerly from the ajar door, blessing another birth with her presence.

However, a grimace adorned Fate’s face. The woman’s passionate pain returned her to premonition, and Fate only recalled those many faces rebuking her for their anguished deaths. Not all on the battlefields known only by Former, but there were many encounters there. Those domestic tyrants, the wasters of life: the lost had greeted her with their defeated consciences before she’d clasped them.

Soon, the first blemish of arrival came: the descension of a bloody ivory cranium. The doctors readied their instruments, and Fate averted her eyes from this high tide.

When all was done and the mother’s serenity was disturbed only by a dull throbbing, Fate approached the free bedside normally reserved for fathers. Although the babe’s cries could tear titanium, she only saw what waited.

Hence, she did not see those great green orbs of the babe focusing on his father.

________________________________________

III.          Infancy

________________________________________



Three years had passed. The infant was master of a dialect and walking, but not of others. His chest was imprisoned by blue fabric, emblazoned with the smile emblem of the school he’d just escaped, as he invited wrath by lobbing the plastic car against the wall. Inside was the family of four, where the equilibrium of natural chaos and learnt order brought feigned happiness to all. Milk curdled as the infant roared against heaven and arose to devastate the town, set on a play mat, which worshipped him.

He thrusted an upturned foot and constraining leather boot against the hillside boxes overlooking the commercial district. Although obscured by their land’s infinitesimality, little people lived in these boxes. These were people who arose at dawn to praise the divine birth of their king and his otherworldly master before proceeding with the day’s affairs in the smog scoured valley. They bought and sold goods of no necessity believing they’d transcended the primitive idea of value by need, but they all needed meaning. They complained of ill-governance but paid for half-truths. Ultimately, they derived all pleasure from what they called the curses of mortality.

Beneath the smog cloud, some had always warned of immediate doom. “We have abandoned the Pantocrater!” was a common slogan. “The Pantocrater’s action heralds his judgment!” was their response to miracles of revived limbs and the sudden appearance of new hillside boxes to house the ever-booming population. “Mass death begins now!” followed the publicly-watched disappearance of prominent agitants for war.

To their terror, the broad sway of a boot from beyond the smog cloud scattered the commercial district into the sky and onto the great unexplored eastern plains. Another swipe crushed the city hall, spreading a deathly miasma and lung-crushing dust. A final kick levelled the hillside, its boxes lost beyond the smog.

The commotion of mass death was loud and clamorous, and hence the mother was not long away. When she arrived, a grimace condemned the infant.

“Look what you’ve done to your toy mat!” she shouted, dabbling her cigarette into the glass ashtray on the desk to her right. She slapped the infant, and the contact of so-mature hand and infertile cheek heralded silence. Two tears began a great riverine voyage down his reddened flesh.

The mother’s glare sought the infant’s opposable soul. Without a word, the infant soon kneeled and pushed himself across the tiles to collect a civilisation’s remnant – and, under restrained maternal guidance, he reconstructed an Incan ghost town of false decomposition and murky death.

In a little world as this, death is sporadic. Even moreso when the Pantocrater’s rule is an imitation.

________________________________________

IV.          Childhood

________________________________________

Fate’s grimace resembled a carrack draining into the water with its hull piercing the twilight veil of stirred cloud and all-surrounding gleaming fire. Right eye contracted; smooth lips contorting toward it with a pushed upturn; scrawled central expression. However, now she had acquired jaundiced pits around her eyes.

The child knew the constellations and some Aramaic, but still nothing of others. Through a telescope whose icy grip seared the flesh, he had studied the cosmos with NASA companion posters bought lovingly by his mother when he’d ceased discussion of his little Tartaros. He wrote bad poetry about constellational strife. With a Persephone and Ganymede, he’d have reverse-engineered Greek myth.

One night as he sought the stars, a clamorous tempest roared at the barricade of his bedroom door. His brief ignorance of it was ended by a particularly soul-piercing screech, the type that would shatter the glass of his telescope if not ended with two dull thuds of successive weight. His eyes widened.

He arched away from his telescope, now aware his room would be pitch black if not for the great orb of moonlight touching his small bed, with its rustled sheets. A mahogany wardrobe with the ominous stature of a daggered bark statue was perceptible beside it – separated by the bed from a nightstand triumphing a library’s few books on astronomy. As silent non-din reigned, he clamoured over his bed and to the door. He slowly turned its corrosive brassy handle to reveal a dim, carpeted landing: stairs beside him.

He gingerly settled down on the third step from top, tilting an ear toward the site of commotion – that is, the familial living room, which turned away from the stairs directly. The big television hummed a sports segment. Someone slurped tea. Blood rested on the glass coffee table, already dripping onto the tiles irregularly.

Blood? The boots of his father-to-be distinctively glinted just within his vision: he was straining his eyes to see diagonally. The man’s body was on the floor. A soft sob now obscured guttural breathing.

He ran down the stairs, rough carpet scratching his feet. He turned to the living room. His mother sat on the sofa, crying into a tall thin mug. The father-to-be was sprawled on his side, blood seeping from his temple. Shards of a glass were shovelled into his skull. Pools of blood adorned the otherwise free coffee table beside the mother-murderer.

Fate looked on from the corridor to the entrance turned exit, on the staircase’s right. The collapse of his jaw and sucking in of cheeks was visible to all, but she alone saw a new layer stitching itself together over his big, expressive pupils – a layer of understanding.

His pupils too sucked in. The mother took to wailing.

______________________________________

V.          Adolescence

________________________________________

Ever since that fateful evening when the mother-murderer was judicator, the boy had learnt much in a paradigm of nothing. In another home, with a father, brother and another mother, he’d mastered the understated art of acted happiness through intellectual silence. He’d abandoned the telescope for the football and the book for the girl, and he mistreated both with his hands. In his sturdy palm, he’d found action not dependent on cultivation and rituals around an opaque deity, but a constant and permanent weapon. A decade ago, he’d have said the same of his mind.



Fate, now, was an old woman: like his mother, denizen of American Tartaros. She’d grown stooped, with a fat, broad paunch, and her cheeks hung from a wearied face. “Take me home, sisters!” Fate cried alone and a lot. “I do not want to see what waits.”



Tonight, the circumference of moonlight did not touch a child’s telescope. It touched a child’s rifle, stroked lovingly with a smooth cloth by its beholder. From its stock protruded death. His bed depressed under the weight of two complete magazines. Satan glimmered in his newly maternal eyes.



Fate disappeared.



Now, of the present, would observe the scholastic chaos.