Hound of my Sons and Daughters, sacred whore of Eden, listen. Listen to my story as it is spoken to you:
The Beginning has a Beginning, a middle, and an End.
A Mind, a Body, and a Breath.
The Beginning of the Beginning begins with Nothing.
NO thing.
NO substance.
By its very nature, this NO thing lacks any sort of overarching intelligence, any sense of awareness.
It has no mind.
It has no body.
As a vacuum, it has no breath.
It desiccates and abrades.
The universal solvent, removing and dissolving everything.
Well, almost everything… For you see, the NO thing cannot destroy itself.
However, it being the NO thing, it is driven to destroy itself… and this friction was the cause of Creation.
Under its own impetus, the NO thing would ripple, buckle, fold, and, importantly, bubble.
There within the inverted surface of such bubbles came into existence the conditions for something to form.
Here, where the NO thing inverted, the YESBeast was the inevitable result.
Here, the inversion of Blackness…
Became Light!
The path led uphill. As I drifted through the twitching ferns and delicate sap feeders, the voice – sometimes female, sometimes male, sometimes neither – continued to speak.
Listen while you have the ears to hear.
Life was born beneath a mirrored sky. There was no reason to mark Time… there was no injury, no sickness, no suffering, no death. No creature ate another creature there, save for our sisters, and theirs was ecstatic pleasure in their return to their Mothers and the Light!
The milk-like substance that collected on the leaves beaded on the hair of my forearms as I passed by. The plants breathed across me, their exhalations warm and perfumed, while something fluttered past my face and stuck. I turned my head to follow as more particles blew past. Soft, gray particles, like snow. Or ash.
We had no idea that there lay outside the shell of Eden an endless, hostile Void. That the Mirror of the sky turned back something, that the sky was also a defense. Until the Mirror broke. The sky cracked and something… something horrifying…
…Dripped from the hole onto the White Land.
And as I crested the hill, I smelled it. The blinding white above turned pink… and then red.
Beneath me was an endless spread of lake and forest, marred by a deep red glow. The sky had an exit wound. The glorious reflective dome was cracked, distorted by a red hole with a black center. It bled soldiers, streams of descending beings that boiled down to the forest in a black cloud. Wherever they landed, the white trees screamed. They threw their branches around their trunks like defending arms as the black, red and violet horde scythed through their mass.
The First War was not a war. The voice, distinctly feminine now, turned hard and strangely familiar. It was a slaughter.
I saw DOGs among their midst, the terrifying oily demons that incorporated any and all biomass into their forms and turned them into weapons. I saw things that looked like stingrays, and things that looked like shambling mouths with lances for limbs. There was no chance for the gentle trees, for their delicate inhabitants, for any of them. A rippling swathe of primordial life simply vanished, consumed by fire, tooth, and sword.
The First War was not a war. It was a rout. It came with the first star to ever light the Mirror of the Sky. It came when that star fell, screaming, to the White ground.
Never forget that when the Morphord appears, the skies scream.
Some say that it is GOD screaming as He descends, as once the whole of Eden screamed.
Others say it is the Manyshaped Himself screaming. Screaming from the pain of making the journey from the Out to the In. His road is his bloodstream, his vehicle his bones. Some say He must tunnel through his own heart to reach the inner I, and that this is why, when encountered, He is so cruel.
He and his get fell upon the forest of the Mothers… they fell upon the meadows and the glades… and they murdered us.
Beware the Red Star in the Morning… beware the time when the sky screams…
Since this time, they have begun the Third War, a War as old the ManLands which bore you. You will see the Star, HuMan Hound… he comes for you again.
The black engulfed me at the top of the hill. I woke up with a shout, drawing a sharp, sharp breath. But my feet were still not quite touching the ground.
At a table in a burned forest clearing sat a man with no eyes. He was tall, handsome, his long black hair bound in a silky ponytail down his back. He smiled at me, friendly, even warm. His cheekbones were streaked with black ichor that coagulated in his sockets, as empty and smooth as onyx.
“You look hungry,” he said. He had the voice of a conman, the soft Southern twang I associated with television evangelists or fix-it men. “Come sit down Alexi, my old friend. It’s been a long while since we played together.”
Chapter 6
On the table was a chessboard. The squares were black and white, the pieces white and blue on one side, black and violet on the other. He played black, of course.
“What the hell is this?” Even as I spoke, my bare feet settled to the ground, sinking into the soft wood ash that blew in swirling clouds through the skeletons of the trees that surrounded us. They were not the alien forms of the white trees, the trees of Eden. They were pine and fir, spruce and hemlock, the forest plants of the Siberian taiga. Dotted in the remains of the undergrowth were slim hexagonal columns. I recognized them as thunderstones. Sacred monuments to Perun, the Slavic god of storms, fire, fertility… and sacrifice.
“You sure got given a pretty good whack of vampire’s blood, pardner,” my host replied. “Seemed like a good time to catch you before you left. That blood gives the gift of foresight, you know. Leverage it right, and you’d be a rich man.”
I frowned. “I’m not your ‘pardner’. I’m not your anything. I have no idea who you are, or why we’re here. Who are you?”
The eyeless man pushed his head forward a little, fixing me with unblinking nothingness. He was still smiling. “What? Don’t remember your old buddy’s name?”
Under the frigid gravity of his stare, I did remember his name… But if I spoke it, it would unmake me.
“They call you the ManyShaped.” I exhaled thinly, nostrils clenching in, and joined him at the table. The wood was cool and hard against my thighs, the wind hot and smoky with the remains of the fire that had torn through the forest. I couldn’t remember how I’d arrived… but the chair and the tension felt very real. “The NO Thing.”
“Nothing? Do I look like ‘nothing’ to you? You just call me Patroclus. Mister P.” He smiled with teeth. They were gleaming white. “You like my little story?”
“That wasn’t your story,” I said, sourly.
“Sure it was. It’s the greatest story around, and I tell all the best stories. Always have. In fact, there wouldn’t be a story if it wasn’t for me.” Mister P – the name was as good as any other – motioned to the board. “I mean, look at this. Best chess board in the universe, I’d say. Only the best for you, Alexi. You played this growing up, but think about it: you can’t play chess without black and white, can you?”