My right arm ached. I reach over with my left hand to rub the shoulder, but another hand takes mine and lays it back down.
“Rest. You are safe here.” Socheniel wipes my face in a soothing gesture. I notice much of the right side of my body numbs as a response. I open my mouth to speak, but feverishly chatter instead. My right shoulder joint catches in the shudder and I wince.
It is bright where I am lying. I can’t see anything distinct, however. I can only feel. Socheniel has me resting with my head in his lap. He continues wiping my face as he is doing something with the clothes over my right arm.
My right arm hurts deeply. The bones feel twisted and the muscles pierced by a thousand impossible needles. The relaxing numbness ends at the shoulder joint itself. My chest and torso are without sensation. My arm feels like it is breaking itself from the inside out.
I look up and see his massive right hand smoothing over my right arm. His blight-wracked hands are absent of their wrapping. I am not concerned about his main tool of judgement. His blight has never infected me. Even when I intentionally took on the greedy tendrils to deliver mislaid judgement, the infection quickly died without leaving even a smear upon me.
His hand passes over my arm again and the pain intensifies. I groan and try to turn over, to turn away from my right side as if I could leave the inflicted appendage behind. He places his hand firmly on my chest, preventing me from moving. In the corners of my submerged thoughts a glimmer of realization tried to surface, that I was infected with Socheniel’s blight, and that it was a deliberate action by the angel. But to accept that thought meant to consider if the angel was attacking me and I didn’t want to face that possibility. Not right now. Not ever.
“You are aware. This will increase your immediate pain, but will allow you to understand sooner.” I could not answer but I made an attempt to nod. “Your right arm is infected with the blight. Only your right arm. I could not remove the blight from you, but I understand why. Do you?”
The first emotion that surfaced was betrayal. It was quickly followed by fear. But his ending question also called my more logical faculties to the surface, and my reason won the race to my tongue. “Something’s wrong… corrupted…”
He smoothed his left hand over my face again. The area became suddenly brighter as the flame over his brow intensified. It reminded me of the downfall of Brother Superior. Socheniel may have carried out the sinful orders, but his heart and his thoughts remained pure. And for that, the blight only affected his hands and his wings. (I still say his eyes were taken out of divine spite.) Brother Superior, on the other hand, was the one that conceived of the sinful orders in the first place, and manipulated Socheniel into carrying them out. So once I carried the blight from Socheniel to Brother Superior, the virulence eagerly devoured Brother Superior’s face and chest as the outward symbol of judgement.
But I remained untouched then. So why am I infected now? Because what was clean then is unclean now. Something has happened to my right arm, and what my right arm represents in my work. What was good before is not good now.
I tried to lift my right arm but the action sent shards of pain into my shoulder. I cried out and tried to shake the arm free of what was smothering it. The instinctive action only made the pain worse.
He smoothed his hand over my face again. “Tell me, my friend. Tell me why you call me ‘סכניאל’ [Socheniel]. Of all the sounds you could have chosen, why did you choose those?”
The pain had plateaued and remained constant. I was able to recollect more of my wits. I knew he was distracting me. Keeping me focused on something intellectual so I would not notice what was going on physically. The meanings of his name was something I had reviewed with him the very first day it came to me. I wanted to make sure that he was comfortable with all the connotations that would come of the name. A private concern discussed publicly because the name would be the moniker I use in my writings. I have called him by no other name since.
I managed to smile. When he did not reflect the gesture, I realized his face was unusually rigid. He had a grave task to do and would not allow fondness to interfere. I nodded and started to academically list the steps I used to derive the root letters and the possible words those letters could form.
As I presented my case once again to the one that had already accepted the outcome, I noticed my right arm had stopped hurting. In fact, it had stopped feeling altogether. It laid beside me, cooling and stiffening. The arm was dead. Unfortunately the arm was still attached to still living tissue. This might be a problem later.
I continued listing the various meanings of his name. Of them all, there are two that can be taken as a blatant warning of what he was capable of. I listed them tonelessly without understanding.
A flash of light, quicker than a blink, raced down from his forehead flame and descended onto and through my right shoulder.
The searing pain intensified, burying my vision with incomprehensible light. I remember arching my back in shock and taking in a breath to scream. He cupped my face with his left hand as he leaned over and sucked my air from my lungs with his mouth, removing the focus of my perception from my body as he did. I saw myself, from his perspective. I watched the detached arm falling into the nothingness that surrounded us, decaying into sterile dust as it tumbled.
It reminded me of a termite eaten beam. Only the paint held the exterior intact. Once removed from supporting structures, the beam broke under its own weight, revealing itself to have the internal integrity of wet cheap tissues. Only the external scarring of the arm had kept it intact. Once removed from me, it had no resources to even attempt to remain whole. The blight was merely a tool that made it easier to remove the diseased arm from me.
The scream never came, but the shuddering of my body in shock allowed me to express my discomfort as a series of whimpers. Socheniel kissed me on the forehead, returning my perception to my body. He stroked my face with both hands while whispering words of what I took to be comfort and conciliation. (Are angels even capable of sympathy? Or do they mimic it because the appearance calms us?)
“To allow it to remain would be more harmful to you than removing it swiftly.” I understood. I really did. It hurt like fuck, but it was the larger version of snatching an adhesive bandage off in surprise. Festering wounds don’t hurt as much, but they incur significantly more damage. But his comfort failed to answer the important question. Why?
The shoulder wound sealed itself quickly. Before he had lifted his head from mine, what remained of my shoulder joint had healed into a tender but smooth scar. I wondered what the Ravens would make of the removal of yet another one of their gifts.
“Do not relax into mute acceptance. Your recovery is not complete. Regrow your arm.”
He was not informing me. He was commanding me. Maybe he took that tone to trigger my usual response of defiance, which would inure me to any further pain. Instead, I blinked away the tears and stared at him. “Regrow my arm?”
“I know what you are capable of. I know in this space, you can alter your form. I also know you have learned other skills from other things, and have skills you have forgotten you ever had. Regrow your arm.”
His forehead flame burned steady and strong. The light from it stung the shoulder scar. The skin itched and I felt a knot of dense flesh collect inside the hollow of the split joint.
The dense flesh squirmed under the skin, making me uncomfortable and strangely impatient. I wanted to laugh at the angel. Did he mistake me for Swamp Thing? Sure, let me just wiggle my stump in sunlight and let the magic of cognitively directed photosynthesis regrow a mammalian appendage including bone, nerves, muscle, and skin.
“And just how the hell am I supposed to do that, Socheniel?”
“By making of yourself what you are, and not what you have been told you are. Regrow your arm.”
“Yea, as if it were that easy. Here, lemme just pretend I’m a Shambling and… wait… I can do this. The Shamblings taught me how.”
I surrendered myself into Socheniel’s hands and focused on the shoulder. The knot of flesh pushed against the cartilage of the joint, tickling it. I tried to will the arm to regrow as if I was a Shambling trying to take on human form.
The flesh twisted itself in painful contortions.
“As you are. Not as you allow others to define you as. Not as you think you should conform to be. Just be.”
“Easy for you to say, Angel. Even after all you’ve been through, you are still the same.” A friend of mine has constantly told me for years to trust my instinct. That I have my own way of doing things that often goes counter to the mainstream expected way, but still gets results because I am me.
I stopped trying to think of how my arm would regrow, but just accepted that it would happen, and that it would happen as it should happen.
Under the light of his forehead flame, the painful twisting of the flesh in the shoulder joint stopped. I felt an outward pressure from it that tickled at first, then became distressingly uncomfortable. I felt bound up with a sudden urge to be free. I felt like pushing.
So I pushed.
The scar over the joint split as the new flesh crawled its way out of the joint. It felt weird. It hurt. It set my teeth on edge. And it felt completely right.
Socheniel continued to hold my head and watched with silent encouragement. Smiling at my “ugh” and “ahh”, he said nothing until the thumb-thick tendril was the proper length of my arm. “Don’t forget you still have to have a functional arm.”
I tried to laugh and found I was exhausted. “I’m not fucking done yet, you shit.” At my abuse, he finally allowed himself to smile. The warmth of his gesture was more encouraging than anything else he had done during this time together.
I wanted to know how. I wanted to study the process and force it to slow down so I could deconstruct it. I wanted to know why. Dream logic is never straight forward in the first place. Symbols are things and things are symbols. If I could deconstruct the process, then I could find the waking world equivalent and take advantage of it. Right? Nope.
The more I tried to control and observe the process, the slower the arm regrew. The only way to have functionality back in this realm was to relax and let it happen. Relax and just be.
I felt the arm thicken. The core of the flesh hardened as bone formed. Tendons pulled on unprepared muscles and my first sensation was a nasty cramp at the elbow. Without thinking on how the arm came to be, I flexed and twisted it in an attempt to work out the cramp. Fingers responded and the wrist shuddered into place.
I lifted my new hand to my face with my new arm. To be honest, I wasn’t worried about the structure of the arm. I was worried about the symbols and scarring that would not be present anymore. I didn’t realize how much of Weaver’s self identity was bound up in scars, tattoos, and ritual marks. I had a new complete arm, but was it Weaver’s arm?
The pain was gone. Nearly total exhaustion remained. Socheniel watched me inspect the new appendage. There was something off about it. It was the right shape but the wrong texture. When the bone was compressed into form, the entire arm shrunk a bit, leaving the skin loose. Now the skin had adjusted by forming irregular vertical lines where lengths of skin appeared to have pleated itself to take up the slack. It wasn’t until I watched how the skin moved over a flexing knuckle that I understood what was wrong.
”It’s a plant. It’s a fucking root of a fucking plant!” I looked up at the angel in alarm and waved my hand in his face. “MY ARM IS A ROOT!”
He took hold of the new hand calmly and inspected it. “Yes. It always has been.” He looked back at my surprised face. “Has it not functioned as such since [that redacted event]? And even then, all that did was bring to your conscious mind the ability to [reach through]. Does it matter that your new arm looks more like vegetation than animal? Does that truly matter here when you have [done certain things that involved vegetation]? If I recall correctly, had you not started to accumulate new scars and markings on your old arm that heavily implied not only the skin texture of your new arm, but the function that is still the same?”
The angel had a point. Or five. It was only the appearance that was different. I still have four fingers and a thumb. Still have a hand, a forearm, and an upper arm. Still have the bendy bit. Only it was made of plant material instead of animal flesh. Somehow that didn’t stop the Gardenmaster of doing kir thing. It shouldn’t stop me from doing mine. Whatever that is.
At the shoulder, the transition from woody plant bark to human skin was quick but fully integrated. I took my left hand and traced back and forth across the boundary. The bark skin felt all the touches just as well as the human skin did.
”So the only difference is cosmetic, then.”
”No. There are other, deeper, differences. But the key thing to remember and understand, is that your human body appears mostly as other entities have told you, or made you to appear. Your scars are a living history of what has happened to you. This arm appears to be solely wood to you, but it is more than that. It is your flesh, and it is the way it is to be the most functional at what you do. This is what you are.”
The exhaustion had set in completely. I was too tired to try for a standard boner joke. On an instinctual level, I understood what Socheniel was saying and accepted it. But my intellect was still rejecting everything that had just happened. Weaver is many things, but a vegetable just wasn’t on the list! (Dammit!) Besides, if my arm was plant material how was I able to move it?
Socheniel wrapped his left arm around me and stood up. He held me at his chest but there was still a massive gap between my feet and his. I sometimes forget just how huge the angel has become since taking his new office. “I will hold you.” He offered no other words to confuse me by. He held me like a rag doll and stood with a defiant stance. I didn’t see anyone else in the still bright expanse. He wrapped his right hand around a tall rod of dark metal and planted it before him. If anything did come up to him, his posture alone would give them pause before challenging.
Why would he announce that he was holding me? Before I could ponder that question, I fell out of his grip. As I turned, I saw that he was still holding on to a part of me, but my awareness wasn’t there anymore. I fell, away from the light of the flame above his brow, and into a clinging darkness.
The hill of bones that broke my fall was loosely assembled. It collapsed under my kinetic assault before embracing me and slowing my descent. It also changed my trajectory, so that I rolled out of the strangely melodic bones without breaking any of mine.
I managed a weak smile at the sound of the hollow bones announcing my arrival. Then the nausea overtook me. Lying on my right side, with my new arm caught underneath me, I was unable to hold back the vomit. I had an instinct not to even try.
Sharp talons scratched my scalp as a raven alighted on my head. At the sound of its cawwing, the nausea intensified. What came out of my mouth was charcoal black, thin, and oily. It reeked in the way that only something unclean can reek. I knew it to be a byproduct of whatever had corrupted my arm combined with the decaying action of the blight. The arm was the physical component. This bile was the spiritual.
I couldn’t move. Not because of the addition of more ravens covering me. I was just that exhausted. I could only remain on the compacted ashen ground, throwing up more of the bile, and unable to even set the unclean offal on fire.
More ravens came to watch. They perched on nearby bones to keep from soiling their feet in the spreading oil slick. I tried to apologize, tried to make an effort at cleaning, but every time I opened my mouth, more bile came trickling out. I finally gave up and stopped trying to move away from the mess.
A sudden chill of despair settled in me. What if this meant my removal from all the things I cared about? What if this was the initial process to disconnect me from [stuff]? I panicked and felt the urge to flee. The panic expressed itself as a flame that chased away the ravens perching on me.
In response, they pulled at the bones in the still unstable hill of bones above me. The hill complied with their urging and collapsed over me. Now buried under thousands of hollow bones, the fire I had set in my panic was changed into a Purging Flame. The bile and all expelled unclean matter would be destroyed.
I worried about my wooden arm, but it was too late to do anything about that. I surrendered to my exhaustion and fell asleep at the bottom of the pyre.
I awoke to the sound of someone digging through the smouldering pyre and the thunder of thousands of ravens encouraging the digger to be faster at the task. Something grabbed my left hand and a human shout of triumph announced my discovery. Before I could try to answer I was pulled out of the ashes.
”Ugh! What the hell happened to you?” Warm human hands wiped the ash out of my eyes and off my face. I looked up to see a familiar Boneburner. He was among my company when we split the sky that one time. “Did you go split Hell open this time? If you did, I’m going to be very cross with you for not calling me to join you!”
I was so happy to see him. So happy for human companionship. I opened my mouth to tell him so, and a trickle of bile poured out. I looked down at myself with sudden horror and embarrassment. I started to silently cry. I wanted to shriek in anger, but only more bile dripped from my mouth.
”They said you were in a bad way, they weren’t kidding. It’s okay. Hold still, I see what’s wrong.” He held my head up with one hand and reached in my mouth with the other. “I can’t do this gently, but if you can, open as wide as you can for me, okay? You have a cast covering the entire inside of your mouth. Nothing can get past it, in or out.” He grabbed something covering my tongue and tried to pull it out. It felt like he was peeling off the exposed layer of flesh.
He looked me dead to rights and said with a severe tone, “I bet no one ever fisted you like this before, huh.”. In shock, I forgot my mouth was unable to function and tried to shout obscenities at him. The action loosened what was stuck in my mouth and he was able to pull it out with one jerk. Only after he held up the hardened bile cast did I realize why he said what he did.
”Ass…” I was still too exhausted to say or do anything more. But I did manage to openly smirk at him. He saw I understood his action and laughed enough for the two of us as he threw the hard bile cast into the fires behind him. My anger now nullified, it was everything I could do to remain seated in place.
”I’m not done with you yet, nor are the Ravens. I’m sorry, this is likely to hurt.” He rearranged the bones behind me to create a hollow for me to relax into. But instead of allowing my new right arm to drape down as normal, he had it extended out to my side.
”Is this flesh? Or… wood?” He somehow locked my wrist in place, preventing me from turning or flexing the arm. As if I had the energy to do that in the first place. He looked at my face one last time, muttered another apology, then pulled out his wide bladed knife. “If this is wood, I can’t cut it. But they want your arm exposed to the bone, so…”
One quick stab and pull answered the question. “It’s wood! But I can cut it like flesh! What the hell have you been in?” I was unable to answer as the pain of the injury had me shuddering in place again. He did not wait for me to even try to answer, but continued the assault down the length of the arm until the humerus, radius, and ulna were exposed.
He stood back as the ravens inspected his work. “Your arm yielded like flesh, but you are not bleeding. It’s some kind of red plant material, with the bones of your arm being some kind of hard heartwood. I correct my statement, you’re not bleeding, but you are oozing. If I didn’t know better, it looks like a red pine sap. But it smells like blood. What…?”
Once he stopped cutting, the pain lessened quickly and I was able to answer. Somewhat. “It’s been… a day.”
He tried to smile but his concern twisted his expression. I found the result more funny than he did. “A day? Weaver, you are a day. And a year. And then some more.”
The Ravens interrupted the attempt at conversation. They quickly pecked and pulled at the wound, exposing the “bones” on all sides. The unkindness made the pain spike again and all I could do was lean back and shiver uncontrollably. I was able to see they were bringing fresh ashes and packing them around the bone. It stung even more than the cutting and pulling of my flesh.
The ash was being absorbed by the flesh of my wooden arm. I could taste it on my tongue and feel it expelled in my breath. I don’t know what purpose the ash was for, but the Ravens considered it necessary that I have it embedded in my body.
Their work completed, they flew away just far enough for the Boneburner to step forward again. Carefully, he pulled the flesh forward and around the bones. As he brought the wounds together, the flesh sealed itself and closed so completely, not even a scar remained. It did not take long for him to restore my arm to wholeness.
He unpinned my right arm and held it in front and towards my left. “They aren’t done with you just yet. Sorry.” I nodded and made no effort to pull away.
Much larger Ravens came. They inspected my clean and undamaged shoulder and cawwed for their human assistant to pull me slightly forward to expose the entire shoulder. He did just that.
You could see where one of the series of marks they had made before was on the portion of human flesh still remaining. Starting from where that mark intersected with the woodsy flesh, the large Ravens bit and scraped with talon and beak until they had restored the marks I had carried before. As the flexible bark wept red sap, they took more ashes and rubbed them into the marks before pinching them closed with their beaks. The woodsy flesh sealed at once, but the ashes remained as a visible tattoo.
Their marks of ownership now restored, they allowed their human assistant to ease me back into a seated position. “Now I get to sit with you until you leave. You are allowed to leave now, you know.” I merely nodded. My arm was aching in the way that overuse would make it ache and what parts of me was not aching was too exhausted to make up for it. I relaxed into my impromptu recliner and closed my eyes.
Immediately, I felt like I was falling and shouted in surprise.
”I have you, my friend. And no one is able to take what I hold.” Socheniel’s voice was as soothing as ever. I opened my eyes to find he was still holding me by the chest with his massive left arm. My feet dangled helplessly at his knees. I looked over at my right arm and saw the marks the Ravens made had returned with me. My shoulders were once again equally scarred. My mouth tasted of ashes.
”I’m… tired…”
”Then sleep. I will hold you until you are rested and fully awake.” He tapped his rod against the ground to punctuate his declaration. I remembered that I still have no idea what function or symbol is that rod for. I meant to open my mouth to ask.
I fell into a deeper sleep instead.
My arm still hurts.