I’m shuddering uncontrollably on the hard, cold surface. I see glowing markings along the top of the walls, just under the ceiling, and I recognize where I’m at.
“Esse…”
Cold hands rest on my shoulders. He leans over my head with his usual stony expression. “Long time no see.” He strokes my face, neck, and collarbone, soothing the uncontrollable shudders into unbreakable calm. “Where is he?”, he mutters at me.
I knew he meant Snake. “Gone. I guess I no longer needed a jailer.”
“You mean babysitter.”
“Yea, that too.” The calm spreads through my body, chilling and numbing me as it goes. “Hey. Where’s the doll now that you don’t have to fight him for control over it?” I meant to say more words, but the chill is making it hard to speak, hard to move at will. Esse is up to some shit again, and I am figuring this out too late again.
Gently he turns my head to the left. There is a shelf high on the wall, and sitting on that shelf is the stolen doll in question. It looks nothing like me or any of my forms. It has a blank mask for a face but is richly adorned in colorful embroidered cloth. The last I saw the doll, it was a small statuette that could not be posed.
I realized I couldn’t turn my head up to face him. “It has joints. What did you do to it?”
He gently turned my head back to center. “I did nothing to change it.” If nothing to change it, what did he do instead? “As you came into yourself, the doll changed to reflect your growth. You were rigid in thinking and action when [the Little Ones] gave you the doll. You have since become more flexible in your outlook and your abilities, and the doll has changed to reflect that.”
“Then give me back the doll.” It was hard to speak against the slur, but I made my demand known.
He stroked my throat and my voice relaxed into uselessness. As he leaned over me to pick up something from a side table, I saw a short, thin crease deepen at the corner of his mouth. Esse was smirking, and thus definitely up to some shit.
He cradled me into a semi-upright position. A bowl of something fluid, bitter, and sharp was tilted to my lips. The arm cradling me was placed so his hand gripped my throat. Through a series of squeezes, he manipulated me into drinking the contents of the bowl quickly and without objection.
The cold of the fluid stabbed my stomach and the shuddering returned even more jarring than before. He quickly laid me out on the stone table again, but his touches and strokes did little to soothe the increasing disturbances.
“One day, you will have questions and I will answer them. Today, however, I will speak the questions and you will answer them.” His hard hands pressed my shoulders to the table, keeping the fit from slamming my head in the vicious jerks and pulls. “I would rather not dull you into submission. It would affect the outcome. You already know you have been poisoned. Let it work its way through you. Let yourself die.”
My lungs felt heavy from the inside and I felt the urge to cough to clear them. Except the poison was already disrupting even involuntary muscle control, and my diaphragm quivered helplessly instead. Too sweet froth backflowed into my mouth as my eyes tracked up against my will. I saw Esse’s smirk widen another few millimeters when my body stopped all movement.
My dead eye had ceased functioning shortly after the poison was swallowed. The living eye was fading into equal dysfunction when I saw the gleam of a fist-gripped, convex blade. Esse tested where he willed to strike before grabbing my face and jaw in his hand and holding it securely against him.
With one stroke, he decapitated me, and I fell into pieces.
“What has he done to you?!” I recognized the voice as that of my wife, but I could not recognize anything else. I was thrashing widely, trying to strike an assailant that I wasn’t even sure was real. My wife had pulled me against something hard like a concrete wall and was pinning me there by her legs.
Her legs were over my shoulders and crossed over my chest. I could smell blood where I had scratched them in my flailing. It was enough to remind me that she was “safe” and not my target, but it enraged me because I was afraid she was under attack herself.
“I’m here! It’s okay. There is nothing here but us, no one here but us. Please, pull your pieces together here, where you are safe.”
I gripped her legs with talon tipped hands and scratched new wounds into her shins. The panic was starting to ease some, but a strange metallic taste was crawling up my throat. I could tell she was seated on a low platform, using her weight as a counterbalance to mine and keeping me pinned on the ground.
It took me a moment to realize who she was and that I was accepting her as “my wife”. It reminded me I was dreaming, and I told myself to remember this scene so I could tease her about it later. The humor calmed me further and I started to regain more of my reason.
I felt her sit up as the action squeezed my shoulders against the concrete. I welcomed the pain as a further grounding agent. Her hands reached down to stroke my cheeks and I jerked in sudden fear.
“Who is he? Why did he cut you to pieces? I think I found all of you, and once I put the pieces near each other, they snapped together like magnets. But why did he cut you up?”
I opened my mouth to speak and realized I had no tongue. I pointed to the empty cavity and started laughing.
My wife tilted my head back and peered inside. “He took it. He knew I was finding your pieces and he took it so I couldn’t. What did he not want you to say?”
«Speak to me.»
I jerked at the command blooming in my mind. My eyes unfocused and clicking noises came out of my mouth. My hands curled as my arms threw themselves back into the concrete platform.
“[Wifey?]” I could see fresh tears threatening to fall on my face, but I could not answer her in sound nor motion. My lungs were filling with froth again, and the way she held my head back was reaffirming my status as dead.
«With [static] I have caught you from falling into the dark. With [static] I have placed you in full view of the light. No grave will devour you. No sky is open to you. Here you are, between [static] and [static]. Speak to me.»
My wife meant to hold my head still so she could kiss me on the forehead.
Her scream of offense and rage when my head came off at the neck into her lap was completely justified, I think.
I need to tell her how proud I am that she was not horrified into panicking.
He wore a stained cloak of mismatched panels. Some pieces were cloth, some were hide. Stitched crudely together, I had the impression that the skins were somehow still alive and moving in futile resistance to their capture. The hill he was climbing was recently filled with stretches of flowers and thick plants. The greenery had been trampled into the mud, along with the bodies of the fallen and the blood left by all involved. I knew in a few months, the flowers will return just as vivid as before, and their thick foliage will hide the slaughter field until the next battle takes place and fresh blood feeds the earth.
Ravens surrounded him as he ascended. Some cawed at him. Some moved out of his way with complaint. Some never looked up from their task of prying out an exposed eye. Some flew ahead of him, low to the ground, eager to be where he was going.
Eager to see what he was carrying.
Smoke from distant fires argued with the low hanging clouds for dominance over the shamed sky. Indifferent to the surroundings, animate or not, the chanting man continued his stick assisted ascent to the crown of the hill. He placed the bundle on the cracked boulder.
As he pulled the large leather piece away from the contents of the bundle, he spoke in low and commanding tones. “Speak to me.”
I did not understand the language spoken, but I could understand the meaning of what he said. But there were gaps. If he said a thing I had not encountered before, I did not know what he was referring to.
He gestured over the last flap of leather covering the bundle. The ravens gathered thickly around him and the cracked black boulder. “With [static] I have caught you from falling into the dark. With [static] I have placed you in full view of the light. No grave will devour you. No sky is open to you. Here you are, between [static] and [static]. Speak to me.”
He pulled away the last layer of obscuring leather.
My exposed ashen face opened its cloud white eyes and black tongued mouth in a breathless scream that caused the bloodless head to tilt.
Jupiter called it “cultural contamination“, when the ideas from one stream infects or influences the ideas coming from another stream. He warned me about all the different sources of my woo and all the different ideas I’ve encountered about wooishness converging in me, mixing in me, and creating something entirely bastardized but entirely mine. All I have in the darkness are the comfort of my thoughts. I knew something had happened, but the enormity of it was so far beyond me, I could not comprehend any of it and had fallen into a willful self-blinded state.
I knew I had to get over the panic and face what had happened if I was going to gain anything of merit from the ordeal. I tried to sort through my memory, using Jupiter’s words as the light to find a trail. The next thought surprised me entirely.
It’s all [coldalbion‘s] fault, I bet. I probably read too much of his thought seeding posts and fell into the spiritual version of a bog of etymology. I tried to laugh but realized I lacked a body to express the mirth. Wait. I can think but I have no body? Headkult? Naw…
Somberly I reflected on the implications of coldalbion’s posts being an influencer of current events. This better not be some headkult bullshit. I’m not even in that fandom! All my shit focuses on the heart and the chest. Which I seem to be lacking right now. Fuck.
Who am I without my hands? Without my wings? Without my heart of flame, and the slowly healing chest wound? Who am I without my marks of experience and survival? Of ownership and retribution? Who am I without the illusion of flesh that I have used as mask and shield, as a knowingly incomplete representation of who I wished I was and who I am still afraid of? If I was reduced to just a head, if all I had was what was contained in the cranium, would I still be me? Or am I still tangled too much in the rotting solidity of flesh?
The one time I wished I could look up the etymology of “be” and “me”, and I haven’t the ability to even scratch my ass in confusion. Fuck. I hope I remember this when I wake up.
Well. There’s only one way out of this mess. If all I have is my head, then I better open my eyes.
The fires had long ceased but their phantasmal smoke still lingered in silent witness. The rain had gently kneaded the remaining pools of blood into rivulets of rust hues veins. The wolves had come at the call of the ravens. Between them, there was little solid flesh left for the worms, but the flowers will bloom spectacularly in a few months, I’m sure.
My black feather and gray pelt cloak settled off a shoulder. I shrugged it back into place, swinging the battered shield slightly. I expected to find my black iron ax in my left hand, but when I looked down, I saw it had become a black iron spear instead. The iron had fed well, darkening from exposure to blood.
I looked back over the field. Facing uphill, I saw a hunched figure at the cracked black boulder on the crest of the hill. I knew I was to wait here for him to finish. Though there was nothing preventing him from descending the hill, I knew he would come this way. He would come to me.
Behind me, Esse stood obscured by shadows. If he wasn’t my master at this time, not even I would know he was there. We stood with the patience of the dead.
The top half of my face had been rubbed black with soot. The bottom half of my face had been rubbed white with ash. My hands had been originally rubbed black with soot up to the elbow, but the work done in this field had turned that black to a filthy browning red. My head was shaved bald and painted with a reddish mud with markings that made no sense to me but marked me as apart from everyone else. I wore only hard leathers under the cloak as armor. No metal upon my person except for the head of the spear and the work on the shield.
The figure at the crest finished his business and wrapped up something on the boulder that I could not see. He tucked it under his right arm, and slowly turned around. He saw me, far below him, and paused. His wide brim hat covered most of his face, but I could see enough of his jaw to note he was smiling. Did he know? Did it matter?
He descended slowly, with an old crippled cadence. Stick, step, shuffle. Stick, step, shuffle. It took him a while to come halfway down the hill. Leaving that place is always harder than approaching it. Esse nodded, and in response I lifted my spear as hail, warning, and challenge.
The old man stopped. He clenched his bundle tighter. Esse stepped out of the shadows and verbally hailed him. “Have you what is mine? Will you surrender it in peace?”
The old man laughed coldly. The ravens gathered in the trees at the sound. “Have you learned nothing? Will you learn it at last?” His reply should have undone my knees in fear if not for Esse’s control over me.
Esse sighed in frustration. “Take it. Do what you will to retrieve it, but retrieve it.”
The old man was far enough away to need to shout. He lifted his bundle and whispered to it. I heard his words as if he was beside me. “Are you flesh? Or are you spirit? Would you fight against yourself?” The words confused me and kept me from moving.
Behind me, Esse snorted. The action asserted his control over me and the confusion fled. “I would do as I am to do.”, I answered as I lifted the spear and tightened my grip. “And I would end you and take what is my master’s.”
The old man laughed as I charged swiftly up the hill. He did not attempt to dodge me, or to counter my assault. I watched the greedy black iron spear head pierce through the squirming living cloak into his heart.
And watched it exit mine, sizzling from sudden heat as it did. The old man laughed without pause as I pulled the spear back in surprise, pulling it out of my wounded flesh before pulling it from his unbroken skin. My heart threw its complaint on the ground while a jet of flame tongued the air obscenely. He watched me fall to my knees as my blood helped to prepare the ground for next season’s blooms. I did not feel the spear and shield falling from my incompetent grip and barely heard them splashing against the puddle around me.
The old man traded his staff for my fallen spear. Despite the fresh coat of blood on the shaft, he gripped it securely. “You don’t think I don’t know this one, [Esse]? I know all the ones you send against me. I know all the ones I take for my own. Sometimes, they are both. But not this time. You have her body. I have her head. We shall see who has her spirit.”
He kicked me over so my fading eyes are towards the matching clouds. He raises my spear, changing it into a war glaive as it rises. He brings it sharply down, neatly decapitating my body and driving my spirit from the bloody hill.
I wake with a jerk in a cold room, lying on a cold stone table. Gulping air, I tremble in near panic at the confusing rush of memories that assault my consciousness. I remembered being Esse’s Hound again, but who the hell was I sent after? Naw, that can’t be right. And why is the Tumblrite coldalbion’s name searing my memory? Who am I, this time, and is this really me, or another layer of lies I have to peel off unwillingly? Who the fuck am I?
I don’t know.
Looking up at the ceiling, I recognize the glowing bindrunes that keep me captive in Esse’s realm. I remembered my “wife” and why the term was so comforting. I wished I were there, with her, instead of here, with only the lies I tell myself for company. I better not lose my head again. Oh wait, that happened.
I reached up to touch my neck and found no new marks had been laid upon me. With a start, I remembered the doll and sat up to look at the shelf where I had seen it.
It was not there. Esse retains control over his Hound.
“I’m done with you.” How long had he been standing there? Esse crossed his arms in obvious disgust. “Absolutely done with you. Get out, and do not ever return to my lands without a summons.”
“Give me the doll back, then. And I’ll have no reason to pester you again.”
“Get out. Or I send you out in pieces.”
“The doll. Or we’ll settle this shit right here, right now.”
We stared each other down. I was at a severe disadvantage, being in his controlled environment and with him having control over the doll. I’ve never bucked Esse with my whole being before, and I knew I would have to go into full berserk mode to even have a fighting chance. I still do not know who or what Esse is. I only know the masks he has worn to gain my confidence. Dwerg, sometimes. Svartalf, often. Master of War and the Forge. Commander of Armies, and possibly, the Dead. Dark Lord.
The confrontation on the hill taught me who he is not, though. But I have no idea how to use that information to my advantage, right now. I have only my bravado and my will to be free. I know it is not enough.
“We will settle the matter of the doll when I am assured you are truly your own. As long as there is a chance you will be used against me, I will keep the doll as a security measure. I do not want to end you prematurely. You know your way out. Don’t come back unrequested.”
He turned away from me and left the chamber. The empty doorway became a solid wall immediately after he passed through it. I sighed and denounced my cowardice loudly to swallow the fear that he had just used the doll against me right then, to keep me from attacking him.
I left the chamber via the only means open to me. I expected to enter the Forest of Shadows again, but I found myself back on the hill. The old man was still there, halfway descended on the hill and facing me. There was a shadow of a person standing with him this time.
That shadow lifted her face, and I recognized myself. The eyes were closed but I knew she/I was watching me.
“We are all puppets in someone’s hands. There is a price to pay for changing owners. You have paid that price many times before. Is it time to pay it again? I do not want you for myself. You will never step into my halls, but I think you already knew that and why. So tell me, [Weaver].”
“Would you know more?”
Before I could even think of answering, he took the hood of the shadow-me beside him and covered her head. The action darkened my sight and smothered me from the dream.