You are reading a novella in four parts.
To read Part One, click here.
To read Part Two, click here.
Prelude to Part III: Another Path
2030
The Oracle shows me another path:
She breaks the brick road, scrapes away the soil below and all the erosion around it.
She lays a fresh foundation, and I watch as brand new bricks unfurl back to where I started from.
Half a brick lies submerged in the primordial waters. The realm of Chaos. Nu. An ocean of many names, the bearer of the egg from which I might have hatched.
“What if?” asks the Oracle of Siwa.
What if.
Part 3: This is Hell
VII: Neon Genesis
2016
I stare at a skyline of jagged towers of varying heights, opaque against the contrast of the setting sun’s dying light.
The dark buildings are like suggestions of what they were before the smoke and sunset washed them out of reality.
They are fading, along with everyone inside them.
Taller than the tallest of these towers, The First Dragon rampages with a mix of madness, vitriol, and relief. I watch it lay waste to the city from a distance that won’t remain safe for much longer.
It is mad, for it is a resuscitated corpse. An impression of a living thing encased in unholy armour. It does not belong to this plane.
It is vitriolic, for it could not win on its own terms. It never will.
It is relieved, for it is free again. This freedom is fleeting, but for now, as it rampages and kills without restraint, it is free.
It will eventually face consequences. None of us will be left alive to witness that day. And this is my doing; all because…
A paw—like an executioner’s axe, descending on my father, on a cool sunny spring day of beauty far too indulgent a backdrop for such an act of random, savage violence.
This day, however, is not beautiful. Nor is the violence random. I was deprived of the opportunity to contend with my father’s legacy and so I sold my grief to the highest bidder and this is the infernal result.
Screams echo like pinballs bouncing between these towering, burning buildings, carrying with them a message that Hell has arrived.
Hell’s ruler has returned with my aid, to set fire to everything, fire so hot the air itself evaporates and the hope of regrowth is irradiated with the promise of a cancerous forever.
The First Dragon spreads its wings. The old order is moulted with its dead feathers, and I along with them.
II: Sliver
1993
A dragon twists in my memory:
I’m three, standing on the shores of a lake encircled by walls. A glorified cage.
Merriment, laughter, joy… ringing in my ears, pressing in from all sides.
There’s popcorn on the floor beneath my feet. Cotton candy strings between the blades of grass.
Hundreds of men, women, and jesters tower over me. Through their touching shoulders, I can barely see.
I’m only three.
*
I’m three, clutching Mother’s hand. We’re on a bus, rolling across a wasteland tucked away in the southern fringes of the Homeland.
An odyssey to nowhere. A place where the fiery breath of Armageddon once grazed away what little life lived here.
There’s another boy—a mirror of me—in the corner of the bus, splayed across the seats. His father keeps him company, but not greater company than the toy gun he’s holding.
I want a gun. More than anything. I promised not to kill with it, yet Mother worried still.
I understand nothing of her worries. I’m only three.
*
“Please show me!” I plead, yet Mother and father remain seated. All around us, the spectators buzz with excitement, pressing more closely together. A human curtain, closing.
All I see past the rows of heads is an overcast sky.
“I will show him,” father says.
“I beg you not to,” Mother.
father. Mother. Arguing with one another. Playing ball with my fate. Why in my heart does it feel too late?
I am only three.
Mother yields. father grabs my wrist. He yanks me through the human curtains…
*
“But why can’t I have a gun?” I ask.
Mother doesn’t answer.
“I’ll only shoot it in the air.” Why is it that even now, even as I swear it, she will not hear? I’m not a killer. I’m only three.
The bus spits us out onto the asphalt. The Bullfighting arena, built on irradiated sand, cracked earth, and drought, towers nearby—
A roar shakes my thoughts, waking my primal brain from the nap it took when I was born. “What is that?” I cry.
“It won’t be alright,” Mother whispers to herself, her words dry of the love that once carried me into this life. “There are—”
*
“…Dragons,” father snarls. I imagine his face is very much like the dragon swimming in the lake in the centre of the arena.
I sit on my father’s shoulders, now high above the human curtain, staring at the lake where the great green Bull twists and turns across its surface, hissing at anyone who looks upon it. As it devours something in the water, a ring blossoms around its writhing form, turning the water to wine.
“Someday…I will kill as he has killed,” father says. “And someday, maybe you will kill as well. Anything is possible… in Paradise.”
I’m only three.
Mother always says the virtuous kill to protect. For father, killing is for prophets and prospects, the foretelling of fortune and glory.
For the dragon, killing is coding. Primal brain. Its beginning and—
*
“…the end.” The Dragon says, inside my head as I gaze upon it.
My trembling lips are worthless. My words lose form outside of this telepathy.
The Great Green Dragon eats its own tail, revolving in circles under a sky so overcast you would think an abundance of rain and life were forthcoming.
There is no life here. There never will be. Nothing but this arena—a Dragon’s lair. A place mother brought me to… to…
To… what?
“To teach you a lesson,” The Great Green Dragon says.
“What lesson?” I ask.
“That the good times always end.”
III: The Day my Mother Died
2008
The day father died is like a portrait with the faces carved out with a jagged dagger.
We were on a dirt trail, winding along the edge of a lake. The blue sky reduced to a washed-out ghost compared to the lake’s glacial brilliance.
So cold and beautiful. Reflections of fluffy clouds drifted across the surface.
The lake was to our left. To our right, a steep slope—rocky at first, then forested. Atop the slope, the main road, out of sight.
Can Paradise possibly beat this?
I would never find out. We were about to plunge into Hell.
In the distance, the lumbering outline of a grizzly bear blocked the road ahead. Behind us, a second grizzly quickly approached.
They told us the trail was safe. They told us bears avoided people.
It was the first iteration of a valuable life lesson: expect death at any moment, even when they tell you it is at a distance.
The only options were to scale the slope or dive into the lake. Sub-zero depths that promised death, or a frantic climb in a race against time.
It took father too long to make up his mind.
I can’t recall now how Mother and I made it out alive. I could never bring myself to ask her.
What lingers in my memory the most is a violent flash as the bear’s paw came down, almost clumsily. It’s a question of scale though, is it not? The force of a casual brush from a bear against the frame of a man whose bravery bordered on arrogance…
The result was bloody crumpled aluminium.
Though Mother never said it, I held on to enough fragments of memory to know the bears feasted on father the way a Bull feasts on those in its vicinity when it is born of Transfiguration.
My father’s death bore no fruit. Nothing grew from the splotches of blood left over on the muddy shores of that lake. His remains were lapped up by the waters until they joined the sediment at the very bottom of the water.
I remember the stench of pine, blood, and mud. The memory of it creeps on me, when there is a dew hanging in the air, or a whisper of fear with the wind if it comes from the direction of a war-torn place.
Was father’s death a tragedy? Or was I saved from a worse fate?
Mother’s health failed in the years that followed. Not even moving back from Paradise to the Homeland was enough to quiet the grief in her heart that eventually permeated every cell in her body.
I hold her hand now, as she likely breathes her last breath. Her hand is frail, all bones, really. An animated skeleton that clung to life as long as it did just for my sake.
As her grip weakens, I’m conscious that I won’t be meeting grief for the first time. I’ve known grief almost all my life. It was the spectre that haunted Mother ever since my father died.
Grief is no stranger. I first resented it. Then I loathed it. Now I ignore it.
Mother’s passing will not be the same as father’s, but I don’t have an ounce of care left to spare it any further thought.
IV: Love Around
2010
A paper rustles between my fingers. The wind has tempted it into escape and soon I will oblige it.
I have been accepted into The Royal Academy of Counter-Insurgency.
I let the wind carry the paper away into the sea where the ravenous waves waste no time reducing the evidence to flotsam.
The wind is cold and carries with it the scent of pine and firewood from somewhere far away and I—
I’m held hostage by a memory of a cabin—at the nexus of where the mountains and oceans meet in the Homeland.
Inside the cabin, whose walls are a series of rustic wooden panes, a woman’s hand touches mine. Her hair burns red like fire in the peripherals of my vision.
I had refused to look at her. And although I did not gaze upon her directly, the scorpion tattoo on her hand was vivid in my mind.
“Why won’t you look at me?” she asked.
I wouldn’t look at her because the guilt of who I left behind weighed heavy on my soul. My beloved was waiting for me across the ocean, and I had deceived her to be here with someone else.
“Look at me.”
I had considered it, but before I could act, a light outside the window caught my eye. At first I thought it was the reflection of the fireplace, soothingly crackling in the back of the room. But as I squinted it became apparent that whatever this was lay on the other side of the glass.
I strained my eyes to better glimpse this orange glow, hovering amongst the stars in the darkness of night.
The longer I stared the more clearly I saw through the obfuscation of the glow and to the heart of its source, until my eyes finally adjusted to reveal an unmistakable disc-like shape…
I blink. The memory rescinds, but not entirely.
I never uttered a word to anyone about that day, for many reasons. For betraying my love. For the unspeakable thing I saw.
Just as I will never utter a word about today.
Somewhere in the sea-tattered remains of my letter is a possibility of another future where I do not heed the call of the Academy’s acceptance. It is the sea’s secret to keep now.
I un-lodge my feet from the sand and say goodbye to this land where there is no one left alive to mourn my departure and the future that might have been.
V: That’s the Spirit
2015
“I think I’ll wear my textured shirt,” I say.
The Coordinator responds with a blank stare that fully reveals the nothingness beneath the suit of elegance he wears called his skin.
“You know,” I gesture at my plain t-shirt to convey my meaning, “like ruffled, you know? Around the chest area?”
The Coordinator snorts. “Textured shirt,” he repeats. He shakes his head and walks away, down the marble corridors of this palace in the middle-of-nowhere England.
I look away from the retreating Coordinator and peer through one of the many grand archways of the hotel lobby that lead outside. Green, as far as the eye can see, which is not especially far now, courtesy of the late summer rain clouds rolling through the heathland.
This hotel is an oasis of secret supremacy in a grounded ocean of normalcy. Here the coordinators of fate, the Nordic Coven, plot and shape the next nexus of power.
Has it always been this way?
I light a cigarette. I shouldn’t, but no one will stop me. Regardless of my background or whether I should belong here, I am an instrument of the black widows who own this place.
If not for a slight divergence in destiny I would be out roaming the heath as a straggler. Instead, I am a contractor, working with a protractor, measuring the angle of spin woven by these spiders to ensnare the world without being seen.
I ash directly on the floor. Also marble. Speckled with muddy boot prints from people coming and going.
The Coordinator brought me and several others here for a special briefing. Graduates of the Academy of Counter-Insurgency. A front, it turned out, for the Nordic Coven.
Soon we too would assume our own coming and going, applying our craft to undermine the machinations of the Council of Bullfighters, curbing their influence, ingratiating the black widows with ever more insects to feast on.
Later that night, in the hotel bar, one of the generals is drunk.
She is a little like me. She wasn’t born powerful. Like me, she is a tool for the powerful, albeit armoured in their luxurious silken webs. Disconnected from her humble roots, she is no longer recognisable to her people, and despite her gentrification, will never be gentle enough for the gentry.
She defies categorization. And if you cannot be categorised, digitised, stored in a database, and tracked, you are to be discarded.
“My time’s up,” she says to me. “They have no use for me anymore.”
“Surely that isn’t true,” I say, entirely sober, as I pour her another glass of bourbon.
Her elegant, tattooed fingers crawl to the glass and drag it back to her side of the table. Precious whiskey is sloshed on the table’s surface.
“It is,” she growls. “The war isn’t what it seems. The Council of Bullfighters are the ones who put the rabid Hounds up to all this in the first place.”
This is not quite news to me but I am eager for more of her take. “To what end?”
She wags a finger at me. “Genocide.”
“Not regime change?” I ask.
“In a way.” She hiccups. “But bigger. A changing of the wider order. More damage. More death. More chaos. So much so that all that’s left of Paradise will be a wasteland when they’re through with it.”
“That seems… extravagant,” I say, taking a tiny sip of my dirty martini.
“Free real estate,” The General says, and then it all makes sense.
Paradise will be ground to dust in total war. Rabid, rebel Hounds will ravage the land, each other, and leave nothing left.
Once Paradise is a desolate ghost town it can be remade in any image.
“Could this really be what the Council of Bullfighters desires?” I muse. If I were in my first year of this line of work, I might have been disturbed. Now, nothing shakes me. No matter how depraved the hands doing the shaking.
“The Council of Bullfighters,” The General scoffs. “No. It’s these fools here who are orchestrating all this.”
Well… I will concede this is rather unexpected. “What do they gain from it?”
“Eternal life,” she says.
A chuckle escapes me. “Be serious General.”
“You think I jest?” She shoves her glass aside and leans forward. “The Bullfighters wave their red flags and the world watches as they slay Dragons and then take their places. A twisted cycle of evolutionarily manipulated bloodshed with a short life span. What do you think happens if a Dragon is not slain?”
A curious image flits through my mind, of a bright white light consuming a planet much like Earth, but not quite, evaporating its atmosphere and plunging it to Hell.
I shiver. “I dare not think of it.”
“The correct sentiment,” The General says. “Our Nordic overseers are not so wise. They have secretly nudged the Council to instigate this civil war to obtain exclusive first rights to any biotech IP that comes out of this last phase of the Paradise experiment.”
I cannot shake the shiver that has now taken a hold of my body. Through chattering teeth, I respond: “What experiment?”
“The whole damn thing!” The General shouts over the ambience of the bar with frustration. “The Bullfighters. Dragons. This genocide. The whole thing has been an experiment to upend the established order of decorum and chivalry. To test the untested without limitation or oversight. To let Dragons live unslain and unchecked by the Bullfighters, to confirm a long-standing theory that Bulls never grow old…”
I steady myself. “…And then?”
The General smiles, a manufactured expression without feeling. “Then, our Nordic overseers learn how to keep spinning their webs forever.”
I am dizzy, although I am sober. The General, watching me closely, laughs. This time with genuine amusement.
“That’s the spirit,” she says.
“General.” A voice. Over my shoulder. The Coordinator.
“Hm?” The General growls.
“A moment please.”
“Certainly.” The General grabs her glass, downs the remainder of her drink. She nods at me, rises to her feet, and departs with The Coordinator.
I will never see her again.
VI: Have you Heard the Good News?
2016
The light fluttered through the tinted floor-to-ceiling windows like butterflies emerging from cocoons woven from the rays of the sun.
They swirled gently around the cavernous room. The space evoked the aesthetics of a hospital and legal office in equal measure.
There was no one there. Just the butterflies and streams of dust. Columns of dust light, converging in the middle of the room on—
A whale. Somehow stuffed into an office on the 90th floor of a sky rise located somewhere in the Far East.
The whale’s eye searched for me. It was in agony. It shouldn’t have been possible for it to be there, and yet there it was all the same.
“Why do you keep me here?” It asked me.
I never meant for this to happen.
“Why do you lie to yourself, Mauricius?” It rumbled. Though it wasn’t possible to tell by human measures, I knew it was weeping.
I raised my hands, contemplating whether to place them on the whale’s skin.
Why? To reassure it? My touch would simply worsen its agony.
“There is no agony worse than this,” it said. “Just release me from this. Please. I beg you.”
“How?” I asked, desperate to oblige.
“Kill me. When the opportunity arises… kill me.”
My throat tightened and I couldn’t swallow properly. Kill it? How could I do something so cruel?
“You are the greatest cruelty the world has ever known,” it said, piercing my heart with its thought-speak. “To release me from this would be a rare mercy from you.”
I woke up paralysed, as though the entirety of the whale’s mass were on my chest. I must have struggled for over an hour until I regained control of my body.
My mind keeps wandering back to that dream. I’m in the very same office building, in the same room, except, of course, there is no whale.
Worker drones quietly go about their work. Grunts, playing their small parts, working towards a greater whole they’ll never know.
The core team is being briefed by the project director. Her presence unnerves me. As I eye her, I’m filled with the same sensation that floods through me when I look in the mirror on a good day. She is a bizarre reflection of me, a stunning display of what I would have looked like as a woman, impossibly beautiful to behold.
How is this real? And does she notice it too?
I hope not. I make sure to avert my gaze, stealing only the occasional look between sweeping the floor. If she were to notice me, it would be a failure on my part.
I feel her eyeing me as I lumber by. The project is top secret. Maybe her scrutiny is just a healthy precaution? Maybe she hasn’t noticed anything especially odd about the way we look alike.
I overheard her introduce herself to her team as Isfet. A peculiar name. I wonder if it really is her birth name.
My mind wanders back yet again to my dream, but I quickly pull it back to the present. An increasingly difficult thing to do, because the unnerving thing—the peculiar, unnerving thing—is:
I had never seen this office before today.
*
The black armour, to my eyes as dimensionless as flat paper, takes everything in and gives nothing back.
“Do you want to be free?” I probe.
Nothing. Just more vantablack blankness.
Inside this deception, something is taking form. I know this because Isfet knows this.
As it turns out, my benefactors and hers are one and the same.
“Light flows forward and backwards, side to side, North, South, East, and West. Outside and inside out. Past, present, and future.” These words form inside my mind outside my will. Are they my own thoughts, or something projected by the essence trapped inside the armour?
The Council of Bullfighters aspired to freeze light itself. For years, they funded projects to achieve their unfathomable dream, until their efforts eventually culminated in a project that succeeded in capturing light with a praseodymium alloy. The method, developed by a secret research and development company in the Far East in 2013, existed away from the prying eyes of the Nordic Coven. Or so they thought.
Isfet, the senior director tasked with overseeing the project’s next phase, was an agent of the Coven who reported directly to The Coordinator. However, intelligence had reached him by other channels that she had discreetly made alterations to the project’s scope without his authorization. Under the pretence of scaling production of the praseodymium alloy, she had convened a confidential task force and assigned them the creation of…
I tilt my head until I catch the armour at an angle that teases its true three dimensionalities.
You used the alloy to create this suit of armour… Why?
Perhaps The Coordinator knew the answer. If he did, he did not deem it worth sharing with me in my briefing.
“Isfet has gone rogue and compromised our surveillance efforts and contaminated the project. You will be embedded in the research and development tower undercover. At the first opportunity, dispose of her.”
Dispose of her.
“The Council of Bullfighters must never learn of this. They must think Isfet walked out the door and disappeared.”
It should have been no problem. It should have been easy, even.
Except—
“Except you love me… don’t you?”
I’m drowning in a frozen lake, ice quickly freezing over the hole I fell through…
I spin around and aim my silenced pistol directly at Isfet’s chest quicker than she can anticipate. She flinches.
How did you sneak up on me like that?
“I’m not ready to die,” she whispers.
I clench my jaw and steady my hand, doing everything I can to quash the ice rising up my throat. Do it. Do it.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this Mauricius,” she says. Despite myself, despite my consciousness, my inner voice, my soul, or whatever you want to name the little light inside, I open my mouth instead of pulling the fucking trigger.
“I don’t have a choice,” I respond.
Isfet shakes her head. Strands of layered hair fall out of place and land across features so eerily like mine.
“Choice is the only thing you do have,” she says. “You’ve made so many. I can see them, in your eyes. Some of them were the right ones. But most of them…”
She trails off and shakes her head again. “I’m so sorry. I don’t quite understand how we ended up here. Things weren’t meant to be this way. You’ve done something. Or your father has.”
Her eyes hold me hostage. There’s no hope anymore, the ice freezes over and consumes me. I lower my gun.
She smiles.
“My father?” I probe.
She nods, her eyes dig deep into mine like a worm ravenously burrowing into an apple. I feel her Will wriggling its way in, subsuming my own.
“The Devouring Dragon of Bisterne,” she nods. “You never slew it to take its place in your father’s stead.”
What is she talking about? “My father died when I was a child.”
“Did he?” she frowns. “Hm. And you never took up the sword as a Bullfighter?”
My fingers tighten around the hilt of my gun. She notices.
“Ah. You took something else up.” She sighs. “I’m not sure what’s happening here, but I think… things are beginning to grow clearer.”
“Not to me.” I grip the gun tighter. Kill her.
She turns her nose up at the gun. “Is there justice in your work?”
The question is a punch to the gut. I never thought about justice before—
“Exactly my point,” she interrupts my thoughts. “There is domination in your work. You snuff out life, irrespective of whether it is just to do so. It isn’t even an afterthought. You think of my will as ravenous? It is you who is ravenous, stuffing your figurative mouth with corpses just to feel… power.”
Vertigo threatens to pull the floor away from beneath my feet. How does she know my thoughts? How is she privy to what I think?
With great desperation, I attempt to pull myself out of the tar pits of her gaze. There is no escape. I’m sinking…
Falling.
gnillaf.
She smiles at me with affection. Despite my confusion and fear, my heart flutters.
“Sins of the father,” she says.
“What?”
She looks around the room, in doing so releasing me from her paralyzing snake’s stare. My lungs are free to pull air in again.
“There are fragments of possibilities, dancing around in my head,” she says, rubbing her chin. “Dreams I’ve had, of the day we first met. Not like this. On a beach of sand, looking towards… home.” She frowns. “No matter. Things are the same, at the heart of it. Your father and the inheritance he left you. And what you, in turn, will leave for your son.”
“I don’t have children,” I say, slowly raising my gun again, now that the stranglehold of her gaze has been lifted from me.
“Correct. Instead of pursuing a family, you pursued power,” she says. “Poor man’s power, at that. Leased to you by those who truly wield it. A shame. Had you chosen differently, I could have offered you real power.”
“What power could you possibly offer me?” My voice fluctuates in my ears. I’m no longer transfixed by her. No longer—
“Shoot me, then.” She nods towards the gun whose barrel is now locked firmly on her heart. “It’s too late for us. You were meant to be there for me, I waited for you on that beach and you never showed up. I had to find another way back home.”
Her eyes flicker. It was just a moment, but I know they stole a glance of the dark armour behind me.
“What is it?” I ask. “The armour. What have you done?”
“You sought power in a misguided effort to soothe the singes left by the sins of your father,” she says. “Power wasn’t the answer. Believe me, I have all the power, and it did nothing to bring me closer to home.”
She bares her teeth at me like a feral beast. “Home is in ashes, Mauricius, and I will never get it back. The only thing left for me is to burn the rest of it.”
In the time it took her to finish her sentence, I fired three shots: two in her chest, and one right in the middle of her forehead.
It’s too late.
A sliver of green dribbles down her mouth and drops with a soft thud on the pitch-black armour. I take aim, but before I can fire another shot, the Wyrm’s slithered into the recesses of the armour.
Movement. My eyes swivel toward it.
The armour! Its fingers. They’re twitching.
Screaming. It invades my ears. Screaming everywhere around me, like knives peeling off my skin from every direction.
The armour rises from the table. A mechanical shadow brought to life by the Serpent who found a way to re-join the Light at last.
Now I understand. The gun falls from my hand.
From the dark spectre’s back erupts a multitude of glowing wings that bathe the room in chaos and light.
I have allowed The First Dragon to be restored, and in the presence of its full might I finally understand that I am powerless.
I: The Day my Father Died
1999
There is a myth that tells the tale of a bear the size of an elephant that must be slain by a hero. A symbol of death. In other myths, the bear is a healer. A symbol of life.
If you asked me before I turned nine what I thought about bears I would have told you they just… are.
When I was nine years old, my father was killed by a bear.
When I was nine years old, father was killed by a bear, and the trajectory of my life changed.
It will be for the worse.
I do know one truth, which is that for my father, in death he found no worse nor better. The consequences of the manner of his death ripple through the land of the living.
For father, when he died, it just was.
Faisal G. Binzagr
June 2026
To be continued in Part IV
Featured Image by Sarah Baslaim
Website: https://sarahbaslaim.wordpress.com/
