#because if she showed up it turns into a 'an insignificant planet orbiting a minor star is now dead' territory

[lightdancer1]

And then there's the Butcher

Who was the last one added and was a part all along of the multiverse, when that became a fully established element of the cosmology. She reflects what I call 'parallels' insofar as they are the equivalent alternate universe selves of people. In her case she is a parallel of the main character of the series, Xaderavcal the Unifier. This particular parallel would seemingly be 'Mary Sue' except that she gets there by an extradimensional incursion slaughtering her family and the basic function she fills was a case, prior to reading anything about the World Eaters, of being her family's equivalent of Angron.

As in 'she introduces herself in a rain of blood and wherever she is, whatever she lands on isn't.' She's less the Executioner and more the Destroyer. And like all her kin she has many names, most of which are various euphemisms for annihilation and butchery because that's....exactly what she is and how she goes about doing it.

As the Urhalzantrani are an entire species of immortal imperialists she's essentially imperialism stripped of its refined traits and as such a parallel to the arch-villain and the irony that one of these is the 'hero' and one of these is the 'villain' is meant to show that at a cosmic level if it's Azarath flaying your soul and reconstructing you as a flesh-puppet for the mad God on the Gilded Throne to torment indefinitely or this one, people might be forgiven for wondering where the difference actually lies.

[rosienth]

Ghost Story

I wrote this piece for my college science fiction class in response to Octavia Butler’s, “The Book of Martha”; there are also a few references to Ted Chiang’s, “Exhalation,” and to Chen Qiufan’s, “Smog Society.” It’s not the best thing that I’ve ever written, but it’s best read when accompanied by the Gone Girl soundtrack–my favorite movie soundtrack to date–specifically, “What Have We Done To Each Other.” 

My wife is as transient to me now as the fog is to everyone else. She comes when the fog opens, like curtains, revealing the face that appears so familiar to me, yet not, at the same time—and she goes when the fog thickens, closing off my view of her and her world in all of their foreign familiarity.

Space travel had not been successful in the earlier years: it took longer than we could afford to wait amidst the famines and the riots, and the astronauts—“our pioneers of the future,” as the last of the grimy government officials liked to call them—went missing, often, much to the public’s horror. Those were the days when my wife was still writing for the papers and leading protests and coming home to talk to me about how things were going to get infinitely better, Emily. As it always did, her doe-eyed optimism rubbed off on me with time, and so we, as in my naive colleagues at the lab and I, went looking for more efficient means—a shortcut that would bridge great spatial distances—of transcending time and space. No more primitively launching ourselves out of orbit. We were arrogant enough to tell ourselves that this project would not only be our redemption, but also the revival of the scientific world. The advent of the Second Enlightenment. When we presented our abstract to our prospective patrons, we called the theory something long, pretentious, and technical—a title that I could not even bother to remember later, when the fog arrived and settled. My wife called it “closing the gaps”—that’s a much more digestible term, Emily—which seems so appropriately ironic, in retrospect. I would have laughed if I had known better then.    

There is no telling or predicting when the fog will clear and there is no demanding or manipulating the fog into clearing. For the first time in a long time, we had to wait to get what we wanted from what was left of our planet. I cannot say whether or not this was good for us, or even if the fog had produced more patient, less self-serving people. It certainly did produce the most devout of religious fanatics, though. First, came the prayer circles; they were mostly secretive and inconspicuous in the beginning. Then, followed the chanting and the singing that echoed throughout the day, into the desolate alleyways and into the brittle corpses of fallen skyscrapers, and bled deep into the night. They—most likely because my wife had gone missing by the time that the Fog Societies multiplied and infiltrated the cities—didn’t bother me as much as they had bothered those who eventually attempted to silence their “disruptive nonsense” through violence. Their singing soothed me and helped me to drown out the sounds of regretful memories: dishes crashing against the kitchen floor, doors slamming in faces, empty curses shouted from across equally empty hallways. I didn’t like being told that I was being greedy; she didn’t like being told that she was being jealous. I was officially granted my own research space at the national lab; she was discharged from her position as editor-in-chief of the local paper.

Public distrust of science was rampant long before my team and I even started our experimental trials, and rightfully so: our predecessors took advantage of science’s promise of absolute objectivity and absolute truth to justify eugenics—among other inhumane acts. Scientists like me were scarce and poor, so naturally, the prize money was the objective of our project; the fog, of course, was the unintended, unnatural consequence—to some, a godly blessing—of our hasty curiosity and desperation.  

What emerged from the tear that we made in the atmosphere was not expected. I thought that you were closing the gaps. There was no kaleidoscopic storm that threatened to devour the city and the oceans; there was no ominous black hole to rip us apart and pull us into the fabric of the universe and end all human life as we knew it; there was no loud, cinematic climax, only a potent, viscous slowness. The fog materialized in waves, ever so subtly, before it was everywhere and before it became everything. It clouded our vision as it snaked through the uprooted streets and penetrated the thin walls of our homes, lulling the city into a gradual hibernation: it dimmed the street lamps, it eclipsed the stars, and it silenced the birds and the children in the parks. The fog became the air that we breathed and it, too, seemed to move—to clot and to dissipate—with the rhythm of our lungs: the exhale, the clotting, was deep and exaggerated, while the inhale, the dissipation, was brief and euphoric.  

Strange, inexplicable things happened during the inhalations, during the fleeting moments when fog cleared. There were miracles and there were tragedies; the two merged into one. My wife was the first to notice the differences that emerged from underneath the fog. At first, they were small, insignificant differences. The wedding album cover was royal blue instead of the seafoam green that my wife swore on her right hand that it was. Peach rose bushes bloomed in places where there should have been dirt and cracked concrete. Grandma Kay’s gilded antique music box disappeared from my wife’s bookshelf and was never found.

“This is a cruel prank, Emily,” my wife had assured me one morning before I left for work at the lab, her voice hoarse from last night’s yelling match. She must have also found it cruel when people began disappearing, too, but she retreated to her room without a word when the first headliner showed up at our door: 25 Missing, No Leads. They were never found.  

I spent the weeks leading up to my wife’s disappearance tossing and turning in the bed sheets, only occasionally getting up for nutritional biscuits and water from the kitchen. It was difficult to cope with the immobility during the exhalations; they were such agonizingly long periods. You could not see the hand in front of you when you stepped foot outside, let alone travel, because the fog was so opaque when it thickened and descended upon everything. My wife liked to joke that we were living beneath a large fleece blanket, though I suppose it wasn’t much of a joke given the bitterness in her tone. Ironically enough, we were safest in the darkness, when we were blind to everything outside of that large blanket. At least, people didn’t go missing during the exhalations.

The city is mostly quiet now because people had given up on hypothesizing and rationalising and instead, surrendered, shut up, and listened to the soft humming of the fog. You cannot sleep because the noise is so incessant, omnipotent, and it is usually at its loudest just before the fog lifts for the next inhalation. You can hear distorted, almost palpable voices muffled in the fog, some of them foreign, some of them so eerily familiar that they make you pause to stare at your reflection in the mirror at night, as my wife so often did. She said that she saw the ghosts of another family living inside of our house: one mother who goes to work—A scientist, Emily!—another mother who stays at home with the giggling baby. She witnessed the welcoming of the new family cat, reflected in the bathroom mirror. She was there for the baby’s first birthday celebration; she watched them dancing around together in the window panes. It made her uneasy, at times, the voyeurism of it all, but she could not bring herself to look away.

It was not long before the rest of the city saw their own ghosts, too. Behind the fog, we saw glimpses of different versions of ourselves. Some of them were brilliant, others, not so much. We got to see the ones that never broke up with our first loves, the ones that pursued the internships that we had been too afraid to in college, and the ones that found solace in opium and lived in dingy spaces on the edges of town. The fog gave us new vision, new eyes: we saw life and we saw death, living and dying, all at once. For some, the gift was too overwhelmingly colorful; it drove them down the rooftops of skyscrapers and down the flights of apartment building staircases. For others, the gift seduced them into stagnance. Sometimes, they formed new religions like the Fog Societies did in order to evoke more frequent inhalation periods. Sometimes, they sat still in their living rooms, inhaling the sounds of their potential lives and choices. My wife sleep walked through empty rooms and traced the spines of nonexistent books that she did not own, at least not in this life. Not here and not now. All of these things were ultimately just different forms of waiting and postponing action. People were tired of working and protesting to deaf ears. Waiting felt good.

One night, sometime after my wife went missing, a stranger joined me in bed. This was an inhalation. The woman resembled my wife in almost every way: she shared the same waist-length curls, same pointed nose that I used to teasingly poke, same bright, hazel eyes. I watched the panic grow and then plateau in those eyes at the realization that I was not at all who she thought that I was.

“You’re not Cara. Where is she? Where is the baby?”

This wife-imposter did not stay for very long. She left just as quickly as she had arrived, when the fog came back and swathed us in its great arms. I don’t think that I ever saw her again. There were other wife-imposters, certainly, but all slightly different; a minority of them recognized me—probably a different version of me, maybe a better me that didn’t abandon my wife when she needed me the most—and I pretended to recognize them too. Most of them reacted similarly to the way that the first one did, by bombarding me with questions, to which I answered as honestly as I could. The questions that I asked myself tortured me more so. Was my real wife starving somewhere on the side of some nondescript road? Was she happier with whomever she wound up with than she was with me? Was she still alive? The first few times the women appeared were frustrating and disorienting; I just wanted to get past the formalities, past those shrill, hysterical questions, and find out for sure if this was indeed my wife from here, from now. My increasing loneliness and guilt softened me, however, and I found myself hopefully waiting for these awkward visits from these strange women that ghosted in and out of our house. I wanted for just anyone to distract me from that harrowing loneliness and guilt.  

These days, I wait out on my flamingo pink lawn chair, half-heartedly pretending to sunbathe, but mostly I’m focused on my breathing. I’ve stopped going to the lab and I’ve stopped communicating with my colleagues altogether, not that either of those things would have mattered, anyway; some of them don’t even remember my name or why they’re even working at the lab. I can’t blame them, though. My own memories feel more like distant childhood bedtime stories than they do reality. Perhaps we are all too intoxicated to tell the difference. Perhaps the fog has suffocated us all in our own daydreams; I don’t know. For now, I know that I am perfectly content waiting around for the fog to churn out the next dazed stranger. I know that she’ll have a lot of questions that I can’t answer, but maybe one day, she won’t have any. She’ll know exactly who I am and she’ll know that she is home.