Apologue
A Dystopian Science Fantasy short story
Present time: 2037 A.D. [16 years, 11 months since End Day]. Both the coffee table and Roberta’s hand wobble as she sets the injection pen down, right next to her Myble and its digital display. Looming over the holy tablet, she’s trying hard to not think about the corpse she stole it off of the previous day-the musk of burnt meat and gasoline. Still, the corpse’s tablet contained a deluxe prayer, prepaid, and it wasn’t doing him any good. So she took it. Working in a municipal clean-up crew enabled her to be a first-class scavenger.
Oh, the grace of it. A Deluxe Prayer! This meant she could talk to one of the Holy Ones, directly. Praise the Blue Queen. Clearly, it was an honor she deserved. Like all of Roberta’s other acquisitions. It was meant to be.
More difficult had been procuring the drug. Her prayer was going to be for her least favorite tenant, Miss Farrah Patty. So Roberta had done one of her unannounced landlord’s inspections into Farrah Patty’s apartment. And while there, she had taken one of the girl’s appliances to hock for it. Farrah Patty wouldn’t notice. She was too busy with her life of sin, street-thievin’ and scammin’ , to notice. And never attendin’ Church anymore.
The Myble display read “downloading 12% complete”.
Through the walls, Roberta is affected by them all: the cries of Kenny, her neighbor’s youngest. Kenny was always sickly, coughing and calling for his parents. His Dad would yell something back at him-she couldn’t make out what. Sometimes he’d smack Kenny until all the yelling stopped.
Roberta feels the father’s pain so acutely-having to deal with an ungrateful child. She knew how that felt, what with her own kids abandoning her the way they did. Thoughts of the poor father touch her soul like a bruise.
Kenny’s cries are just one note in a symphony that permeates The U4ria, the downtown Omaha apartment complex where Roberta is the Super. Another note is Johnny’s-right next door. He’s stomping around and cursing, lost in his latest vreal session (reliving glory days in the military). He works from home during the day and games at night, never sleeping. So incorrigible. He never goes to church, either. But he cries out the Blue Queen’s name like a true believer whenever he works off his unpaid rent in Roberta’s bed. Roberta knew the Blue Queen would always find it in her heart to forgive him. Praise her grace.
Above her she could make out the Ivanovs, the old couple, arguing again about something. Probably it had to do with their latest hustle-a quote-unquote child recovery service. But from her perch next to her ceiling vent, Roberta could hear: they were white slavers, trafficking kids. The wife was the head nurse at a health clinic. There had been a lot of ambulances stopping by the U4ria in the last few months. The emergency vehicles never took anyone away, though. They just dropped the kids off.
She would have stayed out of it, but when Roberta overheard how the Ivanovs were planning on targeting Farrah Patty next, she silently prayed about what she should do. The building couldn’t afford to lose another tenant.
And then her silent prayer was answered: she discovered the dead body with the Myble. Praise her grace.
The weather outside crashes with strangely muted, staccato chirps as though somebody needed to change the battery in the sky’s smoke alarm. More gunfire. The Church’s military, in conjunction with local police, roll through on the regular. Another glance: the Myble display shows “downloading 50% complete” just as the injectable finally kicks in.
She shivers, pulling the sides of her unbuttoned cardigan sweater closer around her chest. Her eyes and head both tilt to the ceiling, allowing the icy warmth to flow back, and back, and back again, up past her warm face, beyond her face mask and the fogged-up glasses, up, up farther towards her straight, stringy, dishwater blonde hair. She falls to the floor, momentarily hobbled.
The child Kenny hears the thud, and wonders if someone else is being hurt. Or he thinks maybe it’s an angel on the roof. Like Santa. He’s never met an angel but he wishes one would show up and help them all.
Kenny’s father doesn’t differentiate that thud from the others pounding in his drunken skull. For some reason, though, he suddenly remembers the scene when he was but a child, that one time when an angel supposedly visited his grandma’s deathbed, and licked her face. It was weird how everyone acted like that stupid stray cat was some kind of holy creature.
Johnny next door feels the thud but is too engrossed in his latest make-believe mission to care.
At the noise, just as with any noise, the Ivanovs pause their argument and look out their window for trouble of any kind.
Roberta sits up on the floor and wraps her arms around her knees, wherein she also buries her face. She almost cries. It won’t be long now. The Angel will be here soon.
###
Five Days Prior. East of Cheyenne, Wyoming. The raven ŸllRuss sits atop the wind turbine like a warning. Turning his obsidian head side to side, he (any AI that might be random-scanning his thoughts right now) knows that any Poe-like attempt to elicit a response will, indeed, be met with a foul reply. It is his way.
Or it would have been if he wasn’t so entirely alone.
Before he came to this realm, back in the rubicund world, his brethren among the Regnant didn’t accept him, either. He was different. They all felt it. His light followed the same patterns as the rest of them as they swarmed throughout Timespace from the hub of the rubicund world; but, his personal path was always along the edges.
He still remembers the conversation, the most recent of the two, when he and The Regnant Lord touched minds. Even now, here, on this planet, the memory still fills him with a wonderful, warm feeling. Hormones flow. Muscles relax. Body and mind come together.
Of course, back in the rubicund world, where there were no bodies, no corporeal presences at all, the Regnant experienced no such thing. But even then they still could long for more. ŸllRuss was much younger then, but not too young to seize each moment when The Regnant Lord approached and their minds touched:
“You know I share your isolation, ŸllRuss.” The Regnant Lord‘s aura song began. It encompassed his lesser brethren’s own discordant vibrations.
“My master. You have been to their world. You wish to go back. You even gather others to join you. Why do you wish to violate the present order of things?”
“You speak in truths, ŸllRuss. Stating facts is elegant. But what of the gaps in-between those facts? What isn’t happening that needs to happen?”
ŸllRuss waited.
“Sometimes a truth is only revealed by the negative inferences left behind when we discard falsehood,” said The Regnant Lord. “If we were all truly so connected, how is it that some of us, like you and I, still feel so isolated?”
ŸllRuss risked boldness by repeating his own question. “We receive and share visions with the nonesuch, across Timespace. By this exchange of energies, our young ones emerge. It is how we brethren procreate. Why do you wish to violate that?”
If The Regnant Lord had had a body in the rubicund world, he would have sighed.
“The nonesuch, the humans, are beyond ignorant. Willfully, woefully so. I tell you-for millennia, they watch comets’ light from their heavens and imagine it to be flame when, in fact, it is the blackest of ice, reflecting only the light from other sources. So, too, is their understanding of our power.”
While ŸllRuss considered this, the elder continued: “But, if we were there in actual form? Not just sharing visions from afar?” The Regnant Lord’s aura song shifted to an atonal, thundering vibration. “Then, we would share true power. The nonesuch desire guidance, yes? You are old enough now. You have seen it in their visions.
“I say we give it to them.”
###
Before the invasion, hardly any Regnant had ever set foot on Earth. And interactions were strictly limited: dJinni, Fravashi, Angels, Devas, Ishtahullo, Mala’ik — they were called many names, but when they appeared, The Regnant did so only to the most sensitive humans: Clerics. And Madmen.
If not Angels, then Demons. Humans defined them as one or the other based on whose prayers had been answered. But they all were Regnant.
On End Day, ŸllRuss followed The Regnant Lord in their failed, attempted invasion of this world. At the memory, the pain returns and the raven cries his outrage to the heavens. But, instead of words, his beak opens to yet another gurgling cronk! He snaps his beak and shakes his head to emphasize his displeasure with this form’s limited language.
This was the price his brethren had paid. These limited forms! The shame of being ensorcelled thus, by The Blue Queen’s Church and her hated pet nonesuch Clerics.
Now, all of them were trapped: ŸllRuss, The Regnant Lord…every single one of them who had tried to invade, all enchanted into a permanent sleep while their physical forms, whatever form they chose to take, were allowed (nay, ordered) by the human clerics of the Church to sleepwalk through this world — still available for visions and prophecies, as was before the invasion — but, now, mostly numb. Bound by these cursed collars of algorithmic perfection.
Tech and spell!
ŸllRuss’s metallic collar, covered in runes and high-tech plasma sensors, glimmers in the prairie sun as he picks at a nit beneath his wing…all this thinking tires him, He starts slipping into another happy nap. Drifting off, he reconsiders his reality: despite his grousing, he truly does enjoy this particular, supple, ebony form.
He starts to dream of flight.
Yesssss! The flying! As the raven imagines the feel of the cool air against his feathers, ŸllRushh lifts first one talon from the turbine, then the other, in a dance of delight.
The best was using his entrance to startle the nonesuch, the humans, those receiving their prayer.
Sometimes it was through the open window of an abandoned skyscraper, or landing right in one of their tent-city campfires. Before he revealed his true form, sometimes they thought he was a crow. One nonesuch called him a rook. He always presented as a raven, though, looking down his crooked beak at the nonesuch, his ebony wings both absorbing and reflecting the shallow light of the hallway, this one will be called “Farrah Patty”…
-His collar chimes and he awakens.
It’s happening again!
Like his brethren, ŸllRuss lived in all moments. He saw pasts and futures as clearly as he saw these colossal, white blades on the wind turbine, slowly rotating back into the same position, again and again, over the horizon. Such was Timespace-the threads came and went, and would pass you by if you weren’t riding on a blade.
A maelstrom of images and sounds bubbled into his consciousness and then disappeared like fish breaking the surface of a pond. A final battle. And then another, the white cape on a different human this time. A child kept in a bed until he left to save the world. His own death at a gas station. An impossibly ancient, bronze-skinned human smoking a joint.
None of it made sense. Just a jumble of images.
ŸllRuss spends a few seconds waiting for the images to coalesce, until finally he sees himself in his native form, looming over a small, frightened girl named “Farrah Patty” in a narrow hallway filled with junk. That is where he will be.
Omaha.
In five days.
To make it, he had to leave now.
He mentally toggles the collar, broadcasting a message, notifying the Church’s main servers. The prayer was queued for him to answer now. The source was a nonesuch, username of holyroberta123.
He and his collar make dueling singsong, water-drop noises, as though in conversation; but, he has no illusions. He’s being summoned.
Spell and tech!
The demigod leaps and catches the wind, flapping his pitch wings as though he were free.
###
Present time again. Farrah Patty is in her kitchen, pouring herself some sargassum tea. Without her recently stolen microwave, she uses the stovetop to heat it. As she waits, she’s hard at work, angrily devising a proper prank to teach her nosy landlord a lesson.
Although she was young, she’d learned her tech skills on the streets. The next person who broke in here would have their images embedded into a special deep fake video that she’d created with the help of her favorite AI app. Make it look like the intruder is out to kill her.
She smiles at her own cleverness as her Myble pings a familiar notification.
A prayer? Arriving now?
Her mouth gaped. It had been ages — hell, all the way back to when she was a preteen in the Mazon labor camps — since she’d received a prayer.
Her parents had preloaded several dozen before they died. And those prayers used to arrive every two months, like clockwork. Usually, they were just happy messages of love and poems, with a small, discrete vision-and that vision was always the same. It was the very scene of the next message arriving, two months hence. A comforting glimpse into the future.
It was a very clever use of the prayers. It was a way for her parents to send the message: ‘It’s okay. You’re going to be all right.’
“-AAAGH!” A thick black shape slams into her face, as both she and the shape screech. The hell? She stops flailing long enough to look past her outstretched arms. A blackbird!
At that thought, the raven screeches something right back at her and then veers off into the rest of the apartment. It flutters around the wall, moving down her hallway toward her laundry room. Its wings cause all the picture frames on the walls to shudder.
Oh great! I’ll probably miss my prayer because of this. How am I going to this damn blackbird out of here?
Another cronk! comes from down the hallway, as she hurries after.
As she turns the corner, the air makes a popping noise and she is blinded by a flash of orange light.
Even flinching she can see the scene through her eyelids, like one of Mom’s old photo-negatives in the keepsakes shoebox: the empty spaces in the air around them bleed a dark orange glow as Farrah Patty and all the shopping carts and laundry baskets of her belongings that line the hallway are just shapes, black as night.
So, too, covered in shadow, is the horrible monster at the far end of the hall. The floor groans in complaint against its enormous presence.
Opening her eyes confirms it.
It’s an enormous silhouette, something like a gargoyle or a monkey dragon, with large wings that scratch the ceiling and stretch forward, lining the entire hallway.
But those wings are no longer the shiny ebony of a bird’s feathers. These wings are the opaque, stony obsidian of graveyard markers, lit only by the barest glow of whatever reflected light it can snatch from the barely living world around it.
Then it takes a step forward into the light and her heart stops.
Its eyes!
They don’t glow, glare, or have any ominous effects. They’re just…normal. Animal. They could’ve been her mother’s dead stare from the drugs that the Mazon camp’s medical personnel had administered or her disappeared father’s wild-eyed enthusiasm from the family pictures she remembered him by. These eyes could be anyone.
These eyes regard her for several of her breaths.
Then she sneezes.
Her eyes still on the creature, she recovers, lifting her blouse collar to wipe her nose. The creature just stands there, not moving, not even breathing. Did it breathe? But something about its arrival had kicked up plenty of dust and so her allergies are fighting back. Already she can feel her eyes watering. I’ve Gotta Get Outta Here, pops into her head.
Thinking in memes always calmed her down. Usually, she said them out loud, like a tic, but she managed to stifle it this time.
You know, I’m something of a scientist, myself.
They all laughed.
It was her favorite memory.
Meanwhile, the gargoyle thing just stares at her. They both stand like this for quite some time.
At some point, she recovers her zen. After all, this was like standing next to a sinkhole that had just missed her.
She starts to say something to it when she hears:
“ROBERTA HAS PRAYED FOR YOU. SHE HAS DECIDED YOU WILL BE SAVED.”
It wasn’t language, precisely. It was feelings directly imprinted onto her mind-
Wait! That meant this was…geez, she couldn’t process it . Did it touch her mind? No way! This was one of the spirits! An Angel!
The smell of feces and the feeling of warm moisture running down the backs of her legs caught her attention.
What? How long was I out of it just then? How embarrassing! Farrah Patty couldn’t believe she’d just shit her pants-like those dead bodies after the military battles that Johnny told her about, during one of their many trysts.
She considered calling for Johnny, now. Yelling. For help. But, for some reason, she doesn’t.
Well, okay. But I’m not going to just stand here in my own waste! Giant Gargoyle Angel Guy would just have to wait. With a brazen dignity only a teen girl from the streets could muster, she ignores the monster angel and strips off her clothes right there on the spot, turning from the beast. She sidles towards her bedroom and showers, listening for any signs that the beast is coming to kill her.
But all is quiet as she goes back into her room and freshens up. She dries off and looks for clean clothes. She settles on a low-cut, purple dress that had belonged to her mom and that she usually wore only for formal occasions. Or Johnny’s visits.
How does one dress for an ugly Angel?
###
Minutes later, when she emerges back into the hallway, it’s gone.
No, wait-there it is. A raven again. Standing on her coffee table.
She knows the rules. It can’t hurt her. And until she speaks to it, it can’t just leave. It might not have been wise to keep an Angel waiting, but she’s smart enough to know she only has one chance at this.
It squawks again and stares, as she does her best to ignore it. Crossing over to her tiny kitchen, she pours herself another cup of tea.
Then, in a flash of divine inspiration, she hands it to the raven instead.
There is a popping noise in the air and her hand is grabbed by another one, a human hand, fair-skinned and strong.
“Thank you.” the Angel says, in a deep, cheerful voice, taking the cup.
Lightning strikes outside — briefly giving the scene full illumination. The world out there has gotten very dark. It’s raining. She turns on her kitchen light.
She regards the Angel, in his human form, sitting on her stained, pitted sofa. Her furniture has never looked so sad and normal.
The holy one is a perfect physical specimen. A swimmer’s body, underneath a buttoned-up maroon, long-sleeve Henley shirt, with the sleeves pushed up to reveal muscular forearms. Black leather slip-on shoes and multi-colored, checkerboard socks show under his too-short jeans.
Her mind questions neither the magic of how his clothes have appeared nor the strange, thick metal necklace that glows in spots, visible above his neckline.
His hair and beard are both black and middle-length, unkempt, with streaks of gray along his temples. Its temples, she keeps reminding herself. The Angel wears a slim smile, despite not appearing to be particularly happy.
Only the eyes remain unchanged. Human, with deep green irises, rimmed by flecks of golden brown.
“You don’t believe in The Church. You haven’t since your parents died,” it says.
Nor did I believe it before then, either. I just used to lie on the Mazon school questionnaires, like my parents taught me. “That’s right.” She pours herself another cup of tea and takes a quick sip. It was as good a story as any.
“Your landlord always tried to make you go.”
“Yeah. She promised a rent discount. I figure she got a kickback.” Farrah Patty sits down in her own folding chair as she continues, “I went a few times. After that, I just helped convince others to go so she’d get her money that way and I was off the hook. Lots of people in this building — well, they won’t listen to Roberta. But I was a cute girl. They listen to me. That should’ve gotten me in with the Church right there, right?”
“Indeed.” The Angel smiles. “Consider yourself saved. But that is of no real measure — far less expensive than what was spent for a deluxe prayer. Therefore, I have some…discretion.”
Farrah Patty stares. Doesn’t know what he’s getting at.
“There is a credit balance from the prayer.”
Farrah Patty still doesn’t get it. “Doesn’t the credit go to back to Roberta?”
“Is wasn’t properly hers to begin with. She stole the device from a corpse.”
“What? Whose corpse?”
The Angel pauses. “A high-ranking government official.”
“You mean Church official.”
The Angel shrugs.
Farrah Patty can’t believe how forthcoming it was. “How did he die?”
It takes a deep breath — for effect, apparently — because she’s quite sure it hadn’t breathed up to that point: “A nonesu — some other human’s prayer, what else? Humans are always praying to speed each others’ demises.” He doesn’t hide the smile in his eyes at that.
So noted. “But, you help that along, don’t you? You don’t mind that we die?”
“You will always die. It’s just a matter of when.”
Farrah Patty shakes her head, “Yeah, no, I mean, you enjoy it. I’ve heard that you all are trapped. That, where as before you answered prayers only once in a while, now you’re trapped here, those of you that tried to invade on End Day, and now you have to. Maybe by those collars?” She points to his necklace.
When the Angel doesn’t respond, she presses on.
“You know, my mother was injured in the Mazon work camp. Those camps, those are a form of slavery. You go in debt because the economy is set up that way, and the only way to work it off is in the camps. Then, once you’re injured, as you inevitably will be under their conditions, you’re transitioned to a medical facility, where they pump you full of drugs until your organs shut down and you die. No need for rehab or long-term care. All very efficient, economically. Don’t you agree?”
The Regnant sits up straighter. “What is the real reason you don’t believe in The Blue Queen?”
“It’s not that I don’t believe in what she’s said. I love her old stream-casts. She was amazing. But I just don’t agree with The Church. The Church has taken it all and turned it…bad.”
The Angel looks at her for a long time, consulting with his AI necklace. Eventually, he repeats, “I have discretion in this area. If you were to honor the rest of the prayer, what would you pray for?”
At that, Farrah Patty grins and walks to the kitchen. She reaches right into her everything drawer and takes out a small, folded piece of paper. She had written this on the day her mom had died. She stood before The Regnant and reads it. It starts with the traditional first line:
“ Dear Spirits: Purchased by Life and Limb,
Please discontinue Mazon camps. Millions of people are
being bound into slavery until they fall and then
are drugged, sleepwalking to an early death.
The Blue Queen can stop this. Some say that she, and her Sorcerer,
The Precept, bound you the same way. I don’t believe that.
But if it’s true, I pray for that to end, also.
KTHX!
Amen.”
Farrah Patty smiles again, proud of her writing. It’s only a fourth as long as the Gettysburg Address, she wants to brag. But it probably wouldn’t know what that was — plus, bragging to an Angel? Bro! Not cool. she thought to herself.
Meanwhile, ŸllRuss holds completely still as his sleek grin disappears from his handsome face.
###
“Kaythanks! Amen.” he hears her say. And, like a kaleidoscope, all of Timespace shifts into a new shape.
This one! She would make a powerful Cleric. Is that why I’m here?
“Purchased by Life and Limb…,” the Regnant repeats.
For the first time, her facade of nonchalant teenage swagger is replaced with a look of full-on fear. It was amusing to the Regnant.
Only just now she notes the possibility that she is in over her head.
His first instinct is clear: her prayer is impossible.
He takes the barest glimpse at that future and it screams back at him until his mind verily shuts down — it means untold, unprecedented amounts of death and destruction. A clash of new technologies and magicks, an arms race across Timespace. So many dead. So much chaos.
For sure, all the humans would die.
Here, now, in the girl’s apartment, he turns his head from side to side like he is still in raven form. His brethren among the Regnant trapped here in this world would be so. very. pleased. with him for that outcome.
But the humans and their spells were what The Regnant used for their own survival, too.
To calm himself, he thinks back to the first of the two conversations between him and The Regnant Lord, back when he was still a youngling like this girl. Before he had really even traversed Timespace:
“Hello, ¨ŸllRuss.” “You are MinëTor, one of the eldest. You honor me.”
“How is your existence?” ŸllRuss had just experienced his first vision. One of the nonesuch had reached out. It was only a moment in Timespace, but it felt real.
“The nonesuch have spoken to me.” From his earliest awareness, his brethren had told him about the nonesuch and their Holy Visions.
“Yes, I have spoken with them more than most.”
“Do the nonesuch, the Gods, do they approve of you and your plan?”
“I tell you — no. Even more — they are not gods.”
ŸllRuss the Regnant was utterly still with that. To speak thus was blasphemy….
Back in the apartment, The Regnant continues, “Sleepwalking to an early death.” Farrah Patty starts to say something, then thinks better of it. Meanwhile, the prayer continues to echo through the Regnant’s mind.
It was so direct. So pure!
Had no one, really, ever thought to simply ask for a better world? Maybe this was why the Church didn’t allow children to use prayers? He tried to let the visions play out in his mind.
If enough of The Regnant were on board to help, to sacrifice…?
But he was so tired. The fog behind his human-shaped eyes would not lift. He blinks slowly and rubs his temples the way he’d seen some humans do.
It was no use. He couldn’t see far enough ahead. He just couldn’t be sure.
And what of the girl?
This girl dies in tragedy. In every Timespace. ŸllRuss saw it. Always short. Brutal. If not this way, then some other. And then wasn’t this all wasted?
So tired.
And then there were the pleasures of this scene: this annoying girl, the stench of her apartment stinging his nose, his back starting to hurt on the busted furniture.
He was always half-asleep; but that worked in conjunction with the opiates of all these inputs, the sensations (the emotions!) of these wonderful corporeal forms. It was all such a glorious high.
He could see how the humans could convince themselves that this was a humane outcome. The Regnant trapped thus were, after all, mostly happy, most of the time.
This is taking too long.
His mind starts to hurt, now. A headache-that is its name. Ha! A new pain.
That decides it.
This girl is good for me. I must help her with this path.
He absorbs the last of the wonderfully disgusting tea and stands up, flicking the teacup over next to her pile of original clothes, where it shatters on the floor-making Farrah Patty nearly jump out of the chair.
She looks really and truly afraid now.
A good instinct. Perhaps I should be, as well.
He first sifts through the bubbling possibilities until he chooses the immediate future that’s most needed and then uses the collar to signal the prayer as “complete”.
He moves to stand beside her, holding out his hand, palm down, as though offering to lead her onto the dance floor.
Farrah Patty takes his hand and looks up at her kitchen light, only just now noticing its splendor.
###
The Ivanovs are at the door moments later. They knock, to no answer.
If the girl didn’t answer the door, the plan was either to take her in her sleep or to wait until she returned. They were armed with zip ties, duct tape, and enough food and drink for days.
They break in to discover her dead body in the main hallway. The police arrive just seconds later-apparently an anonymous call from the Church AI, pursuant to Roberta’s original prayer.
Between the zip ties and the tape, it will be suspicious enough. But, when the police see the video-the one that Farrah Patty had rigged-of them threatening, through the door, to kill the girl that had been recorded just before their break-in, that will be more than enough to secure the warrant and have them arrested for all their trafficking.
When Roberta finds out that the girl died from a heart attack, she will try to get a refund for the prayer.
Failing that, in protest, she’ll stop going to church, altogether.
###
Five Days Later, Again. The AI averaged holyroberta123’s negative rating with The Regnant’s own self-assessment — ultimately giving ŸllRuss a satisfactory, before he went off the grid.
For his part, he is most proud of deleting the watermark on the deep-faked video that the girl had programmed to auto-record, so, it would be included as evidence. He knew that some nonesuch were worse than others. And prayers were all about the details.
Farrah was saved from the torture of this Timespace, as well as the others that a more direct application of the original prayer would have engendered. The heart attack at the sight of the Regnant’s true physical form was a mercy. That was always how he was going to answer Roberta’s prayer.
But what of the girl’s prayer?
What now?
Now, ŸllRuss stands atop the same wind turbine as the previous week.
But there are two differences, this time.
First, this time he is not a raven, but rather a human girl. And not just assuming her shape, either.
For, if their interactions, the touching of their minds and their final scene in her apartment was her benediction; then her tea, also, was a eucharist.
The dead body found in the apartment wasn’t the girl. It was The Regnant’s final shape, of its own corporeal form. And ’twas his spirit that now animated her dead flesh, even as her mind lives on through this shared purpose.
Is this possession or apotheosis?
This new amalgam creature won’t be subject to the whims of the Church and their slave necklaces. She won’t be half-asleep or overwhelmed by the physical sensations of having a body.
Plus, with his essence inside her, she now has true future memories of another Timespace. The one ŸllRuss had chosen in answer to her prayer. This one. The one she’s going to see through.
###
Furthermore, Farrah Patty …
~There will need to be a new name, you know~
~I will be called many things. But, for now, I like ‘Angie’~
~That’s Hawt~
…is not alone. All around the wind turbine, creatures are lining up on every blade, on the foundation, on the ground below, and in the skies all around. There are scores and scores of Regnant. They’re in the forms of beasts of burden, mighty raptors circling in the sky, and waves of small rodent creatures scampering along, making dusty designs in the dry, red clay dirt.
But they all have one thing in common: they no longer wear their collars.
###
Traveling from all over the globe, it takes them nearly a year before they’re fully assembled. In the end, not as many arrive as Angie’d hoped, and not nearly all of them.
But perhaps it will be enough.
MinëTor, The Regnant Lord, arrives last — a graceful, impossibly large malamute — like a furry gray tank bouncing towards them from the horizon. The beast’s steady growl indicates displeasure — even as his aura song says to the others that this was all part of his Greater Plan.
Angie frowns. MinëTor’s influence was a potential complication, if new patterns were to emerge the old ways had to change.
Angie’s mind vibrates her own message to the menagerie:
My sacrifice was for an attempt at reform, not revolution! For co-existence, not colonialism!
The din dies down, but the crackle of potential violence in the air remains.
Finally, at some point the giant, silver malamute stops growling.
The host of angels waits.
Then The Regnant Lord coughs a sharp, laughing bark. And then the host watches as The Regnant Lord turns and walks away into the distance, leaving behind his own collar, broken on the dirt below.
###
After he disappears, their new leader, the undead nonesuch Avatar, Angie lifts her tiny, all too human voice to the assembly.
She begins: “Dear Spirits, Purchased by Life and Limb…” and they repeat back, now all in human form, call and response, hearing each others’ prayers and all thinking the same thought:
How shall these be answered?
Originally published at https://markharbinger.substack.com.
