And what offered, Oh, paradise, but a thoughtless mimicry of the flesh that has infiltrated the ruinous halls of the kingdom.
…
Hence darkness and light denied. His palace is deep and kingly and swarmed with leviathan countless.
And in the glorious black, spite what we seek, we will find but iron and wrath and shadows for comforts. An accursed abyss of naught. Neither life nor death. Neither heaven nor hell…
Without mouths nor ears, into this black we shall scream, yet…
Of Flesh and Iron
FlowerHead
I
The corpse was just another on the pile. Another body tossed haphazardly atop the bloody tangle of limbs and jutting torsos, lying ugly and twisted beside. Another guileless stare attentively gazing at the nothing beyond its sightless eyes. Another mindless bit of flesh set here and left to dissolve away. Perhaps the corpse had once been something comparable to the human concept of an individual, but no longer. Now he was just one more empty thing dripping ruby blood and staining the white sands below.
In life he'd had but few virtuous qualities, chief of which had been the noble, and ultimately naive, notion that it was somehow his duty to fight against cruelties, to stand against injustices wherever they might arise, despite all indications of how poorly it could potentially end for him.
And finally did.
Beyond that, he'd been little else but stupid and angry. And that stubborn, empty head, guided by his romanticized sense of justice, had got him nothing and led him nowhere but to an early grave.
He'd been a young man when executed, a youth of not quite 23, although you'd never be able to tell from looking at him. His anger had aged him near 15 years. Frown lines and wrinkles had been carved into his face from a lifetime of glowers, knit brows, and slagging stares. His muscles were stringy, his limbs long and wiry, and only a few wisps of brown hair still clung, ever dearly, to his scalp. His eyes were dark and sunken and had been glazed over with a certain vacancy even before the bullet took him in the head. This made only worse by death.
Whatever he'd been in life it didn't matter much now. Now he was just another corpse on the pile.
Awake seraphim, Awake and bleed.
Deep within this corpse's quieted brain dwelled a seed. An old seed and metal too. Of wrought, midnight black Iron.
And germination was beginning.
The seed shed its coat and a newly formed radicle unfurled. It threaded into the soft gray of the cerebrum with fine lateral roots, twisting and turning amongst the grooves and folds of the brain, the wormy finger-like tips cutting and embedding and reaching like mold through a sponge.
The emergent hair cells spat glutamate and other little bits of human thought throughout, sparking bare ideas, initiating subtle twitches, and rebuilding life from these organic and bleeding ruins.
The roots continued their patient progress, creeping further still and spreading their dominion down the bundle of nerves winding through his vertebrae. From the central to the peripheral and hijacking those more sunken synapses and muscle fibers, coiling about the meat.
The roots swelled within the body and the skin above bulged where the thick woody root branches ran fat just beneath, showing like great veins crisscrossing throughout.
It took minutes, four, maybe five, but soon the seed's roots colonized every inch of the flesh. But this was the easy part. The tricky bit was the integration.
At first, the most complex thoughts the seedling could manage was attaching emotional valence to simple stimuli; the crawling itch, like bugs across its borrowed back, sparked something like annoyance or disgust, the soft music of the wind brought contentment. The fiery licks of the flames introduced irritation and pain. Fear.
It learned slow. But through meandering and graceless trial and error, its thoughts grew to be more and more complex, till eventually the seedling began to realize, first to realize it was. And soon thereafter what it was.
The first coherent thought it managed to string together was praise be, I'm awake. The seed was vaguely aware it had been dormant for a long while, a very long while indeed. And it was happy to awaken here within the man's head, nestled safely beneath the meat and bone.
There was a growing crawling sensation across the touch receptors buried within the flesh's skin. The feeling turned harsh. It felt the flames bite at its back, stimulating nociceptors. The seedling realized further what it was, where it was, and what it was doing atop the tangle of bodies. It stretched new appendages like a human waking from a long nap.
One last step now, the seedling unraveled to reveal a delicate shoot. The greenery yawned against the pull of gravity, growing in a choppy, rolling reach, its tip searching for a path to the outside.
It found one.
The small plant squeezed through a pebble-sized hole in the head and stretched wide its green leaflings and felt the warm kiss of the sun above. Its bud swelled and unfurled, spreading white petals in a circular fan. Alive.
Lieutenant Emerus
II
The Lieutenant took a long, savoring drag of a stale cigarette, exhaled, and watched as the pale wisps of smoke danced up around his head and away into the cold morning air of the desert. Beyond, the sun was breaking dawn, casting her first light over the eastern dunes.
Though it seemed she had yet to tell the desert it was time to wake. The heat of day had yet to stir, leaving the air cold despite the gaining dawn.
He breathed in the chill and stared across the vast emptiness bourne of the Shiloh. There was naught but sand in all directions for miles and miles, a dirty white hue crisscrossed with veins of rusted red, glittering beneath the turning sky as far as the eye could see.
What bland backdrop for such an assignment, the Lieutenant reflected. Atrocity more like. He took another puff.
It was out here, out in the nowhere, that the dead had been stacked lazily in three distinct piles, each one rising near two meters high. They made for quite the imposing sight, limbs reaching outwards and empty eyes glaring down, judging him.
He flicked the barely-smoked stick into the sands, and, out of muscle memory, crushed it into the earth with the heel of his boot.
The cigarette's taste was stubborn, and the bitterness lingered long, well after he'd stomped it to ash. It left him with a harshness hanging in the mucousy recesses of his mouth, with a sore throat and teasing cough to boot. It left him wanting. But he'd been desperate for a way to stay his nerves and the weathered pack of cigarettes forgotten in his breast pocket was about the best he could do in such an instance.
And it had failed miserably in its particular task.
Breathe in the flies that crowd the dead. Thou art a killer, so kill. And remember of Death walking with the bloody night and in her starless glory, in her serene expression of non-existence. So kill…
The Lieutenant lacked the imagination required to delude himself into believing that what he was doing, that what he had done, was in any way honorable. That what he was about to do was honorable. He wasn't blessed in that way like so many of his countrymen.
He glanced over his shoulder to his men, they were busy dragging the heavy tins of kerosene from the back of the trucks.
Duty above all, he reminded himself sternly and not for the first time since learning of his orders. He reached to his belt, fingers trailing over his pistol and falling upon the water skin slung at his waist. He shook the thing. Half empty judging by its weight and slosh. He downed the rest in a couple thirsty gulps. He needn't savor a drop, he wouldn't be out here much longer.
There were just a couple more drops of blood to spill. His index finger twitched in anticipation, miming the pulling of a trigger.
Goddamn, I wish I had a fresh cigarette, he lamented, knowing full well it wouldn't do him any better than the stale one.
It had been in the witching hour of a midsummer night when he had the men roused from their bunks. The soldiers, for the most part, were young privates, untried. Few, if any at all, had ever even fired their rifles in the field. The moon had been bright the night the soldiers piled into the trucks, side by side the condemned. Together, they moved out, heading west towards the Shiloh.
The trucks hadn't ventured far into the desert; there'd been no need. The seemingly unending expanse of the Great White Shiloh made it effortless to disappear, even on its periphery.
The desert stretched for hundreds and hundreds of miles west, all the way to Anatolia, the golden gateway to western Barbaria. To the north, it sprawled a great distance more toward the mountain called Mother, and the range that divided Thracia and Etruria, and with utterly fuck-all between. Some nomads here and there.
They'd driven out here in three big trucks, the victims had cried, whimpered, and protested their innocence the whole while.
Hadn't done them much good, he thought, glancing at the piles.
It had taken but half the night to drive out into the emptiness, the rough roads, if you had the grace to call them roads at all, shook the trucks violently, condemning its passengers to sickness, half of whom spewed their guts across the wooden truckbeds. Surely their dread did little to help settle their stomachs
"Here, drink." he had said to a wet eyed, not to mention 'traitorous' sergeant as they bounced painfully along sandy roads. He'd shoved his water skin into the man's hands. The sergeant had evidently been thirsty as he gulped down half the water right then, splashing a good bit to the truck's floor. He'd wiped droplets from his whiskers and nodded his thanks. A man ought die with some bit of comfort, the Lieutenant thought as he tore a small chunk of ration and handed it to the dead man.
That dead man would vomit up the scrap nearly an hour later.
He was somewhere in the pile now. The Lieutenant searched the corpses for the sergeant's familiar face, and found it was lost amongst the plethora of blank stares.
How serene are their expressions now? Bloodless and doomed. Breathe in the flies and know there is nothing else to come.
He'd killed before of course. He'd flown a B-22 in the Great War, soaring high above the blackened battlefields like a bird of prey, watching bombs bloom to orange flowers and turn to craters beneath his aeroplane. The lifeless bodies scattered. But out west he'd been fighting a war for the crown, fighting soldiers, fighting against the butcher. Out here in the desert he'd been the butcher. But orders were orders and what's right is right. No matter how it twists your gut. He was a King's man after all.
Maggots crawl from the pits you made and serene smiles warmed the homes you burned. Flesh worries so of death, yet hardly know life.
Traitors, he'd been told. But he knew better. He'd also known better than to question elsewise he'd be just another corpse piled atop.
Orders are orders, he thought again, studying the black dog insignia sewn onto his flowing gray coat. It's not your place to question the crown, they know better. He reminded himself solemnly.
But looking over the piles it was certainly challenging to see how.
The knots of flesh seemed nothing more than faultless officers, some royals, a few sergeants, even some governors. Anyone who Section III had deemed dangerous. That mattered so little now. Whatever honors they had in life they were all just rotting flesh now. Young or old, man or woman, homely or comely, they were all the same in there, empty bags of meat. Death was good at that, the Lieutenant reflected, it had a real way of equalizing everyone.
When he'd come before the men and relayed the more gruesome details of the mission, he'd expected nervousness from the men, sickness even. The Gods knew he'd been sick to relay it.
But the young soldiers had been anything but nervous, eager more like. So like Parrin it was. The vacant gaze of a dying man flashed in his mind.
They had led the traitors from the trucks with almost childish enthusiasm, systematically lined them up in front of harsh trucklight. The begging had for the most part ceased by then; they had, it seemed, resigned themselves to the hopelessness.
It had happened quickly. Sergeant Eros barked an order. Guns were aimed and a moment later the air filled with loud cracks and gunsmoke, the bodies slumped aside so easily. Their blood spilt to seep into the sandy expanse beneath and the ever thirsty Shiloh drank deep that night. The smoke danced up and away, dissipating with the breeze, but the acrid smell of gunpowder endured.
He had expected an unease to settle with the gunsmoke then, an atmosphere of quiet respect. However, instead of a reverent silence, there echoed laughter and jokes from his men. Damned fools, he thought, these boys had yet to experience a fight where the other side fires back. Surely that would cease their laughter, it had ceased his own way back when.
The Lieutenant's generation and the generation above had all fought in the war, but these kids, they were slick behind the ears. Hopefully they're allowed to stay that way.
Alas, with the growing tension with Thracia perhaps they'll get their turns to die soon enough, the Lieutenant considered with a pit in his gut and thickness in his head as he toppled a small pile of sand with a kick.
Judging by the nose wrinkling-odor wafting his way, his men had begun dowsing the dead with kerosene. Ash and bones, that's all that would be left of his crimes by the end of the day, and even then the desert winds would blow and disintegrate what little else they'd left here within the week. Then nothing. The only thing to remind him of what he'd done here today would be the whimpers of the dead burnt into his mind.
He remembered back to Parrin and to the noise the man made as he slumped towards death.
A throat cleared behind him, disrupting the Lieutenant's self-pitying reveries. Sergeant Eros stood at attention, his expression as dark as his tone. "Are you ready to deal with the traitors, sir?"
The lieutenant had earlier told the man, 'after my cigarette.' Well, his cigarette was ash in the sand now.
No, not ever, was the answer he wanted to give but knew he couldn't for the weakness it would imply. "Just about." He said instead.
"Aye, sir. Good, sir"
Gods, there'll be more blood before I get home to my bed. He adjusted the Black dog insignia on his chest, turned on his heel and said. "Privates Loruci and Anthos, was it?"
Eros nodded. "Aye, sir." He said again.
Damned shame. He didn't know much about Anthos, but he liked Loruci well enough, the lad was half gaullic just like himself and was always quick with a joke. "And we're sure that they're guilty?"
"Apparently they'd tried to recruit Private Reesus, they were heard calling this excursion murder, saying how they had to do something."
How right they are and they'll die for it. Duty above all.
"How sure are we," he asked again and sternly.
"Confident, sir."
The Lieutenant nodded and put his hand to his holster. His gun was a tired old thing of his grandfather's, the barbarous one. Out west, in Gaul, they called it an executioner's pistol, it held a singular iron slug, or just about whatever you could fit down the barrel. It was meant for clean, close-quarters shots to the head. Not much use in battle, but it held a certain ceremonial quality the Lieutenant quite liked.
The ornate iron dazzled as he pulled it into the light. It looked more like a religious artifact than a weapon, with its delicate carvings of skulls and ivy and flowers shaped to a bouquet along its barrel and cherrywood handle. He nodded knowingly. "Well then, take me to them."
The sergeant returned the nod. "Aye sir. They're being held in the third truck." He spun in a fluid motion and led the Lieutenant towards.
Lt. Emerus
III
The Lieutenant stood at the edge of the truck bed, listening to the bumbling within as the two men-- traitors he reminded himself-- were gathered. A cold wind blew and jerked the Lieutenant's long ash gray officer's jacket back and forth, snapping it against the air like a whip.
The two traitors were pushed from the back of the truck, falling into the desert sun. Private Loruci managed to land on his feet while Anthos crashed down into the sand, landing hard at the Lieutenant's boots. Loruci wasted no time joining his accomplice there in the sand, his voice trembling as he began his groveling. "Please, sir, it's not true! It's not! I just listened to Anthos, I swear it. I said nothing," he pleaded, his words falling out in a panicked rush. The Lieutenant looked down at him, recognizing the same terror he'd seen in the other dead.
Anthos, though, he simply stood, brushing the sand from his pants and straightening his jacket. He said nothing. His defiant stare did all the talking for him. This one's not afraid.
"Please Lieutenant, I never would have done nothing, I only listened. I'm a king's man!" Drool dripped from Loruci's mouth as he whined. Pings of pity and guilt crawled along the Lieutenant's mind as the poor boy insisted his innocence. Duty above all, he thought sadly. The boy might as well already be dead.
Sergeant Eros stepped forward and stuck his face into Loruci's. "No king's man would've even listened to treason, A real king's man would've throttled the traitor then and there, the moment treason slipped from his slimy tongue."
Loruci jerked his head back like a beaten dog shying away from a bout. His eyes squeezed shut and tears began to swell, "I know, I know, I was weak, I was wrong, but I'm no accursed traitor, I'm not I- I- I-."
"Ha, listen to him stutter, the boy can barely speak." The Lieutenant wished Eros would hold his tongue; the boy didn't deserve such scorn. A quick death is what he deserves. The Lieutenant ignored the loud exchange aside as best he could. He was busy watching Anthos, in fact, the two hadn't broken eye contact since the private had first pushed himself up from the sand, his sunken eyes staring right back into the Lieutenant's.
The Lieutenant broke first, "And how about you?" He calmly asked the man, "Are you innocent as well?"
"Are you?" Anthos shot back, his dark stare not faltering.
"You insolent Pig, we oughta toss this one on the fire still breathing." Eros said.
Anthos made no reply to that, in fact he gave no indication he even heard Eros, he just stared sullenly at the Lieutenant.
Loruci was still on his knees beside begging incoherently for mercy; though he won't find much here, the Lieutenant knew. There's naught but sand in the Shiloh. "Please sirs, I- I- I'll do anything, I'm innocent I tell you." You have a duty, he reminded himself as he steeled for what must be done.
"Shut it!" Eros snapped.
"Gods, I'm no traitor, I'm not, I- I-, I just listened! Please!"
"I said shut your mouth!"
Loruci wasn't able to oblige the sergeant. His sobs sang icy through the desert air, "Oh Gods, oh mercy! Please, I don't want to die." Loruci was speaking as much to himself now as he was Eros or the Lieutenant, and in that murmured whimper he groveled. "Mercy, please have mercy. Mercy." Mercy, he kept repeating. As if the Gods had any to spare, as if the Lieutenant had any. The boy's tears fell warm onto cold sands. The gun was heavy. Is there anything heavier than a gun poised to kill?
"Get on your feet, boy," Eros shouted, "and quit your crying. If you're really a king's man you oughta die like-,". BANG, The sharp crack of the Lieutenant's pistol silenced Eros mid sentence. And Loruci's wails for that matter. The Sergeant jumped stupidly at the suddenness, "Gods!" He exclaimed in a brief panic. Loruci's body slumped down into the sands pitifully. Mercy enough for you?
The Lieutenant Steadied his hand and expression, careful to hide any wanton shame. As good an end as any Etruscan could hope for.
The Lieutenant gestured to two nearby privates, then to the body. They promptly sprang to action and moved to drag the corpse off to join a pile. The Lieutenant returned his attention to Private Anthos. The man had hardly flinched.
He looked the private over. He was a young man of 20ish years he knew, but looked nearer 35. Almost no hair remained on his head save a few brown wisps.
From a baggie within his jacket, the Lieutenant poured a bit of gunpowder into the nozzle of his pistol, dropped a fresh iron pellet down the barrel, and pulled back the hammer. "Anything to say at all?" He asked Anthos with a feigned sense of composure. Anthos responded with but his silent stare, his clenched jaw and dark gaze doing all the necessary talk.
"Duty private, we all have a duty." He could feel a heat rising in his chest, a reddening in his cheeks, his cool demeanor breaking at the seams.
He knew what he was doing was right of course, but it made it no less difficult. Good Gods, the fact it's right is exactly what makes it so difficult. Duty above all, he reminded himself again, though it did nothing to quiet the clamoring guilt. "It's not our place to question the crown's orders. Do you presume to know better than the king?" He found he was speaking with that sloppy quality of anger.
Finally the private spoke. "I know my duty, sir, I tried to do it. Now shoot me and be done." Lieutenant nodded. Bringing the gun to the man's head, he did as Anthos asked.
Lt. Emerus
IV
The sickly scent of the burning flesh chased the truck as it pulled away. It reminded him of roast pig. He wondered if any of the others made that connection. Likely not.
The truck was sweet, and loud, with the familiar laughter and comradery of young soldiers after a 'battle'. And what a battle it was. The Lieutenant woefully alone in his melancholy and thoughts of pork.
As they drove away from the royally sanctioned crime scene he looked back to watch it grow small. It was anything but small. The flames rose in a swirling inferno, reaching 20 feet into the sky. Beautiful locks of red and orange intertwined and dancing, sharing nicely the colors of the sunrise beyond. It's hard to tell where one starts and the other ends, The Lieutenant reflected. He watched as the steely smoke climbed high into the desert sky, dissipating as it fell prey to entropy in the very same way as his little cigarette.
Duty above all, he reminded himself one last time, staring at the flames.
He could've sworn he saw a figure pull itself from the pile. A guilty mind often plays tricks. He thought as the truck jostled him about.