-Shortfic collection.
I'm not even sure what these are? Some strange, short, experimental stories and thoughts that I don't know where else to put, but might be incorporated into something later on, who knows.
The man who went over each name like rosary beads.
The first chapter of names was within immediate recall, for he had known them the longest; he knew their faces, many personally, others by association. He knew when they’d entered, and how and why they’d exited. The pages began to fill more densely; names without faces, some with no more than a bullet point of history known to him. Certain names stood out large among them, whose impact had altered him or the world at large. He knew intimately the page on which his first civilian casualties were listed. Another chapter, more names, fewer stories. Another chapter, names, names, names.
By the final tally– 99,822 people (with more on the way that he will never learn because that is the day he joins them on the list)– he did not have them memorized individually. He’d begun memorizing them not as words but as photographs, entire pages he knew by sight if not by letter. Exceptions lingered, but the innocents ceased to be among them– he remembered when he’d stopped being able to tell them apart, when he’d started thinking of them as necessary evils instead of failures. His line of work would not exist if people in his position allowed themselves to feel each loss intimately– it was in fact imprudent, reckless, selfish to entertain the luxury of grief, and grief on the scale he operated at was impossible anyway.
Why did he do it? Not as penance. There was little substance to his memorization– certainly the majority of those in his ledger would not have thanked him for his remembrance. And it wasn’t simply record keeping– there were casualty lists far more thorough in OZ’s databases stretching back to the Alliance days. Neither was it a catalogue of remorse, though remorse would always live with him; some entries he even counted as triumphs, while others meant relatively little to him on the whole. Many names in that book he’d happily add again.
Some days it struck him as a little embarrassing, this habit– juvenile, a child’s understanding of accountability. But he had never let it go.
It was important. Even if it was absurd, or futile, or insulting, it was important for him to know where he stood upon the road. If they reached the future he sought, he would know how long the chain of sacrifices had been to get there. For it was not all the dead whose names he kept– these were his. The ones he had laid on the altar.
–And would you prefer a complete monster, someone who enjoyed this work and thought nothing of it? Would it be more honest?
You tell me it makes no difference that I remember the dead– that it is meaningless to have a conscience if such a conscience led me here. I agree. I did not arrive by accident. The distinction is essential to me, and no one else: I believe there is a correct path, a destination that will benefit everyone alive, and those who are no longer living are my responsibility. So I keep them with me, as I can.
…Of course I’d do this for you. I’d die for you, why wouldn’t I give you anything and everything else?
I don’t know why it’d be so much easier to die for you than it is to have you see me.
Don’t look at me like you know I’m a real person– I’m just a principle in motion. I can’t disappoint you if I’m an idea. If you know who I am you’ll find out I’m disgusting, and small, and mediocre.
Don’t look at me. I’m meant to look at you. You mean something. Let your eyes pass over me in the crowd and smile, show us we mean something to you because you mean something to us– what you taught us, what we believe because you showed us it’s possible, everything you’ve said that shines a light through the darkness, to the shore we hope to make land on.
How am I meant to follow the lighted way if I mean something to you as myself? Just myself?
If I thought for a second I could love you for real, how I could do anything but live? And how could I live if I could not be of use to you? What can I offer you of value except my service? Don’t do this to me. Don’t look at me.
If you die out here, what was the point of anything?
[--if you die out here what was the point of anything?]
This is what I have learned: Secrecy might seem like it grants you leverage, but really what it means is that the secret itself has power over you. It is only potent as long as it is kept, and if it is kept, it cannot be used. It is only a flimsy deterrent, destroyed the moment it is put into action.
Standing before the mirror I saw myself lit only by moonlight. In a shapeless nightgown I was entirely indeterminate of gender, with colorless hair, colorless skin, colorless eyes.
I was already a ghost, I thought. Had anyone ever seen me, or had I only imagined being seen? I’d only survived this long by not being recognized. I’d erased myself to live.
Exhilaration tore at me like a violent wind, prying me from the earth-- if I was not myself I could be anyone, if I was nothing I could be anything. I could be someone terrible if I wanted. I could do something wicked, and who could say afterwards who had really done it? No one would know me.
I fear we only ever succeeded in offering you the novelty of comfort. Our home was a place of safety you would join us in, but never thought of as your own.
It was like keeping a tame but wild animal in the house-- There was always something magical, and tenuous, about seeing you there; knowing you trusted us, knowing you might leave without warning.
At one time in his youth, he'd been quite an accomplished ballet dancer. As a pastime it was suitably elevated, and everyone agreed he had the bones for it. That was important. Appearances mattered.
What mattered was that on stage, he looked the part of a lead:
The lights would always flatter him, his movements would stay precisely on tempo, and no part of his performance would ever betray the illusion of his having arrived fully formed and perfect on this earth, his feet never once having to undergo the inglorious, tiresome process of instruction and error.
He’d arrive with a delightful confidence that put his audience at ease– at a glance they knew he could be trusted with their expectations. They knew he would die before he would embarrass them.
He’d always known he would have to choose someday between ballet and fencing, or risk mastering neither. Inevitably, he’d chosen the sword, and so in the year before he’d left for Victoria, he’d planned the finest exit performance he could. It would allow him to demonstrate the peak of what he had achieved, his love for the form and essence he most admired, an encapsulating expression of all that had drawn him to the art in the first place. After that, he would be satisfied, and he could move on without regrets.
In the finale of his final show, he’d fractured his patella; the injury was not what had made it his last, but rather the knowledge that it was his last made it worth ignoring the pain. He’d wanted a perfect finish. Appearances mattered.
...And that was the age and attire he currently found himself occupying in his dream: willowy, aglow, and costumed for the stage, waiting for the curtain to rise.
But the theater was not a theater, and there was no audience in the velvet black. Colors burst from the dark, flowing around a quatrefoil of tracery that was lost in deep shadow, all pouring through a window he recognized from an early memory:
A knight in blue riding a white horse, his crown gold, his cape scarlet; angels with tricolored wings beckoned and watched curiously from their margin boxes.
Lead held every facet of glass in place, bold outlines that gave definition to each iconic figure, upholding the structure of the window’s design. Lead that was heavy but ductile, and easily worked– lead that was deadly in the long run.
Yet it was all so light! Just as he was light. He felt as though he’d been plucked up by a sunbeam, suspended like a feather or a mote of dust. The kaleidoscope spread out behind him, sprouting from his back, and the lead cames that divided each panel were now the outlines of a butterfly’s wings: gold couplets on each shoulder, swoops of brilliant silver-white grisaille, a swallowtail cape of royal red, and blue--
That medieval blue so mysterious and rich it was once believed to be a jealous secret; a blue so profound the soul knew it instantly across centuries of time.
Yet there was another scene in the dark of his dreaming mind.
He occupied two places simultaneously: a boy held aloft by the light and wind, and a boy looking up at a window inside a memory.
The boy in flight was dancing, effortless, weightless, unburdened by gravity-- the wind his playmate, lifting him joyously to the top of the world, where the topography of the clouds formed mountain ranges stretching unbroken to the horizon, and he was absolutely free.
I was born for this, he thought, as the boy in flight, just as the boy who was contemplating the colors of stained glass, thought: where am I?
–For this was not the cupula where the window belonged. He looked up at it from within a different memory, closer to home, closer in time.
Not a cathedral– a crypt with low, white vaults, starkly lit and dreadfully cold. Around him were the monumental leaden sarcophagi of the Habsburgs, overwhelming in their baroque splendor, yet humbled by the base metal heaped upon their coffins as if trying to bury the ghosts of hereditary empire under a mountain of cast bronze.
Fresh flowers graced many of the imperial coffins, whether out of nostalgia or a maudlin gesture of national sentiment, or perhaps imaginative longing.
The Empress Elizabeth, forever the fascination of romantics, was never without flowers-- immortalized in the eyes of the public, her exceptional beauty and whimsical spirit the cultivated stage performance of an intelligent woman whose life was marked by isolation and inescapable tragedy. To the world she would forever be in her late 20’s, smiling a perfect, clever smile, a corona of stars in her hair like Ariadne, doomed by fate.
The sarcophagi remained frozen in space and time, but the figures atop them felt serenely alive– unexcitable, as if stationary by choice, remaining at their antique appointed stations to remind the living that they, too, were temporary.
So cunningly had the artist sculpted the facsimile of life in alloyed metal that the veils of mourning looked airy as silk, and multi-ton angels as though they might at any moment cast gravity aside and ascend into the stars.
The royal deceased themselves gazed not towards the painted heavens but at each other, and personified geniuses of Empire lay unstrung and weeping at their feet– impotent and meaningless without their human vessels.
There, directly at eye level, a deathshead rose from the clutter of symbolized power, wearing in mockery the crown of the extinct Holy Roman Empire. The crown, like the skull and like the angels, was a warm metallic gray.
Without moving, and without horror, the skull asked: Who are you?
“Generaloberst Treize Khushrenada, Herzog von Romefeller und Catalonia”, said the man who until then had been dreaming of being a boy. “Ritter von OZ, Bezwinger der Weltallianz.”
(The boy in flight felt the sun hot on his back; melted lead ran in rivulets down his arms.)
“I am Treize Khushrenada, the surviving son of Mercedes Ángela de Catalonia and Eins Khushrenada. A man in exile, whose purpose and ambition were stripped from him.”
Patiently, expectantly, the skull repeated: I do not know you.
(Panes of glass tumbled away in flakes, glittering. When he tried to catch one, it cut his hands, and fell past his reach with the rest of them. He was freezing atop his pillar in the sky. The wind scoured him, his friend no longer. Was there no way back down?
'There is always a way down', said the wind.)
“I am Treize. A sinner. A dead man walking.”
Smiling as it had been all the while, crowned Death stood and raised the curtain for him.
Now, you may enter. Come, and I will show you the destiny you were searching for.
