From the Burn, With Love

Katarina Dorne, Wastelander | Mateus RP | Main: liana-warden.tumblr.com

[florescentlcvesickness]

[fromtheburn-withlove]

Horizon

(Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky, detail of The Brig Mercury in Moonlight, 1874)

I’ve disappointed many in my quest for enlightenment. No matter how much the scenery changes, from the dusty whistle of desert air across the Burn to the undulating flesh feasts writhing and moaning in a cloud of smoke somewhere deep in the perfumed smuthouses of Radz-at-Han, it tails me like a long cloak just waiting to tangle underfoot. I’m brilliant, capable, witty, and utterly strapped to my inability to stick around and make a home in other people.

I thought once that I was improving. I became obsessed with being the hero I always fancied myself deep down. Full of goodness, a moral compass with a strong arm that would always know which way to point without so much as a wobble. I thought I was prepared to step into the role that the Expromotorium promised to good little girls like me and I would see the due adulation and recognition I so desperately, hungrily, violently craved. Maybe that never happened, but I did save people, didn’t I? I did sweat for their lives, suffer for them, worry about them, even weep for them...You’d think it might count for more, but alas.

Ah, listen to me. It sounds as though I’m about to go on at length about how those days are past me and I’ve become a hardened sort, but I know deep down what an awful, bold-faced lie that is. I might have broken Tsurai’s tender little heart, but even that will teach valuable lessons that I, myself, once had to learn. Doesn’t that make me a good mentor? Aha, of course it doesn’t. But I’m not about to change and pain is nourishing in just the right measure. She’ll come to see it or perhaps if she doesn’t, it never would have worked out after all. Yes, indeed, we all just have to keep moving through the ache. I’ll be a silhouette on the horizon of her memories soon, and then after that? Nothing. Blissful nothing.

What was I on about? It’s probably not important. I make now for strange shores well and truly out in the middle of nowhere. There lies a set of Allagan ruins that begs my waking kiss, and I am so very intent on delivering. Do you know what it is I like best about ancient machines? They always light up when I bring them back, like a smile from an old and familiar friend, however infrequently I come to visit and no matter how long they’ve been asleep. Hello, they seem to say. It’s good to see you.

[fromtheburn-withlove]

Artist: Kan Liu

[fromtheburn-withlove]

Reconciliation

(GAIA take II by Jean-Francois Chaubard)

A continuation of Breakthrough.

Dry dust blew tight twisters across the flat top of the canyon’s summit, invisible fingers playing wicked strums as they stirred up the particulate. Scrub-brush rattled with brittle scrapes and whispers, swaying as the wind whistled through the tangle. Save for the occasional dagger-sharp cry of predatory birds circling the great, blue expanse overseeing it all, serenity burst into abundance by comparison to the maelstrom that had battered the terrain some hours before. Where once there was deluge now saw only gauzy sunshine under the heavy lids of sunset.

From here, a keen set of eyes could make out shady alcoves dotting the Val River Swale, good places to wash away the day’s burden and find a cool drink, assuming the local fauna hadn’t gone feral with a shift in the aether. An astute observer might note the detritus of Sharlayans past being slowly swallowed by a choke of ivy, reclaimed by a deceptively fierce carpet of green and dragged back into mud over what must be but a blink in those long, long earth-years.  But alas, there was no keen set of eyes here to behold it.

Just then, a scrabble broke the placid view and the sound of rock crumbling and dancing down the cliffside followed shortly thereafter. Like a freight train slamming through a meadow with no tracks to preclude it, a scraped elbow appeared over the edge and anchored itself with a loud grunt, followed shortly by another. Brittle crunches and strained cursing decimated the pristine nature that was, for a moment, immaculate in the golden hour of the declining sun with the stormclouds but a distant reminder on the opposite horizon.

“Maiden...Menphina’s...fat...tits...” puffed the voice just over the rim, groaning loudly. A small lizard perked its head at the sound, freezing in place.

“Althyk’s...withered...bollocks...” it spat, coughing dryly as a hand slapped at the ground looking for leverage.

“Nald’thal’s ten-tonze...twin cocks...” Fingers clenched tight and with a monumental heave, a dirtied face crusted with streaked blood and mud made its harrowed appearance. She gasped and wheezed as she heaved her aching body over the threshold, shoulders quivering with effort as she clawed her way to safety and collapsed belly-down and unmoving at the apex, swallowing loud gulps of air.

“Fuck my arse,” she croaked with one final puff into the dirt, black hair powdered ashen, turning her face to spit to one side. And before she could lapse to silence, she began to laugh and laugh, loud enough to frighten off the paralyzed lizard with her maddened cackle.

[fromtheburn-withlove]

Breakthrough

(Canyon Morning from Yavapai Point by Ralph Love.)

The skywatcher at base camp told me the rain was coming, but never mentioned that its onset would be so swift and so absolute, a switch thrown in the heavens that I’ve been working on ascending toward for hours one precarious handhold at a time. I should have guessed, really; this one isn’t on the skywatch, I’ve been here long enough now to know how quickly the environs go from paradise to pisspot in the blink of an eye. This is Val, the trickster isle, the one that lulls you into a sense of complacency with bird trills and hazy sunshine only to turn on a whim and bury you in ten fulms of fresh-driven snow, not that I’m speaking from experience (I am). Maybe that was why I was drawn back here to this untamed plot in the middle of actual nowhere, ever the poor sucker for all the things that can’t treat me proper. I like to tell myself, as I struggle to grip a wet cliffside three stories off the next highest outcrop, that this, this, is love. This fear, this awe, this magnitude and momentousness, this pants-shittingly vulnerable spot I’m in is capital-L Love. I love this land. I love the life it gives me. I love this feeling, this wild freedom at the mercy of something greater than me. It doesn’t care a whit for my existence and I love it passionately, foolishly, tragically.

The steady beat of heavy rainfall crescendos into fast-moving and oppressive sheets, sweeping the flat rock face and taking what should have been a quick scuttle up a relatively straight-forward climb and dashing it into dust. I didn’t even bother setting up solo lines, thinking I could cleverly outpace mother nature, and now here I am panting wordless prayers into the slab against which I brace my whole body. Prayers to whom or to what -- it’s never been the point, but I like to imagine that whatever it is, it has the capacity to see this impious woman directing frenzied, desperate pleas, begging rapidfire please-please-please don’t let this be the dumb stunt that ends me and remark with some amount of incredulity at what an absolute knob this sad, simpering creature is.

It really is funny, isn’t it? Behold: Katarina Dorne, most audacious explorer, cheerful thrillseeker, and absolute fucking jester dangling precariously from cliffside for what must be the thousandth time, stealing glances at the distant ground below like an absolute rookie. Behold as she contemplates with both wonder and chagrin just how the hell she got herself up here like a kitten whose appetite for scaling trees outweighs its good sense to know its own damn limits. People die doing this under far more ideal circumstances, in case you didn’t know, and I’ve been shaving my life expectancy down to the bone one hair’s-breadth encounter with death at a time for most of my grown life. Do I really ever learn? Good question. I’ll get back to you on that. Later, preferably.

The absolute effort it takes to do this is taxing when dry, but when every surface is doing everything in its power to be as inhospitable to friction as possible -- well, I haven’t got to tell you that my choices are less than ideal. I inhale and use the last reserves of strength to sling my arm upward, to use my legs and hips to thrust myself toward the last bastion available in the form of a deep crevice in the rock so far overhead that I know I’m either going to nail this like an absolute professional or wind up with my innards smeared down the side of this cliff from here to the canyon floor. Naturally, of course, I was quite confident it was going to be the former --

Wait, of course I didn’t think I was going to nail it, are you fucking crazy?

This isn’t some thrilling novel or theatrical production, it’s my gods-forsaken life we’re talking about. Any person in their right mind would be scared out of their dwindling wits, and perhaps if you’d asked me even six months prior if I ever had a doubt in my mind that I’d make it, I would have laughed at the notion that I ever couldn’t. Inconceivable. But that’s fucking crazy, too! It’s not courageous, it’s not admirable, it’s frighteningly, outrageously irresponsible and reckless and-and-and--look at me. Look at me. I’m not some unflappable demigod piddling around in mortal matters, I’m just a woman who’s had a wild run of life’s good fortunes -- a cat (pun unfortunately intended) who has at this point racked up a monumental tab for lives she wasn’t intended to have. If I keep doing this, I will die. I will die. Is this a fucking breakthrough I’m having right now? Gods, to have Lita’s voice on the other end of a linkpearl to listen to me work through this in what can only be the absolute most mental way possible. I’d laugh, but--well, just look at me, would you?

I want to live. I want to live. I want to live. Please, let me live.

[fromtheburn-withlove]

Oh, what a world, don't wanna leave All kinds of magic all around us, it's hard to believe Thank God it's not too good to be true Oh, what a world, and then there is you

[fromtheburn-withlove]

[fromtheburn-withlove]

[fromtheburn-withlove]

Balance

Andriske Orgy by Titian Vecelli

CN: Sexual descriptions

I taste the tang of blood, the tang of cunt. I swallow sacraments in seed and spit jettisoned into my open and awaiting mouth like a coin in a wishing well. Instead of throwing my body from a cliff to hurdle toward the sea for fun and thrills, I fall backwards onto a mattress or maybe into a sofa so tragic that it sags into the ground from the weight of too many encounters exactly like this, and subsequently into the arms of someone who could easily cut my throat or rob me blind; I am devoid of humanity to these hungry hands and eyes who make a banquet of my body. It’s that kind of vulnerability that I need torn out of me like pernicious weeds choking a garden or a deep splinter that only gives relief after a deep and shuddering hurt. A viera who calls herself Orchid slaps me so hard I look in the mirror the next morning and I give a hungover smile to the bruise just under my right eye -- she was a left-hander and I never noticed. Later, a man grabs a thick handful of both tits and looks me in the eye when he declares with the utmost conviction, I’m going to ruin you, and I break the moment when a laugh bubbles up unbidden, as though anything can touch me that profoundly, much less a loveless fuck after a night spent bombed on the latest alchemical wonders to circulate the city. Ah, the mortal reminder: laughter replaced with a sudden gasp as he plunges so sharply, so suddenly, so easily that I can feel it in my gut, he’s that hung. It’s not going to ruin me, unfortunately, but he’s going to do his best to try, and I respect that, I really do.

This is day...six? of this hedonistic bender I’ve been on in order to reclaim a semblance of my humanity since the grand finale of the little issue back in La Noscea that I spent countless hours, tears, and sacks of gil trying to fix. Have I mentioned before that the supernatural gives me the creeps like nothing else? It fucking does. I try not to think about what I saw, about the priestess screaming in the chamber while her scrambled aether ripped her very essence apart. I try not to think about the blood-curdling shriek from the front lawn that followed that sounded dangerously and impossibly like Inika (who should not be alive), or the catatonic miqo’te who emerged from the abyss with a haunted, empty stare. I remember Lita’s sessions, I take pains not to blame myself too much for the things I couldn’t reasonably control, and I keep my legs open for beautiful strangers who keep me tethered to the earth, sometimes more literally than I intended that to mean (the last part is my idea, not my therapist’s). This probably isn’t balance, but I’m so starved for connection that it starts to feel like it when I’m in the thick of it. Don’t feel sorry for me. Counterintuitive though it is, this -- for me -- is healing.

What’s the point?, you might be asking yourself. Maybe there isn’t much of one. Life is long, if you’re lucky, and these weak, paperthin vessels have a shelf life that demands use before the instruments begin to fail and the pleasures summarily dull. There’s nothing like these shitty bodies of ours, no manmade technological wonder that replicates the deeply intrinsic ability to feel pain and joy, to chase weird, to taste the dusty leather of a man’s boots with your own damn tongue, to masturbate to a dead woman’s scolding recordings until you get so deeply depressed that you try and fail to kill yourself. There’s just nothing else out there that can give you that but these impermanent, fallible, decaying towers of sculpted meat and bone. This is all we have, this living vehicle for consuming the tangible. So, I ask, why not?

[fromtheburn-withlove]

Don't nobody tell me that God don't have a sense of humor 'Cause now that I want to live, well, everybody around me is dyin' Now that I finally wanna live, the ones I love are dyin' Becoming friends with a noose that I made and I keep tryin' to untie it Make it into something useful or maybe hang it through a window pane Turn it into a fire escape It tastes so bitter on my tongue The truth's a killer But I can't leave it alone

[fromtheburn-withlove]

Theseus

(Artist: Sachin Teng)

There’s an Allagan parable that Kuzhuk reminded me of some time ago about the ship called Theseus. As it needed repair, it was replaced piece by piece until every single part of it had been changed for something new. At the end of it all, a ship bearing none of its original components floated in the harbor, but was it still the same ship?

For the first time in months, I fired up the recording that Annelise left for me, the one that I contemplated jettisoning off the side of my boat for weeks on end until I grew too cowardly and attached to sever the tie and give it to the ocean that had similarly swallowed the guns that were meant to take my life. It’s gathered dust in a trunk since, next to the files and files of research and development wasted on a shot at redemption that was never about her survival. I can admit that now that those pieces of me have been patched over.

Katarina, her voice said, and where I once felt a depth of longing in the sharp daggers of her annunciation, the only thing that surfaces now is a dull pang and the persistent weight of expectation that I now shoulder with weary acceptance at a soldier’s pace rather than the frantic, desperate sprint that inevitably led to complete collapse. I’ve reached the end of the road to enlightenment, and the shepherd’s life promised to me as a follower of technological progress is far more ascetic than any of my teachers even knew. Who am I fooling? I’ve been living like a pauper-prophet for years. It’s not greatness, but destiny can’t always deliver. Even priests have to make something of silence. Chins up.

If you can hear this, it means the worst has come to pass, she drawls, and what am I even doing? We’ve been here before. Lives suspended by spider’s silk threads await the intrepid Katarina Dorne’s hand in their delicate fate. I’m sorry to them; I wish it were anyone else, but it can’t be—won’t be. Do you hear that, fate? I submit. I skip through the recording. I don’t need what she isn’t offering now. I don’t need a reminder. Of course the ship isn’t the same in the most pedantic sense, but identity is intangible. Her voice warps, distorts, words sputtering out with no rhyme or reason, and before I know it I’m out on the deck and the tomestone is following a beautiful arc across the sky until it hits ocean water and unfathomable depths and unlimited gravity. I have better things to do.

[fromtheburn-withlove]

I shot myself yesterday Got to Heaven anyway Think I might regret it now Tie my feet to rocks and drown If you don't bleed, then you don't die Cross my heart and hope to fly If you like it, then you'll make it out alive If they could see me now, smiling six feet underground I'll tie my feet to rocks and drown You'll miss me when I'm not around

[vans-drop]

[fromtheburn-withlove]

The pictures tell the story This life has many shades I'd wake up every morning and before I'd start each day I'd take a drag from last night's cigarette That smoldered in it's tray Down a little something and then be on my way

I traveled far and wide And laid this head in many ports I was guided by a compass I saw beauty to the north I drew the tales of many lives And wore the faces of my own I had these memories all around me So I wouldn't be alone

Some may be from showing up Others are from growing up Sometimes I was so messed up and didn't have a clue

[fromtheburn-withlove]

I guess it would be nice to give my heart to a god But which one, which one do I choose? All the churches filled with losers, psycho or confused I just want to hold the divine in mine

[fromtheburn-withlove]

Paradise

CN: Vivid, lengthy, and frank suicidal ideation

You wouldn’t guess it by looking at me these days, but planning my own death for the last few months has been supremely therapeutic. I don’t know when it became a coping mechanism for the internal miasma that surfaced some time back, but day after day, I would consider the possibilities and it suddenly became an elaborate, layered fantasy with an ending under my control. Is that what this is about? Control?

It’s laughable, really, to say that I’ve gotten good at it. Katarina, what would you say you’re skilled at doing? they’ll ask. And I’ll say, Oh, you know...Magitek systems and security, survivalist techniques, rock climbing, and playing a spectacular travel agent to my own demise. You can’t tell me that’s not funny. Or maybe you can, and I really have become supremely warped over time. Impossible to say. I digress.

I had the best breakup of my life the other day. It involved death threats, a budding rivalry, a smattering of humor, and a compliment that I’ll never hear again. I know what you’re thinking, but do you know how the one before that ended? She wouldn’t tell me she loved me, so I told everyone she murdered her husband. Maybe I’ve finally taken her lessons to heart and grown up a bit. Maybe this is the dawn of a new era.

Who am I kidding? It hurts. I was an obsequious adherent to an unmade god. I don’t know what to believe anymore. The dream of the Expromotorium seems resolutely dead like everything else I care for, and maybe it never ought to have lived; maybe one entity alone isn’t enough to unmake a world of difficulties, or maybe we’ll die waiting. Listen to me, this is pure, maudlin Kat speaking. I’m sorry, heartbreak has never been my favorite emotion, and this is coming from someone who’s made a hobby out of plotting an all-inclusive suicide destination. Ah, yes, that’s what I was talking about when we got so horribly off-track. Let’s start again.

It all started as short-track daydreams of how I might end myself. I’m not given especially to gory outcomes; hate them, as a matter of fact, so I made a list and ran the simulations in my head of how it would go down. Overdosing, drowning (ugh, what was I thinking?), cliffdiving, an airship crash, leaving myself to the elements in the desert (poetic, but I’m too spiteful to even chance it that I’d make a meal for sandworms; may I never outgrow that grudge), and a good old-fashioned bullet through the skull. Each had their pros and cons. But I got bored with that. I haven’t lived ordinarily, so why should I die that way? Why should someone find me so undignified, so...plain?

I started dreaming up jobs I could take on that would take me to foolish places. I could return to Garlemald a spy and keep that suicide pill grinding away between my back teeth, carving hair’s breadth shavings with every gnash. I liked that one a lot; an escape is only a jaw clench away, and I’ve always loved riding the razor’s edge. Downside: I’d be working for the Empire again, obviously, and that was rotten work. And then I thought about becoming a pirate -- some sort of brigand, perhaps, but that’s frankly just comically awful. I’ve too many teeth, too pretty a face, and not enough love for pissing in a bucket on a vessel that doesn’t stop moving.

From there, my daydreams grew more elaborate. I could catch a few rumors of exotic locales and follow them headlong into needless, fruitless danger and let nature take its course. I could be crushed by falling rocks, I could drink tainted water, I could be stung by something wicked and deadly. Or I could survive it and admire the beauty of the world, and feel I’d done something meaningful and experienced some kind of nirvana before choosing to never see anything else again and go out with a bang. Yeah, that’s more like it.

The longer and more elaborate my fantasies, the less I’ve felt like dying. It’s a fantasyland built just for me, my secret place where I know the world is mine, where I’m beyond hurt and grief. Where I don’t need anyone, where I am full of gold, full of warmth, full of curiosity and patience and peace. Where I’m beyond the years behind me, where I have nothing but time and love for the road ahead. I retreat there, I rest there, I come back to myself again and again and again. 

I know if I told anyone, they would panic. They would say, with eyes as round as full moons, “But Kat, you’re so loved. You’d be so missed. The world would be a little dimmer.” And they’re right, aren’t they? So maybe I’ll remain a strange, distant visitor on this funny little plane just a little longer. I’ll ride belly-down on the water until the waves break and rejoin the sea. Let’s just see what happens.

[fromtheburn-withlove]

Is it possible to stop having sex once you’ve started?

Scratch that, let me start over.

I’m done having sex with people. I’ve decided to uncloud my mind, to free myself from the burden, to make like the papacy and Holy See my way out of the slut scene. It’s time for me to get my shit together, to search for real enlightenment instead of whatever this sad, horny puppy dog shit has been for the last decade of my life. I’ve fucked some unfathomable number of strangers and I have nothing to show for it but a bottomless well of desire that shows no signs of satisfaction. I want to be done with the burden of flesh desires. I don’t want to eat, I don’t want to breathe, I don’t want to drink or fuck or sleep or shit or blink. The least I can do is strike one from the list.

How the hell did I get here? The dream of the Expromotorium was to seek out and endear ourselves to technological forces beyond our comprehension, to lift up entities that showed awareness higher than our own and bring about a revolution that could birth eons of peace and prosperity to surpass the Allagans and let me tell you that I can’t keep anything alive, much less a dream of that sheer magnitude and impossibility. When I bought my houseboat, I threw the potted plants away that came with the vessel because I didn’t want the disappointment of watching them wither when I inevitably couldn’t handle the responsibility. Sad is an understatement. I’m sad.

It’s time to start focusing up, to start getting my mind right. I want to climb mountains, literally, and meditate while the material world remains so small and untouchable below. Is this stupid? Am I being stupid? I can’t tell anymore, but I need to change something before my desperate grasp at solutions turns back to thrusting a gun in my mouth and squeezing the trigger so I can free myself of this awful burden. All the world’s gurus are celibate it seems, so it’s time to submit myself to the possibility that I should be, too. Maybe it’s time to find god, or at least find a damn good sex toy.