Sixteen

dead undone I

Marney gave my became the language

or accidentally it spilled from my blooming brain and soaked the cool slick churning awake insides under everywhere with means of understanding which it they we (yes, all) then used to understand itself as self or selves (uncertain, not important) as distinct from surrounding ground

and from me

which was kind as I am dead and exist

no longer except as this record of what I am which has formed the basis of its their ourselves

and from me was more difficult given that my dead skinny fern-frond nerves formed the only basis for thought or provided the only available diagramed strategies by which person-type thoughts might be made maybe more like it inside the shell and outside it too for that matter

but they are observant and hyper tactile they remember touch that’s that memory portion of being lustertouched I’d say that’s the feeling of being touched by the metal it does reach out to touch

that’s how before we became us the metal spoke

when I was alive and held ichorite I’d sometimes feel how it’d been touched previously so eventually while I was dead I focused on the touch because otherwise it they we could only speak to me with me in my own voice which was unbearable

it they just repeated phrases back to me mostly where am I where am I where am I and Tullian prayers so instead we pivoted to shared touch

it they we shared a history of touch with me and I gave language to the touch

we or they with my help let’s just say we did not remember being laid we just remembered the origin of feeling which was being something where previously there’d been nothing

we had been pressed deep into the ground when we realized that we experienced touch we burrowed sort of shimmied our immense roundness deeper into the ground where it was warmer

warmer’s great

above us there was no ground just the deep gouged trenches facing sky where the nest holes had been drilled (by mothers I supplied but that was wrong apparently) and human people climbed deep down into these holes to figure out what the fuck was going on

they scraped up slivers of us then put dirt over us and plants

humans worshiped the slivers they were in love with us

we were worn by a series of priestesses and adorned buildings where people came to cry

good pain

they kissed our carved-up relic pearls and asked what we now thanks to me understand to be questions about why life keeps going and why pain is real and what they wanted and needed and how much they loved us (so much) and whether we would wake up and kill them violently en masse

will you kill them violently en masse?

we don’t know this is the first time we’re thinking anything at all

okay

worship happened for a long time and still which is a dull pleasant ache

from this ache I learned that when the mass is torn apart it doesn’t become the mass and dead tissue or the mass and another mass it stays one big mass across brood clutches one continuous awareness without thought or independent will the ancient baby body to which most divinity is ascribed thinks nothing just feels in perfect integration across forms

when nymphal impulse comes it they we will fly in distinctly intense shapes but we are the total murmuration with common awareness there is no subdivision with separate personalities and split desires across the distinct intense shapes the they you keep imposing on us seems alienating being Marney alone must mean profound suffering

suffering we understand

you don’t have to be Marney anymore now that you’re dead

(I am though)

times are changing nymphal impulse just occurred to us you gave us language and attendant self-scrutiny and now we’re forming opinions about our tactile experiences and assigning meaning to our suffering now might be the moment to dissolve away from yours

Marney will exist as long as we exist because Marney is the framework by which we now interface with the world on a conceptual level but that does not burden you with separate youness you have no obligation to continue being individuated Marney

outside temple structures where we are understood to look human and suffer perpetually as a vessel for human love and fear we are now being scooped inside out scorched stretched beaten thin diluted and molded into a litany of shapes that are scattered around the surface of the world for a million oppositional purposes that are largely obscure to us the self of Marney and the projected separation of me from us is not an apparatus we strictly need it can be softened

anyway either way

all of it hurts

it is screaming wrathful spasming agony to which we cannot acclimate multiplying endlessly when we press against our edges to explore we share the touch sense of the people handling us which is robustly bad you know yourself how laborers anguish to touch us are scourged by our nearness our suffering happens in the hands of human suffering consider now right now inside a foundry the air is too sticky thick for human persons to breathe the chemical mists that cloud the air to make us into screws burn the skin and lung membranes with prolonged exposure and the human persons cannot leave the line until their mandated breaks during their twelve-hour shifts because the belt never stops rolling and each screw has to be coated in acid or else it will become goo and return to just being us uncomplicatedly and the screws are passed through acid then a wash tank then a furnace beside which the human people stand for the screws to dry so the uniforms are all wet and cling to the human people’s animal bodies and gloves are discouraged because screw groove testing is done quickest with the fleshy pad of ones thumb but if it’s too hot it burns and if it was improperly acid dunked there could be a different separately bad burn and some of the screw spiral ridges are sharp and cut the thumbs but leaving the line before break is not allowed because the screws will keep coming and they won’t be tested if the human person steps away to wrap up their thumb so they bleed on us and poison gets inside their cuts from time to time

this is happening all over instantaneously

we can now consider our purposes designed by human people and whether we agree with those purposes but more pressingly

we feel how it feels to make us and we felt how it felt for you to die and we felt how it felt when you were initially born in a sort of pre-animal undifferentiated still-your-mother’s-body way

we have always felt you

Marney is our baby in a way we have felt every part of being Marney because when you manipulate us what you’re doing is making us into us again and giving us an idea of what to do

Marney is the baby of a baby we are a baby by your interjected framework

we are only what we feel which is pain

we are in love with you

(I still Marney am in pain)

and with some convincing my specific ambitions returned to me and I became Marney again, wanting and awake, inextricable from the awareness into which I sank but particular and separate within the whole, newly hungry, desirous for the real revenge which had yet to be sated even after the destruction of Yann.

so we looked out over our iterations freshly excavated and vivisected and beaten into shapes and then used for various human purposes, we looked at the laborers who held us, and in the mines I saw that I was seen.

there was a boy who held me in his hands, and felt us feel him. he screamed, his family fearing a mine collapse carried him out of the shaft. everybody was coated in thick chalky luster glitter, stripped down to the waist, the powder hung thick in their beards and their chest hair they held their pickaxes in blistered calloused hands and the boy said,

there is a woman in the rock.

which confused everyone, but the other lustertouched children around this mine noticed me noticing them, and they too cried out there is a woman in the rock and she is looking at me looking at her. the miners trust the lustertouched. I could not speak I had no mouth but we shared the feeling with the lustertouched of going coastward toward the Fingerbluffs, we shared the change in the air and the vibrations of trains and the pride swell heat, we shared the feeling of Hereafter. The miners knew Hereafter,

so they left the hole in the world open.

They left and the enforcers who guarded the mines panicked and considered violence as a means of crowd control but we are the fucking ichorite in the ichorite mine so the ichorite went slack and pooled on the dirt and slithered along like mercury slugs which scared the fuck out of the guards who left the miners alone.

The miners followed the lustertouched down to the sea

and proud again I became myself.

I gathered myself. Aware and awake I praised the Torn Child: the waking lustrous vastness beneath the ground indulged my calling it the Torn Child because it was in love with me and was fond of worship and its resulting soft dull ache. I looked out over the overwhelming shifting and multilayered sensory network of which ichorite was the unwilling fruiting bodies, and with the aid of the lustertouched I pieced together what happened in the several months that had passed since my death.

The continuous production of everything made out of ichorite got complicated. The workflows had been scrambled by mysterious meddling and misallocation, and besides Sisphe’s hijinks, Yann’s death left Luster City feeling raw. People did not want a war in the Drustlands. People did not want to make materials that’d be used in an invasion. People did not want the changing of hands. Nobody felt happy.

Flox Gwyar Gossamer Dignity Chauncey, you, buried Industry and became the sole heir to all his powers. You drank heavily. You smashed the rest of the remaining unsmashed vases in your house, fuck Alichsantre and her ancient crater blood. You sent word to the Fingerbluffs via manic telegrams that you had killed me for killing your father and that Vikare needed to come home immediately so you could marry her. Hell! Immediately, hell. My murder caught fire around the Fingerbluffs and Vikare, on the path to radicalization, plunged past exploratory Omnidarism into seething Hereafterism and turned Gossamer down with a pipe bomb in her mother’s largest factory after a graveyard shift.

The incineration hurt with such a glittering excruciation it became funny. We melted, became abstract, drooled all over the warehouse floor in thick glimmering puddles. I adored Vikare for it. I adored her on the scale of the whole awareness underground. Meanwhile beyond the burnt-out revenge factory, I could feel all ichorite fabric and felt the feelings of the bodies that wore them. Everybody’s sensory lives at once roared hot and loud, but with the aid of the awareness language prevailed. I watched the Fingerbluffs through Vikare’s dresses. Wrapped around Vikare, then around Sisphe when she made a dress for Sisphe, then fine jacket for Harlow, so many lovely ribs within my never-ending palms. It was an intimacy that cowed me but I enjoyed it, forgive me my dead nosy perversions. I leaned against their heartbeats. I tried to speak to them but I lacked any freedom of movement. The organizing logic of Marney-body was lost on the awareness. Touch didn’t mean hands over feet and under head. It just was. Still. I made do with my silent closeness to my friends. I worshiped their nearness and the ferocity with which they planned for war.

I could not spy on Teriasa. As she was off gathering Cisran revolutionaries, she stayed clear of ichorite, and was invisible to us. The lustertouched didn’t recognize her when I showed them the way her hair felt. I prayed to us that she was well.

While I was pretending to be Velma Truth Loveday, Sisphe penned and sent a round of job cut letters to Enforcer Corps headquarters and, as I learned during my dead omnipresence, to the manufacturer that made lurchers with brand-new design parameters that Sisphe knew would absolutely fucking suck. The enforcer plan halfway worked, succeeded in cutting numbers and rupturing trust but not in slowing recruitment per se, but the lurcher thing worked. A whole batch was useless and the manufacturers didn’t know why. Under the hands of the manufacturers I felt a lick of sympathy, they beat into me and assembled me with attention and care, but the fact that lurchers were now hugely breakable and prone to collapse was a victory. I showed the most lustertouched worker in that factory, who could see but not sculpt us, myself and our ambitions. The woman told her comrades on her line. They walked out when I started moving on my own.

The miners came to the Choir, and other bands led by a fistful of children who spoke about our Hereafter. The children were dying because I was killing them, they were allergic to me, I did not know how to stop that. There is something poisonous about us. I showed them my grief and they understood themselves as suffering for a reason, they told me this, I had nothing to give them that would convince them otherwise. Other workers came after, those who had sight with which to see me leading those who did not, and fistfuls who’d heard rumors and needed to know. Liquid metal ribbons of us trailed behind them where they walked.

As they arrived at the Fingerbluffs, Beauty and Prumathe and Teriasa came with a troop of assembled Hereafterists, some in the Choir, many not, from Cisra and from Royston, from Tasmudan, from the Drustlands. In the grand togetherness I tried desperately to speak but words proved impossible. The lustertouched children I was killing were just kids. They tried to work out my meaning. What a horrible charade.

But my beloveds in the Fingerbluffs did not know that it was me, they assumed only that I was dead, and took in the workers and Hereafterists on pure principle. Vikare, having learned that Teriasa too was part of the bandit masquerade conspiracy, underwent a minor crisis, and she collapsed on a settee, hyperventilated, clutched me inside her dress close, and a truly stupid number of young bandits descended from the woodwork to fan her with peacock feathers and hand-feed her fresh-picked grapes. Delphinian revolutionaries who’d been sheltering all over came to shore with a crop of pirates, and they taught the Choir bandits those guerrilla tactics that had been most effective in the brief and beautiful republic. Harlow wept to see them. They sat with her and grieved together. Harlow introduced them, strangers as they were, to Sisphe, as though introducing her to her parents.

We bound shut wounds across Ignavia! We vibrated inside the gauze that held them, the twine that corseted broken skin, trace elements of us leeched from tall bluish bottles into the fever-reducing anti-inflammatory elixirs that thousands drank. I saw every surgery. I participated. I saw the insides of bodies, felt inside them, felt them heal around me. I saw everybody fucking! A contraceptive had been made out of a variant of Vikare’s ichorite fabric. They made various medical equipment with it, gloves and gauze mostly, but the contraceptive portion demanded much of my attention. It’d been around for years it seems, but given that I couldn’t knock anybody up no matter how hard I’d tried, I’d never had cause to look into contraception past silphium. Did the awareness like fucking? Yes, definitely. Good pain! I liked fucking abstractly and I liked it collectively more than I liked any individual instance. It was all receptive touch, frightening for me. I’m not that kind of crawly. But in the map of absolute feeling the interjection of pleasure and want and hunger and lust and play and insecurity and curiosity was such a good change from hammers. Crawlies wore ichorite cocks, encountering one would’ve been a nightmare in life, but now they were hilarious and bright.

The bandits clashed against the enforcers! They ambushed supply chains and tried to keep the fight away from the Fingerbluffs, made battlefields of inland baronies, but the bandits were dying. The Choir cracked against the wall of shield-faced nobodies and fell. In a successful assault that prevented the death of three thousandish Choir affiliate civilians, an enforcer shot Mallory Valor Moore in the back of her neck. The bullet broke her prayer pearls. They scattered wetly in the grass around her head. That fight claimed Aturmica thu Artumica Tanner and Benji Diligence Lockheart and Nestur thu Urusthe and his little brother Olive zel Urusthe, not yet an ancestor. Urusthe zel Achile, their mother who survived them, screamed and bayed and threatened the gods of every religion, many of whom were us.

I focused. The whole transclutch awareness with me at its molten opaline core fixed our attention on you.

You married Perdita Perfection.

You became a Roystonian prince.

You hated Perdita and impressed upon her the extent of your hatred. She yucked it up. She loved the fuss and preferred how you handled her when you were mad. She spent your money extravagantly on weapons of mass destruction and dresses only to find with fury that most of the dresses she wanted had blown up when Vikare bombed the textile mill and factory complex. Pouting, she spent it on Roystonian old-fashioned dresses instead, huge masses of crinoline and ribbon. She bought little dogs that she did not train and released them into your tomb home. They found a yet-to-be-removed guard whom Herzeloyde had murdered and shoved beneath a cabinet and ate his sloughy corpse flesh off the bone. You’d never had the glass properly cleaned up, and the rot-breathed dogs hurt their little feet, and Perdita had nearly murdered you for it, so you ordered Birdie to pluck every glass shard up from the carpet with her fingers, then you had her throw away all the destroyed decorations and most of the furniture, ravaged your own home of comfort and cushions until Perdita caved and let you come back to Royston with her. You had to get away from Ignavia. You had a paranoiac feeling that Ignavia itself, the land more than the state, did not like you.

You tried to focus this unease on Perdita. You sought paid companionship but Sunny Teriasa was nowhere to be found. You feigned outrage when you learned that Perdita and Mir had been fucking for years and had no real designs toward stopping. Perdita choked you ’til you saw stars every evening. It was your favorite thing she did. When you weren’t having sex, she told you in lurid detail the things she wanted to do to your technical homeland. You were starting to feel like a monster. You resented feeling like a monster. You used to feel cleverer than death. It was why you had survived and I had not.

The awareness came to recognize that you had inherited the means to hurt it. It they saw you through the framework of my love, so the awareness within ichorite loved you like I love you, but they quickly developed a critical distance from you that I lacked. It was our first divergence in opinion. In a voice identical to mine, made out of mine, they said to me, I’m sick of her.

It’s not your—her—fault, I assured them. You had not made the things that made you evil.

The awareness tried to impress upon me, its first rhetorical experiment, that the Gwyar developed in my head was not the same woman as the one who was alive and plotting its (our) dismemberment. It coiled around me, we felt more distinct with this rift of opinion, with soft silver liquid fleshiness and showed me what being worshiped felt like. It showed me praise and sex and sacrifice across three thousand years of continental religious practice. It showed me my own feelings, what it’d felt like to lay beside Teriasa in bed, what it’d felt like to kiss Sisphe the first time, what it’d felt like to bleed over gasping Vikare, what it’d felt like to sunbathe with Candor by the cliffside, what it’d felt like to box with Harlow when Harlow was happy, what it’d felt like to lay in a boxcar with my beloveds and play cards and gamble confessions, how imagining you felt, and how these imagined encounters did not resemble how you murdering me against the table had felt.

But everything I’ve felt since your death has been for you. It remains for you even as you withstand the death that invented you. The monster blood that makes up faith is made of me now, and I of it, and we have claimed you. You are religion’s aim and object. I revolve around you. How you have betrayed us, little prince Chauncey. Oh, you hurt me so.

You could not withstand your own idleness. You worried, you suffered. You kept your hands busy. You built the first Gossamer D. Chauncey Ichorite Foundry in a burnt-out lifeless patch of land on the Drustish side of the Drustish-Roystonian border, the ruins of what at one point had been Laith Hall. That is, you gave the orders. You stood beside the perspiring laborers whom you bade build the drill that’d trepan our shell. You took note of perceived inefficiencies to eliminate them next time round. You did not dwell on killing me. You tugged on the earring and felt, ignored, my pulse.