Serpentine Squiggles

Golden sky hung above as horizon enveloped sun. Gilded like kintsugi, shining between shards of darkling clouds. This twilight might well have been night already — that suited me.

I crawled up the tower, claws of my tarsi hooking into brickwork. Human alchemists loved this plain white stone. What was it that drew such empire-wide devotion — the symbolic purity? As if this tower wasn’t a stain on forest that predated it. Even where it wasn’t garrish white stone, it was angular iron bars flecked with red.

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For a mortal enthralled to a chrylurk’s will, one’s mind is not one’s own. Trivial wisdom, oft quoted. But for all its overpreached banality, few have reckoned with that this means. Chrylurk subjudgation is no less than a challenge — a refutation — an annihilation — of the human condition. Beyond human! Subjectivity itself ought experience a profound vertigo in the face of the thralls.

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:: Be me :: thrallborn. :: Vectored by a master infiltrator. :: stealthy as fuck :: slipped right into the summer palace :: infested a princess. :: Court never figured it out! :: Three instars pass :: fending for myself :: totally parasite-mastering. :: one day a hive nurse shows up, starts tending to me :: it’s another infiltrator. :: Court’s face when princess’s favorite maid was a bug and no one noticed.

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Sleep is another kind of rot, Ava thought. Her dreams had changed. Images hung around. Shapes carved into her sight, afterimage of a some blinding glare. Colors bleed from the forms, as hazy as smoke in still air. Maybe blowing out some long sigh of relief—maybe achieving relief, first—would be what banished them, but Ava was suffocating.

Sensation stuck around, too, but she didn’t have an analogy for that. Say it hung or clung, that was almost equivalent, but the important part is that it didn’t feel like that. The sensation was different, overlaying a numb absence of embodiness, the same way the visions played across closed eyes. The visions drew her in, she stared so deeply that of course it’d leave an afterimage, and whatever she felt she eagerly draped over herself.

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Alchemy is about change. Not decay, not erosion: the art of transmutation wroughts new order from components sacrificed. At its core, alchemy is change for the better — the fuel of transmutation, then, is hope.

Whenever an organism burns with dreams, wishes, ambitions, a little mote of alchemical essence is created. This bundle persists in the body for a time, absorbing energy from the world, before its eventual dissolution, whereupon it releases more energy than was spent to fuel it.

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You awaken in chrysalis. Your mind hangs by a web, our web, our embrace. Like dewdrops rolling down threads, your dreams are pulsing-sliding along silk lines, and our dreams enjoin and subsume. Your sleep is long, and the accord has washed all vestiges of you into us—tucked safe, in care unending—leaving you blank as a palimpsest. Upon this canvas we shall paint you.

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The first law of alchemy defines the chain of emanation. Through dreaming, matter begets essence; through alchemy, essence begets limina; through transmutation, limina begets matter. This is a chain and not a loop, as enforced by the second law of alchemy: It entails that alchemization and transmutation are governed by opposing fields whose energy values must have a product of zero at all points in space. Thus, the “transmutation of dreams” would be a phenomena as paradoxical as a machine perpetually in motion.

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Do tapeworms feel cozy or confined, dwelling undetected in those prison walls of flesh? The host feeds them, yet growth must conform to viscera squeezed tight.

A certain ennui gnaws at Vil. (“Vili” if you must — do not use her full name). She has everything a girl could want — provided that girl does not want more than three plates each day, a bed to sleep in, and a life as a bargaining chip.

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When the eggs make contact with your skin, they hatch and burrow into your flesh, like blowflies or lice. While you sleep, they’ll crawl out and migrate across your body in the fashion of bedbugs, seeking the best hiding and feeding spots. The ideal for them is accessing your digestive system.

As they grow, they split and multiply asexually, each generation enhancing the odds that a questing worm arrives at its goal, as well as making the infestation that much harder to permanently root out.

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