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They move like phantasms throughout the hallways—ghosts printed from etchings old as two centuries, draped in their rust-colored robes. Lamplight trickles down upon ornately framed stone walls, hushed whispers bouncing through echoey corridors. Damian notices this as he makes his way to the library, glancing at the distorted silhouette of his pale reflection on a badly cracked window. Speckles of incantations fall through thin air, pages turn.
How different from Byrgenwerth’s halls—gilded and boasting refined academic dressings, a brittle varnish on their stringent ignorance. Mensis has no masks, only the humility in the cages they put on.
The smell of blood permeates the air, spreads—a perfume masking a far rottener scent, of saggy skin that crackles with decay. Damian smiles to himself. The clock ticks. Their plans flow steady as river water.
“How has your progress been?”
Micolash sits across from him at the desk, hollowed eyes gleaming. He is a wiry man, sunken face framed by an oily mass of dark, curly hair—his eyes shine as flowers that glow-in-the dark, Damian likes. His is a face with character.
He sets his admiration aside with a sigh. “Bad,” he mutters, setting down a stack of dry papers with a rustle. “My attempts with the most recent volunteer bore no fruit—no response.”
“Bah. She knows too much, then?”
The Great Ones would turn their million eyes away from the Healing Church, of course—a puffed-up, high and mighty place. No, Mensis must humble themselves to a crawl.
“…Well, when you phrase it that way perhaps the point is we should have them be less volunteers—in that maybe the key is their ignorance and unwillingness.”
“I’ve Pthumerian blood, but no association with some of the more eccentric sorts,” young miss Olga says, and that prompts Damian to make his decision. Her haughty mien, folded arms and determination to maintain her status as teacher’s pet made him consider her as a candidate. Now she sits across from him, her posture prim—exactly what he looks for.
“Excellent. I’ll see to scheduling a meeting with the Headmaster regarding this new thesis. Your eagerness in pursuit of further studies is welcome.”
Red blossoms from her mouth, the last fleshy lump that was once her tongue scraped out at last. Olga gargles on her own spit, half-congealed in her mouth. She bends over from where her hands are tied down to the armchair, vomit rushing warm out of her mouth to splatter onto the floor.
“You selected a worthy candidate,” Micolash says, placing a bony hand on Damian’s shoulder.
He smiles, reveling in what Olga might say where her tongue not cut out, nor were there slugs aglow and squirming in the coils of her stomach, straining against the clumsy stitches they made on her body: What have you done, she must want to say, not once did I agree to be cut up like this, I’d have you skinned for what you’ve wrought upon me. But he has taught this test subject humility, to be silent in search of a whispering back from the Great Ones.
Olga’s eyes are dull, akin to the glass bead eyes of taxidermy displays. Her jaw has decayed, a flower of crumbled, dry viscera in its wake. There is a hole in her stomach from where what was sewed inside her has crawled out.
“I tried,” Damian says, drawing a white sheet over her body, “I thought she would have worked.”
In the blinking of their Morse code, they have received no response—no signal, nor anything to translate as a sign.
“As above, so below.”
This library is choked with dust and cobwebs, heavy with the aromatic sting of smoke. They retire tonight in the wake of their recent failure, a moment of respite from the blood-drunk celebration they had indulged in too soon. Respite, of course, means engaging in quiet thought—reviewing the papery collage of past notes and volumes that may so much as hint towards the Great Ones, highlighting the facts they have long since established by candlelight.
“The Emerald Tablet,” says Damian, pale eyes gazing at Micolash amidst his note-taking. “You never struck me as the sort of person who would be all that interested in Hermetic texts.”
“Hermetic—bah. You know, the idea it might have been a sole product of Hermes Trismesgistus is tripe. Pushed by Byrgenwerth when I got swept up in their more ignorant teachings, of course. They have, you know, traces of its hypotheses and teachings as far back as the eighth or ninth century—in the Middle East, I believe.”
“I recall that perfectly well. The professor whom you corrected about that held a semester-long grudge against you for being corrected during class, that it was ‘irrelevant to the point of this course’s thesis.’”
“But,” says Micolash, leaning across the desk, “Despite its lack of Hermetic origins, I do agree with the text in terms of how we approach looking for a sign. As above, so below—that second verse speaks to the mechanics of the Great Ones and how their movements mirror ours. We have not yet grasped how to understand them, nor what extent of humility they require. It is a delicate tightrope we walk, you know.”
“What do you suppose we ought to do?”
“Our current approach,” says Micolash, “has been to humble those who have not yet been taught—we supposed, after our previous failures, that the Great Ones would like a demonstration from us, directed towards the ignorant. But I think we ourselves, Damian, have not shown them enough humility and grace. We must do unto ourselves as we might those we try to teach.”
Under a faceless moon, Damian dreams.
He dreams of a slimy, gargantuan mollusk descended from the skies above all over again as he and Micolash bear witness—Kos come to their plane to bless them, he knows. This is the world as they would have wanted it to be.
They emerge transformed—eyes upon eyes upon eyes—granted vision into realms beyond.
“I don’t believe we’ve met before.”
This new student draws up a chair before Damian in his office: dark blond hair, harsh outlines to his face for someone that he suspects to be in his younger years. Surely, his face must have been present at one of the lectures during dead of night, or alongside other students shuffling through Mensis’ winding corridors.
He clears his throat. “My name is Edgar. I only recently arrived here, Professor.”
There is something strange about him—not quite the sacrificial stirrings Damian can find when examining other attendants of Mensis, this is a man who entered this dream without permission—stole the key and unlocked the door in search of answers, not allies nor the transcendence his peers seek.
Damian smiles, displaying crooked teeth and dry lips. “A pleasure to meet you, then. You strike me as someone who would be quite diligent in their field of study.”
Yes, he realizes, he has seen Edgar before—always tucked into the quiet corners of rooms where Micolash occupies, surveying him as though waiting for him to crack and give way to hollow insides. But does Mensis not acquire new followers all the time? He oughtn’t jump to conclusions so soon.
“I learn best,” Edgar says, “through observation. Not quite direct participation. I prefer to take in everything I can before coming to my conclusions on the world.”
“You’ll fit here quite well.”
When he falls asleep with sore eyelids by candlelight, Damian dreams of taking Micolash apart: of ripping out his teeth one by one, blood welling from empty gums. Then, when he at last tires of his work, he breaks Micolash’s jaw and wrenches it off entirely.
And he knows if he did this, he would be happy—vivisecting the most important figure he has ever known.
“I’d wager that Edgar fellow isn’t exactly who he claims he is,” he says.
The runes carved upon Micolash’s stomach are a ritual: bloodied shirt tossed aside to expose his pale, dry skin wrapping tightly over his brittle ribcage, marked by scalpel patterns—scars upon scars, some from when he dug deep inside himself with a knife to sever his Fallopian tubes. This is the cipher he and Damian alone understand—a call to the voices beyond, an indulgence.
Micolash tilts his head, shifting carefully under Damian’s knife. “What makes you suggest that?”
“Isn’t it strange how he… showed up one day? Absent one day, and present the next. I could hardly find much information on his background, I only know his family lives here. And he hardly carries himself the way a scholar would.”
“Ahh, I see… how does he carry himself, then?”
Like a priest—a choir member poised to join in song. Someone too proud and preening, convinced of some nonsense greater good. “Well, I’m certain you’re aware of our most prominent rivals these days—where they come from.”
The blood on his scalpel glistens black under the moonlight. He awaits for Micolash’s retort—another clicking of patchwork numbers for this cipher.
“Let us string him along, then. He hasn’t been here for very long—we ought to learn what we can following that little schism, after all, no?”
Damian collects samples akin to a butterfly catcher: vials of blood, glimmering dark red by candlelight. Then the eyes—a retort, a gift—for Micolash, sampled after Rom’s transcendence, red veins running faintly through fleshy sclera, pupils frozen as the last bit of color amidst embalming fluids.
He looks at the thick sutures on the boy’s stomach, the bloodstains where their blunt surgical instruments did not cut so cleanly. Damian was half-tempted to request that Edgar join them in this experiment—a supposed reward for good behaviors he had never really shown, in reality much more a test of loyalty. How would he act behind closed doors when confronted with the truth, he wonders? But tonight: dyed in luminous blue of the Phantasms they gather for yet another test run.
“Oskar would have turned nineteen this summer,” Micolash notes, “and his mother, I believe, was a Byrgenwerth student. Never worked in the same field as us, though.”
There were—are—things I admired about you most, Damian thinks, saying aloud, “You remember who our sacrifices are. They are not nameless pieces of meat to be butchered and forgotten. You understand and respect their meager origins for our higher purpose.”
“We must be courteous. Some of these souls are bright and curious, untouched by how harsh the world can be. Others have to be humbled under the suture.”
The boy gurgles, tongue severed. He will stay for a few days, as planned, and they will wait for a signal in that time. They will wait and see what Oskar is in the dark, and what he will cough up amidst the phlegm and blood.
The bars of the cage on his head rattle. “Do you ever wonder,” Damian asks, “if the only reason Kos does not grant us second sight—eyes—is because it does not wish to?”
“On occasion. Doubts are inevitable, I suppose. But we know not of that for sure. The most we can do now is keep trying, and work hard enough to ensure our efforts will bear fruit—birth the sight we want, or at least leave us something that leaks from the amniotic fluid dribbling from the womb.”
At night, he admits to Micolash that his most pleasant dreams are the ones where he gets to rip out his teeth, then his jaw; the ones where he peels off his fingernails to leave raw, bloody nail beds in their wake.
“I hope that is how I will depart, then,” Micolash says with an oily smile.
One day, Damian thinks, if I am lucky shall taste the excess of your liver wedged between my teeth.
Micolash assists him with his new manuscript today, something akin to the Voynich book of herbs and trickery he skimmed through: anatomy of the empty spider drifting through worlds that they crafted, dear Rom with her many eyes she had been gifted. The Augur of Ebrietas, the dripping phantasms and notes on the slimy trails they leave—maybe the pages will be weathered, lost to time someday. Maybe their conclusions will be wrong. But Damian closes his eyes at the gnarled hand illustrating the pages alongside his own.
He awakens in the night to the sound of footsteps in the hallway. Damian stirs but does not stand from the rickety chair he fell asleep in after working tirelessly in search of a sign with Oskar, coiled within the depths of his intestines. Every scrape of his scalpel upon wet, bloodied organs led nowhere so far. He must wait.
Out of the corner of his eye he can catch the haloed shine of a pair of small, round glasses in between a crack in the door—a rustling of uniform robes, footsteps trying too hard to maintain quiet amidst the echoey hallways. He was right, Damian knows, that there is a spy in their midst—a mole regurgitating their knowledge back to the Healing Church.
He opens his eye for one moment, moves just a little to ensure his suspicions can be confirmed—
The figure glimpsing at the vivisected young boy jumps and darts away, the clicking of his shoes upon the cold hallway floors fading away.
“I know who he is,” Damian says.
Oskar is barely breathing, eyes dulled from several days lying amidst the operating table—barely allowed to feed or drink, only flicker in and out of consciousness (too much food would dull his clarity, Micolash explains).
Micolash flicks the scalpel around in his fingers, inhaling the stench of blood and scabby, bruised flesh. “Who, pray tell?”
“Edgar. He tried to get a look at what I was doing the other night—with Oskar. He didn’t dare linger. But I don’t think anyone loyal to our school of thought would sneak around that way—he’s a spy for the Church. Has to be.”
He braces himself for an autopsy tonight as they continue work, eyes constantly darting to the door. Micolash had patted it once they had locked it shut, advising they work quietly—let them taunt Edgar, he had said, and ensure he does not eavesdrop on what is already an open secret. Instead of transcending, they will make quick work of a corpse and leave it to stink up the place as it rots down to crumbling bone—burned away in all its uselessness, nothing more than a hollow shell.
Damian works tirelessly, blood clinging to his hands. He has to go on, he—
This must be the garden of the universe—a plane of existence that he has dreamed of reaching. It is consumed in trickling moonlight, rushing white; reality ebbs and flows in this place. He tastes a rush of metal on his tongue; blood from where he must have bit down on the inside of his mouth too hard. This blue and white shall swallow the world and his mind until not even his dried-up tendons are left—a wasteland, a paradise.
Somewhere at the edge of it all is Ebrietas.
He cannot see the Daughter of the Cosmos for himself, he knows. Yet there she is: the crack of her bones and she stretches out her arms and tendrils to feel at this world she has always known in search of its guests who managed to open their eyes. Damian feels as though he is at Yharnam’s shore all over again, stood beneath a night sky which is sparse of stars. That was when the orphan of Kos washed ashore, curled in on itself—gargantuan, nothing like the whales that their town hauled in day by day before.
(Where is the mother who birthed that long-dissected child? He wonders. Where does she lay, womb torn open in all her grief? Or was it joy, joy that this orphan could be granted at least a bit more mercy and reverence than she might have been?)
And somehow, Micolash is present to partake in this revelation, too.
There are eyes blooming all across him—fresh pupils opening upon his arms, his hands, his face. This is the gift they have earned through trial and error, as they poke around others in search of eyes. No lying about altruism has brought them here, Damian recognizes, it was all Micolash’s doing to ensure that they would be laid bare to partake in this glory.
He cannot move. He cannot speak. This sight Damian has been granted is of nothing accessible to the ordinary eyes he had been born with, hereditary from the plane he had been brought from to here. He crawls here not as a human groveling before a madwoman queen, but as an ant crawling through deserts beneath the scorching sun—awe-inspiring, the source of its joy and agony in tandem. This world was never theirs to alter, Damian understands, until now. The lighthouse has shone upon something at last in the distance, they flickered through Morse code for who knows how long. And at last Ebrietas flickers back—nothing more than acknowledgement, no answers. But it is more than he could ask for now.
All of this spans only the single action of blinking an eye.
“Our first sign…”
Our first sign, Damian notes. He can’t help but feel honored that Micolash has chosen to include him in this not-quite ascension, this revelation about the kaleidoscope beyond the cages of their humanity. All of this they found bathed under moonlight, when at some point the circumstances of whatever cosmic tide exists decided to fall for them enough so they could wade a little closer
This, then, is not a corpse lying on the operating table: this is a treasure chest baring something far more priceless than even the rarest of gemstones, the most valuable of coins. The boy whose face has collapsed upon itself, an eyeball fallen from his crushed-in skull and rolling onto the ground, a gaping hole in his torso to expose the tattered remains of shredded flesh steeped in viscera that once made up his vital organs, his intestines… he who had been taught by Micolash at last has grasped the key and opened up the first gate.
So, he thinks, Oskar was somehow enough after all—he brought upon us something we can’t exactly place, but was enough to allow us even the smallest taste of Ebrietas.
Damian glances to the Phantasms slithering over the path of ribcage beneath collapsed lungs, and it is the first time that their presence has not felt like a mockery of his ignorance.
“I can only thank you,” says Micolash, “for your loyalty, your participation. We’ll deal with the mole soon enough, but… thank you. For all your observations and work by my side. You are a scholar equal of rank to me, not some shadow. I want you to indulge in the endeavors of all our experimentation, too.”
He stands before Damian drenched in blood, pausing only to pick up the eyeball that had rolled onto the floor.
“I can only hope that whatever I do next to assist your studies shall be nearly as helpful as what we have done now.”
“That which I have said of the operation of the Sun is accomplished and ended.”
The Emerald Tablet.
Dyed in rust-red and crusted with gore, Damian pulls Micolash close to kiss him. He tastes of metal, all of his mouth from his long tongue to his crooked teeth warm with the saltiness of someone else’s blood. This mess of flesh and guts is proof of what they have looked for after so long.
He hopes this phantasmagorical waltz will never end.