Paragenesis: Stories of the Dawn of Wraeththu (5 page)

When I was done, Orien looked
sad but told me thank you. Then he took my right hand in his own,
which was shaking, and gave it a squeeze. “You're cold,” he said.
“Let me make you warm.”

He told me to lie down on the
bed of cardboard boxes and newspapers where we slept. I did so,
thinking he would be going off to bring me some secret stash of
blankets or gather more firewood. But then, beginning with my
shoes, Orien began to remove my clothing. When I asked him what he
was doing – it was still cold – he assured me he would be making me
warm. He knew the trick.

Drained from telling my story,
I did not protest, remaining limp as Orien stripped me, tossing my
clothes into a pile. I thought once I was naked he would begin, but
then he announced that he would be joining me, exposing his own
skin as much as mine. I thought he was mad but I often thought
that, and so I closed my eyes as garments fell to the floor one by
one.

“Now we will begin,” he said to
me.

“What will you do?” I murmured,
feeling my skin prickle with goose pimples against the night
air.

“Warm you,” he answered.

My eyes were closed and so at
first I did not know what he was doing. The cardboard shifted as
Orien put his weight upon it, kneeling as he shared his newly
discovered power. He was silent as he worked. At first I did not
feel it, but then in my feet I felt a tingling. It could have been
the cold. Soon, though, it grew stronger and then, I felt something
else, like something stroking my bare feet, only without really
touching it. My feet were getting warmer. Yes, just a bit warm,
then a little warmer, then yet a little warmer.

“Do you feel it?” Orien asked
me.

I opened my eyes and he was
kneeling with his hands over my feet. I nodded yes, wondering,
could he only do my feet? Orien worked over me then, moving from
the feet to the calves to the knees and up my thighs. When he
reached my mid-point, he asked what I would like warmed next. The
look on his face was an odd one, strained and awkward. For a brief
moment, I sensed he had something more to say, but then I realized
I had better let him proceed. I was warm in my lower half but still
cool in my upper – too cool. He swung his leg over me, spanning my
middle as he spread his hands to soothe me with warmth.

He worked from my waist up to
my chest, then from my shoulders down to my hands. I felt warm like
a rock in the sun, even though the sun had set. It was only the
weak light of our fire that flickered against our naked skins.
Orien put his hands over my face, almost touching, and in an
instant my cheeks grew warm. I smiled at him, appreciating this
gift more than any other he had shown me. Orien smiled back, then
bent down to kiss me.

It was the sharing of breath. I
had not felt it before – that kiss that brings more than two sets
of lips together, but two souls. I felt the need in Orien then. His
body still cold, perhaps even colder than before, he wanted my
warmth. I wanted to give it to him. My arms curled around his back
and he hissed as slowly he lowered his body down onto mine. Our
lips were locked together and thus, our souls. Hungry, yes he was,
and wanting warmth.

Lying beneath him, I felt his
Wraeththu organ pressed against mine. What a strange sensation, our
petals touching. I felt suddenly that I had woken up, remembered
something I’d forgotten. Since that fatal night, I had turned away
from that part of myself, burying it not only in grief but in the
myriad other matters to consider: food, shelter, Orien and then the
special powers Orien so enthused about. Orien woke as well and
soon, us kissing, tangled together on the cardboard, his ouana-lim
came alive against me.

Something happened then,
something I will never forget so long as I live. It is a moment
most every har remembers. Pressed on my back enjoying (yes,
enjoying!) Orien’s attentions, I suddenly felt a shifting and then,
to my surprise, I had become female, soume. Orien propped himself
up on his arms immediately, even as I felt his ouana-lim grow yet
more firm. He looked into my eyes with an ineffable look of wonder.
“Can we?” he asked.

I felt so strange at that
moment. I had always known I was different. Certainly the doctors
had told me so often enough, My parents had held it against me. I
was a girl and a boy, a hermaphrodite. I had a cavity like a
female; it was the way I was built. Still, I had never felt my male
parts disappear. I had never felt a hot burning not only between my
legs but deep inside. It was a craving, as vicious as the hunger of
the starved. I pulled Orien back down to meet my lips. “We can,” I
told him, speaking in a growl like a hungry she-cat.

Orien wasted no time, but slid
into me easily, the feel of him an inner caress. Our parts were
perfectly matched; they knew one another, completed one another,
became one. That night we created a great heat, if not a fire.
Souls and bodies merging, this for me was the real first Grissecon,
no matter the later more public success with the group. On that
cold dark night Orien and I discovered the knowledge of that great
magic, aruna, and in so doing, took the first step in truly
understanding the great magic that we are.

A Sickle
Blade

Christopher Coyle

Boline, a white-handled ritual
knife, used in the tradition of witchcraft for the cutting of herbs
and cords. Complement to the Athame, the ritual blade.

In the beginning, there was
darkness. The darkness of the womb and the darkness of creation. I
think there is a connection between the two: seeds sown in the
night that blossom in the dawning of the light. I was brought forth
from the gloom of creation almost sixteen years ago and tonight, I
will once more be thrust back into the darkness, awaiting my
rebirth.

I am naked and shivering, lying
on a cold stone platform, somewhere deep beneath the city streets.
Tight leather bands cross my chest; they dig into my flesh, prevent
me from rising or moving. Shadows press in against my skin, and the
only sound I hear is the breathing of at least twenty others, all
about to undergo the same transformation as myself.

We had been locked together in
a dank cell for three days; blind in the darkness, denied food or
water. We had become weak from hunger and dehydration. The only way
we’d known time had passed had been through the smallest fraction
of light that had crossed the wall; sunlight that had somehow
managed to find its way down below.

Then, after those three days of
incarceration, the door burst open and they’d come in. Tall,
beautiful, and terrifying, they called themselves the Uigenna. I
had believed them to be the stuff of tabloid tales, stories told to
frighten children into behaving, or characters taken from some book
or movie. I was wrong, they were all-too-real, and I was to become
one of them.

I’d been too weak to struggle
as they’d dragged me down a hall into a large room filled with
stone tables. I’d seen that other people, who must have been in
that cell with me, were already being laid out on the tables;
leather bonds strapped across their chests and legs, pinning them
down. It was the first time I’d seen the others clearly, outside
the darkness of our cell, but my mind didn’t want to focus on
anyone else’s troubles but my own.

I’d been pulled towards one of
the tables by two Uigenna, where they’d laid me out and tied me
down securely. Other figures had come into the room, moving about
the bodies on the tables and doing something that I couldn’t quite
see - at least not until one of them came up to me. In his hand,
he’d held a wicked-looking knife. I hadn’t been able to see his
face, but when he’d suddenly slashed the blade across my wrist, it
wasn’t his face I looked at. I’d yelled in shock at the sudden
pain, but my tormentor had not finished. He did the same thing to
himself, slicing open his wrist without making any sound of pain.
As the blood had flowed down his wrist, he’d reached down and
pressed his open cut against me, mingling his blood with mine. Then
he’d moved on, leaving me there alone.

A few moments later, they’d
turned out the lights and left us in the dark. The wound on my arm
started to itch, then it started to burn, spreading up my arm and
through the rest of my body.

As I lie here on the cold
stone, my mind wanders down the twisting corridors of memory,
filling my head with a million thoughts and images dragged from the
depths. The pain of my metamorphosis begins; fiery blades seem to
carve away my flesh, and icy needles sliver their way through my
insides. My psyche seizes upon the events that have brought me to
this place, deep below the city.

The day began like any other:
the same routine playing itself out in the same pattern. I woke up,
got out of bed and hurried through my morning ritual of getting
ready for school. Jumped into the shower, quickly cleaned myself,
avoiding looking into the mirror for I knew and hated what would be
staring back at me. I had not been an attractive child, and wasn’t
an attractive teenager either. My face had been attacked by acne
for years now; my hair was stringy and unkempt; my body was flabby
and fat. My mother said it was genetic, that I had glandular
problems, but it was more psychological than anything else. When
you hate yourself, it’s easier to find comfort in food and the
cycle becomes self-perpetuating - you make yourself even more
unlovable. It even becomes something of a sick sort of twisted
pride, a sign of how much you don’t care about your body (even
though you do).

After throwing on whatever
clothes first came to hand, I grabbed up my backpack, stuffed my
half-finished homework inside and ran to catch the bus. I hated
going to school. Not because I hated learning. I was actually good
at school; perhaps too good. Being fat, ugly and smart were three
things almost guaranteed to ensure that you were amongst the least
popular kids at school. This in turn meant you were ready prey for
those higher up the social hierarchy than you. Needless to say, I
was near the bottom of said hierarchy, quarry that even other prey
could hunt without many feelings of remorse or pity.

For all prey, there is a
certain safety in travelling in numbers; the protection of the
herd. Of course, the slowest was often culled by the predators,
while the others scurried for safety. He or she became a sacrifice
to the rampant sadism of humanity. Unfortunately, over the last few
months, my herd had been culled. One by one, they had either
transferred to different schools, moved on to other herds, or had
run away. Some kids had even killed themselves in despair over
everything that had happened over the last few years. The world was
changing around us, quicker than anyone could account for. Despite
what they say about the resilience of youth, kids don’t like change
all that much. Too much change and we have little to ground
ourselves. So, perhaps it was no wonder that kids were either
killing themselves or disappearing at an alarming rate.

Adam, one of the latest to
disappear from my herd, was the only one I had truly considered my
friend. His disappearance struck me particularly hard. Adam had
disappeared about a month before, apparently running away without
leaving even a note or message to say why or where he had gone.
There had been only a token effort made by the police to track him
down, but in the last few months the reports of runaways and
missing persons had drastically increased. If they were not found
within 72 hours, the police just gave up, almost as if they knew
what had happened to them, yet were afraid of admitting the reality
of it. The usual explanation in the police reports was that it was
most likely that the individuals had run off to join one of the
strange new gangs that had been cropping up in the seedier parts of
the city. Perhaps it was no coincidence that these gangs had been
increasing in number and strength over the same period of time as
the disappearances of kids and teenagers had escalated. These gangs
had been spreading rapidly, yet although they seemed to be forming
in large numbers, no one seemed able to find out anything about
them. They disappeared at the first hint of danger, apparently
possessing some instinct that warned them of journalists or
cops.

I hoped that Adam had found a
place among one of those gangs, and that he was safe, although a
part of me resented him for getting away and leaving me to deal
with everything here on my own. More than anything, I wished he had
taken me with him. I was too cowardly to try running away alone and
just as scared of the idea of committing suicide. As much as I may
have hated myself and my life, I didn’t want to die. So I remained
where I was, living each day as I had the one before it. At home, I
was safe and provided for. The only downside was the darkness,
depressiveness and monotony of my life.

As usual, school seemed to last
forever. I hurried from class to class, waiting until the last
moment to dart through the throngs of students, to minimize the
chance of running into any of my tormentors. Thankfully, that day,
I managed to avoid any undue encounters and I thought I had made it
safely through another week. I had grown to anticipate Fridays
perhaps more than was normal for most kids, as it meant at least
two days of relative safety and peace, where I could lock myself in
my room and not see another living soul.

The bus let me off a few blocks
away from my home, and I saw that my mother had yet to arrive.
Usually, she picked me up at the bus stop after school as she
passed by on her way home. She must have been running late at her
office that day, but I dreaded she had been in a car accident, or
some other calamity had struck. Normally, if she wasn’t able to
make it, she’d send one of the family’s security guards to bring me
home. Like most other well-to-do families in the area, with all the
disappearances and gang related incidents increasing, my family had
taken to hiring security guards whenever we went out. Of course,
the security guards didn’t seem to like me any more than the kids
at school did, and probably for the same reasons. All I know is
that I was standing out there, alone on the street, without any
cover to hide from what might come. A sudden fear overtook me, a
premonition that I was too vulnerable at that moment, and that it
was all too likely I would be viewed as easy prey by any passing
threat.