The Maker

These hands are not my hands.

I have never used them before.

These lines, scars and abrasions are unfamiliar to me.

They move when I command them to and my mind breaks a little.

These arms are not my arms.

They bulge horrifically against the restraining straps, creaking leather, brawny and terrible. I do not recognize their breathtaking strength.

I made…

I made…

Shoes?

I made shoes.

My despairing cry is not my voice and a heart deep within this chest sinks as I wonder what remains. What is left of me?

I turn desperately, looking to see - with my own eyes, I prayed - what might strike a chord within memory and my ferocity frightens me.

I snarl and growl in confusion, testing the limits of my binds.

My chin is wet.

My teeth are too big and I have time enough to wonder at what a strange realization that is before there is a cool hand on my forehead.

This forehead.

I cannot see. I cannot see who it is and I want to, I need to because they must be responsible and I have to know why.

“Calm,” it is a soothing voice, throaty and warm, “Calm. You are well.”

Despite myself there is obedience, and I shrink beneath the words. My back, much too broad, flattens on unyielding wood.

“Whe-”

I make the attempt again, held by a voice not my own; the rumbling cords in this throat deeper than I remember, “Whe-”

The hand smooths the furrowing brow, “Safe, sound,” the voice returns, stepping on me, on my utterances with an almost dismissive and casual ease.

“Rest,” it continues, “There is work to be done and you must be ready, rest.”

Obedience. Defiance? I made shoes. Not with these hands, not with these arms, not anymore.

They had bound me, what else could I do?

Obedience.

I rested.

None of it was mine. In the coming weeks I explored myself, a desperate search, looking for anything, anything that would knell, but I was stranger to these questing fingers and probing eyes. I was a haphazard fusion of tone, texture and temper.

I had not even been gifted an organ. My legs joined to nothing, I could not even have the contentness of gender.

He said I had no need for it.

“Not borne of womb, my dearest,” he said, “There lies your canal, seeded by the unwilling,” and he pointed to a circle, etched into the ground. It bled. I wondered if it was mine or theirs, stained so, but I could not recognize even that.

Nothing was mine. I must remake me.

He said I was his first success. Showed me on this body how I was joined, the sigils that powered movement, that granted agility, that succored life.

“None like you, dearest,” he crooned, “But soon there will be. Much work to be done.”

I crawled. Muscles spasmed. I walked. I ran.

I dreamed.

Fleeting snatches of a once-life, and when I told him of it he brushed it away with that same dismissive, casual ease.

“Fragments of a fragment,” he said with his flighty air, “You are you, that is all.”

“I made shoes.”

“And I made mud,” he snapped, and it was as aggravated as I had ever seen him, “You can smell it still. Soon it will go, as will this.”

He prodded this forehead with a stiffened finger.

“Fragments. Of a fragment.”

———————————

Fragments.

I am drawing the sigils in fragments. I do it upside down, tracing the raised flesh with a finger and scratching out its sibling on the floor of my room.

I use coal.

I cannot look into a mirror. It would be easier, but for all of this muscle, I do not have the strength. My teeth are still too big and I am afraid. Sometimes I see him watching me, studying my movements, and I hear him mutter because these are not my ears; “The next will be better.”

I am torn then, as torn as I probably used to be, because I want to be better, and then I hate myself for desiring to please him when I know I should hate.

A memory bubbles, a voice I do not know, a feeling I cannot place; if it is easy, it is not worth doing.

It is easy to hate. It must not be worth doing. Yet, it feels right.

I trace a sigil and follow it with the coal.

The next will be better.

They pepper my floor, I hide them with a rug, carefully laid so as to not erase the marks. Sometimes I do, because I am clumsy, or afraid, but then I remake them again, because I will make myself better.

He is working. I can hear him. He is creating another, but he will not tell me how. He will not let me watch. He wants to keep me ignorant. He does not say so, but I can tell.

Perhaps he is afraid.

I feel a thrill, it shivers up and down my length like a frothy horse.

Perhaps he should be.

I have learned things. Like how the sunlight hurts. Like how I do not need to breathe. I do not need to eat. That I am fast. That iron burns at the touch.

That I am a prisoner.

He says that I am not, but I am.

There is iron where he does not want me, and sunlight too.

I can hear him working and I want to watch, I want to learn, but he told me to stay, to wait, and while I am fast, strong, breathless, I am also obedient.

I do not want to be but I am.

He is coming now, so I hide the sigils, I see one of them smear as I do so and I whine. Like an animal. I cannot be upset when he comes in, so I change my face, grind my too large teeth.

He opens the door gently and finds me plucking at my blankets. I have little here, I do not mind it, I cannot remember having things. This is more than I’ve ever known.

“Come look,” he says so I follow and cannot help but wonder and fear that whatever he has made is more than me.

When I see it, I think of beauty. It is lithe and sleek, with pleasing contours. The sigils that stitch it are different and I try to memorize them but know that I cannot. It reminds me of a predator, poised and wirey, smooth, pliable.

I want to hold it. I want to crush it.

It does not pull at its restraints as I did, it watches us both with golden eyes, quiet, pale, attentive.

He does not need to soothe it as he did me. He looks proud, his gaze fixed upon it, “Now we are not alone,” he says, he murmurs it as if to himself.

“My dears, my hearts,” he turns a wide grin to me at last, I bask in it, I show him my teeth, “Now we rise.”

He gave her everything I did not have. She was complete. She was succulent. I did not need a mirror then, because her perfect face would wrinkle with disgust when she looked at me. I was glad, then, to have never seen what he had made me into, thankful too that he never saw me with such abject distaste.

I put her to question when he slept, I needed to glean the manner of her creation, and while she tolerated my study of her sigils, she either withheld her knowledge, or was born in ignorance. In either case I could not fault her, my own form was not as pleasing as hers. I would avoid me too. I did not tell her of everything else I had learned and took some satisfaction in watching her find out on her own; how she hissed in the sunlight and whined when iron burned her hand.

“May I see the one on your head?” I ask her, pointing at the sigil emblazoned on her forehead. We huddle in the main room. It is late, the sun is gone but I can see her clearly.

She narrows her golden eyes at me, “I have let you,” she says, “Look at your own.”

The hands I was given reach up to my head before I can stop them, “My own?”

“You have not seen your own?”

“I have not seen me. I do not want to.”

“Yes,” she says quietly and gives me the longest look she ever has before she turns away.

The fingers on these hands find it, follow the scarred flesh.

He told me of the others, the ones that give me life, speed and strength. He never told me of this one.

I want to draw it. I will draw it. I want to see what he has hidden from me.

——————————

He uses us. He dresses her in fineries I never knew he had. He clothes me in darkness, “You are not for the light,” he says, but he says it so kindly I forget to be upset at being denied, even though I know.

I know what the light does.

The work he sets us to is cruel because I feel sick, it is the first time I have, and it is the word that bobs to the surface of my mind when we do it.

I remembered what he had said in my first weeks of life; the unwilling.

I had never given it further thought, and I wished I had.

He must have struggled.

They must have fought.

What had it cost him to make us both?

Nothing now, his labor paid for itself.

She would lure them, her beauty a beacon, captured first by her strange quintessence, then by me. I made them unwilling. They soiled themselves when they saw me. Their eyes widened, their mouths gaped, they stiffened and fought. They could do nothing to me. Not as I was.

Who had these hands been?

This face, these legs. They are not mine. I look at her, see past her beauty, and I see the parts. He lets us watch now. His manner is perverse. He has learned how to shape them, he practices on what we bring him, and he takes longer than he ever has on the next.

He uses no tools, drawing from something I cannot understand, and that she has no desire to.

I am alone in my curiosity.

I hate her lack of wonder.

His hands burn and glow but are not consumed, the womb in which he fertilizes his creations is the circle he indicated once before, scored, pitted and ringed.

I have felt unnatural, but next to this I feel of this world, grounded and present.

Whatever he trafficks in is not.

The amalgamations he pieces together, wreathed in blood, are nothing more than corpses until he inscribes the sigils with a single, powerful finger.

He fights reality to make it so, then finishes it with the same mark I know to be on all of our heads.

I am the least of us now. I am his first foray. His experiment. The sign of progress. An example of what was. His third shines, and if there was ever a magnum opus it lay within him.

Him.

He is a god. He has made a god. He is perfect. He is sublime. He is rigid, he is yielding, and I am dirt.

I am dirt. I cannot stand before him, I cannot look at him any longer, and so I flee. They stay behind and I am alone.

I return to my room. With feverish ferocity I rip up the rug, and I begin to lay hands on my marks as I have done a hundred times before, to wipe them, to forget them, but I pause.

If he can make a god. If he can make a golden eyed nymph.

Then I.

Then I.

The next will be better.

He lavishes his newest child, I can hear his lauding praises, and I, darkness shrouded per his gift, steal to the iron doors. I grit my teeth against the pain as I wrench them open and enter with tingling hands. Here, where we were forbidden, real treasure lies.

There are books here. Knowledge. His manner and style, within this warm room. It is wooden and muted, unlike the harsh stone of the rest of his abode. It is soft and curtained. He lived like a king. We were beasts. I tear into his shelves, giving into it, latent beneath a surface. Spines cracked, parchment ripped, glass shattered, wood sundered, and in the midst of my jealous destruction I remembered. I had forgotten myself. I had forgotten my purpose. Betterment.

Improvement.

His work was recent.

It would be out.

It splayed open on the desk. Old. Older than I could fathom. Upon each page were symbols I had drawn a hundred times before, and beneath each…this stolen heart leapt.

Beneath each, its correspondence.

I keened.

Strength. Agility. Finesse. Speed. Beauty. Balance. The building blocks of his creation.

Nightsight. Breathless. Clever.

Obedience.

I lay gentle, massive fingers against it.

Obedience.

I found it on my forehead.

My forehead.

Obedience.

I pinched the skin, the nails gouged, I pulled.

I am strong. I can draw the sigil that grants it.

Pain was ever a constant.

What was a little more?

Skin lifted, ripped, squelched, resisted then gave.

I felt it in a rush. Memories. Enough to drive a man to his knees, but I wasn’t a man anymore, was I?

I had not been for a long time. I could stand.

I could stand on legs stolen for me, clench fists once ripped brutally away, gnash teeth too large for my mouth.

Me.

Mine.

Born without consent, born in blood, born foully, but me.

How far I had fallen.

I was unrecognizable.

I was a cobbler once, what had he done?

As if he had heard my plaintive, mind lashed cry, he appeared in the doorway of his room. His eyes were wide, his mouth gaped, he stiffened.

“My dearest,” he whispered, his waifish little hands reaching up to his thin lipped mouth, “Oh, my love, what have you done?”

Memory flashed again, his face above mine, leering, sweaty, the cold press of steel in my side, my chest, my neck. I could smell him. He smelled desperate then. He smelled desperate now.

I held up Obedience and threw it at his feet. He could see where it once stood, proud upon my head, a red, leaking circle all that remained.

“What am I?” I asked, because I could not tame my curiosity.

“My child!” He lamented, holding his hands out to me, “You are a god! I have made you in the image of gods!”

“I am no god,” I rumbled, “You do not imprison gods.”

He stutter stepped towards me, and some vestige of obedience must have remained because I moved back, away from him, “You were not ready,” he said as if I hadn’t drawn away, “None of you were ready, and you nearly are, you are so close!”

My curiosity was rampant, torturous, “What is needed?”

Yet somehow, I suddenly knew, because the price had always been the same.

My realization was mirrored in his face. He grinned, filled with sudden hope, “Just one more,” he told me, “One more. That is all. One more. Every god needs a sacrifice. You will ascend. We will all ascend.”

I can confess the temptation.

Because she was beautiful. Because he was perfect, and I?

And I.

The dog of the pantheon.

Cloaked in shadow.

Stealer, mongrel, patchworked.

Yet, I wanted none of these. I was not a deity. I was not bound or prophesied for another purpose. I looked at the patch of skin I had tossed at his feet.

And I was no hound.

I pointed at him.

I took a step.

“I will make you as I am. In my image.”

He cowered away, tried to run, but he forgot my speed. He placed it on me himself. Father to son.

“Fragments of a fragment.”

He screamed, raw, hoarse.

I let him.

I wanted to see how long he could go.

They arrived too late. For all their perfection, they were too slow to save him.

“What is this?” She asked, her face marred for the first time in memory with absolute shock.

Our brother said nothing.

“It is what you see.” I said. I flexed my gore flecked hands, all that remained of the one who made us.

“Why?” It was my brother now, his voice pealing and beautiful.

The question struck me. As assured and unwavering as my actions had been, I couldn’t answer. The deed had been done in a fit. Strangely this comforted me. What was more human than tragic impulse?

I managed a smile, “I don’t know why. Isn’t that wonderful?”

They recoiled bodily away at the answer, uncertain what to do with such aimless purpose.

“But what do we do?” She asked now, unknowing and as ignorant as the day she was born.

“What happens now?”

I grabbed a torch from a sconce and touched its rolling flame to the book, the bed, the curtains, the floor, tossed it, sparking, spinning, against the wall.

I turned back to them, haloed in cleansing flame. I spread my arms, “Whatever you want,” my teeth clicked together in a grinding grin.

My chin was wet.

I laughed as the flames climbed.

“Isn’t that wonderful?”