Book 2, Chapter 15 – Built Different (Patreon)

Fleshcrafting is generally frowned upon outside of the second ring. 

It’s an understandable phobia, one which tends to disguise the biases of ineducation. There is nothing so fundamentally different, in abstract, about the harm that can be done by fleshcrafting that can’t be done with flame, with sword, with dreams or a big rock. It can cripple you, change your body without your consent and in ways you can’t understand or fix on your own, and use you as a resource for other actions. Same as any form of magic, in its abstract depths. 

But there’s something psychologically affecting about that sort of transformation. There is a viscerality in its effect on your perception of self. Being burned alive is a method by which millions die every year without ever developing insight or truer madness from it, but, while there are a scant few tens of thousands affected by fleshcrafting every year, there are many that develop neuroses or comprehension from its effects.

We are of flesh. Flesh is mind, and mind is soul, and soul is flesh, a truth as intrinsic as the cycle of evaporation, of decay into nutrition into new growth, as the sun’s path in the sky. What the mind and soul cannot do on their own, the flesh might, and vice-versa. It is our avatar, long before we form a Soul. It is an extension and piece of a tri-part divinity, which is the divinity of being alive. It is no surprise that those who do not have a more academic understanding of it tend to mystify it, to express it as an alien and transformative thing which they are bound to yet empowered by. 

Personally, I think it’s lovely. Most of those second-ring flesh-workers aren’t doing nearly enough with it. Tweaks and additions here and there, when they could be learning to run on blades and fly with internal fumes and multiply their limbs as needed.

But! I do get it. When a part of you that is so fundamental becomes changed, be it by the self or by exterior forces, it cannot be anything less than profound. 

Three-part divinity. I like that. I might use that someday.

–Interview with Dao Tie, an Arch-Demonic Cultivator censured for their use of unsanctioned fleshcrafting, heretical cultivation, and treason to the Empire. Current Whereabouts unknown.

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She is not herself for a while. 

Hardly a surprise, that. One is hardly who they once were or will be in moments like this, trapped in amber, between everything. She remembers the attack on that last spirit beast, remembers reaching some impossible tipping point inside, and… nothing else, save perhaps the sense of shifting and unraveling and heat. It had not burned, but… she felt like she was melting into herself, and no other words can describe it.

It hurts where she is. She is not herself, not Raika, not yet, but apparently the pain overrides even that. Deeper than her name, the bitch is, roiling and churning and coiling all through her. In truth, she doesn’t know that she has anything but pain; there is little self here, less flesh, and any concept of a body or a presence in this not-place seems to barely even make sense. But still there is the pain, and it is… enough her that she can be it.

She does not look around. She can’t.

She sees anyway.

She sees the blood, dancing against her existence like she’s an island and boat and rock in a river and ocean and sea. She sees the flame, wrapping around her, uplifting and unmaking and remolding, avatar above all of Change, and impossible to glimpse and hold for even a moment as a single, frozen state.  She sees the doors, the pathways left free, the edges of blades, where the blood dances and is molded by the knife’s edge. She sees a beating, pulsing thing, impossible and beloved, surrounded in fire and blood and blade and claw and growing, grasping roots and refusing to stop beating, no matter what part of it changes and is cut and is grown into or torn apart, always whole and always unmade and yet refusing to go still or silent. She sees scraps of other things, other ideas, other… concepts feels too simple a thing to call them. They are dreams. They are secret truths, endless mysteries, impossible glimpses of what cannot be understood yet is. She sees the stone, perfect in every level, wrapped and clad in bone and fire and forging and ravenous hunger, floating by her and the pain which she is. She sees flashes of lightning, running through everything, making of the world a road and bursting along its paths, and endless all-black waters, perfect in stillness yet always in motion and perfectly without depth and endless.

She sees a tree that is not a tree, that grows upside down until its branches reach high enough to escape the far black of the sea-bottom above.

She sees so, so much. She sees nothing at all.

But something sees her, too.

In this impossible place, in this momentous dream and delusion, something in that dark turns its gaze upon her wretchedness.

It is not here. It cannot see her. She cannot know what it is. She does not know it is looking. It is unknown and forgotten because there is nothing there, and it is here and so close and looking at her.

All these things are true. All these things are terrible and far, far beyond her.

She is not an ant. An ant can do things. An ant can walk, can build, can bite. She is less than an ant. She is a single, endless and nearly-never instant, believing that she is alive, believing that she is herself, believing that she exists.

This thing exists. This thing is alive. This thing IS.

It is many things.

She quails before it. Her Truth, meager, childish toy that it is, quivers, the weight of ALL briefly shifting above it. The dreams and delusions about her, the metaphors she tries to use to understand what she’s experiencing, all flutter and warp, as if they too are made unknowable by the thing that IS looking at her.

There is something worse than the weight, though. Worse than the impossibility, worse than the pain of it, worse than the fact that she is nothing and it is EVERYTHING and it is many, so so many, and it is dead and alive and gone and here and never been and always was-

And worse is that its gaze, turned to her, is one of DISGUST.

And this is not Truth. Truth is the will of children, the madness of the malformed and deficient, and to call it by that name is an insult to all that is and was not and is above all and beyond all and right here, now. It is beyond that, warping all that is by the weight of even that passing thought, and it means… everything. She is disgusting. She is beyond small, and she is made wrong, and she is disgusting, she is worthy of that disgust.

The passing interest of totality brushes against her, and she knows she is not enough for it.

Something trembles. Something makes a sound in a place without ears or eyes, and somehow, it is real in this moment anyways. And the sound travels, and she feels it touch her, and she is more than pain.

She is… she’s not herself, in this place.

But what does that mean?

She is aware, in a way. She sees that island, malformed and suffused with ideas too big for her to hold that shape it and shape her. 

She is judged by this thing as nothing.

And yet here she is.

She is not just pain. She is beating, undying heart, and unbearable heat, and changing forms and bleeding agonies and sharpened edges, and if she is nothing so are they.

The concepts resonate, making the tiniest waves in the ocean of all-black that goes above transcendence.

The not-place trembles, and she feels things shift. She feels that which she is draw closer, droplets of what is and could be and will be and can never be drawn back with it.

A thing that is not and is all looks at her and feels DISGUST.

And, as part of her clicks back into place, she understands something in a place without understanding and mired in delusion and perfection and the alien and the divine and the unholy.

She sees all that is, and feels its judgment, and even as it warps everything that is, it has no fucking right to judge her.

Stain on the wall

All of reality is not him, is not her, is not anything she can hold and recognize. The ocean is made of all the water that is, but it is not a droplet.

He is not here. He is not anywhere. But she smells tangerines, for a brief, impossible moment in a timeless place.

The Heavens or the gods or the impossible things above and below and beyond all don’t get to judge her. She does not recognize their authority. She is worthless, and monstrous, and ruinous, but she grows, and she writhes, and she gets back up, and when she is done then she and the memory of a simple kid who saved her will judge her and find her wanting, not this thing.

I Am Me. I Am Mine.

Fuck the Heavens for judging her. She is not theirs. 

Something trembles at her side. A moment in which she is not alone, shivered into unreality, and she can almost hear the little “Dink” noise that comes with it.

She has shaped herself so far. One might say that they are a product of their world and its systems, but she shapes herself and what she can reach, in spite of all that is and all that says otherwise. She is Raika, and she is not here, wherever it is, to entertain the opinions of some big space bitch she doesn’t even know.

She looks back at the thing that IS and IS NOT and does her level best to convey the concept of spitting at it. This is a place of truth. Bare of illusions, it can suck her fat cock and fuck off.

Whatever is and is not gazing at her is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction, its mere passing at this impossible moment enough to warp all that is. And yet, for a single moment, the self which Raika has built, for all its flaws, aided by the smell of tangerines and a touch of trembling, beautiful sound, withstands the tide. Truth as anchor, Self as ship, and that which she is tied to and conquered and made of her waters.

In that moment, she builds herself again. The island convulses, drawing in all that overwhelming madness around her, pulling at it angrily. She feels memories of everything she’s ever done, flavoring tides of Concept far beyond her, and draws them in. She pulls, and somehow it means she is in these concept-delusions and they are in her, a torus of her own existence consuming and being grown from itself. She is the undying heart, the writhing tree and blossoming flesh, the cutting edge of what is and that which shapes the wound, the hunger that consumes and the self that transforms, and she, too, Is.

A reflection of the DIVINE, born from spiteful will.

Not everything comes cleanly. Some pieces are ill fits, and she cannot refuse them, has no power or weight in this place to push them away. So instead, she takes them in. Every part of her, not just the parts she wants, all echo.

And one exception. 

A tiny, perfect cube, born of a shadow of a shadow, born of death and torn apart in her teeth. It is pulled into the mess of her being, worn away at, like a pearl, sharpening against her. It remains cold, even in her metaphysical guts. It is a part of nothing in a way nothing else can be, but still, it is hers, and it is in her, and she has taken it from the world. She brandishes it at reality, screaming behind the weight of it, using it as crutch and shiv both to anchor herself. 

I have seen and been seen before, she screams, and I took from what I saw a fucking trophy.

She is Raika. Broken, but alive.

She is her pain, and it is proof she is alive. She is the fire and the blood, the gritted teeth and holy knife’s edge and endless forge, the howl against the world and the sapling, torn apart yet still growing. She is the holy sacrament of what they all together create, Glory Be.

The tiny piece of the impossible thing above all things looks at her again. It hates her. It finds her disgusting, and frustrating, and worth nothing.

It is good, then, that its opinion can go fuck itself and the impossibility it rode in on. 

It hurts her. But so what? Pain is what it means to be alive in a cruel world, is it not? And the world is cruel, in ways she cannot know or see but can feel and taste ever so faint in the fabric of it all. And she is alive, despite the wishes of many who have met her.

Someday she will not be, if only so she can be judged by those she has failed. But that day is not today, and not here. The world warps around her, and she stands. Reality bends and cuts and tries to pull her apart, and she stands, holding tight to that pale white anchor and the soft sound and that sweet scent and to her Pain. 

The offhand judgment of all that is and all that could be dismisses her, and even as she screams and struggles and spasms and pulls her pieces back together, she stands.

As the Will of Heaven itself crashes down upon her, she discovers that every Truth has parts to it. Every part of every idea has pieces that make it up, ideas that shape what it is, and just like she is all of these many things and more, so too is her Truth. She takes a piece of it, shining it like a jewel as she pulls herself together again and again beneath an impossible weight whose DISGUST unmakes her with every not-moment. She stabs the truth, like a knife, into the perfect white stone, into herself, into the place where she is and the world around and behind all that is, and in that one piece of truth she finds a part of it even truer than the rest, refined by broken marble and infinite pressure.

I Am.

And then, with something like a hyena’s cackle and a middle finger raised, she drags herself back into reality and wakes up, ripping apart ruinous black stone and glowing flesh to taste air and howl.