Oracle
“It will happen,” I said.
“Yes, but how are you saying it will happen?” Lenard said.
This was the problem with people; I gave them a short answer, and all they wanted was details. Details that would inevitably shift the way they saw things until a perfectly good future turned into a tragic mess.
I debated with myself.
Not with whether or not to tell him. My rear end-slowly freezing off as I sat on this bench showed my decision on that. Only on how to tell him in a way that wouldn’t destroy either of our lives. That was the question.
The stupid bench was sharp too, while the cold sun shone down on us. Both treating the knowledge of heat as a delusion. He sat next to me, in a nice shirt and suit that would have caused anyone I knew to itch. A neat-looking man who was 33 years old with a birthday coming in a month.
“When red falls on well-tread path, what you desire will be within your grasp.”
There. A perfectly cryptic way to describe a scarf falling upon the sidewalk outside his workplace.
He looked at me, unamused.
I shrugged. I could give some bogus about “the visions not being clear” but that would be a disservice to both of us.
“It’s all I can say,” is what I said instead.
“I guess I’ll keep an eye out for red,” he said, half-believing. “Thanks for the fortune, I guess? Don’t worry about the change.”
He shoved a dollar bill in my direction. I hadn’t asked for any money. I definitely looked fit for handouts with my hole-ridden sweaters. None of my attempts to lift myself from hobo to grunge ever worked.
I looked down and saw ten bucks. I couldn’t afford a new sweater with this, let alone a new coat or shoes.
It was probably better this way.
It’s worse when they are true believers. Then every word spoken carried the weight to break bones. Just showing up and proclaiming to know the future becomes an event in most people’s heads, and that was enough.
Of course, it could always be the opposite of what I wanted. Even I don’t know everything.
He was already out of sight when I looked back up. Tragic, he missed all my inane conversation attempts.
Lenard Juilliard Belle was a nice enough guy who spent all his time at his job in the bank. The only reason he listened to me at all was that he was worried about marriage, and proclaiming to know the future had left an impression on him. It was the typical crisis: not being married when most of your peers found their spouse at college, or work, or what have you. If he had any sense, he wouldn’t have bothered hearing me out.
Lenard’s future was perfectly bright. Honestly, he just had to wait until he met Eliza Atticus Greene. Specifically, when she lost her scarf, so he would pick it up for her outside the bank on his coffee break at 3:02 P.M. on one June 8th.
They would have two kids and live in a marvelous house on Faison Road with two floors, a basement, pool, and one cat they’d pick up named Mr. Snuffles. Minus the cat, it was such a picture perfect life. I almost wanted one of my own.
If I had given Mr. Belle too much, like a description of the woman, he would have idly kept a lookout for women that looked like Eliza, and ended up with Kaitlyn. A lovely woman whose erratic sleeping habits, combined with her love of buying used furniture in their much smaller house due to a smaller income, would cause him to divorce her after three years.
If I told her Eliza’s name directly, he would, of course, not believe me. But he would casually look her up on Facebook, and casually go through the list of women with her name until he found one he liked best. Shockingly, he would actually find her. Not that she would appreciate this stranger trying to meet her. Even going through a mutual acquaintance wouldn’t be enough to save him. Just a tad too much intensity to turn her off. He wouldn’t get a second date.
If I had them meet through various other ways, each one led to a different ending for their relationship. Some were good, and some were very bad. Distracted driving never ended well, and despite romantic dramatizations, enemies don’t easily turn into lovers. Most often they became ignored acquaintances.
The worst part is they would have met anyways. It was part of her daily ritual to get a coffee from the coffee shop by the bank. And they did both recognize a few fellow faces. This was one of the most minor fortune tellings I’d probably ever do.
But what could I do?
As a 22-year-old jobless freak woken up countless times in a cold sweat to Eliza’s son beating the crap out of my favorite nephew I’d only met in visions of the future, there wasn’t much. I’d tried to ignore it. At least let the favored nephew be born and all that. But inner peace and sleep completely evaded me, unlike the usual only mostly. And all of this because of Lenard’s nasty divorce, in turn caused by him having stray eyes with a random woman he met, because he thought she might be “the one.”
Sure, I could nudge him into marrying Kaitlyn, but why would I ruin their perfect future when it was kept with such an easy seal? A few words to make him trust and believe.
Hopefully, tonight I’d sleep. At least the ten would work for a warm coffee. I got up, hoping for a warmer day after tomorrow, because I knew tomorrow would reach 47 degrees Fahrenheit at most.
Conception of Death
The story of my “conception” is quite a simple one.
One night, an ancient vampire desired a son. Being completely decrepit, though this is not to say he did not have the famous charm of his species, he had little hope of one. Therefore, Count Cassius arose from his coffin to knock on the coffin lid of a known lich. A neighbor and friend of countless years, which he had also not checked in on for countless more. This all despite the lich’s rest being only a few estates away.
The knocking awoke no one. The inside was as hollow as the dead with only a scrap of parchment inside.
“Moved to do business” it read. Being a tiny scrap, the long and convoluted address was on the other side.
So my would-be sire called his wolves to watch over the manor while he went off for business in the form of the mist itself. A simple ride of the wind towards a familiar haunt: the city of monsters, Ebode. The place for the dead and cursed and bestial to collect.
The lich’s new haunt was one crooked lane in the basement of a baker in the district for the distraught, where rent was cheapest. It was quite likely the practice was illegal even then. The lich as deficient at remembering what the current city regulations of Ebode as Cassius was and continues to be. Seeing as they change from year to year, unlike the nature of the moon, the sun, the stones of a certain dilapidated estate, and the wolves. Despite this, the sign over the door read “Practicing All Manner of Magicks, whether Trinkets, Curses, or Unspoken of Cures”. Wooden and worn, the sign could have been much improved with some truncating of the message.
The inside was as dreary as the door and sign. Respectable as any lich’s domain, perhaps minus the location. Which is to say that it was dry, dusty, littered with books, and ill-lit. Dim magical lighting and unidentified stains marred the rugs in what passed as a sitting room. Jebidiah the Lich turned, his moth bitten robes and bony hands appearing as if he had crawled out of the grave that morning. He had never been one to keep up with fashion. Or change his attire when not completely rags. He gestured for Cassius to sit on the remnants of a couch.
“It has come to my attention that I am the last of my line,” Cassius began.
“And?” Jebidiah said.
The fact that the Lich spoke without tongue, just a whispering from the depths, did nothing to disconcert his old peer.
“I would like not to be. You, of some skill, could certainly aid me in creating a child.”
“Let me ignore the base insinuations you have overlooked in your proposal,” the lich said, “and let me properly understand that you desire me, a magical practitioner of awe-inspiring power and skill, to help you magically form a child. A task completely unworthy of my attention.”
“Yes,” Cassius, my sire said.
“Turn someone,” the lich said, likely resisting the urge to rub his bony brow.
“They all have far too much of their habits,” he said. “Must I break a man to make him in my own image? I never carry it out to completion, and they can never be as sons or daughters to me. Plus, so many resist warnings of the sun, garlic, and staking to be gone in a decade.”
Neither had to mention to the other that the undead age only in wear, so if the end result desired would be an adult, then the “child” in question would have to be.
“Adopt, then turn,” Jebidiah, the lich that nearly caused a crusade a century or two before this, advised.
“Ah, but how could I kidnap an innocent child just to indoctrinate them to my ways? We are not so surely fallen to that, have we?”
“Did you fail to hear that I spoke ‘adopt’ and not ‘kidnap’?”
“I didn’t realize you prepared a list of human kingdoms that allow adoptions to monsters. How far thinking of you!”
Now, it has been spoken by both that Jebidiah did rub his bony brow. Those already cursed could not, under normal circumstances, be cursed twice. The citizens of Ebode were as such to a one. Impossible to enter the city without some damnation. They could not be used for the endeavor.
“So… to kidnap,” Jebidiah said. “But certainly there must be parents undeserving within easy reach or street urchins in every city in need of parenting and schooling. If a child is what you want, a child in need is not so hard to find.”
“Ah, so you have a list of corrupt or enslaved kids on hand, and the wretched parents robbed of their charge would surely not make any complaint, nor would the street urchins not take my gifts for their upbringing and any gifts they could put their hands upon and run, far-flung in the day, living out their dreams of a normal life.”
Jebidiah groaned with an excess of bone-rattling.
“It is obvious, old coot,” Jebidiah began, “that you have come to me with a specific solution on hand, and nothing to do with what I can say may change it.”
Cassius leaned forward.
“Dhamphirs are a noted—and studied!—existence, you know.”
“ONLY in certain circumstances and ALWAYS conceived either BEFORE or quickly AFTER the first death! You can’t just pop them out like daisies!” Jebidiah snapped into animacy at Cassius’s statement. “YOU have been turned for centuries! Even if by some mystical miracle your body was incited for such processes again, what god or goddess would bless YOUR children with a soul, oh Count Cassius the eternally damned.”
“Yes, but why must I, or any of my cursed race,” Cassius said, “suffer such indecency to our lineage simply because the gods proclaim us damned? We haven’t harmed the worlds more so than any one individual of normal breeding! So what if… a simple soul went missing?”
Jeb’s skeletal hands pressed against his long-gone temples in a reversed “V” form.
“It will be time for the Soul Party soon,” Cassius continued. “The trail of them will follow the Bright Lady through the scattering of worlds to reach the final resting place. A few at the back will surely not be missed.”
“You want to steal a soul,” Jeb said, “from a goddess?”
Cassius waited. Jeb straightened himself.
“Probably easier than forging the required adoption papers,” he said.
“Obviously,” Cassius said.
“She missed neither your or my soul, didn’t she?” Jeb continued.
“We’re both damned anyways,” Cassius replied. “The only thing she holds over us is our long-awaited rest.”
“And Dhampirs are not so damned,” Jeb said. “Only half cursed, their souls may still find rest. So the crime is just a borrowing of sorts, not technically a theft.”
Still, Jeb made Cassius wait as only the dead could wait. A painfully drawn out wait before he gave his final reply.
Cassius later proclaimed indecision was what struck him, and Jebidiah was adamant about his making Cassius suffer for such a request. Of course, Cassius was patient as the dead, hardly stirring in the time.
“All right,” Jeb said.
“Excuse me?” Cassius said.
“All right,” Jebidiah said. “As long as you pay me, in at least a bookshelf’s weight of solid gold, wipe all favors you have on me from your memory, and NEVER request this favor from me again, I will deal.”
“So be it,” Cassius.
“Believe without a doubt I will allow no loopholes,” Jeb said.
“So it will be as binding as we make it, like all assurances,” Cassius replied.
Just because they had both the motivation for it, did not mean they had an easy method for it. Yet, it was not the theft of the goddess that halted them.
“You don’t have a woman to conceive the body do you?” Jebidiah said.
“While it would be easy to entice a victim to such a purpose for me,” Cassius said, “I find such a thought displeasing. A new life should not be so quickly tainted.”
“What odd places your morality emerges,” Jebidiah said. “To ignore a crime against a goddess, but pause at manipulation. Such inhibitors impede you, but—don’t tell me you were expecting to use one of your mutts?”
“If sheep are an option for human mages I don’t know why wolves are wrong? I hear they make exceptional nannies.”
Cassius spoke with only a touch of contrite.
“I fail to see the honor you put upon these animals,” Jebidiah said. “I will not see the product of my efforts given to snarling at others during high occasions due to picking habits from the basest born beasts. Certainly, there should be one woman among those who sell their body for hire who’d be willing to take a strange deal.”
“I see the sense in the possibility,” Cassius said, swallowing his opinions of wolves as the most cunning of hunters, and having their own refined manners when it came to dining.
At this point the two had spent the entire day discussing the options of such a unknown undertaking for either of them, Cassius letting Jebidiah carry a majority of the conversation, as the latter grew with inspiration over such an odd magickal project. Of course, magick must be involved. When the natural failed, the laws would be bent or break to the desires of those willing to learn. The jump to which such a woman could be found was a quick one, for they were also found in the district of the distraught.
“Lemme get this straight, you two toothpicks,” a lady called Hemlock said. “You want me, a working woman, to ruin my body for a brat that isn’t mine, for a bag of gold?”
She sat in her working attire of lingerie and soft furred coat. Cassius snuck a glance at Jebidiah. The silence stretched out as Hemlock blew smoke in their general direction. Finally, Jebidiah coughed.
“Do it for the study of magick!” He pitched.
“Sounds shady as fuck,” she batted back.
A home run! Neither lich nor vampire could deny that the offer was, such as it was put, “shady”. The patience of the dead did not extend to this working woman. After waiting some few minutes, which both grasped at the words that might convince, she uncrossed her legs, lowering her superior demeanor only to convey her wish to be done with them.
“Get out,” she said, and pointing to Cassius she continued. “You can come back if you actually want to hire us, but Skelly over there is banned.”
The two were led out of the nicest building in the Red District of Ebode without a peep.
“Well that was a mark on the memories,” Cassius said.
“Terrible thought really, why did I follow you?” Jebidiah said.
Cassius glared with a red glint at the unjust accusation.
“I mean, I was banned for your trouble,” Jebidiah said, probably continuing to vent his annoyance based upon the assurance of his own use.
“Maybe so, but it is not like you have cause to frequent such venues!”
“Even bones like to have options!”
“All right but—
“Options!”
“So what are our options?” Cassius said. “I’m not trying another establishment. Although you may.”
“Oh, the oft-named ‘demonic trees’ are the only option,” Jebidiah said. “Their tendency to feast upon flesh can be reversed for our purposes. Easy enough to procure a sapling from the local plant nursery.”
“Hmmm.”
Such was the pair’s embarrassment that they brought up no other solution that required a living body. Inevitably when I was told, one or the other would bring it up, both saying it had been the other’s idea. I was born, thankfully, without any leaves or complications. Nor did my heritage allow much love for sunlight. Jebidiah would go on at length about the specific spells he had used, which after the first hour would go completely over my head.
So the plan was—somewhat—set! To steal a soul from a goddess would by all reasonable standards have taken decades of planning and the stars to align. My father Cassius and Jebidiah discussed plans over a comfortable lunch and tea.
Other than all the tools Jebidiah had amassed over his long unlife, he needed only a way to grasp souls with a far reach. Cassius offered his own wisp net. Its ability to catch souls was from its material, made from Winter Court Folk’s silk, and proven by the many wisps used as lighting around his manor.
As the goddess led the train they’d steal from the back. She was not known for circling her track, not for any of the lost or damned. Besides that I imagine they did as they always do, discussing the transience of time, and reminiscing when the chairs and tables they sat on were new.
That was tea, and two weeks hence was the Souls Party. The lights in nearly all the cities were lit, along the river, and crowds filled the bank. Humans with their lanterns, awaited the Dark Lady. In the city of Ebode, they stood in the night, waiting for the Bright Lady to pass their humble abode.
“Which soul should we pick?” Cassius whispered.
The crowd of Ebode was one in wearing black, but diverse in all ages and other aspects. Cassius and Jebidiah stood at the edge of the river, jostled by all sides but the front.
“I don’t know,” Jeb said.
Cassius lent a sneer towards Jeb’s head. The dark pits not revealing any ability for sight.
“The study of soul coloring, formation, and attitude has never led to any concrete conclusions!” He angrily chattered, lacking the lips to whisper.
“Shhhh!”
But it was just a mother to her children. Everyone was murmuring now. The light of the Lady was upon the brightened horizon.
Jeb barely breathed the last words, his jaw moving hardly at all.
“Just pick one that appeals.”
Even the tradition of respect for the dead couldn’t silence all tongues as the Lady closer, tread. She came once every ten years, and although her large collection of souls made it unlikely that the ones that followed were the one that had been held dear, the chance was enough that all drew near.
The first that followed still had their faces and ages. Race and culture clothed them. Cassius reached for the net inside his cloak. Jebidiah shook his head.
“Not these, they’ll remember too much.”
Cassius scowled at him, but said, “Hey, I was just paying my respects.”
His lie was pointless. Many tears wet the eyes, hardly any in the crowd were of mind to notice their whispers.
Soul after soul passed by. Faces became less defined. Eventually, the arms were just trails, and the body disappeared into a faded point. Even further than that, when all but the two prospective thieves were gone, only dandelions of souls were left. Bits flaking off like seeds to be smoked on the water.
“These should do,” Jeb said.
“It doesn’t look like there’s hardly anything there!”
“It’s for the best. Once in a suitable body, the soul can more easily grow back into a shape that suits it.”
These souls, like the others, came in all colors, shapes, and sizes. Still enough memory for a strong personality, unlike the abandoned cool blue wisps found in graveyards which were only forgotten fragments. They traipsed behind the Lady along the waters in all moods. Many had a sad drag, but many yet bounced all along the river’s head. Seeing not the end in the beginning, but the beginning in the end.
Cassius was still in this final choice. His eyes darting from one to the other, the display of his indecision. Still a hope for some kind of precision.
“This is why biological parents were never allowed to choose,” Jeb said.
Finally, the net was lifted out hesitantly, lowered, and raised above the water. And stopped.
At this point I would always ask, was I green or was I red? Did I move quick with a jump or sink along the water? Never did I hear a true reply.
“You already know that,” Cassius, my father, said.
The net lowered, and I was scooped up.
The world went black.
In fact, it was not the world but the Lady who went black. As she did for the humans, the uncursed living, she did appear for the two would-be thieves in that moment.
The river, glowing with her light went dark, and their clothes and all shadows were light. All was in reverse. And from the miles on ahead, the Lady turned her head.
A pull that both my father and Jeb had forgotten nearly laid them to rest. The tug of eternity, the fulfilled promise of slumber, the moment one is cut asunder.Things that the undead for centuries don’t dread, but more long for.
Neither Cassius nor Jeb needed breath, but they didn’t dare move. Only eyeing the dark speck of her face upon the now-bright horizon. Then she turned away.
Although Jeb, has added a few comments now that I am older, complaints of my father demanding he choose my gender, my looks, and so on, and Jeb complying to none of that, the story ends like this from Cassius:
“She turned away, and so we are not thieves, since you are her dear gift to me.”
A Certain Dragon and Some Certain Knights
There was a dragon whose flame-filled tongue no longer sung. He knew with rest it would naturally refill in his lungs. But rest is best for those with time. The dragon was short on that, as the knights rode on in lines.
The dragon, a beast with armed with trickery, layered in scales, a tail tipped with black bone that outreached the knights’ spears, and wings to wail gusts upon those who’d easily qual. He lasted many a day without breath of flame. But the fights wore him more, and the knights acted as if they had smelled it. They came in score, more cautious at the core, as hope armed their minds. For a moment, they dreamed of staying alive. Then, the oft-forgotten claws tore down on their heads, and the dragon breathed out tendrils of smoke where they had stead.
One more day, both sides knew without the other to say. One more day and you will give way. Neither side suppressed the other. The dragon in his might stood tall, and the knights with their unified and seemingly countless number. Who would outpride the other, humanity or the snaking beast? With the dragon worn down day and night, without much rest, he became less and less to best. And winning the most foolish victory of all, the knights won the dragon’s treasure to those-yet-rising-chests.
Gold, and pearls, and fine cutlery. The cost of the dragon’s flame licks. For if he had fled the finery, he would have lived to sing his bestial roar again. And the knights? So many brethren lost, for gold and silver as the cost.
Like any cheap whore or mercenary.
Gold rush singing, gold rushing song!
Drops of gold caught in leaves keeps me coming strong.
If I was a wealthy man I would not know, that sunlight is the purest gold you’ll get to hold.
Everyone gets it to an almost fair degree.
Poorest when it comes to days, even the North Pole gets it for free.
Gold rush singing, gold rushing song!
Memories a-clinging so I keep on coming on.
Friends I may forget, still I’ll know what you do.
Like a lover, like a fam, you’ll let me cling to you.
Turned away the song dries up, distilled days turning into stilled night.
Still I know you’ll come in my plight, my dear moonlight.