Immortal Coil

In my last life, when I was young boy,

my brother and I used to play in the

palace garden. Although I don’t remember

much in this fragmented memory, as it

comes and goes, I do recall becoming

aware that I had been holding the grounds

-keeper’s sickled blade I had bloodied

from my brother’s chest. He looked me

in the eyes before he went and said…

shit, what did he say?

Frankincense filled the darkness, wisped from two sticks stuck into the shrine I carved from blue calcite. Perhaps it was karma that I was born into poverty, but you know what they say… What doesn’t kill you, courses like venom throughout my vindictive strength.

I drifted out of my body. My consciousness flew like a peregrine, at lightning speed. Across the desolate metropolis, I traversed this new continent, uprooted from the last polar shift. I came upon a statue of my previous self, ripped from its stone pillar, and its face, dishonored. At the furthest reaches of the land, towards the largest mountain, I found the palace hidden in the mountain maple and beech, where I last died, amidst the dark of its backside. Two spirit entities, as large as the sky, arose from within the mountain, and stood before me. I could barely define their eyes, as their limbs and hands extended before all I could see. My consciousness could no longer pursue this feeling I’ve held all this time, and knew that this must be the place that they were hiding “my intended incarnation” from me… as certain as I felt the silver cord tug at my spine. My eyes snapped open and dilated wide as my ears rang a piercing frequency that resounded throughout the halls of my veins, and the twitch in my eager fingers.

Just outside the property line, I had ground the old vine, grown from my rotted corpse, that had been thrown into a dirt hole, and not a sarcophagus. Perhaps it was all starting to come back to me. I painted the ancient scriptures in paste around where I had stood, up my leg and stomach, and the old word for “gate” on my chest.

Then another glimpse washed over my

thoughts… It was my concubine, about

to give birth to my new vessel. The decrepit

witch had painted the old scriptures for

“soul transfer” on her stomach, as I drank...

wait, what did I drink?

The guard that I had tormented, ran across the palace grounds from the security gate, screaming “help” as loud as she could. I had torn her clothes into shreds from her chest. Her delectable breasts bounced as she ran in fear and sheer terror. I thought her skull would have been kissed by a sniper’s bullet, as she fell dead no more than a hundred yards of the front door, but it wasn’t.

My fingers snapped, and the first word ignited without a match. The fire read me that story as it inflected in the flickering of smoke and ash. When the tale had been told, I heard a familiar voice that whispered “remember” in my ears, as though the champion of this story had come to life in my thoughts.

“I remember…” It told me to close my eyes, as a force, not of my own will, inhaled the cloud and filled my lungs through my nose, and the black of my eyes became filled with a glowing crimson light, as I opened them and recalled “...everything.” I hummed a deep and resonant “Om”, and my body vanished into thin air.

Ten of me stormed the palace grounds as I was met with a symphony of bees buzzing and whizzing past all of our eyes and heads, and the closer I got, I could finally see where they hid behind the shadows and crevices of the palace’s shade. Confused, as I imagined they would be, as they saw, not one, but ten of me wielding iron scythes as large as my bodies. Closing in on the sound of their guns firing in panic, it was only until I saw the consciousness in their mortal eyes, did I disappear from their sight… and reappeared behind each and every single one of them. Before they could comprehend what had just happened, we vanished again, as half of their heads and bodies slid and fell to the ground, as the muscles and bones that once held them together, didn’t.

As I slowly pushed my head through the front door to get a look inside, I was greeted with the barrel end of a shotgun held between my eyes at point blank. The blast shattered the wood and reinforced steel of the front door, and confused the hell out of the man who fired it. I slowly tilted my head staring deep into the man’s soul, and saw a beaten child, pissing and shitting himself… as another of me sliced through his arms and hand. Before his appendages and shotgun fell and hit the marble floor, an orchestra of assault rifles drew the notes of their score as though their had been a staff drawn along the walls behind where my second shadow clone stood. I slowly swung the monstrous blade like a propellor before me and then above my head, until the whirring became an oscillating, ringing tone. The sickle had spun so fast it seemed to disappear, as I whipped the blade by the handle to my side into a crouching lean. A streamline of a blinding red light flickered across the room at eye level, and everything the light touched was sliced through. Walls, pillars, paintings, heads and all were left to the construct of gravity.

We appeared before every door in the palace, simultaneously, kicking them all in, drawing our blades, and slaughtering everyone within. As I walked past the onslaught, the gunfire, shrills and cries of dying men and women would soon flush them out, I was certain of it.

Then there they were… the bitch’s face was entirely covered with tears, as my son drug her by the wrist. Her face was in such shock, it was frozen with her mouth wide open, unable to vocalize the fear that paled the blood from within her albino flesh. When they reached the end of the hall, he opened a panel on the wall and spoke softly at it. When the vault door of the panic room opened, my son ran in first as she pulled away, and pushed the door shut behind him and locked it. The thick steel rods of the door slid into their sockets, like a multi-armed samurai sheathing all of it’s swords.

“Ryu! Wait! I can expl…” Before she could beg, the door pressurized and locked, as the panel lit with green light became painted with blood as it sprayed from her neck, and sang off of my steel.

I leaned in close, and whispered into her ear before she went, as she hung there crucified by her throat, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”, and to no surprise, the door did not unlock.

Our heads and shoulders emerged slowly through the walls and ceilings, as though the three-foot thick steel was water. Twenty eyes locked onto his, as we encroached and drew our steel to strike him down as he just stood there, eyes closed and quiescent, in meditation, with one arm behind his back, and the other centering his focus.

“Hello father, brother, stranger.” Riku spoke with an eerie calmness in his tone.

“That body doesn’t belong to you, son, brother, stranger. None of this belongs to you, bastard! Birthed from a whore and a witch who conspired against their sovereign, and watched me as I took my own life, like the fool. You are not worthy of that vessel. You are not worthy of the empire that I built...”

“-Stole. Father built.”

“Father was dying. I was next in line.”

“I was, and still am, eldest.” The kid’s got some brass in his diaper, and here I thought he would just surrender. Perhaps I was being naive.

“Inheritance is speculative. Possession is nine and a half tenths of the law.”

“Fraudulent misappropriation. You took advantage of honest citizens, and destroyed the honor and trust our father built with our great name. You starved the land. Your empire was just this palace. You bankrupted and corrupted the system for pleasure and greed.” His voice had this tonal smugness to it, as though he were gently slapping my face like a child, but with his tongue.

“Pale in comparison to power, and look at what you’ve done with it… This place is half as empty as it was, like you’ve just been giving things away…”

“-like all of the family jewels…?”

“WHAT?!” Fuck the body. I’m going to rip his tongue from his throat with my bare hands.

“-and all of your currency…” My adrenal glands swelled and burst, as crimson became all that I could see. My ears burned with anticipation, as this maddening shrill became deafening. “...gone.”

All of my one-ton iron blades tore at him like a spider’s fangs, striking to cut him into twenty pieces at once, but each swing was met with the clang of steel that rang and vibrated all of my senses into a blur. When my kaleidoscopic vision unified my focus back to a singular Riku, I could see his third eye wide open and dilated, protruding from the center of his forehead. His body had been blessed with some deity’s spirit, as twenty arms moved behind his body in a hypnotic metachronal wave, where each hand held a tuning rod, and did not follow the laws of nature that govern the physical world. So I filled the room with thirty clones in suit, to occupy this nuisance, to ensure that what he could only see was this gauntlet of twenty nine of me. We swung our sickles fervently around, at, and through his body, without materializing any of them, to keep him in suspense, overwhelming anxiety, and confusion. My thirtieth clone walked slowly towards him, looking directly into his third eye, dragging his steel behind his back, like a troll, holding his audible senses captive. When he swung that hulking metal at his chest, I took both of his feet from beneath the floorboards. He slid from his ankles and fell back onto the fang of my sickle, protruding from the wood, pierced him through his heart, as the unfathomable had happened.

Within the blink of an eye, I was in his body. My blade certainly had pierced him through his heart, as I felt it seizing all of the blood that flowed into and out of it, but why? I ripped open his shirt, and the sonofabitch had the ancient text “soul transfer” tattooed on his chest.

…

In my last life, when I was a young man, I

was impaled by the talon of a very large

scythe as I fell onto my back, detached from

my own feet. Although I don’t remember

much in this fragmented memory, as it

comes and goes, I remember becoming

aware that I had been murdered by my dear

brother, who took all that I loved, and lived

in the palace I built; a palace I will burn to

the ground with him asleep in it.