Brink

" Eat the rich 'snap'
Flail the colonizer 'whooch'
Kill the right wight blight with scythes of light 'slice'
bEFORE iT UNDOES US ALL- "

I snap the blade he swings at me into so many pieces. I grab him by the neck. Not my first neck. I'm more careful this time. I will try to understand the madness. I have super privilege. I AM SUPER! I won't lose more family.

"I'm not going to kill you. If you talk with me, I don't even want to hurt you. I do have to restrain you. You can't hurt me with a blade, but if you use my body to kill yourself, it still hurts my soul."

" mmm if the wight plague had hurled itself upon YOUR body, instead of your vulnerable ancestors, thou shalt not fret-

FOR THUS IS THE GLORY OF ACRETIA!

'choir' THE SOoooURCE 'choir'

Can I get a MOTHER OF ALL POSSIBILITY!

'choir' ONNMNNO 'choir'

"I'm going to interrupt you there. Am I making an unreasonable demand of you if I ask you to address my line of communication in a way that I might be able to translate?"

He sits up stiff us a board within his chains. I hadn't realized he had that much wiggle room. Almost scared me. He moves his arms as if to wrap them over each other, crosses his legs, and puts on his most inscrutably white thoughtful expression. His skin shines such that I can almost imagine he is white for a moment. He talks with a fourth voice, high pitched, almost nasal, but with a menacing underlying baritone growl and compressed air bass.

"When one side is making unequitable demands of the other, they are forcing violence. Living things are capable of symbiosis, consentual exchanges, sincere attempts at mutually beneficial collaborations. When they choose not to, that is greed, violence, avarice, hate, &/or voracious hunger. Atomic, Microbial, Viral, Triassic, Crustacean, Neolithic, Stratospheric or Chattel... it seems to amount to much of the same extremism with more or less extra steps. I consume meat. I wish I did so more responsibly. Our food deserves much more respect than gets allotted by the insane culture that infects me. I am not proud of my consumer habits. I can never reduce my consumption enough. On rare occassion, I even remember that this is also the result of the poisonous brainwashing indoctrination that destroying, invading, colonizing, 'occupying' fascist forces either very meticulously worked out over long periods of mastering how to enslave [cattle] or a very easy consequence of easily manipulated mass human ignorance or other possibilities I can't grasp- But it's real. Women know. You know."

How often have I been made to feel as if I should be invisible, unseen, unheard, unless my presence pleases- No, fuck his manipulative bullshit. This caricature couldn't possibly have been reaching for anything that sincere. Play MY game. Wheres the angle.

"Ok. I'm beginning to understand that we began these communications on the wrong foundation and I'm partly to blame for that. Let me be transparent. I invaded your shelter because I have evidence to suggest that you've murdered very many members of varied Kafklik Suicide Cults' less than self-sacrificing leadership, clergy, priesthood, bishops, and Broman Kafklik leadership. Along with political recipients of the stolen donations made by their flock, varied accused sexual predators amongst their social circles, and corporate majority shareholders involved in organized fund raising activities with the above dead white men and women. Would you do me the courtesy of addressing these allegations?"

"If I ever have a child, I'll teach them these truths. As many as they can consentualy learn with minimal scarring. Children can understand consent. Imagine that. I have to, to hold the concept in my head, to prevent it from fleeing away like wight doves sprinkling white blight in their wake. No one and nothing in my childhood ever asked for my consent. And I'm lucky to be alive. But I've done awful things to stay alive, on occasion. I will do even more awful things, if necessary, to keep my definition of humanity alive. The rubber band will stretch to the breaking point, it will snap, explode, disintegrate, reintegrate in their lungs..."

I allow him to continue rambling into the recording device he conveniently has left well charged in the middle of the bedroom. I'm losing confidence in whats happening at the moment. He is confidently, but assuredly insanely, confessing to his involvement in the genetically selective viral agent hes been working to disperse into the stratosphere. And part of me suspects that my 'allies' might have let him, could they believe that it would effectively help them achieve their goals. No, no, his paranoia is making me doubt truths I can't- Don't submit to his will. I ground myself and hear him again.

"Equitable exchange also means that when I confess sins to all of you, many of which I have only come to understand years after committing them, specifically diabolical sins hurtful towards you, that you will respect this difficult endeavor by doing the same. On a related note, this may not be possible until all sides of an exchange like this have also discussed how their understandings of other humans' [lifeforms'] points of view have evolved with change and experience, because although it is easy for a child to stand on the hill of true, youth, innocence and ignorance, it is difficult to consider the possibility that the minds of some of our ancestors were such that they could not grasp what we can today, for any number of reasons. They are no more nor less than us for this possibility, they were/are simply a product of very different and varied conditions that their descendants may find difficulty imagining. Their descendants, who are only possible because somehow, some ways, those that came before us survived, for better and for worse, unimaginable horrors that they committed, or that they fought against, or that they lost entire communities of hundreds of millions of neighbors and families to."

"Ok, please, slow down. I'm a superhero that can exist in states of time beyond your comprehension and you're still losing me here. Based on what you've said so far, the people you've murdered and the additional people you've planned to mass murder, deserve an opportunity to repent. Just like you do?"

"Finding our own truths is difficult. Placing them in the context of the truths of those we care about most is increasingly difficult. Taking that delicate foundation and architecture and finding where it fits among everyone elses' conceptions of 'truth'... It may be impossibly difficult. Our collective failure to do this may spell our species extinction. I don't want to hate the wight plague that annihilated my ancestral family, ecosystems, thriving varieties of life, to feed the insatiable, mindless, destructive violence of infected death eaters. But I must hate it until it makes true, undeniable, collective, financial, nutritious, medical, and structural changes to how we live together. Failure to hate a monstrosity that perpetually threatens to, and CONTINUES TO destroy you and everything you love... that would be real insanity. That is real insanity. I AM INSANITY YOU FUCKING FASCIST CHEAT CODE!!!. and I will cleanse the cosmos of any trace of their enduring horror."

I don't give him the satisfaction of a reaction. I have to believe hes very broken, very likely for transparent reasons.

"Ok. I'm REEAAALYyy tring to hear you and absorb and understand. You're referring to the White Kingdoms' Genocides that resulted in the enslavements and mass murders of hundreds of millions of humans, the thefts of every and any conceivable resource they had, and the continued fascist occupations and rapes. You're implying that the conquerors and the sick prisoners they sent over here- they're actually zombies? A nod, ok, we're moving from there. I can understand why you may feel that way, but I still can't allow you to mass murder them in retaliation. Even if I could believe that your efforts have been accurate enough to successfully do this thing without hurting everyone whose lives are now intertwined with your would be victims... I want to improve things for everyone if it's possible, even some of the 'zombies' you want to 'cleanse'. My comrades and I are working towards that end. I want to give you the option of trying to heal from your wounds, somewhere safe from all the men, and their 'systems', and the complicit monsters around them who allowed the horrors committed upon you and those you cared about. You now are among a rare few to know, from personal experience, how powerful my comrades and I are. Do you believe we could help you without behaving like our shared opponents?"

His skin glimmers. An illusion? He seems to quickly wither reikt before my eyes. The dull glossy shine of his once gaunt, greying golden skin shrink wraps around his emaciated skeletal form. I panic.

"I NEED EYES IN HERE! WHATS HAPPENING?! GIL, MONET, GALE, TALK TO ME!"

Gil:"To me. Read it."

I slow time to a near grinding halt. I believe his condition continues to deteriorate as I vanish and appear before Gil as he is releasing his tenuous 'hold' on a warm syringe. I take it, read the instructions on route, reappear before my captor, and inject it directly into his left femoral, human slowly, as I realize in horror that he may die in my arms before I can get the answers I need. I listen to the sound of feint gasses escaping his lips and pray to whomever or whatever Acretia is. Although I have taken careful account of my grounding in human time, it feels like infinity before I finally hear his breaths manifest into words.

"It is suicidal, depressing, psyche shattering- It can induce people to 'wild' 'violent' acts of very desperately needed self defense. Much like the sounds of military helicopter blades droning steadily overhead hour after hour presenting martial law rearing it's ugly head over the horizon can drive the poor survivors to madness..."

And he dozes off into what I can only hope is a restful sleep and minimally terrifying nightmare as I fly him back to Sanctuary and into the uncanny care of much more amazing people than I.

#Val
#Nightmare
#PainfulTruth
#MANGES

signed, VirgilIO