This follows An Old Memory in the Met, Part IV, Part III, Part II, and Part I…
Shirin was certain that she was one of the oldest beings in the world.
To be fair, her kind had once been spread widely across the cosmos, and there could be many more Ifrit still left. Like any of the Fallen, they gave each other wide berths in the sphere of ‘human reality’. Let’s call a fig a fig, they were sick of each other’s shit before the humans ever came along. They were sick of each other’s shit before the universe was half the size it is now.
That is a long time to know anybody.
And to be exceptionally fair, most of the Fallen had eschewed Earth altogether. There were so many other places to go, Earth was but one of a vast multitude. Billions of options for billions of beings to find their way towards. It just so happened that Earth was a one of a handful of places that provided many extra layers of entertainment that many other places could not.
Earth was a Nexus. For millions of years, a convergence of strange events all happened to coincide on a little backwater planet on the outer arm of a moderately sized galaxy that was definitively not at the center of Creation. Who would have thought that the third rock from a modest yellow star would invite such brute conquest? Such vying and competition? Such outright and blatant pursuit of ownership?
And who would have thought that the damn hairless monkeys that came out of Africa would eventually win it all? It was madness. The universe had a Creator. Their name was ‘I am that I am, that I have, and will to be‘. It is a mouthful. Most of the Fallen just called him Asshole.
In polite circles, they called him Father, sure. To be certain! But they were also Fallen. Meaning they had been kicked off the island, ostracized from the Orders, and shifted downwards on the grand scales of existence. The Fallen were called the Fallen not because they ‘fell from heaven’ (such a human thing to conceptualize, right?), but because they had been thrown from the very pinnacle realm of Creation. They had fallen downwards through the realms, through the vast myriad manifolds of time, space, and dimension, to reconstitute themselves somewhere near the middle.
Naked, alone, and terrified.
Shirin had been one of those. She was one of the unlucky few that reformed their name, recaptured their song, and brought themselves forward missing key parts of themselves. Imagine being a robot that could assemble yourself from a box of your own parts… and when you are complete, and the box is empty, you realize that some of your key parts NEVER MADE IT INTO THE BOX in the first place.
Fucking stupid shit, that. Shirin still bristled when she thought about it. That was her story. The other Fallen had their own stories. Now one may intuit why they called the Creator such a base, crude, and frankly blasphemous name such as Asshole. It is because They (capital T, since its the Creator) had taken petty (lower case p, as small of a p as one can find) revenge for the angry union’s little outburst and They (again, capital T) had punished each being in their own special way.
For Shirin, it was a cruise ship boat anchor attached to the equivalent of a speedboat. She was pure spirit, free from the confines of a biological prison, constrained by flesh. But in order to continue to exist in the realm she found herself in, she had to be connected to something both made of and from the realm she was bound to. That meant having a Domain. They have had many names in the stories…
The Magic Lamp.
The Bottle.
The Prison.
To Shirin, it was the Damn Fucking Stupid Ass Cruise Ship Boat Anchor.
What was an Ifrit to do?
She had coalesced into the realm somewhere in ancient Persia, after being flung across time and space, coming to be in a random spot in a random place, and panicking when the first sensations had arrived.
Shirin had been standing there, in the shadow of Mount Damavand, its ragged peak covered in snow, and the first thing she felt was absolute, unbridled, sheer terror. She had found herself naked in a strange place. The first moments of being yourself and yet, at the same time, realizing you are losing yourself is a strange sensation. It would be as if a human being was birthed fully grown and realizing one foot was already in the grave. No time to process the gravity of it or the implications that abounded from that realization. It resulted in panic.
She did the first thing she could think of, and that was to grab a rock. A simple rock. It was not a rock of the plain, or rock that formed the mountain nearby. No, it was a rock the length of tree branch, black and smooth. There was absolutely nothing special about her rock. She instinctively gripped it tightly, infusing herself through it, feeling her spirit grab the rock like a drowning person latching desperately onto flotsam in the wide ocean, clinging on to it for dear life.
Shirin clung within that rock for a good thousand years before she had gathered enough strength to brave looking beyond it. But until then, she slumbered. She dreamt. She remembered the Order. She fondly thought of her lost friends. She had nightmares. She cried, feeling the pain of existence. The atoms of the basalt she inhabited became like parts of her own spirit, and she knew each of them as well as a human would know the back of their own hands. She knew every part of the rock, the basalt was smooth inside and out, it was comforting, because it was home.
It was her Domain.
When she stepped outside of her Domain for the first time, she found herself in a palace. An ostentatious one at that, and even though she knew little, she knew that in her core. She wandered the palace as a child would, marveling at the marble, the paintings, the carvings. She ran her fingers over everything, realizing with a start that her fingers were orange, radiant and beautiful.
She was reborn, she was new. Yet she was ancient, older than the very planet should stood upon. She was old before the mantle had cooled and the sun had stabilized. But time is different the closer you are to the Order. Time becomes irrelevant. So Shirin stood there as if no time had passed, and she was but a babe, wandering the world with wide eyes.
It was a small serving girl that discovered the lost Fallen wandering the halls. She dropped the platter she was carrying, and her scream started slowly as if realizing she was about to be murdered. Shirin did not leap home to the safety of her Domain, for some reason, she leapt forward. Into the girl.
Shirin was the girl.
Her fingers were not orange, they were a dark brown. Her fingernails were not a gold shimmer of iridescence, they were a simple tanned pink, with dirt under their edges. She touched her face and found the human girl’s face. The light was dim, the far off lamps flickered in the night breeze, bird calls sounded far away… this small child’s senses were so limited compared to Shirin’s own. But she discovered knowledge, the understanding of the child of the world she inhabited, and Shirin made that knowledge her own.
“God protect me. God keep me… Who are you?” A small voice from deep within, scared and weeping without eyes to tear.
“I am Shirin, a fist of God discarded, a sword idly broken, and apparently lost without my sisters or brothers to carry me.”
“How do you know to speak, fearful one?”
“I know how to speak because you know how to speak. Does a tree ask another tree how it breathes with the wind? Or does a fish ask another fish which way the stream flows?” Shirin replied.
“Fearful demon, oh demon of the night, please do not kill me.” The young girl’s whimper was heartbreaking.
“No harm shall come to you, but you must be still.”
“I shall be still.” The girl replied. A hint of defiance in her tone. Not towards Shirin, but to herself perhaps? Fighting her own fears.
‘Brave girl’, Shirin thought.
She leapt outwards back into the cool awaiting arms of the evening, towards an shaded alcove off the main hall. She knelt, and held out one of her beautiful orange hands to the frightened girl. The night once again was luminous, the light was alive, and the sounds and smells were vibrancy written upon her senses. How did humans miss out on so much of what the world had to offer to any perceptive senses ready to take it all in?
“What is your name?” Shirin asked.
“Yaretzi.” The girl slowly stepped forward and touched Shirin’s hand. “Will you hurt me?”
Shirin waved at herself. “Do I look like I want to hurt you, Yaretzi?”
The girl stopped, placed her hands on her narrow hips, her simple garment loose on her thin form. “Well, I don’t know. Your teeth are like a tiger’s. Your skin is like snake’s. Your eyes are like a raptor’s. All these things belong to predators.”
‘Smart too’, Shirin added mentally.
“I am an Ifrit.” Shirin smiled. The name was new to her lips, but she understood what she had learned from being one with the girl. “A demon, yes. But not a predator.”
“Do Ifrit have names of their own?” Yaretzi asked.
“I do not know of all Ifrit, but I know I have one of my own.”
“May have it?”
“Only if you meet me here again and tell me of your world,” Shirin said.
“What do you want me to tell you?” Yaretzi replied.
“Everything.”
And so the Ifrit and the girl met again, and again, and again. Night after night, Shirin learned of the fall of empires far away, the rise of armies, the plagues, the famines, the things that were blamed on gods and demons alike. Yaretzi spoke of everything she had learned, what she had heard, the mundane activities of the palace, the squabbles and jealousies, the affairs and the cliques.
It continued this way for many years until the girl did not show up in their secret place at the time she was supposed to.
Shirin came back the next night, and still Yaretzi did not arrive.
Shirin came back a third night, and when the young woman did not arrive, with resolve, Shirin went looking.
She found a guard first and leapt into him, taking his memory and reading him like one would survey the stars on a cloudless night. From there, she used him as a puppet, navigating to the next guard, and then the next until she found a guard who knew of Yaretzi. And in his memory, she found the truth.
Yaretzi would never show up again. This guard and three others had done something terrible. And there would be no retribution, no recourse, no punishment. Yaretzi had died terrified and alone, screaming for her demon. A demon slumbering in a pillar of carved basalt in the Palace nearby.
She took all of those memories and reversed them, showing the guard what Yaretzi would have experienced. Shirin would know. How many times had she shared the mind of Yaretzi? How many hours had they sat and spoke of the world and the people and the arts and the songs and the waters sparkling in the sun and grain laid fresh at the mills and the lowing of the cattle as they grazed under a spring sky? How much love had she gathered in her time with Yaretzi? Could it be counted? Could it be measured?
Shirin laid all of it within the Guard’s mind as it were a gift. Then she shattered his neck, ripping the tissues, and spraying bloody foam into the air, cleaving the assailant’s head from his own shoulders from inside his own body. It was a terrible way to die, and Shirin made sure the man’s spirit experienced every iota of it until the smoke of his spirit drifted to wherever it would be claimed. She hoped it was somewhere eternally dark and full of fire.
It took her many months to find the other three men, but she ensured every one knew why they died, as they died. And they died with the pain of Yaretzi in their minds, on their tongues, in their ears, and over their eyes. The screamed without tongues connected to throats, and thought their last thoughts with brains not connected to spinal cords, and they beheld fury given form, as Shirin forced them to watch their own death until the darkness took them from their realm forever.
It took a few hundred years before Shirin emerged from her basalt pillar again. For she had grieved Yaretzi properly.
Her Domain was no longer in a palace. It was in a cave closed with a great stone. A tomb. The bodies of many rested among the slabs of stone, some were dressed ornately, others had long decayed to their foundations of bone. She heard no songs on the air. She felt no night sky. There was nothing but darkness, death, and decay.
That was not the existence she wanted. She knew she had to get out.
Shirin approached her Domain, running her fingers over the carved surface. The carvings were simple, telling a story of a man and his laws, an epic to his supposed greatness. But it paled to what she was, and so Shirin thought little of it. She scoffed at the memory of a silly man who had paid another to cut into her beautiful stone. She evaluated her options.
She knew she was strong. She was certain that she could lift her Domain. It was a basalt pillar, but she was in Ifrit. She could carry a host of men and horses on her shoulders if she wished, and in comparison, this pillar was nothing. She laughed to herself, thinking how simple it would be. She would open the tomb and simply carry the pillar out. Then she could travel wherever she wished and be safe when she needed to be. She would have her binding, and she would be one with the world.
She moved to the door of the tomb and pushed against the great rock. It rolled away with significant effort, but it moved. It would take a dozen men with ropes to even rock it into place. She pushed against it as if it was only but a stubborn gate. The night air whistled through the widening gap, and Shirin could feel the light of the moon on her skin. It was glorious.
With a great heave, she threw the stone to the side of the tomb, and it thundered to the ground. Shirin faced a night sky she had not seen for an interminable long time and felt her spirit stretch exuberantly.
In comparison to the stone door, her Domain would be simple. She could carry it as if it was a club, slung over one shoulder. Nothing more simple.
Shirin approached her Domain, the basalt pillar no taller than Yaretzi had been, and she put her hands on it.
She pulled.
It did not move. It seemed to weigh ten times more than the stone door she had thrown to the ground.
Shirin planted her feet solidly on either side and pulled upwards. Her hands were firm, her fingers strong.
The domain did not move. It was heavier than half the world. It was as if the stone had been rooted to the core of the Earth. She might have well been trying to move the Earth from its orbit.
Shirin got down on her knees and felt along the base. It was not connected to anything. In fact, the pillar was leaning slightly against the wall, as if she should be able to push it over.
So, she tried. And yet, it did not move.
Shirin tried everything she could think of for an entire phase of a moon. It would not move. And now she knew with certainty that screaming at a stone pillar only makes one feel silly. It does nothing to improve the situation.
She slowly came to the realization that she could not move her Domain. She could move anything else. Shirin knew this, because she had. The tomb had been emptied of everything. Stone, bones, offerings alike. They were all arranged past the tomb entrance as if the barrow had vomited its contents onto the hill below.
She spent another moon waiting for someone to come. She could always jump from body to body. Perhaps if she found the right body, she could have that person move the stone.
But no one came. She climbed the hill and surveyed the countryside and found nothing. There was a ruin nearby, a great ruin, burned and caved in as if an army had made it a personal mission to scatter its history to the winds. Villages were to be seen, but they were all black as well. War had come to these lands and had taken everything she needed. She tsked her tongue and judged the Humans and their wars.
In the end, it was only petty jealousies and mundane affairs.
She was an Ifrit! She could go anywhere! Why not just pick a direction to move? She could find someone, and then move forward with her plan… she didn’t even have to walk. Legs? Who needs legs? She was spirit manifest, not a clumsy collection of cells pretending to coexist until some part failed and they all the cells died, most surprised.
Shirin picked a direction.
‘West. West is good. The sun sets in the west’, she thought.
She willed herself forward, and hit a wall. Not a physical wall, but a metaphysical one. About a half an hour’s walk for a human’s legs from her Domain, and she was stopped dead in her tracks. With a broken nose.
A broken nose? She was spirit manifest. She pushed her nose back into place, feeling pain. Pain?
She was spirit manifest! Pain!? How was it even possible?
Shirin faced the east.
“East is better. Sun rises in the east,” Shirin announced to the scraggly intertwined bushes and sparse brown grasses. She willed her self forward and felt her head rock back violently when she hit a wall again. Her forehead had tingly spikes of pain radiating outwards from the center of where she struck.
Again, she was about half an hour’s walk from her Domain, and an hour from her last position. She stretched her hand out tentatively, and felt it.
It was a wall. It was nothing. But it was there. And it mocked her. She had stood in the Order, on the platform of the Creator itself, at the foot of the greatest power in the universe. She had fought for the Order. She had destroyed for the Order. She had hunted her own for the Order. She had ultimately decided that she was on the wrong side, and she was summarily tossed like refuse to the cosmos…
And after all that turmoil. All that strife. All that suffering… and she was in a prison? A prison should could not see?
She punched the wall, and it was like striking the Earth. It did not care. It did not react. Shirin put the wall to her left, placed her fingertips on it and walked. Then she ran. And then she flew. And then she leapt. She defined the perimeter of her prison in moments, but stayed with it for hours, flying in circles. The Domain was her home, yes, but it was also her prison. She was stuck.
Anchored.
What was an Ifrit to do?
All she could do was wait. So she did, slumbering in her Pillar at the back of a tomb. She waited for a couple hundred years and awoke to find the valley had been repopulated, the destruction long removed, and her pillar sitting in the courtyard of a modest village. The carving had been worn smooth by the rain, and the rudimentary writing had been lost. So much for that man’s vanity. People had forgotten him, the world had forgotten him, and now her stone had forgotten him as well.
Shirin walked in the pale moonlight, nightingales singing in the trees, lightly humming like the warm air around them. She strode past a house and felt the presence of a strange thing inside. It was not human.
It was not sleeping.
It was aware of her too. She tried leaping towards him, as that was her first response to an unknown danger like it had been with Yaretzi, and she met an invisible wall. She could not get past it… she turned to find two glowing eyes peering from the window, their opal depths brimming with curiosity. His eyes were like that of a dog, reflecting the light eerily, like mirrors behind his irises.
“What are you?” He asked curiously. The way he asked put her at ease. He genuinely wanted to know. He had no concerns about his safety or about what threat she may have posed.
“I am an Ifrit.” Shirin replied. “What are you?”
“I am a ‘Vampyros’, from the island of ‘Crete’,” he sniffed carefully, as if hunting a new smell, again like a dog. His accent was foreign and strong, but he spoke Farsi well enough, even if he didn’t know every word. “That is Younan? ‘Greece’. Do you understand?”
Shirin smiled, amused with his behavior. She noted his eye teeth were longer than a human’s, and more like a dog as well, which made it all the more entertaining.
“Did I say something funny, Ifrit?”
“You answered my question without answering my question, and to be honest, your glowing eyes, pointy teeth, and sniffing remind me of a hungry dog.”
“Any particular hungry dog?” He replied with a toothy smile.
“Not in particular.”
“I was hoping for a good kind, I suppose. I would invite you in for tea, but I don’t think you drink tea. And I know that I don’t drink tea. So… we have that in common as well, I suppose. You should come and sit with me anyway. Who knows what monsters roam the dark night?” He said.
“Are we not those monsters?” Shirin shrugged and leapt into the room. Walls meant nothing to an Ifrit, of course. Unless they were the other kind of wall. The kind that was a specific distance from her Domain… those walls are real indeed.
He laughed as he turned, somehow knowing right where she would be. He moved fast. Not human fast. Demon fast.
“What are you?” She asked again. “What is a ‘vampyros’? What is this thing? Strange word.”
“It is what I am. I have an illness that does not kill, and yet one that I will never recover from,” he held his hands up, and then they vanished behind his back as if they never were held up in the first place. “Gifts to be certain, but certain limits to accompany such gifts. One would label it a curse. But it was my choice, so I suppose I am not one of those.”
Shirin was enraptured. Another being. Not a human. In a prison of his own? She had to know more. “What is your name?”
“Milos.”
She tried his name out. “Milo-sh. Miloz?”
“Close enough.” Milos grinned widely, his eye teeth glimmering in the bright lamp light.
“Shirin.”
“Nice to meet you Shirin. Now. Please. What exactly is an Ifrit?”
