SEAN ROBIN HUGHES

This follows An Old Memory in the Met Part V, Part IV, Part III, Part II, and Part I…

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Liz was certain she not the oldest thing to come out of Wales, there were plenty of others to pick from.

But there were days were she felt older than the mountains… a deep fatigue that spoke to the history of her life written deep in her bones, as an ossuary church declaratively demonstrates the vast depth of human history so exactly because of what it is constructed from. Simply said, she knew in her bones she was old. But there were things older still. That was rationalization enough to avoid the label altogether.

If one were to ask Ysabella “Elizabeth” de Montfort how old she was, one would receive two things in rapid succession. The first would be the answer of the age Liz chose to be, followed by an increasingly crude tirade of colorful insults coupled with a middle finger (or two) defiantly raised in one’s direction. Both would be provided at the maximum volume, either vocally or physically, with little regard to whom would be offended in the nearby vicinity.

Liz would never, ever, consider herself old. Old was a pejorative term. Nearly as bad as Fenian. Or worse yet, English. Liz had made the choice in the Year of Our Lord 1282 to never ever encounter a world where she was going to be called old.

She was a Witch. Witches tended to prefer youth. Immeasurable, unassailable, and perpetual youth. For Liz, her outward appearance of youth was roughly situated in her late 20’s. When she had been a child in the Welsh countryside in the mid-13th century, well after the fall of Normandy, and before the death of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the last true free Leader of Wales… being in your late 20’s or early 30’s had been considered middle-aged.

In those days, Death came early. Death came often. For women it was always present. One out of every eight women died in childbirth, or due to complications shortly afterward, and out of every five children, one died as an infant and another would die before reaching adulthood. The lesson learned by every human in those days was that mortality was always near. One bad growing season… one bad war campaign… one unfortunate series of escalating events of situations outside a village’s control, and mortality was not just close, it would hang behind every person like a black shroud they carried until pestilence, exposure, starvation, or a sharp edge of another man’s weapon sent them onward to heaven or hell. Youth was fleeting, if not absent for most. Most girls were married young, and having their first child in their mid-to-late teens. Most people had very little choice in their life or how they would live their life, and for women that fact was doubled over because the Reaper did not spare the birthing chamber. And every birth was a gamble in both their own life and that of their child.

Watching her cousin Eleanor de Montfort, Princess of Wales and Lady of Snowdon, die in childbirth was the first call that things needed to be different for herself. Watching her entire family’s legacy be burned, buried, and melted down by the English was another. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd had been a strong man with a strong hand, but the sword he held was small, and he was foolhardy. The Welsh communities spent just as much time fighting each other as they did fighting the English, and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd’s final year was nothing but the culmination of idiocy from the entire region that would lament their loss of culture and identity for centuries to come. His death, itself a comical tragedy of errors, was the final cut that rendered her heart free from the constraint of family, hearth, and home.

Since she had been a small child, she knew of the Arglwyddes yr Wyddfa. It was said that the monster was a cursed woman, one that would steal children, hollow them out as a spider consumes its prey, stuff them with evil, and return the children to their families as crude mimics of their former selves. The Arglwyddes yr Wyddfa was the reason crops failed, or livestock died unexpectedly, or why milk went sour. She was a phantom used to scare children, mock peers, and scapegoat like one naturally blames the wind or the rain. It so happened that Arglwyddes yr Wyddfa was the namesake of her cousin, although in that shitty, terrible, ffycin English, Yr Wyddfa is Snowdon. Perhaps nobility thought by creating a title named after Snowdon, they would steal the power of the name Yr Wyddfa.

They couldn’t have been more wrong.

Arglwyddes yr Wyddfa was strong. Powerful. Liz had no idea what she was looking for when she went hunting for the real Lady of Snowdon, but she knew deep in her core that her life, as it had been, was as dead as her beloved cousin. She fled from her home to the south and the east, she eschewed the villages and roads along the way, preferring the rough lands and damp skies of the open wilds. She trembled in the early morning fogs that crept from the mountains to lay cold over the lands below. She kept her fires as meager things, for who ever knew who was watching, and she did her best to hide from the eyes of others she spied from afar. The rain was constant, and it made the trek all the more miserable.

… time slid by without marker or measure, the sun and the moon were but the same.

The peak still hung in the distance, and her food had run out three days before. She was nearly mad with desire to find the Lady of Snowdon, Arglwyddes yr Wyddfa. She chanted the name over and over as she walked, saying the name like an invocation, calling on a power she did not understand. In that madness, camped for the evening, lamenting her lack of food and capabilities to hunt, instead morosely munching on Fat Hens, a weed to most, but food for the desperate, she mumbled the name again and again, feeling her head, her heart, and her feet, all heavy from the same toil.

… time slid by without marker or measure, the sun and the moon were but the same.

Like her hunger, which had lead to munch on a weed, her drive to find they Lady was desperate. She had hit that point weeks ago. She had hit that point before she had left the confines of her village. Where Liz was now was far beyond desperation. She held her hands over her small fire, looking over her pathetic camp, and prayed that no man would stumble across her in the night. Her eyes were so heavy, but sleep itself was dangerous.

… time slid by without marker or measure, the sun and the moon were but the same.

Liz blinked heavily, her fire, the trees, the soft light of bouncing off her surroundings. Her wandering eyes fell on her torn, mangled, shredded dress. She found herself idly wondering where each tear had been incurred. Had that one been a rock? A tree branch? A bush? Had an angel grabbed at her to keep her safe? A demon had pulled her towards her doom? Which tears mattered? Which ones were inconsequential? Which would pick sides and gather their fellow tears and rend her dress further? Would she end up wandering the hills under the shadow of the peak, forever lamenting the rebellion of her own clothing?

She giggled. Madness was not far for her. Neither was death.

But Arglwyddes yr Wyddfa was nearer. Her voice was like hard struck iron, deep and resonant, tolling for a soul that would never hear it. “Your fire is low, kitten. It will not last through your slumber.”

Liz’s head whipped upwards to find a women sitting at the fire across from her. She sat cross-legged upon a soft bed of heather and lichen. She was dressed plainly enough, but her clothes were strange, and the more Liz tried to focus on them, they shifted and turned like viewing a starry night through a layer of thin, high clouds. The witch’s face was unlined, but ancient, like stone had come alive and in doing so, rejected the age thrust upon it. In that magnificent face, Liz witnessed both wisdom and power. Two things that she had never seen contained within the same person before.

“I must keep it low, my Lady. I am fearful for those that may see it,” Liz replied, her desire to sleep had fled like a panicked animal.

“And if I am one of those that you fear?”

“Then I suppose it is a good time for God to take me.”

The woman appraised her for a moment and then laughed. Her laugh was deep and throaty, as if rocks had learned what laughter was just to entertain themselves. “Well I suppose that He won’t, for I am here, and I want to know why a lady such as yourself is calling for me?”

“You are the Lady of the Mountain? I found you?”

“You found nothing, little kitten. I found you. Do you fear having nothing?” The Lady leaned back, to grab some more wood for the fire. She tossed a handful of small branches into the glowing coals.

“I have nothing, my Lady. I am a daughter of no one, sister to no one, and mourned by no one. I have lost everything that I have ever loved. So I have nothing, and I am nothing.”

“Oh a kitten of self pity, all the worse! So why does one miserable, soaking wet thing such as yourself wander the wilds avoiding all trouble but nevertheless calling for it all along the way?”

“I was not calling for trouble.”

The Lady squinted her eyes. “Oh you were. I watched you stumbling along for days, muttering my name, slapping at the midges, crying, and just winging on and on… although I think you did not realize you were. You are in a terrible state, my child.”

“I came all this way to find you, my Lady. Why did you wait until now?”

“I wanted to make sure you meant it, kitten,” the Lady said.

“I mean it.”

“You may regret meaning it.”

“I won’t.”

“We shall see, won’t we?” The Lady smirked. “Well come along, little kitten. Time to start regretting your choices.”

This follows An Old Memory in the Met, Part IV, Part III, Part II, and Part I…

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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?”

This follows An Old Memory in the Met, Part III, Part II, and Part I…

---

Al was certain he was one of the oldest things in the world.

To be fair, there were a handful of other things older yet. And there were rumors that some of the meanest, abstract, and powerful ones still lingered, ready for some opportunity. But to Al’s eye none of the heavy hitters walked the earth any longer. The forces that created most of them, that had formed the clay and breathed themselves into it… the Old Ones, they were gone as well.

Humans failed to realize the forces that had been play on Earth before their modernity arrived. And those forces had achieved intelligence long before the upright bipedal monkeys in Africa had. The humans were but the last ones standing in a world that had been abandoned long before. Humans had this innate sense that the world was ending, in their own lifetime, but what they all failed to realize is that the ending had already occurred. Everything in the span of modern humans was the sad, long tail of the end times running themselves out towards the heat death of the universe.

And some of the eldest could give zero shits about that.

Faerie was older than Al, but the earthly plane of ‘pieneerthe‘, the realm of man, was just that… the realm of man. Not faerie. The Fairie enjoyed fucking about, but when it came down to it, they could shift to their home, and not give a literal unicorn shit about what happened within ‘pieneerthe‘ (which literally translated as ‘the world of pain‘). Faerie did not understand pain. It was an intellectual pursuit, so when it got harder because mankind started inventing things, Faerie collectively shrugged and said, ‘fuck it’. They ran back to their fiefdoms and waged their petty wars, still laughing remembrances of the old times when the human animals were a fun distraction from their static, rule-bound plane of existence.

Humans were definitely fun to mess with. Al understood that exceptionally well. He had been doing it himself for thousands of years.

Humans were smart though. And being smart led to other things. Things that were detrimental to the elder races bound to the plane of Earth and unable to shift elsewhere to escape. The ones left behind in the slowly unspooling and boring apocalypse… they had the choice to either hide or live, and it was but only those two choices.

Al had chosen life. It was hard. It was messy. But it was vibrant. Vibrancy was nearly sustenance.

What was a wi’nteko’wa to do? Modern humans would call them Wendigo.

For Al, the answer was to paint. To sculpt. To throw pottery. To bring his own pain and suffering to his work. When the wendigo had been created it had been a natural thing. Tens of thousands of years ago, the realms were well aligned. Earth was a collection of interrelated systems that gave forth an explosion of life and spirit. Wendigos were creations of the Old Ones. In a harsh world, they were meant to be a harsh consequence. Nothing more. They were but a part of the circle of life in a complex set of interlinked countless circles.

But humans were smart. And they learned quickly not to violate the plans. The rules. The consistency. Humans were born of some indominable spirit, something more volatile, something more explosive. Each human was a singular point of confusion to the old order. For within each simple walking, talking, human being, a singular soul existed, and that singular soul found meaning through connections with others of their own kind. They were beautiful and terrible at the same time. A dichotomy that created nothing but madness for the elder races.

The old order collapsed because of the humans. The humans themselves were the end of the world. Humans were the apocalypse to what had come before.

Al would know. He had been there. All those millennia ago, when the world shifted from a multiphasic plane of intermingling worlds, and with some vast cosmic realization, all of reality had clapped once and pathetically gave up. The realms decoupled, the planes shifted to the left and right, and all those forces, the ones that had shaped all of the universe, moved onwards, leaving a sprawling wreckage behind. Al was one part of the vast, nameless, and sprawling wreckage that modern humans considered absolutely mundane.

He was not meant to be walking among the humans 10,000 years later. He was not meant to be here, starving for a connection to the Old Ones that he could not fill. The hunger was insatiable. The hole within him was deeper than the sea and darker than the void, the only thing that could fill it for any amount of time was prey. To kill. To consume. A soul to take.

A living, breathing, conscious, soulful, beautiful thing to be unmade through satiating his selfish, evil hunger. And the irony in it all? The absolute fucking banger punchline to the joke?

The hunger was not because he would starve to death. No. The hunger was there whether he filled it or not. It was crawling under his skin, pulling at this muscles like spurs on his bones, grating him internally as if skeleton was crafted of razors and just the act of breathing caused agony. His heart beating was continuous suffering.

The hunger would consume to the point of considering death, objectively. But only in the sense that death was nearly preferable to the agony of life.

Humans can glimpse this kind of hunger. They are called addicts. Heroin. Cocaine. Oxy. Fent. Meth. Alcohol. It eats at the very soul. It is endless, and even when satiated, it is already scratching at the door again. Death is too far, but the hunger, it is near. The in-between, that place that every addict dreams of, is always just out of reach.

There is no security in addiction. Nothing to achieve, no bar to reach. The addiction only consumes through consumption.

Now. Imagine that for millennia.

What was a wi’nteko’wa to do?

Al shook his head.

What was a wi’nteko’wa to do? He was just a single thing. An old thing to be certain. But he was only a microcosm of self. An individual among eight billion other individuals on an uncaring blue marble hurtling through space.

The hunger again prodded at his consciousness, and he shook his head. Al sighed heavily, knowing that the need would never leave. It would never cease. It would never relent.

A hand touched his elbow lightly.

“Are you ok, Al?” Nami’s voice was gentle, knowing herself what PTSD looked like. She still had the relapses in reacting to loud noises, reverting to her childhood, wondering what neighbors were dying under the bombs from far off planes, already flying to where they came from as their payloads delivered careless, unfeeling death.

Al snapped free of his reverie, and scooped up more of the clay from the bag on the floor. He slapped it on to the accelerating wheel, wetting his fingers in a nearby bowl. “Yes, Nami. I am well.” He did not look in her eyes, wondering if she would sense the hunger there, lurking behind his eyelids like a wolf in the bright light of the moon.

“You were not here just then, Al. You have been staring at your wheel for a good ten minutes, watching it spin.”

“Ah, yes. Yes I was.” He said, sniffing once.

“Where were you?” Nami asked quietly. She picked up her own clay from the bag and balled it carefully, running fingers and palms across the dull matte brown surface. Where her fingers touched, it was briefly glossy before the clay soaked the water in.

“Remembering,” Al sighed. “Always remembering.”

“I hear that,” she said. Nami placed the ball at the center of her table, and lightly pushed her foot on the pedal below, accelerating the spinning platform. She ran her hands across the brown surface, pushing the clay upwards. “The meds help me with that.”

“Mmmmm,” he murmured. His hands moved of their own accord, pushing his own clay into a form only they knew.

Nami did not press. She knew when the old man needed encouragement and when he needed silence. He would talk when he was ready.

Al dipped his fingers again and his hands moved across the face of the spinning clay with ease. Nami attempted to copy his movements, but he made it look so easy. So unnatural. As if his hands were clay themselves, melded in their own components, an extension of Al. His art was sublime, delicate, and yet, brutal all the same. She was proud to be his apprentice in the Art Collective. Learning from a master was a privilege Nami would never take for granted, and she mimicked as best as she could, wetting her fingers, letting the experience flow.

Al finally looked over at her table, sniffing with an arched eyebrow. “Listen to your own clay, Nami.”

“I am, I am.”

A perceived silence pervaded the air, only the sounds of the electric motors humming, wet clay being shaped, and the rumble of the platforms as they spun. Not silence, but an absence of speech. The collective was light today, as few of the resident artists worked early in the morning, and the heaviest tourist season was still months away.

“Let me ask a weird question, Nami.” Al grumbled.

“Alright?” She said.

“What do you think I am thinking when I drift off?”

“Dementia.” Nami replied without a pause.

“Funny.”

“Its not.” Nami smiled lightly, letting her voice shift towards seriousness. “I don’t know. I guess you are thinking about a great number of things. Being present in memories can be all consuming.”

“They can be,” Al grabbed a shaping tool from the bench and placed the edge of it against the edge of the bowl. “I often wonder if what I remember is real. Then I think about how to define real. What is real? My experience is real. But only when the experience happens? When it is in the past, it is no longer real, and only my memory of it lends it realism? What is real, Nami?”

“Well my practically useless masters of philosophy has well prepared me for a wide range of answers here, Al.” Nami teased.

“Tell me what you believe.”

Nami took a deep breath, thinking. She touched the clay and pushed her fingertips, her fingers, and her palms into the cold brown. “The clay in my fingers is real. My breakfast that I ate before starting is real, because it gives my fingers energy to move the clay. This table is real, because I can interact with it. I know my parents are real, because I came from somewhere. I know my sisters were real, even though they are buried in a country I will never return to. I know that New York is real, because I walk through it every day. I know that my mentor is real, because I am sitting next to him. All my experiences inform who I am at this specific point in time, and that moment in time is real, which infers that all those experiences were real, too.”

“Does that make your memories real for me?” Al asked.

“I was not expecting to get into deep topics this morning,” she said.

“Humor an old man.”

“Ok.” Nami leaned back from her clay, wiping her fingers on her apron absentmindedly.  “Uh… who I am, and how I act, and the fact that I am a living, breathing human next to you, interacting with you, means that all those things that make me up, the sum of my experiences, again, through inference, are also real. Because I am real. I am not a figment of your imagination.”

“They are real, because you are real.”

“Yes,” she said.

“So are your thoughts real? Your memories?”

“Uh, they should be. But they can be imperfect. Suspect. Memories change over time,” Nami shrugged. “But the experiences that caused those memories still occurred. Do I remember my sisters before they died? Yes. Do I remember every time we played? No. The memories of them are fleeting in a way, but I still love them. It is like… like a fossil of the experience. The fossil can change, morph, and shift over time, but the imprint exists because the thing that made it existed.”

“Fair.” Al nodded. “And I am a fossil.”

“You aren’t that old, Al,” she replied. She noted that he spoke of his age twice already. Strange. He never had referenced his age before.

“Thanks. Appreciate that.” Al pushed his hand along the rim of the bowl, using his long preternatural fingernails to trim the edge cleanly; a knife could not have done better. “I often wonder if I am the memory. I am the memory of thing that no longer exists. The thing that dreamed of me awoke a long time ago and moved onwards, leaving the dream behind to question the dreamer.”

“You are in a strange mood today.” Nami leaned back towards her sad looking bowl, she glanced over towards Al’s, and noted how effortlessly he brought his pottery to life. He wasn’t a master, he was well beyond that. She was in the presence of greatness that defied artistry. Again she wondered how Al wasn’t revered around the world as the true singular master that he was? Even in New York, everyone should know of his talent, but few did.

“I had an old friend call me. It was surprising to hear from him. It has put me in an odd mood, I suppose.”

“Oh?” Nami was nearly bursting internally, curious what kind of thing could put Al out of sorts. She had a million questions, but miraculously managed to keep all of them to herself.

“He had a job offer for me. And it pays well…” Milos sniffed, rubbing his nose with the back of his hand. “Extremely well.”

“Are you going to take it?” Nami glanced sidelong at Al as he worked, his brow was furrowed deeply above his bushy eyebrows.

“I think I am? It just has me questioning things, I suppose. I have lived the last few years finding an equilibrium of sorts. Working here, working with you… it is a recovery. Managing pain. Managing myself. It has gone well.”

“And you think the gig will knock that out of whack?” Nami asked.

“Yes.” Al admitted to both himself and to his protege. The realization hit him with violence. The shock of it arriving was so sudden, his hands fell to his sides as the pottery wheel slowly spun to a stop.

He would have to doppel for Milos.

The hunger would come.

It would not be the lingering ache that he felt every moment of every day. It would be the ache unlocked. It was a blood rage. The all consuming red light pouring from within, the gluttony of addiction yet unfulfilled, to take all that he could, gorge on it, and move on to the next to gorge more until some portion of the beautiful world was consumed. An all consuming fire that could never be sated, just subdued.

He would have to doppel for the job.

The hunger would explode into his consciousness and he would be unable to resist it. To contain it. To redirect it. To do anything to stop what would happen after.

He would have to doppel for the comb. The link to the Old Ones that would finally shut it all down.

And he would have to relapse as an addict to gain the cure for his addiction.

How many would die? How many humans would he tear through before his addiction was sated? What number was acceptable? One? Two? Ten? A hundred?

Nami? Killing his protege? Slaughtering her innocence? Splashing her blood across the walls of the studio? How many people, beautiful individuals that were more real than he would ever could believe himself to be, would have to be snuffed out so he could get finally be free of the addiction?

Would he hand a vial of fent to an addict, and tell that poor addict that if he smoked just enough, he would cure his addiction? Every addict presented with that opportunity would die.

But Al wouldn’t. He would rip and tear. Shred and bite. Chew and rend.

The Old Ones should have woken before ever dreaming of the Wendigo. Al should not be here.

“Oh my god, Al. This. This is beautiful.” Nami whispered. “Magnificence.”

Nami stood beside him, looking over the bowl that he had shaped lost in his thoughts. The edges flared upwards as if it was a water droplet exploding from the surface of the water, the sides ponderously held as if they would fall back any moment. The bowl was water given life, exploding outwards towards an infinite universe uncaring.

Al swiped upwards in a brutally quick motion, and the bowl fell into itself limply, the slice from his sharp fingernail rendering the strength of its form mute.

“Why? Why destroy it, Al?” Nami said. “It was perfect!”

“It was a dream.” Al deflated like the sides of his bowl, feeling the itch behind his eyeballs, in his skin, and his bones, as if the hunger was his form, and he was only a passenger.

“It wasn’t real,” he muttered.