//------------------------------// // EX·DVRIS·GLORIA // Story: IN·ICTV·OCVLI // by Woodrow Wilson //------------------------------// My exact features were not particularly human to any standard eye. In fact, the concept of humanoid was so far away, that calling myself that would seem to disgrace the namesake. I don't fondly recall my appearance from the reflection in the metal plates at the side of my train's booster engine, as it is vague. It is not what I pictured of myself at all, and that is what has caused me so much disgust and utmost confusion. The fact I have lived countless years without a single manner of recollection to my physical features is a feat that no living thing has possibly achieved any better than I. As of last night, before the Creature ruminated in me the thoughts of inexcusable escape by brute force, I thought about myself. I tried to picture myself in myself and all I could picture was a young boy who was irregularly feminine. Big, greedy blue eyes had looked me back and saw to it that my very soul turned to mere information, and I realised those were my eyes. My eyes so hungry and abyssal in their cobalt that the power in a thousand stars could not feed it for all it was worth; Eyes that sought with an astounding curiosity so as that the question of Gods would turn into ones and zeroes and the concept of time and space became mathematical logic and electronic gateways. I looked at this mirror of what I thought I was, and now that I am awake, I see myself in the reflection of my Washbasin. My face, at least. It is the utmost bizarre thing---one living entity does not subsume another's consciousness, lest the information of the mind is transferred via flesh into flesh. That concept dawned on me that I may have been built from the ground up and that my being as a living thing may be man-made entirely. What else to explain my previously odd behaviour than that of a machine? It is highly unlikely. No living entity in my conscious memory spoke as of a computer and caused time to change so quickly one might assume a fast-forward in a recording. But I digress. I am not human in my body, for in that reflection was indescribable horror. So much so it was as if it was out of the bottomless pits of mankind and torn from the front of an ancient script, pulled from the black pages of the Aged Necronomicon and out of the Oblivion in which wormholes break through the fabric of reality and build their tunnels. I saw something great and pale, like an upright dragon, but my head was most long and a neck arching out of my spine, my head at the end of this trunk of hardened pale flesh, with which mandibles and a jaw sat, filled with numerous serrated teeth and tusk. My hands, I raised to look at, were counted eighteen digits, with nine on each hand. It felt like I had never seen it before but also as if it was the most familiar thing in existence. I knew the reflection in the washbasin was me, but the concept of me was as vague as consciousness and the state of biology itself. I could not find those computational logic gates worth of eyes in the reflection, but I could see it was me nonetheless. With this, I quickly dismissed it as a moment of dissociation, seeing it as nothing but me being confused about my identity. This is me. I am this beast. This beast will escape and find answers from the Empress who calls herself Luna. I am this beast. My name is Franziskus Amadeus Ivanova. As quickly as this, my captors returned and they ushered me to the gates of my cell, motioning me to come to them so that they may send me to my aforementioned doom. They had given me time to think about something, but I was unsure what of, for I have had no crimes. They had at once mentioned my sin of murdering their superiors. I was not finding it of any recollection in sin or evil but as a good for my self-defence in the preservation of my own life. They stood at the entrance of my cell, awaiting my presence there almost forebodingly. I immediately schemed to destroy them. I began to approach them, and in turn preparing myself for their utmost destruction of at least removal from my path. I decided these guards will not let me by with ease, as they held clubs and batons in which they could bash me unconscious again. I must dispose of them swiftly. My gauntlet shifted as I turned over my wrist, my left arm swinging back with my footsteps; but when I made it face-to-face with the guard at my cell's entrance, I swung my hand and its claws up into his face. He suffered terribly, the bird lost the entire top of his beak when I smashed it shut with the pale pseudo-fist. At that moment, the fine china that made up said piece of armour seemed more like titanium and steel, as no piece broke. Instead, fractals of cracks stretched across the plates on my fist, making what appeared to be a gorgeous floral pattern. I found that I will request custom plates from the Goddess who spoke to me prior. The other guards assuming duty immediately made a move as blood came from the flesh at the beak of this now-unconscious avian. They met a similar fate, albeit more gruesome. Their faces had been broken in, and their skulls and been hatched like the very eggs they came from, split and terribly mangled with one singular, swift motion. One of which may never see the light of day again, if facial reconstruction surgery had yet to exist in this world, as I so assumed. When I put down the last of these foes, there were four bodies on the ground. I turned my wrist over again, flicking my hand back and revealing my pistol, which I held in my palm before myself. I aimed it down as I went down this corridor, shifting into another hallway where there were no guards, but only a row of doors to other rooms or sections. Whatever it was, I hoped only that it was small. Then they came. Five down the hall, Most of them wielded spears, but some wielded swords instead. They came at me swiftly. The first was a swordsman, who was dismissed with a loud crack from a shot. A mist of pink flew from the back of his head. The next was a spearman who was dismissed by three shots: two in the chest and one in the leg. He fell in agony, holding himself on the ground and tripping the others. Two of the three tripped over the dying, while the last one jumped over them all. They were adamant; I will give them that. The one that still stood met me with a jab at the pelvis before I could process the damage I had already caused. He roared as he tried to jab me again, catching my body and almost running me through in one side of my abdomen, before I swiped my hand and grasped his spear in another of his lunges, quickly pulling it behind me and sending him into my open hand. When my hand reached him, my claws dug into his stomach, and my armoured hand grasped his back, bringing him into a hug. I pulled him against me, whispering to him as I continued to shove my great, spindly claws deep into his abdomen, gripping onto his innards, pulling them out slowly like a loose string from the hem of a shirt. "May our Goddess in her might bring thee peacefully into the Empyrean Heaven again. Blessed be the journey in nature's afterlife as it should have been in thine living hour," and he fell to his knees as if to bow to a throne before the ground slowly took in his ichor, "Space have mercy on your soul," I let him go and saw my bloodied hand. I flicked it to shake away the paint of war and continued my march to the Kingdom of Heaven which so powerfully called me in my dream-realm. The ones who were lying on the ground in what appeared to be still fear, or an awaiting ambush, was turned into a carpet, for I was walking on them.  Their bodies made the sounds of cracking and popping as my heels pressed into their necks and spines, their hellish screeching filling the hallway in what I could assume to be a call for help. No such help came for them, and no such help would be able to fix them, to my knowledge. The hall ended, and I found myself exposed to the open whispers of breeze;  the light of evening burned brightly. It was beautiful, shadowing the world in long darkness but also shades of fiery orange and red. There was no-one outside, not for as far as I saw, minus flicks of shadow across the grounds. I looked around myself to land my sights on a building just out of sight, the structure not being to any degree as gorgeous as the rest of the property. The building, if I could call it so much, was pale and set up much like a triangular prism. It was apparently made of cloth, as I had come to touch it, before going inside. The cloth pavilion, if I could call it that, was filled with weird instruments not unlike old tools used on frontier worlds: simply constructed microscopes, manual tools, pieces of examination equipment I had no name for. Slats of glass magnified images in a way not much unlike a microscope, but it did it without the extra pieces. There were weird hieroglyphs on the slate, which reminded me of my data slate. Underneath it was a dissected round from my magazines, which I threw off the table and spilt into the dirt that made up the floor. I could not and would not let these primitives know the functions of my weapons, nor their method of creation. These were unique to the peoples of the galaxy---I will not let primitives learn tools of war so more advanced than their flooring ability. They still walked on stone and dirt like in that of a low-phase colony, paths of worn earth the only identification of civilisation beyond the bizarre structures. I quickly found the rest of my tools, which were dissected almost completely. I, of course, reassembled them and made sure the pieces of my tool were fast together. I shouldered it and found the analogue sight on the tool was slightly damaged, and I will have to hope precision is not in my foresight. I, as well, recollected my magazines from the research tent and put them to my arm. I took a small tool that appeared like a looking-glass into my grip and peered unto my own face. I was unable to recognise it, peering into my own face without comprehending what at all was peering back. My claws grew shaken and the looking-glass trembled, I throwing it through the air and into the ground where it cracked and became embedded in the filth. I heard a sound from outside, or rather the absence of such sound, and moved close to the flaps that made the entrance of the pavilion. Whatever it may be, I could not feel but unwelcome in this chamber. Rather, unwelcoming to whosoever stood beyond the thin cloth. I met the silence and listened deeply, my skin freezing in the cold air between the weird white plates across my body. A screech resounded through the air and I opened the flap of the tent, prepared to pull the trigger, but was met by empty air. I lowered my weapon before I felt a brush of wind, and then something struck me hard in the back. I fell into the dirt, a puff of dust as I landed and with it something on my back. It screamed out and wrapped hands about my neck, trying to pull me backwards without letting weight off me. As my back inverted, I attempted to resist, feeling the warmth on the side of my skull as if something were trying to tell me something. "Wretched, pale Thing, have you no mercy for my soldiery? Have you no sparing hand when we show you kindness?" the voice was a hoarse whisper, I struggling against its grip and trying to writhe from out under it. I slowly caught hold of the ground with my feet, the talons on the digits catching some kind of root or hard surface beneath the dirt. I prepared to push. I returned in my own tongue, but with a tone that it may understand. A low, guttural voice, scratching at the back of the throat in growling and hissing, every noise sharp to the ears of all who listened. The language, as I have heard it described, was much like that of now-archaic German, just a lot more intense and a lot harder to understand and parse. The language was called 'Rhetoric of Mind' in the common tongue, but it was my mother tongue. "Jklʒ-lʒ lʒj-hwʒk, Zʒ hw-mwʒ! Lʒ hwjʒ-Zʒ mwʒk-kʒwhlʒm-hʒkʒ!" my voice was not Before my foe could even comprehend I actually spoke in a language, I shoved my feet. In doing so, I threw myself from under his weight, and him being confused in the mix of loud, guttural noise and quick motion. I used my feet to grip his shoulders in my talons, much like he had originally done with his significantly--weaker claws to my shoulders. I did not sentence him to death, but I fired the rifle obnoxiously close to the side of his head. My body was twisting in ways it never had before to achieve this, but I can guarantee his ear will ring for aeons. And from this, he became immensely confused, which I used to sprint away into the depths of the forest, out of this bizarre place. I followed a path that, after a few weird turns, led me to some gate. It was a rather tall one, being three times my height, along with the fencing made of stone and metal and wood that extended into the treelines at my left and right. The reason I had not killed him was that I seemed to have awakened within that moment. I am not sure exactly why, but things seem suddenly clearer now than merely moments before. This did not stop me from completely scaling the gate and sprinting off into the darkening forest, however. It was also, at this moment, that I realised exactly how fucked I was when it came to navigating through it. I ended up deciding that the forest was pretty much endless and at some point, I would find myself back in the desert or dead, though I hoped for the former. After a few more moments, I almost forgot I was running, and through this forest, I had been going for what seems like no time at all; The daylight fell as my legs moved swiftly and I tore into the ground with talon and claw on all four like some rabid animal chasing after prey. I awoke from my stupor, again, and crashed as I became aware of it all, rolling on my side and stumbling back to my hands and feet. I was unable to stand, it seems, as I had collapsed against one of these giant trees, and fell into a divet that sunk beneath the expanding root systems around me---much akin to a small, natural hut. I snuck into this pit, sealing off what I could by putting dirt around the holes and patches, just to create absolute darkness for myself. And I stayed there. I remained in this pit and within it, I tried to retain normality. I recessed into the abyss of my mind, to think and to dream.