ANATHEMA—THÁNA—ATHAMÉ

      At the game of chess with bile and bone, Burakh found himself a massive fucking loser.
He had crawled back to his lair, limping like a wounded animal. His hands flailed, trying to tear themselves out of his own grasp, burning. He had ordered Sticky to keep clear of him — or at least he thinks he ordered, he wasn’t sure if his voice had made it out of him — and watched him stumble back, walk out of the lair and into the entrance with a wild, terrified look in his curious eyes. 
Burakh uncorked a bottle of blood — it was heavy like lead, a clumpy, jam-like merlot color that kissed thoroughly the sides of its vial, almost staining it through. He recklessly dumped it into the brewery; the liquid hit the already-poured tincture with a swishing, scorching sound, not unlike a hiss — or the sound of metal branding a bull’s flank. Vapors rose from the machine and they clawed at Burakh’s face, their violent warmth weaving into his fever haze. He almost fell to his knees. They buckled under him and he dragged himself to the bed. It was violently cold under his touch. The embrace of sheets and covers felt lacerating. He kicked his boots off and extricated himself from his smock, then his sweater; it clung to his sweat with a hungry bite. He threw the blanket over himself. Its coolness clawed at his bare, weak, shaking arms as he pulled on his undershirt, trying to tear off of him the clammy, weighted, drowning feeling of the fever. He didn’t quite succeed. His head felt like it sank through his pillow and he was asleep with what felt like a hammer to the skull.

_____________

THE PALE BEAST walks to him, who’s also you.
THE PALE BEAST speaks, and you understand it:

      It’s a long way down, Dreamer. 

      It’s a long way beneath the skin. 

(He shivers, he turns and twitches. Something beneath his skin is boiling — his blood, his blood, maybe. It whistles with a high-pitch sear like an iron brand on rib-meat. Fever coils around his throat like a gallows-rope, pouring its unbearable burn down his neck and chest.)

      You’re barely getting started. Do you feel how your fingers tingle with the effort of… flipping pages? Do you feel how your eyes struggle to catch 

                          my words

                                       drifting

                                                                 across

the page?

      It’s a long way down, Dreamer. 

      Wipe your lips clean of that dried blood.

      I’ll tear your growing hunger apart like a ripe pomegranate, and stuff in the hollow alcoves where seeds once nestled thoughts of erratically-beating hearts. I love red things.

      And you do too. That is why you’re here. 

      And you love tearing things apart. (Butcher.)

      Oh, how alike we are.

                  We’re only getting started. 

      Burakh tore himself awake and, damp from a febrile sweat, legs barely holding him up, he crawled out of bed, put his smock on without bothering with his usual sweater, and limped to the brewery. Thirty more minutes, he thought, thirty more…
Sticky had not left the corner he had backed himself in. He kept the distance between Burakh and himself like he was holding a spear. 

      “Where are you going?” Sticky asked, his voice trembling — he was trying to be so, so brave. 
      “Outside,” Burakh croaked. “I need some fresh air.”

The night breeze felt like it could bite his skin off. The darkness felt like it was seeping through all of his fractures; through the crack of his lips as they dried, through his mouth that he could not close, through the minuscule break of bone he had, and had healed years ago, on his bad knee. The illness found any hollow to seep through like blood did through the mesh of gauze. He walked, wandered, arms limp, steps so painfully heavy he felt the earth shiver beneath them, as if wounded. 

Thank-you-me-not my elision
my salve, my salvation?
See—watch—watch over the sea
of the sick
waves
as one
depths meddled, met at once, muddled,
finally dark, damp,
in the merciful earth-womb,
cradled,
cradle all-water-as-one
all tears as one
at once!

The headache was worsening. The noise—the voice—rang through his jaw like a wire to sew it shut.

Forget-me-not my correption,
my ply, my rot, my corruption!
Your ache beautiful and raw
raw earth
red earth
raw-red-earth-roe
roe-worm-roe-you
your ache as part of the ache of aches
your rot as part of the rot of rots.

Burakh passed in the shadow of the Crowstone and cursed it, cursed it twice for good measure. Forcing his thoughts into shapes felt like dislocating his temporal bone, meaning seeping into and out of the trench between it and the sphenoid, where the noise crawled in its wake. 

Fight-me-not—fight yourself for once,
why should you take,
then take from me?
Spurn the spin of my needle
my merciful blade,
rend me—it won’t make you whole!
Must I be ischaemia
must you be bloodletting?
Must you pin me in your neverending hunger
hunger neverending
why can’t I want too?
Mercy!
Mercy!
Mercy!
I am life, shelter me!

Burakh didn’t hear this — hey, wait, he didn’t hear that. 
Who did? Who could have? 
He heard the characteristic sound of a weight hitting the grass, the muffled noise of earth dipping under buckling knees, elbows, chest. Burakh’s hazy eyes scraped something in the distance, a moving outcropping that grew from the steppe like a tooth. Brides — four, five of them; they were agitated. They crowded, flailing weakened arms and legs like the branches of weeping willows. Surrounded, between them, lying still: a silhouette of black coat, black hair, cramped gloved hands that extended out, as if having torn themselves from the body to grasp something right out of reach.
Oh no. Oh no, no, no.
Burakh walked to the gathering, steps scuffing the soil that burst in dry clouds like disturbed silt, feet sinking under the weight of the illness as it crushed his spine. As he did so, the Brides hauled the fallen Bachelor — it was him, it couldn’t not be him, and he was so horribly limp, and he was so horribly pliant: his body, as if weightless, yielded to the Brides’ hands as they carried him between all five of them, one per limb, one for his heavy, pale—unthinkably pale head. The Brides started walking towards the town. One of them began to sing, and the others followed. 

They were not fast, but Burakh still couldn’t keep up. His lungs felt like they had turned to blades and were sinking in the rotting meat below his ribs. 

As the cortege marched on, one Bride, then another, then another joined — they didn’t touch the sick, but they sang. They sang and danced, feet scraping the earth until they bled; they wailed and flailed as if ailed themselves. Burakh immediately realized that they slowed down as they made their way through the streets; they were, in a morbid funeral procession, showing the sick doctor to the townsfolk who brought hands on their horrified mouths, whose eyes widened in aghast realization; a few crossed themselves, and a few fell to their knees, too. Their chants rang and echoed like long eulogies of defeat. Windows and doors opened then closed, as if the houses themselves couldn’t bear the sight (or so Burakh felt, or so Burakh thought). 

The cortege wove through streets, paths and narrows, and the longer it went on, Burakh thought, the more it looked like carrion birds parading a dead deer. He felt his throat tighten, the grasp of the illness toying with his strength as if to see just how far he was willing to take it. 
When he realized the cortege was headed for the Stillwater, he decided he was willing to take it there.

He had time, as the Brides paraded and eulogized the Bachelor’s—(it wasn’t a corpse, it is not a corpse, you must keep telling yourself it isn’t a corpse)— through emptying streets; he still, almost, didn’t make it. Right as they appeared by the Stillwater steps, fever almost scythed Burakh off his feet, and he stumbled forward. A steel-heavy, crushing fog fell on him all at once, and he didn’t hear himself speak: 

      “What happened?” As if he didn’t damn well know — he didn’t want to sound like a weirdo who had followed them there. 
      “Erdem is sick,” replied a Bride, and she wasn’t sad, and she wasn’t happy: her voice was a perfect, placid grey; her eyes on Burakh were too, as if just waiting for his reaction. 
      “We brought him here to rest,” spoke another; her voice was raspy from singing. 
      “Yes, rest.”
      “Put him down,” Burakh ordered, and the fever wrung his voice out of him until it was nothing but a croak. “I’ll carry him.”
      “Do not touch him,” cautioned a Bride, “you could get sick.” Burakh shivered at how calm she sounded about it.
      “It cannot get worse than this for me,” Burakh spat, and looked away as the Brides landed piercing gazes on him, then shared them between themselves, and nodded.

They brought the Bachelor to the ground, not really helping Burakh swing one of his arms around his shoulders; watching him do it with curious eyes as they stepped back. 

Ô—ô-my-stretching-suture
my-surrendering-stitch
give out—give up—give yourself in
to the straight-forward-cut
give yourself to me
let me spider-scurry
you won’t be able to catch me.

Burakh grabbed one of the Bachelor’s wrists to pin his arm in place around his neck; right where glove and shirt parted to reveal a gap of skin, Burakh found he wasn’t even warm — fever reaped them both at once, its teeth crushing Burakh’s skull, until his head felt too heavy to bear, and Dankovsky’s ribs to tear out of him a pathetic, breathless gasp. 

My-surrendering-stitch
my lost sinking soul
let me tear from you the itch—
let me cradle your head—
that comes with fearing the death—the dead.

Dankovsky’s legs didn’t straighten beneath him. His knees raked the floorboards, and he was pulling Burakh down with him. He wasn’t even heavy—this worried Burakh: he wasn’t even heavy, as if the swift scythe of the illness had bled him out of all matter. Still, Burakh barely managed to keep him up as he walked with a precarious list, one misstep away from sinking, too, into the eager jaws of unconsciousness,

Let me be the knife — for once
be meat. 
Let me be the knife — for once
be me. 
Let meat be the blade — at once
beat me.
Try—fail—surrender. 
Surrender—sink—stretch. 
Be broken and set;
be dead and buried,
be whole in the earth,
be hole in the earth,
be blade in the earth,
bleed. 

The Bachelor heaved; a grotesque, scraping cough tore through his throat, and a thin trickle of red dripped from the slit of his pinched mouth. 
Burakh dragged him up the stairs; hauled him like he could, like one would a horse carcass. 

Damn that beast, too, damn it to hell.

Swearing wouldn’t fix anything, but it gave Burakh a last slap of strength to yank Dankovsky out of the entryway and into the bed. (Swearing wouldn't fix anything — this was no Beast. This was a whole different bird…) 

When Burakh turned to run off, Rubin was in the way; his eyes were wild, baffled, pupils swollen with a tangible fear that dripped down his face. 

      “Cub,” he called, his voice fraying, stricken.
      “Don’t come near me,” Burakh choked, “don’t come near him.” He used his shoulder to carve himself a way out as Rubin stood in the doorway — he recoiled at the touch, and Burakh turned to him feverishly. “Wait,” he croaked, and covered his mouth with the hollow of his elbow, “do. Do. Cover your mouth. Put on gloves. Watch over him,” he asked, “please. I only need a few hours.”
      “What are you—”

Burakh rummaged through his smock and pulled out a jumble of pills and a single potion. 

      “Keep an eye on him. Just a few hours, please .”
      “He has twenty at most,” Rubin replied, fright unraveling his voice into wispy threads.
      “I’ll come back.”

Burakh crawled out of the crushing, suffocating Stillwater, and threw himself into the streets — alongside Brides, townfolk had come to gawk. Shit, shit, shit. He tried to tell them off and all that climbed out of his throat was a breathless, torn gasp. 
He didn’t even notice the lady of the house who, accompanied by the Mathematician whose coat she was wearing, had come to find her place swarmed like a newly-erected tomb. Rubin almost didn’t let her in.

He ran to the workshop. When he stumbled forward, Sticky, who hadn’t left, jumped back and away from the brewery. Burakh fished the vial out of it, and the boiling water didn’t even make him flinch. He brought it to his lips. The damn thing—the damn thing was heavy as plumb, or maybe he was too weak to hold even that. The smell struck him like a spear — potent, pungent, deep and dark and rotten. His arm protested with a sharp strike of pain when he pulled it up to pinch his nose and, one less sense to worry about, he drank it all. 
It slid down his throat with the consistency of wet mud, or honey. 
Electrical shock seemed to course through him; lightning, divine grace. He felt how the illness recoiled, its spidery legs curling like a grasping fist, tearing from him the lining of his stomach like it wanted to turn him into hide. 
If that works, Burakh thought, if that works, he could heal the whole town. 
He could heal Dankovsky—feverish, on his bed, away. 
He crawled into bed and as a last angry, powerful, maniacal burst, the illness tore through his throat with a bout of cough, and pinned him under its weight to his bed. He sunk into sleep—he drowned in it like he had been thrown overboard.

_____________

      What struck him first was the fever — no, no, not a fever; this was flames.
In the distance — well, distance, everything was only as relative as his thread allowed him to sew —, a silhouette stood before the blaze; someone here waiting for him.
He walked on and found:

      “Oynon…?”

It was; he turned to Burakh. His eyes were sunken in with unspeakable sorrow. Burakh turned his head to the blaze and, in the erratic waltz of flecks and flames, could make out two shelves; the height of giants, full of books to overflow, they were slowly crumbling down, bleeding out pages and spines like an animal gutted. Between them, a tall door was stubbornly closed. Thank god, Burakh thought — he could see black velvet seep beneath it, reaching out like spider legs. 
He sat by the Bachelor. He found under his thighs the familiar wood of an amphitheater bench. As the thought came to him, the shelves came tumbling down like a gigantic deck of cards; the dark-stained wood howling, as if in pain, as it fell onto the pyre. Books sprawling, hanging agape like open wounds, Burakh could decipher a few things on their pages; treaties of medicine, of ethics, of platonic philosophy. Burakh was starting to have an inkling of what the scene before his eyes could be. 
When he brought his eyes above the fire and the dark door, his suspicions were as close to confirmed as could be: a blazon hanging above, bound to a floating piece of wall (the last of Burakh’s worries, truly), depicted a Rod of Asclepius in the form of a pointing dagger, the black snake coiling around it turning an enamel eye to Burakh as he watched. Balancing on the pommel, a skull was flanked of wings, reminiscent of carved mementos on the graves of old. 

      “What good was it to collect so many books to then see them turn into nothing but kindling? What a pitiful death.” Dankovsky began; and his voice, ghostly, thin with unmistakable ache, lost itself into the flames like it couldn’t withstand not burning alongside the object of its sorrow. “They speak of witches holding their heads high as they are sent to the stakes, but I don’t think that ever was true. A burning is a most painful end. The slowest of devourments that pries pieces of you still, everywhere, all at once, never eating you fully enough until the very end, where you have left yourself behind and cannot even savour that last, merciful, crushing bite. Yes, most painful.”

Burakh brought his eyes on Dankovsky. He was unkempt, disarranged. Some of his hair was plastered to his face by sweat or spilled water; his cravat was nowhere to be seen and his shirt hung open like the mouth of a great whale, pearls of sweat in the hollow where the Bachelor’s clavicles met lining its lapels like rows of teeth. His gloved hands were gripping, on his thighs, at his slacks, like he wanted to tear off him the skin beneath. His smirk — his usual smirk haunted his lips, his face moving around it like it would crack if it let it fall. His jaw was working powerfully, as if holding in a long, sharp cry.

      “You wouldn’t say that,” Burakh eventually said. “You wouldn’t say ‘what good was it’ as if it was just all lost… What good is it to plant a forest if it will fall prey to wildfires? (Dankovsky laughed at this, eyes on the blaze, and Burakh realized maybe it wasn’t the best way to go about it.) What good is it to care for one’s body if it will rot in the end?"
      “You jest, Burakh, but I ask myself this quite often.” The Bachelor took a long breath, filling his lungs with smoke. “Why shave, why wash your face, why wash your body, why feed it, why clothe it, if in the end it will be meaningless? I ask myself this often…”

Burakh’s entire body tensed. There was a longing in the Bachelor’s voice, a… self-destructive edge that Burakh had no idea how to handle. He feared he would cut his own hands on it if he attempted to offer a hand.

       “I think this is all (he gestures) this is about. Well… Was about. If I… search and I search and I find… maybe it will be all worth it.”

He dragged his polished shoe across the soil. Burakh could see it was a vibrant clay red.

      “You search for it, Burakh. You wait for it. You wait for the — the strike, the lightning rod, the sudden stab of divine grace; you wait for it and it never comes.”

In the silence torn asunder by the howling blaze, he asked:

      “Are you religious, Burakh?”
      “Jesus Christ, no. Well, Jesus Ch—you know what I mean.”
      “I do. I do.”

He nodded. He nodded… 
He weighed his words carefully.

      “Divinity again, then? You’ve mentioned it before. You think about this a lot, don’t you?”
      “I’m sorry?”
      “Don’t mind me.”

Dankovsky bit the inside of his cheek, eyes pensive (which Burakh saw, because he was looking).

      “It might be one thing I envy them for,” he said, not elaborating on this ‘them’ — not wanting to elaborate; too wounded to elaborate. “This belief in an… inherent worthiness. In an inherent something after all the things that come. A promise. Something to… turn to.”

He turned to Burakh. He looked at him and saw him.

      “I’ve walked to the top of the Tower, Burakh, and there was no one above. There was nothing but the immense, sprawling sky and all of its stars, many dead already — not even them can withstand the hold of the end.”

Burakh didn’t speak. He digested the Bachelor’s words slowly, and tried to not shirk his drilling, desperate gaze. 

      “And can’t that be enough, oynon? The stars?”

The seriousness on the Bachelor’s face flickered. A smile cracked his mouth open, and the gold of flames caught itself reflected on the spit on his teeth. 

      “Maybe for you, Burakh. Maybe for you. I hope so, for you.”

And he fell silent — fell is the word. His shoulders slumped suddenly, his arms became limp. His gaze pinned itself on the fire; it was still going strong. Burakh could make out the faint, faint smell of gasoline in the forsaken dance of embers and sparks. This was Dankovsky’s work was starting to dawn on him. To weight on him, crushing, miserable, inescapable. He didn’t know what he had been brought here to do — this was not something he could mend, surely. He wasn’t sure how he could sew it together with the Town — besides the fact that the town, too, was slowly consumed in flames.
Brought as a witness, then. (He witnessed Dankovsky when he threw him a sidelong glance: he thought he had heard him crush up a sob.)

Dankovsky slipped fingers in his pocket and pulled out a cigarette case. It was a sterling silver, catching and spitting back reflections of the fire like it, itself, was enraged, violent and mean; Dankovsky opened it and brought a white cigarette rod to his lips.

      “How can you burn such a thing…?” Burakh asked, eyes on the pyre. 
      “Like a matchstick.” Dankovsky replied. “You start with the head.”

His words — unbearably heavy and somber, caught Burakh at the throat more than the fire did. 
Dankovsky got up. He leaned into the flames, and Burakh saw how they licked his face, his open collar hungrily; how he then pushed the tip of his disheartened, bitter cigarette into them and let them light it. He sat back. 

      “Got a smoke?” Burakh asked. 

Dankovsky opened the silver case again and shook his head apologetically as he showed it, empty, to Burakh. That was his last one.
Burakh saw then — how he plucked it from his mouth and offered it to Burakh. 

      “Oynon—”
      “It will only consume itself if you do not take it.”

Then, after a pause: 

      “Consume itself for nothing.”

So, Burakh took it. He fit his fingers around it and around Dankovsky’s as to not let the ash shake off, picking it from his hold like a delicate fruit. He put it in his mouth. He felt how the crease where the Bachelor’s lips had been marked the paper, and demanded he adjust his own around it. The tobacco had no taste, no smell, hitting Burakh with its oneiric quality — he had almost forgotten about that detail. When Burakh’s eyes tore themselves from the blaze, he could see how Dankovsky worried his lower lip with a mindless, nervous thumb — a gesture to fit the smoking void.

 Atop the grand entrance, the enamel dagger fell from the escutcheon. Then, the enamel skull fell on the enamel dagger, and they both shattered. Dankovsky winced — restrained, reserved, pinching his lips as if to hold back a howl. He looked away. He looked away, and Burakh didn’t. He watched how the flames ate at the gate, the intricate columns; swallowed in a scorching red everything that could be swallowed — or couldn’t be: this was a dream, and fire wasn’t bound to its earthly rules. It ate at the ground, tearing its (burnt—ha!) sienna fabric to shreds until it was nothing but rags over a pitch-blackness that stretched to the end of the dream, the bottom of the well. The pyre was hungry. 

Hungry, hungry, hungry…

Of the escutcheon fell then the snake. It impaled itself on the debris below. Dankovsky closed his eyes and dropped his head.

      “Leave when you can, Burakh. I won’t be able to.”

Burakh wanted to stay; he was slammed awake by the weight of the blazon when, at last, it tumbled down.

His cheeks, forehead, chest were hot; his whole body covered in a thin layer of sweat, causing the sheets to cling to his skin, entraving his movements as he tried to sit up. He still felt the bite of the pyre, the persistent breath of that everdevoring fire, his own breath was hot; he eventually remembered he was sick. He had been sick. (He wondered if the fever had conjured the fiery dream, or the fiery dream barely felt at home within his fever.)

He dragged himself to the sink and splashed water on himself — its coolness washed the illness clean off. He rubbed the sweat and the fever off his skin. He was reborn. 

      “Are you feeling better?” asked Sticky, keeping the table between them, almost as a protective barrier. 
      “I am,” Burakh said — a sigh of relief crawled through him, agitating remnants of the disease that scraped his lungs and trachea. “I am. It worked.”
      “What worked?”

Burakh shifted through his belongings and brought to his eyes the other vial he’d taken from Shekhen. It took a lot from him not to kiss it. Then, his face fell. The only other vial.
Come the morning, the Inquisition would send someone. Come the morning, he would likely, surely be asked about it. He cradled it to his chest. Its ruby depths sang with a promise so heavy Burakh felt like dropping it to the floor — but didn’t, couldn’t let himself. His heart moved in his chest like it, too, sought the kiss of the crimson vial. His ribs felt hammered from within with a promise he had to keep.

     “Sticky?”
      “Yeah…?” 
      “You have my explicit permission to hide and run from the new visitor. Do not lie, but you won’t be tempted to if you don’t get caught.”
      “Easy enough, boss.”