“…ahem. Oh, good. This thing is working. Very good. Apologies. I’m currently without my devoted tecchie, Miss Zahra Nassar, but more on her and the other Prodigals later…

Isn’t anyone going to welcome me back? I won’t say, “welcome home,” because home is a vague construct – not societal, nor social, but personal. I have no need for a home. The word itself implies a place of rest and refuge. There is no such place on this earth. Pain, suffering, stress, torment…all of it presses in on all sides like walls and makes a home of its own. The only place you might call “home” exists in the human mind.

In this sense of individual mentality, I am a bulldozer, flanked on all sides by anarchists. I have come to level your home, steal your furniture, and eat your children. Make like the Okies and flee for the West Coast. There will be no refuge, no home for you there. But that’s the only thing you can do to prevent my inevitable domination of your safety: run. It’s either that, or be kind enough to look at the bloody flowers while I place a revolver to the back of your brain. Both ways, everything’s eventual, and of it all, one element of human life is inevitable: death. It will find you. I am the instrument, the medium through which the end of life itself is rendered. Death will find you. I will find you.

This insignificant little speck of dust in the universe – you pathetic worms fondly refer to it as “Earth” – has always been host to an interplay of language, life, and death. Recall the human myth of the Ten Commandments; they were written on tablets, a stone which bears frightening resemblance to…oh, say…the curve of the top of a tombstone. Your text, your language, your very lives, are all encompassed in a fossil – a stone bearing the remnants of what had once been life, now forever a monument to the harsh reality of mortality. It is composed of the same material as the aforementioned tablets and tombstones: the very earth itself. All inevitably returns to dust.

Oh, but I’m being cryptic again. Hello, those of you unfamiliar. I am Mystica, the Sleeping God, my actual physical form cast into ice and held in place by sciences far beyond human capability. Thus, why I wear this ridiculous man-suit. Fragile flesh, you see, is my only means of interacting with the horrific dominant species on this planet known as Homo sapiens.

But why come back to this land forsaken by benevolent deities? The answer is simple: I’ve come to destroy you. Not because you pose a threat. It is merely because I got bored. You see, organized combat is an effective means of testing my capability to wreak destruction upon the lives of those with the sheer bravado, foolhardy as it may be, to stand in my way. You, my dear XWF peers, are merely my guinea pigs in an experiment of my ultimate capability to annihilate your weak, quivering flesh and watch as it melts off your bones and muscles.

In short: you’re dead, but you just don’t know it yet. There is no God, no Pantheon, no meaning behind any moment of your life. There is only death. I am Mystica: Harbinger of the Harvest, Man of the Myst, Courier of the End.

And you are just a man.

Now, enough of this negativity. Would anyone like to know how it is I came to be here, right now? No need to answer. I know you do. So allow me to become the spider and spin you a tale, if you’d be so kind as to lie there like a good little insect and let me drink the marrow from your bones. Thanks to my infinite consciousness, I have been able to store moments in time, short instances of significance, that will tell you all you need to know about what happens when an Ancient, older than time itself, must rebuild an empire. I shall begin with a tale that occurred only a few days ago…"

---

My fingers, nails bitten to the cuticle and half-bloody, fumble with the envelope – especially the flap, torn open at a rough angle. Always been bad at opening letters. Weak fingers, dad used to say, girl fingers was made fer decoratin’, so stop tryna shove ‘em down yer throat! The letter is not from him. He died on his knees in the gravel behind a zinc factory in 1995. The envelope is Conqueror: about twenty cents per sheet, but you can’t buy these things individually anymore. Melissa has been stupid, spending a hundred dollars on envelopes so soft a puppy could nod off on them, only to waste it on writing me. Who writes anymore? Why write? Why wire communications through the phone? Why order your line to fire when the U.N. is right bloody—

In the letter, after the usual blee-bloo-blah crapsack, she asks the terminal question.

Why? That is, perhaps, the most commonly asked question of me I can possibly think of. If you want the psych record, contact the University Clinical Center at Tuzla. Ask for Dr. Jankovic and mention the flower girl. He’ll know what you’re talking about.

Rhetoric for you: why do you think I am the way I am (am I the way I am? I am, amen’t I?)? We can play this game all day and I’ll never get bored. No boring into my head. Keep those worms out of this, they stay in the dirt.

It’s the sheer audacity of it all, really – her, trying to reach into me and pull out meaning, as though there were any to be found. Sorry, luv, but there’s not much down there. In here, rather. All of it was scooped out by a Serb with a wooden spoon. And she called herself my friend once. That’s more of her headstrong pig head, roasted on an open flame like a pile of smoldering bodies. To her, you can’t call yourself a friend until you dive pighead-first into someone’s head and hope it’s not the shallow end. Neck goes snap like a frozen rubber band if you’re wrong. At least that’s kind of fun to watch.

Alone at the table in this Prague café, I give a quick glance around with my good eye. It’s too late in the afternoon for anyone to be interested in coffee. It’s only me and the older gent who runs the place basking in the sunset and bergamot mist, and he and I both know we don’t want to talk to each other. It would ruin the pleasant silence. And yet, I’m the guilty one: my hands, still holding the letter about a foot from my face, are quivering in the midst of the amphetamine and caffeine rush and creating that awful sound of vibrating cardboard. Sorry, café man. Can’t help it.

She would assume that’s what makes me do what I do, but that would be a silly misconception. Stupid pig-head with a broken neck. She knew what I came from, and still she doesn’t know. No one knows. I confess openly all the time, but anyone around is too lost in their own self-obsession to actually listen and know. This is not an exit. People speak, but never listen. If they did, maybe they could hear the sound of gunshots outside the Dutch embassy, the clunk of exposed skulls hitting the concrete, the cries of pregnant women having their wombs torn out and discarded. My voice is an orchestra of the unspeakable, spoken. Everyone plays dumb. Or they are dumb. It makes no difference. They never hear me when, like the good Catholics who annihilated my family, I confess my every sin to private ears. Confession means nothing if there is no one to hear it. I’ll try again.

“I am a complete and utter psychopath,” I whisper across the room to the café man. “I am ever-compelled to re-enact what happened to my bloodline on innocent people. And what should really terrify me about it -- the mutilation, the executions, the fetuses stamped out in the dust and soil -- is that it doesn’t affect me any more than stubbing my toe or buying stationery would. I don’t feel anything. It’s not exciting, it’s not horrifying…I just do it because I want to. But in the end, with all that copper taste in my mouth and all over the ground, it doesn’t make me happy. Nothing does. And I can’t stop. No one will stop me. Please stop me.”

“We close in five minutes,” says the café man auf Deutsch as he cleans the countertop and I chew my fingernails. He doesn’t even bother to look over his shoulder at me.

---

In truth, it took her until several minutes past the turn of the hour to actually exit the café and go staggering into the infant dusk leaning on her cane. The evening fog had been given the time to roll up onto the low passages of the city, and as she limped onward aimlessly into it, it quickly became apparent that she had no idea where she was, nor where she was going. But then again, it hadn’t been her aim to actually get anywhere. That was life now: a great wandering from place to place, no purpose or meaning to any of it.

In truth, she was running. What from, she could not ascertain. Everything around her, however calm, felt as though the magnesium were raining down again and again wherever she went. Life, hell, war, death – like a cycle. She was always running in place, away from everything, only to wrap around and meet her fears face-first at the other end of the ouroboros. All of her senses, all of her short years on this earth, were little more than a snake swallowing its own tail, becoming anew, engulfing the self. And now she was locked in this endless cycle, not aware enough of her own predicament to do anything to change, because change, she knew, hurt.

These thoughts, curling back on themselves – this doublethink – led her mind astray, and her senses followed suit. Before she had gotten far along the riverbank, a dull, throbbing sort of pain began to move its way forward from the back of her right eye, as though something angry and made of glass were burrowing out from behind the socket. She stopped, hand moving up to cover the affected eye. She hadn’t seen right out of it in years. For so long, she saw the world in two dimensions, robbed of her depth perception. It was one of two reasons – separate parts, but originating from the same shrapnel blast – as to why she utilized the doorknob-handled cane, now held in white-knuckle grip in her right hand as she tried to lean on it and scratch at her eye simultaneously. This led only to a tangled mess of limbs, hair, and burning ocular pain. She was so wrapped up in nothing and herself that she didn’t even notice the strange man dressed in a tweed jacket and humming an oddly familiar tune to himself as he emerged from the fog several yards ahead of her.

“Me-oh-my,” the man said, frosty blue eyes peering over his spectacles as the girl doubled over in pain. “Quite alright, my dear?”

“Fine,” she dismissed, swatting him away pitifully with her cane. “No, not fine. There’s…there’s something in my eye.”

Though she could not see him do so, the man gave a warm smile – an outward evocation that the foolish might construe for friendliness. Yet he was here to make a friend, so to say. Friend…host…was there really any difference to him?

“Oh, good. You speak English. Quite well, if I might compliment your linguistic capabilities. If you’d like,” said the gangly man, taking a cautious step toward her, “I could examine it. I’m a doctor. Er, well… maybe I used to be. Once or twice.”

No, the girl assured herself, no help from anyone. She wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Though her eye – the left one, permanently blinded -- was clenched shut in agony, she could perceive him move ever-closer to her, and the thought returned to her: the two of them were standing in the middle of a rather isolated alleyway. This would have been the perfect opportunity for the vile things inside her to work their insidious magic, but the pain was too severe. No, this man would be allowed to live. At least until the pain subsided or the weirdo made one false move.

“F-fine,” she muttered begrudgingly, face contorted in suffering. “No funny business.”

“Oh, I assure you, luv…” the man replied, his hands moving expertly toward her and cradling the edges of her face so that she was forced into looking at him directly, “…there’s nothing funny about what I do.”

That was when she saw them. His eyes, black marbles of eternity carefully guarded by sentinel rings of the deepest, darkest ocean blue, caught her gaze. For more than a moment, she found herself frozen in place, caught in the searchlights of a midnight rescue boat. The colour of them, its wondrous depth and hue, inspired in her a feeling she had not experienced for many years: envy. Her own eyes, brown and warm, remained locked with his. If only to have that beauty, to be more than a dust mite in the dark. Without her realizing it, her inflicted eye slowly opened.

The man flashed her a friendly smile and removed his hands from her face. But he never looked away, and for that, she was grateful. She never wanted to look away from them. His voice emerged as an amalgamation of both solemnity and what she could swear was joviality. Or even...glee?

“You have ugly things in your head.”

Immersed, rapt at attention in the icy glow of his eyes, the girl nodded in regretful confirmation. The strange man’s brow rose, as though in anticipation of an event neither of them could yet fully comprehend. He was still smiling, but she was near tears. The war raged on betwixt the cracks in her skull, aching to let combat spill over into the real world and flood the streets of Prague in crimson-tinted, glorious vengeance. He could see it in her: the potential energy, the crackling doom beneath her wilting, tanned skin.

“But that doesn’t have to be a bad thing…”