>> old excerpts that should have been put here
[ SHANTALA THE MARTYR: EXCERPT I ]
loneliness is a self-created disease.
along the lines of our fascination with the unknown, we never stop to wonder what we already know. for this reason we are blind to ourselves. the mystery is in the logic, the question is in the truth.
we ask ourselves, as soldiers, as the world, we ask to try; and try we might--bred for battle, forced to fight: you were the epitome of what it meant to be human, and yet you never knew. fatigue was our mortal foe, though what we feared most was ourselves. we built this mighty empire from the bodies of the dead.
for there is no greater smell than the rot of the enemy.
death clung to our army with such a grip as to turn the knuckles a new shade of white, our faces full of pallor and our chest devoid of warmth. breath froze in our wake, our trails marked in the snow. we trudged on.
martyr, she. how we hoped the lie was true.
[ SHANTALA THE MARTYR: EXCERPT II ]
turmoil.
ice dancers in her head - etching. the map was dripping; distorted, the ink smearing and blending into the paper. her pen wavered, her mind blackened from the chaos she had endured that evening. she could not think or see, and the cold bit into her skin. her fingertips were numbed to a dead weight, unsteady and shaking. lower lip trembling. cold. coldcoldcold.
take it. TAKEIT.
gripping the wood of the table, she dug her pen into the paper, scratching the line down. x marks the spot, herehereandhere. strategy is what she needed. ideas. not fleeting sparks of life struggling to survive the snowstorm. her brain wasn't functioning. her body was slowing to a stop. survive, just survive. you can do this.
every breath was a battle. every blink, every heartbeat.
someonesaveme.
[ XIRTRIAN METAPHORICAL SYMBOLISM ]
i am just a machine. my heart beats for two. if i have any control, it will remain this way until it beats no more. this love overrides my other emotions and keeps me stable. i am programmed to feel good.
i am just a machine.
[ SHANTALA THE MARTYR: EXCERPT III ]
she cried.
to cry was weakness. to her, there was no weakness, no emptiness for her to feel--she was dead, a shell of a woman. how could the tears come now. how dare they come now, when everything else had already been lost.
the first tear dribbled down her cheek, down. dropped on the paper with a flat, echoless smack, spreading across the ink and blurring the words written there. she crunched the letter in her fist till her knuckles were bleached white, sobs wracking her body as she sank to her knees in the open field. there was silence and wind and nothing else but her and the world and no one to judge and no one to feel.
how it had always been.
she held the note to her chest, sucking in a shallow breath before dropping it on the grass. the wind quickly caught it up and carried it away. she fell all the way to the ground, too empty to feel her loss.
she loved you, defiance.
[ XIRTRIAN (DEFIANCE) ]
you were bold, you were courageous--you were god, in their eyes. towering above them. an idol, unflinching, untouchable; immortal, said by some; irreversible and illogical, said by many. always won, always prevailed; always conquered and always, always dominated. beast, creature, man, monster, killergodsatanwarriorheathendevilYOU. power of the mighty, ruler of self and all before you.
you were beautiful, because you were broken.
broken beaten battered and still you battled, a behemoth on the battleground, your bellows belting from your biomechanical throat with enough force to shatter eardrums. massive chest scarred with the marks of those who defied you and did not live to tell about it [ those who did were under your wing, crusader ]. share your world, they cried, but you were deaf to their terrorized voices, deaf to all and everything. the volume was on mute, the world was turned down. you courted death with dances that dazzled, demanding nothing short of a do-or-die decadence. deceitful, you were, for you desired death but drove it dormant, dimmed its light to match the volume of your eyes. such a shame, really, for it was what you cravedlustedyearned for with every bolt in your machineheart. salivated at the thought of running alongside the beast, chasing it and tearing out its throat and thirsting for its blood; and it became you. you became it. death was your name, and you delivered what you demanded.
how tall you stood when you fell.
[ SHANTALA THE MARTYR: EXCERPT IV ]
we are all soldiers, fighting the inner war; for the only true war is the war against yourself.
she promised dreams and achieved only fatigue, listless woes of melancholy acceptance of her past sentences; verbs and nouns all composed of water and no gills with which to breathe them. she was a ghost in the world, dead and gone but still present, and with this presence she haunted those who loved her by dwelling in their memory.
she only thought of herself, she said.
[ SHANTALA (DECEIT OF): EXCERPT V ]
"Some things can't be changed, Shantala. You of all people should be aware of that."
"I am. But I was unaware that you were so prone to panic under pressure, Xirtrian."
Malicious, are we? "Nion would always say, it's foolish to attempt the impossible, but--"
"--those who do and succeed are nothing short of heroes. I know. You worry me sometimes, constantly dwelling on the past--"
"I'm not dwelling," I snorted. "Bah, dwelling... you're one to throw stones, girl."
She huffed at me, rolling those steely blue eyes to the ceiling. "Are we going to just stand around and lecture each other?"
"You started it--"
"Liar."
We stared at each other for a moment, locked in a tug-of-war teasing game. Then she giggled, averting her gaze from mine.
I walked to her and slid my arms around her waist, pulling her up against me and putting my mouth by her ear.
"All is fair in love and war," I whispered, "and you know I don't play fair."
She exhaled slowly, staring past me into her thoughts. "Time's up, girl," she breathed, a chilling calmness in her words. "Checkmate."
I realized all too late that the enemy didn't intend on playing fair either; I didn't come to this conclusion until the dagger was embedded in my stomach and my blood was spattering on the floor.
She leaned up and kissed me, caressing my neck with her hand. Then she whipped it around and smacked me across the mouth, drawing blood. Her other hand twisted the dagger and shoved it deeper, forcing the breath from my lungs.
"Weren't you listening," she whispered coldly, "when I told you I wasn't myself today."
[ SYMBOLISM EXCERPT 1-A ]
life's a lot like a dream, and dreams are a lot like life; but everything in between is only what it seems, and that's where we all lose ourselves in ecstacy; not reality, not unconsciousness; but between; between in that narrow universe that spirals to nowhere and everywhere at once. more often than not it is this that makes us lose our mind, for we forget who and where we are and what we're doing.
but we never forget the ones we love.
[ SYMBOLISM EXCERPT 1-B ]
time is moving rapidly forward and i have nothing to show for it, nothing to think or say or do or feel from it, and overall i'm at a loss as to where exactly it is i think i'm going; no direction, no path to follow, nothing to see; and it feels like i'm falling at speeds beyond normality, tumbling downward to nowhere;
vertigo.
shut up. SHUT. UP. listening to you is like listening to myself played backward; garbled but full of bullshit nonetheless. but what do i expect? you learned it all from me. like i copied a piece of myself and implanted it into a microchip in your brain, and now you've become me, in a sense. you say we've become each other, but i am not you. i am nothing. i am not what i want to be, not what i was, and not what i am. i'm a ghost in the system, the insecure channel where the AI makes mistakes intentionally to confuse the decoders. morbid fascination with the untruth is where we're at, and it's going nowhere but you fail to see that, just like you fail to see how hopeless this situation was from the beginning, what with you being a hypocrite and all. you've learned, to an extent, how to be intelligent without knowing anything. everyone believes you, just like they believed me, and now the tables have turned and you're sitting behind the right side of the board. so what's it feel like, now, to be controlling the machine.
tell me: what machines could breathe like they?
but you won't, 'cause you don't know.
suits me just fine, it does, since more often than not, and without knowing any better, i'm right, and you fail. you fail miserably. but i console you and we're back to the beginning, after a period of hatred. or something similar. i know what i mean, i know what i say, but you misinterpret and you misunderstand, and where i was going with the topic is lost and we find ourselves meandering through a forest of lies, as always; perpetually. our understanding of one another is based on these lies, and the reciprocals of the lies are beyond us. just a big, tangled web of intricately laced lies, is all. is all is all is all we are.
forever we dance on the ties we've created, unaware that the spiders lie in wait.
loneliness is a self-created disease.
along the lines of our fascination with the unknown, we never stop to wonder what we already know. for this reason we are blind to ourselves. the mystery is in the logic, the question is in the truth.
we ask ourselves, as soldiers, as the world, we ask to try; and try we might--bred for battle, forced to fight: you were the epitome of what it meant to be human, and yet you never knew. fatigue was our mortal foe, though what we feared most was ourselves. we built this mighty empire from the bodies of the dead.
for there is no greater smell than the rot of the enemy.
death clung to our army with such a grip as to turn the knuckles a new shade of white, our faces full of pallor and our chest devoid of warmth. breath froze in our wake, our trails marked in the snow. we trudged on.
martyr, she. how we hoped the lie was true.
[ SHANTALA THE MARTYR: EXCERPT II ]
turmoil.
ice dancers in her head - etching. the map was dripping; distorted, the ink smearing and blending into the paper. her pen wavered, her mind blackened from the chaos she had endured that evening. she could not think or see, and the cold bit into her skin. her fingertips were numbed to a dead weight, unsteady and shaking. lower lip trembling. cold. coldcoldcold.
take it. TAKEIT.
gripping the wood of the table, she dug her pen into the paper, scratching the line down. x marks the spot, herehereandhere. strategy is what she needed. ideas. not fleeting sparks of life struggling to survive the snowstorm. her brain wasn't functioning. her body was slowing to a stop. survive, just survive. you can do this.
every breath was a battle. every blink, every heartbeat.
someonesaveme.
[ XIRTRIAN METAPHORICAL SYMBOLISM ]
i am just a machine. my heart beats for two. if i have any control, it will remain this way until it beats no more. this love overrides my other emotions and keeps me stable. i am programmed to feel good.
i am just a machine.
[ SHANTALA THE MARTYR: EXCERPT III ]
she cried.
to cry was weakness. to her, there was no weakness, no emptiness for her to feel--she was dead, a shell of a woman. how could the tears come now. how dare they come now, when everything else had already been lost.
the first tear dribbled down her cheek, down. dropped on the paper with a flat, echoless smack, spreading across the ink and blurring the words written there. she crunched the letter in her fist till her knuckles were bleached white, sobs wracking her body as she sank to her knees in the open field. there was silence and wind and nothing else but her and the world and no one to judge and no one to feel.
how it had always been.
she held the note to her chest, sucking in a shallow breath before dropping it on the grass. the wind quickly caught it up and carried it away. she fell all the way to the ground, too empty to feel her loss.
she loved you, defiance.
[ XIRTRIAN (DEFIANCE) ]
you were bold, you were courageous--you were god, in their eyes. towering above them. an idol, unflinching, untouchable; immortal, said by some; irreversible and illogical, said by many. always won, always prevailed; always conquered and always, always dominated. beast, creature, man, monster, killergodsatanwarriorheathendevilYOU. power of the mighty, ruler of self and all before you.
you were beautiful, because you were broken.
broken beaten battered and still you battled, a behemoth on the battleground, your bellows belting from your biomechanical throat with enough force to shatter eardrums. massive chest scarred with the marks of those who defied you and did not live to tell about it [ those who did were under your wing, crusader ]. share your world, they cried, but you were deaf to their terrorized voices, deaf to all and everything. the volume was on mute, the world was turned down. you courted death with dances that dazzled, demanding nothing short of a do-or-die decadence. deceitful, you were, for you desired death but drove it dormant, dimmed its light to match the volume of your eyes. such a shame, really, for it was what you cravedlustedyearned for with every bolt in your machineheart. salivated at the thought of running alongside the beast, chasing it and tearing out its throat and thirsting for its blood; and it became you. you became it. death was your name, and you delivered what you demanded.
how tall you stood when you fell.
[ SHANTALA THE MARTYR: EXCERPT IV ]
we are all soldiers, fighting the inner war; for the only true war is the war against yourself.
she promised dreams and achieved only fatigue, listless woes of melancholy acceptance of her past sentences; verbs and nouns all composed of water and no gills with which to breathe them. she was a ghost in the world, dead and gone but still present, and with this presence she haunted those who loved her by dwelling in their memory.
she only thought of herself, she said.
[ SHANTALA (DECEIT OF): EXCERPT V ]
"Some things can't be changed, Shantala. You of all people should be aware of that."
"I am. But I was unaware that you were so prone to panic under pressure, Xirtrian."
Malicious, are we? "Nion would always say, it's foolish to attempt the impossible, but--"
"--those who do and succeed are nothing short of heroes. I know. You worry me sometimes, constantly dwelling on the past--"
"I'm not dwelling," I snorted. "Bah, dwelling... you're one to throw stones, girl."
She huffed at me, rolling those steely blue eyes to the ceiling. "Are we going to just stand around and lecture each other?"
"You started it--"
"Liar."
We stared at each other for a moment, locked in a tug-of-war teasing game. Then she giggled, averting her gaze from mine.
I walked to her and slid my arms around her waist, pulling her up against me and putting my mouth by her ear.
"All is fair in love and war," I whispered, "and you know I don't play fair."
She exhaled slowly, staring past me into her thoughts. "Time's up, girl," she breathed, a chilling calmness in her words. "Checkmate."
I realized all too late that the enemy didn't intend on playing fair either; I didn't come to this conclusion until the dagger was embedded in my stomach and my blood was spattering on the floor.
She leaned up and kissed me, caressing my neck with her hand. Then she whipped it around and smacked me across the mouth, drawing blood. Her other hand twisted the dagger and shoved it deeper, forcing the breath from my lungs.
"Weren't you listening," she whispered coldly, "when I told you I wasn't myself today."
[ SYMBOLISM EXCERPT 1-A ]
life's a lot like a dream, and dreams are a lot like life; but everything in between is only what it seems, and that's where we all lose ourselves in ecstacy; not reality, not unconsciousness; but between; between in that narrow universe that spirals to nowhere and everywhere at once. more often than not it is this that makes us lose our mind, for we forget who and where we are and what we're doing.
but we never forget the ones we love.
[ SYMBOLISM EXCERPT 1-B ]
time is moving rapidly forward and i have nothing to show for it, nothing to think or say or do or feel from it, and overall i'm at a loss as to where exactly it is i think i'm going; no direction, no path to follow, nothing to see; and it feels like i'm falling at speeds beyond normality, tumbling downward to nowhere;
vertigo.
shut up. SHUT. UP. listening to you is like listening to myself played backward; garbled but full of bullshit nonetheless. but what do i expect? you learned it all from me. like i copied a piece of myself and implanted it into a microchip in your brain, and now you've become me, in a sense. you say we've become each other, but i am not you. i am nothing. i am not what i want to be, not what i was, and not what i am. i'm a ghost in the system, the insecure channel where the AI makes mistakes intentionally to confuse the decoders. morbid fascination with the untruth is where we're at, and it's going nowhere but you fail to see that, just like you fail to see how hopeless this situation was from the beginning, what with you being a hypocrite and all. you've learned, to an extent, how to be intelligent without knowing anything. everyone believes you, just like they believed me, and now the tables have turned and you're sitting behind the right side of the board. so what's it feel like, now, to be controlling the machine.
tell me: what machines could breathe like they?
but you won't, 'cause you don't know.
suits me just fine, it does, since more often than not, and without knowing any better, i'm right, and you fail. you fail miserably. but i console you and we're back to the beginning, after a period of hatred. or something similar. i know what i mean, i know what i say, but you misinterpret and you misunderstand, and where i was going with the topic is lost and we find ourselves meandering through a forest of lies, as always; perpetually. our understanding of one another is based on these lies, and the reciprocals of the lies are beyond us. just a big, tangled web of intricately laced lies, is all. is all is all is all we are.
forever we dance on the ties we've created, unaware that the spiders lie in wait.