Boiling, blackened flesh drips off my body, melding with the cinders of the Forefathers, forming the blessed ichor from which I shall reshape myself in Their image.
Pain is present, of course, and so is fear; they are irrelevant. Being born into the world is painful and frightening as well. I find the analogy pleasing, for if this brass, rune-laden kiln is not a womb of sorts, then what is it?
As my eyes - dozens, hundreds of them - open for the first time and finally gaze inward, I bask in the sudden clarity of truth I’ve so long been unable to see.
For a moment, it is too much. I see too much. Then divine, primordial ideas shatter my mind, transpose its flesh and blood nature, and reforge it in the shape of spectral, impossible geometries.
I am More.
As my old bones lie in a pitiful mound at the bottom of the kiln, I start devouring the elixirs I had prepared. I am hungry - so hungry! I have newer, stronger flesh to build, bones, tendons, tendrils, teeth!
And of course, eyes.
Hundreds of eyes, small and large, all gazing inward!
For the time being, however, I find my lack of limbs or other discernible appendages oddly liberating. No matter how strong the flesh, it is, after all, only a vessel for the vastness of the spirit.
The Little Mothers are on their way, their supplicant arms ready to receive me. They’ll be here any minute now, always mindful, always silent, nigh-invisible to the lordlings’ men.
I smirk at the thought of the lordlings - not that I have a face in the strictest of senses, mind you, but this is what it feels like.
I smirk at Lord Edgar’s foolish faith in the blood, and his wretched aristocracy of hunger-crazed pawns. They stew in their arrogance and delusions of grandeur, fancying themselves apex predators; the image of perfection.
In my former state and nature I might pity them, I suppose. All they are is malformed, botched fetuses crying for a Mother that does not, nor will ever, exist - their eyes blindly facing outward, always outward.
My own Little Mothers are here. Careful, ever careful they come at the mouth of the kiln, their tiny hands reaching to receive me. My flesh is strong enough now for me to wiggle out of my womb and into their expecting arms. I caress their pale faces, reach into the tangled skeins of their thoughts.
Alien, so alien they feel, with their tiny minds, two arms, two legs, two blind, outward facing eyes!
As they carry me through doors unopened, I can hear the shrill melodies of the Kamen-Chimes. What I once thought the sound of madness was now soothing music to my proverbial ears.
It’s that music that leads me to that sudden, serene realization: I am finally all I was meant to be - pure, whole, immaculate.
God.
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