Chapter 330 - Whom Gods Destroy, Uroboros, 23,000 Years Ago part 3

As spring melted into summer, during one of my lucid periods, I noticed some of the denizens of the Shol making a strange gesture whenever they passed in the avenue directly beneath me. They would pause and glance up at my decapitated head and then they would place the first and second fingers of their right hand to their brow and nod very discreetly. After this they would continue on as if they had not paused to genuflect in my direction. They never spoke or made any other signs, just shuffled away as inconspicuously as possible.

At first I thought I was imagining it, so starved was I for human interaction. So high up on the wall, I was effectively cut off from human contact, like a mortal prisoner in solitary confinement. Khronos no longer came to gloat over me, and the other blood drinkers, his minions, had long since ceased to taunt me. I had become, for all practical purposes, little more than an ornament—and I was not even the only one. Others had been decapitated and hung on the wall beside me as well, although I, being an Eternal, was the only one still living. My enemies had forgotten me.

I suppose it is sad that I missed their cruelty. At least I was being acknowledged when they taunted me or pelted me with rotten vegetables. I was so hungry for human contact that I immediately took note of the nod, even though it was a very subtle thing.

I wasn't sure what it meant at first. At first, I thought it a nod of respect, that they were paying homage to a being who had at least tried to defy their oppressors, even if he had failed spectacularly. Perhaps, I thought later, it was merely a gesture of sympathy. Look at that pitiful thing, still alive, hanging up there on the wall. Won't someone put him out of his misery?

I began to stay awake for longer periods of time, to resist the madness with more determination, searching the faces of the mortals who passed below, waiting for that clandestine gesture. And when it came, I responded to the gesture with a slow blink, which was really the only movement I was capable of, aside from wiggling my lips a little. I couldn't even open my mouth completely, as the pike that was shoved up beneath my jawbone partially blocked its movement.

Invariably, when I acknowledged their gesture, the mortal passersby would duck their heads between their shoulders and scurry away in a panic. It was obvious they were fearful of reprisal, but it was nearly a full cycle of the moon before I realized what their gesture actually meant.

"They have begun to worship you, Gon," Brulde said.

The voice came out of nowhere one afternoon, startling me from my ruminations.

It had come from my immediate left. I could not turn my head to look—I didn't have a neck and shoulders—so I strained my eyeballs as far to the side as I could manage… and there, clinging to the face of the city's protective wall, was my long lost companion, Brulde.

He had been made into an immortal, I saw. His skin was as white and smooth as moonstone. His hair, a mass of golden ringlets, scintillated around his face. His blue eyes gleamed like sapphires, and he had fangs, short thick sharp eyeteeth that showed between his parted lips. I had always thought him handsome but the Blood had transformed him into a god. He was Aos, Osiris, Attis, Adonis.

He clung moth-like to the wall, his body facing outwards, his hands and the soles of his feet bent so that they were in contact with the roughhewn stone. The wind blew through his golden hair, making his shining locks dance around his face. He was a cold, white, powerful Eternal.

Of course, I knew instantly that I was imagining him, that I had slipped once more into an interlude of madness.

Hallucination or not, I was thrilled to see him. It had been months since my imaginary father had visited me. "Brulde!" I cried out in my mind. If I had arms I would have embraced him. "Oh, Brulde, I'm so glad you came to see me!"

As with my father's visitation, Brulde heard my thoughts as if I had spoken them aloud, though he did not return my heartfelt greeting. Instead, he nodded to the mortals below us, his face grave, perhaps even a little reproachful. "Why do you pretend you do not hear them, E'hemann?" E'hemann was our people's word for husband. Brulde had rarely used the honorific when he was alive, only when he was speaking to me of something that he felt was very important.

"Hear them?" I cried indignantly. "Night and day I am battered by their voices! I hear their groaning and their screams, their pleading and their tears. Their suffering would drive me mad if I were not already mad from my own endless torments."

"You hear them praying, too, though you pretend that you do not."

"I hear them pray sometimes," I admitted, somewhat reluctantly.

"They pray to you, Divided God."

I shook my head. I knew it was true, but I did not wish to think about it. Each night, the prayers of the Shol's mortal denizens arose from the tenements like a swarm of locusts, driving me to distraction with their incessant buzzing until I could do ought but block them out of my awareness.

"No," I said.

Brulde stared at me.

"All right! Yes, I hear them!" I hissed. "But what can I do to help? The God King has defeated me. I have been divided, and the pieces of my body hidden unto the ends of the world. Even Khronos, by his own decree, does not know where his generals have hidden my body."

"You have many allies," Brulde said. "They will deliver you from Uroboros."

"So my father said," I replied, the words sounding petulant, even in my own imagination. "It hasn't happened yet."

"Listen to their prayers," Brulde said. "They do not pray to be rescued."

And with that enigmatic statement, he was gone, melting away like the morning mist vanishes in the daylight. I rolled my eyes around, desperately hoping he had merely moved, that he was still somewhere nearby, but he was gone. I wept bitterly then, cursing my fallen state, cursing my loneliness, cursing my foolishness and pride, cursing even my decision to defy the God King-- as if I, a single man, an immortal who had lived only a few thousand years, could hope to defeat a creature who was by then nearly twenty thousand years old!

And yet the tears passed quickly, like a sun shower, for Brulde had given me hope. It did not matter whether he was real or imagined, he had given me hope.

And he had given me a mystery to solve.

Listen to their prayers, he had said.

They do not pray to be rescued, he had said.

So what, I wondered, do they pray for?

So I listened to them. I lowered my mental barriers, the dam wall all immortals are forced to maintain in their minds. We put up that psychic barricade to filter out the chaos that our enhanced senses pour relentlessly into our minds. Without that mental shield, all that we can see and hear and smell and taste would drive us insane. An immortal learns to lower that barrier selectively, to let in only that which is of interest to us, and no more. But following Brulde's visitation, and his exhortation for me to listen to the prayers of the Shol's luckless denizens, I lowered my mental barriers completely and allowed myself to be inundated by the sum sensoria of the Shol's downtrodden inhabitants. 

Ancestors, it was terrible!

There has always been a part of me that has taken keen delight in human nastiness. Even when I was a mortal man, I was easily distracted by carnal pleasures. I could be entranced by the most venal odors, take great delight in acts that many would consider repulsive, eat until my guts were stuffed to bursting, fuck until my cock was raw and aching. Yes, I am a sentimental, sympathetic and moral creature, but I am also a self-indulgent sensualist. All human beings share this duality of high and low mindedness -- some more than others, obviously. It is a small but influential characteristic of my personality. It is probably my predilection for carnal pleasure, more than anything else, which is responsible for making me such a long-lived and successful vampire, for when I am overwhelmed by loss and loneliness, when the weight of those endless ages threatens to crush me flat, I can always retreat into mindless sensuality, distract myself from my pain with simple thoughtless pleasures. But the horrors of the Shol were almost too horrendous to cope with, even for me, insatiable hedonist that I was.

Death. Decay. Madness. Rape. Torture.

I was assaulted by all of it at once. It came rushing into my mind like the stormwinds of Hell, all the depravities that I had blocked from my awareness as I hung overlooking the bowels of the God King's depraved empire. Masses of human bodies lying corrupt and slowly dissolving in innumerable charnel pits. Smell of blood and rage and fear as mortal man killed mortal man. The cries of the raped for an end to their defilement. The threats of their rapists and their grunting sounds of pleasure. The screams of men slowly dying on the crucifixes that studded the city like a forest of failing flesh. The jollity of the immortals who patrolled the fetid avenues, administering the law of the God King, which was eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. All this and more. So much pain and fear and lust and hatred that my mind reeled, my will dissolved and I almost turned away from it again. Barricaded my mind. Retreated back into my dreams. Fled reeling into madness.

But I persevered. I paddled desperately in the floodwaters, barely keeping my head above water, and, slowly, timorously, I began to sort through the flotsam swirling in those churning torrents. I blocked out that which I did not find pertinent, closed my mind to the corruption and atrocities, and pursued the mystery that Brulde had brought to my attention.

In a tiny, dark, stinking hut, an old woman sang softly to a child. It was a song about me, Gon the Divided God. She sang of how I'd challenged the God King, and how the God King had taken me apart and hidden the pieces of my body in the darkest pits and the highest mountains and the deepest waters of the world, but someday soon (she sang to the child) the world would give up the pieces of my body, and the winds would carry them back to Uroboros, and I would rise, remade, and lead the people to their freedom

In the fighting rings where T'Sukuru pitted mortal men against one another in deadly combat, a gladiator bowed his head and said a prayer before stepping into the arena. "Please, Divided One, harden my club and my shield. Grant me the strength to defeat my opponents. And if I should fall in battle today, help me to find my way to the Land of Warm Days. In the name of All-Mother and All-Father, hear my prayers, Gon."

In a dank cave at the base of Fen'Dagher, where several of the Shol's inhabitants had gathered in secret, a wise woman spoke passionately of her prophetic dreams: that I would be restored, that I would lead the people of the Shol to rise up against the God King, that I would cast Khronos from his throne in the sky, that he would fall from the heavens and shatter to a thousand pieces at their feet, that they would be free, free at long last… free!

Her voice rose to a triumphant croak as she shouted that glorious word: "FREEEE!"

They did not pray to be rescued, I realized.

They prayed to be led!