Slumrat Rising

Vol. 5 Chap. 66 A Case Of Mistaken Identity

There had been too much horror. Too much suffering. The inevitable crushing down on him as it did on everyone else. Truth had the means to do something about it. Just a little bit. Just in this one place, at this one moment. In a random corner of what was once the greatest city in the world, in a mostly forgotten children’s playground, he would make an island of hope.

You couldn’t fit many people in such a tiny playground. No doubt forces and powers he didn’t approve of would discover it and claim it. He couldn’t prevent that. But he could bring at least a little light, and hope, and life into the world.

Truth could bet on hope. He could stand the loss if he was wrong, so why not try and see if he could get lucky?

Truth combined all the layers of magic in his soul and every scrap of his understanding of the world and cast a singular spell. A spell called Truth. It was a bit janky. Definitely a work in progress. But as a first effort, the results were… spectacular.

The sun had set on Harban. The shadows swarmed in, filling the alleys and ruins. Filling the minds of the people who lived in the toppling towers. The shadows swallowed up the city. Except for one little playground. A place with no name, marked on no maps, occasionally maintained by the absentee landlord corporation that ran the nearby apartment buildings. That one strange place was drowning in sunlight.

Truth wasn’t seeing the playground anymore. His mind had been wrenched somewhere else. He was pulled up and away from the world, seeing the blue planet shrink beneath him, then suddenly transform into an impossibly vast angel- a being of infinite angles and endless meanings. Then it was the planet again, then the angel, then the images superimposed and he could see that the world was the angel- all the oceans and continents were just traceries of the endless complexity of that great being.

He was falling forward. Falling in towards something. Towards the sun. He very quickly learned what the word ‘immense’ truly ment. The planet was a speck. The sun was… everything. Everything. Boiling gas and fire, the meanings of obliteration and life and death and eternity. Of fierce pride. Overwhelming, terrible pride. Within the blinding light of the sun, different forms began to appear.

The first amongst them was the sun itself- not merely a collection of boiling gasses, but the very essence of that yellow disk in the sky. Perfectly round. Infinitely mighty. Not God, but modeled upon that universal perfection. Infinite in all ways, endless power, endless endurance, the beginning and end of all things, most particularly life. It was indifferent to anything external to itself, because it was perfectly self-sufficient. Heat, light and life were merely emmanations caused by its existence. They certainly weren’t gifts. They were the breath it exhaled, consumed by hungry trees.

Then it shifted, and Truth was confronted by a seven-headed snake. Truth had always thought he liked snakes. At least, since he learned Incisive he had always thought he liked snakes. He didn’t like this one. Or this… seven. He wasn’t quite sure how to figure it.

The seven-headed snake saw him. It saw everything. It saw every speck of dust it’s light touched. It saw every human that reached up to thank it for its blessings of light, and every fish that died flopping on the shore, scales shining and dancing as it choked to death. It saw it all, and it didn’t care. To the extent that it did care, it accepted the worship as it’s due, and the suffering of others as amusement.

Prideful. The serpent in the sun was prideful. Where Botis was reserved and watchful, the seven-headed snake demanded to be watched. It demanded love and fear, but offering none of its own. It had the capital to be demanding. The serpent was powerful. Dreadfully, nightmarishly, powerful.

Botis was subtle. The Sun-Serpent was blunt. Botis was cautious. The Sun-Serpent was brash. Botis ensured he had no enemies. The Sun-Serpent had no enemies either. Not anymore. It wasn’t a real snake as Truth had come to understand the word. It was a monster mocking the shape of a snake. But why? Why seven heads? Why not be a giant snake?

Hunger. That was all he could think of. The sun gave endlessly, but it came with a dreadful apatite. The sun was certainly eating something. Truth had no idea what it could be, but was afraid. Why is it always monstrous serpents? The statue in the Ghul nest, this, Botis, so many others in the Goetia. What is it about snakes? Are they the real chosen species?

Then the Seven-Headed Snake was gone, and in its place was the Rough Patron.

Truth couldn’t tear his eyes away. It was clearly the Rough Patron, but not the Rough Patron he knew. This being had thick brows over a brutal face. The eyes were filled with resentment. All humor was gone. There was only obsession, jealousy. Spite. His body was sprayed with blood already drying to black, though his hands still dripped a fresh red. Sharply defined muscles, yes, but in the way that starving men are sharply muscled. No fat to smooth out the edges.

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Truth couldn’t look away from the eyes. The layers of emotion in those eyes made him struggle to breathe. Obsession. Outrage. Hunger. Was there loneliness there too? Something that he had never picked up during their meetings- insecurity. The Rough Patron, or this version of the Rough Patron, was screaming out for something. Some sign or trace of affection.

Was the story Susan told him true? Once upon a time, two humans were created, and they had three sons. One died young. Truth was going to guess it wasn’t because of a fever. One child was the Rough Patron who’s descendants, maybe voluntarily, maybe not, had sex with angels. And the third son? Just skated on all of that. Life’s tragedies just seemed to whiff past him.

Imagine there were only five people in the world. Double that, maybe, to give the boys someone to breed with, but for the sake of narrative, you had two parents, three kids, and one overbearing grandparent. Do mummy and daddy love their kids equally? Or do they play favorites? How about Grandpa? What would it feel like to get frozen out by the only people in existence?

Of course the first two humans were lousy parents. They had no idea how to raise a kid. They had no examples to follow. It must have been alien and terrifying to them. This strange thing growing inside her belly, kicking her, weakening her. How could she know what to do? The angels would never have seen this before either. Even if “God” knew how this was supposed to work, he had never seen it before. Never witnessed the miracle created by his creation.

And the climax of that blood and pain and horror was a tiny human. Other animals learned to walk in minutes. Not this baby. It was blind, helpless, smelly, covered in blood. It wouldn’t have seemed like a miracle- it would have seemed like a curse. A horror inexplicably inflicted on the first woman, then a burden placed on both husband and wife. They would have to feed three, now, and the child hadn’t yet invented farming.

How much resentment would there be for this first child? How much awkwardness and coldness? They would know better for the second, and by the third it would all be ‘normal.’ To say nothing of any daughters they must have had, and he wasn’t going to think about that one too much. The Rough Patron had to take the lumps for his sibs, he had to suffer so that when his parents got around to the others, they could do a better job raising them. But unlike Truth, the Rough Patron didn’t have that instinct to protect his juniors.

Truth didn’t know what the age gap was, but… at least nine months, right? A year? Two? More? Enough time to see, very clearly, who the favored child was. To feel the coldness of neglect. Enough times for the embers of resentment to blaze into a bonfire.

But why the sun? How did the Rough Patron go from that damaged, hateful man to the sun?

Truth hung in that frozen moment, in that place between heaven and earth, and tried to understand. How do you go from the first murderer, to the sun? How does that work? Because he wasn’t the ‘Father’ of all humans.

Or… was he?

Not literally, of course. Sethians, that’s what Susan had called them. But didn’t human civilization rely on the things the Rough Patron made? Agriculture, metalworking, city building?

The first two people lived like animals in the woods, hunting and foraging to survive. The Rough Patron built.

The Rough Patron looked at the world and said “I can’t accept how things are, but I can work with this. I can use the world to my advantage. Crops will come in as regularly as I can manage. You will have tools, reliable, long lasting tools. You will have the time and space to make art and science and argue about the nature of Virtue. And it won’t be remotely fair, or kind. Some of you will suffer horribly for this. But that’s how the world is. Some people are just born blessed, and some people get shit on for no reason. Don’t like it? Do something about it.”

He was the one who brought light to the world, the light of civilization. Of prosperity for some, built on the suffering of others. His whole lineage was despised… but didn’t we follow in his footsteps? Who was worse- the man who committed the crimes, or the people who did the same damn things while patting themselves on the back and saying how good they were?

Truth wanted to laugh, hanging in that shattering void. He was overthinking it. Why was the Rough Patron also the sun? Because he was the first victim of parental neglect, which apparently turned into violence, for which he was blamed and punished. Then his kids were violent pricks, and they taught others to be violent pricks, and they eventually gave birth to the Nephilim who apparently built their entire culture around being violent pricks. He was the sun, because like the sun, the cycle of violence and abuse is omnipresent, inescapable, and its victims understand everything by its light.

Every single person who ever lived was part of that cycle. Carrying that trauma, generation after generation. Literally from the first human born onward. An entire species defined by trauma.

What is a human? A dangerous question, when asked in the wrong place. For example, could a human state that, regardless of how the planet felt and the sun felt, one specific spot on the planet would always be bathed in cosmic rays? That seemed like a bold declaration.

The Rough Patron looked over at him. Truth knew that, while this wasn’t the Rough Patron he knew, this ancient knew him. He knew that every speck of him was seen through. That nothing this sun’s rays touched was overlooked.

YOU SHOULD HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT WHERE YOU WERE STANDING.

The light flowed down on him, pouring over him like water and fire. He didn’t know light could hurt, that it could hammer at you. There were poisons hidden in that light, specks of it that were faster and more cruel than others. Those tried to burrow into him, burn little holes through his skin to rot and destroy from within.

Truth tried to wrap himself in his body cultivation but this was practically a joke. Matching his tiny power against the very sun itself? He was overwhelmed, smashed back into his body and into that nothing, nowhere playground. A place that, despite the gloom filling the rest of Harban, was now basking in sunshine.