Friday, October 31, 2014

Daughter of the Zoars

Daughter of the Zoars
by
Bobby Derie

They were the ancient people known as the Zoars, who had seen the first Romans come to their lonely hills, and who had watched the last Romans depart with the same patient look. Men of other races called them shepherds, for such was the English term for what the men of that pastoral people called themselves, but a more literal translation would be "sheep pimp."

The Zoars were never alone in their pasturage, for they had neighbors from other tribes, whom they seldom fought with openly, but stole upon their flocks by night and made much mischief - feeding the females herbs to cause them to miscarry or foul the milk, gelding the males, or just hamstringing the animals and leaving poor lame things to cry in distant pastures. It was a long war against such neighbors, and in time the other tribes would tend to move on, leaving the Zoars be once again for a space, until the next invaders came.

Zoar sheep, too, were a breed apart, and some whispered they were more akin to goats, and all knew they were vile-tempered and prone to forms of hereditary madness. The Zoar knew no difference between their flock and their family, and the men called themselves rams and their wives were ewes, and they drew no distinction between their children and their flocks, but would buy and sell and trade them all to one another openly and evenly. In the days before the Romans it is even said they made no discernment of what meat was in the pot, and a taste for veal ran throughout the whole nation, but of such rumors not much has come since the shadow of the Cross fell across the land...nor would the Zoar have long survived if such legends had proliferated long.

The families of the Zoar, then, are harsh and domineering; the children learn their place quickly, and grow up sullen and mean and crafty, which traits the Zoar pride themselves in, within their own strange way. Cruelty is common among the elders, and they brook no disobedience while they have strength to enforce their will, so rare is the Zoar that does not achieve adulthood without the mark of the whip or the lash, and aye even of the sword and the burning brand. Yet none run away, for the Zoars live in a lonely country, and all their neighbors know better than to take in those tainted children - for the Zoars will come after them, in the night, as sure as a shepherd hunts for the lost and lonely lamb.

So it is that among the daughters of the Zoar it is not beauty that is most highly esteemed, nor even creulty and craftiness, but a sort of brutal will that can stop a charging ram with a glance. The mothers teach their daughters the way of the knife from as soon as their teeth come in, and mix blood with their milk. Their are girls of twelve who have cut a hundred throats of sheep and chickens, and will broaden the smile of any man that lets down their guard for a moment. No true Zoar girl, they say, is ever without the little curve-bladed knife in her belt, or a stone or strap to sharpen it; and they whisper too that no daughter of the Zoar carries but a single knife, though stories differ as to when and how they carry their secret blades, and what shapes and materials they consist of. Perhaps the Zoar women spread these tales themselves, to frighten their menfolk; if so, it does not always work, for the Zoar boys grow up ugly of temper and quick to split a lip or gouge an eye or aim a cruel kick, and the weaker the target, all the better.

Yet among themselves, the heroes of the Zoar are always the daughters, who carry the blood of the race, and in their boundless and bloody cruelty out-bastard a nation of bastards. The stories are told at night, when the dark and cold has forced man and sheep together around hearths in rare community; the tales of The Gelder of Kings, The Gruesome Necklace, The Bloody Mouth Below, and ever and again the stories of Azoar, mother of the race; her father was a god who seduced her mother in the shape of a ram, and she was born with the appetites of a god, and preferred the company of her four-legged half-brothers in the fields to human contact. Six marriages in turn were prepared for Azoar by her family, and each one she ended in bloody and brutal fashion, through knife and noose and poison and lies, destroying both suitor and the family member who had arranged the joining, until at last there was no-one of her family or clan to contain her, and she left with all their sheep and her six children - the parents of the present Zoar race.

So it is whispered, they say, among the campfires of the Zoars, and which they might tell to travelers if caught skulking around campfires, and badly outnumbered, but how much may be lies and how much may be truth, it is impossible to say.

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Friday, October 24, 2014

The Maiden Dracula

The Maiden Dracula
by
Bobby Derie

"There have been so many that carried the name Dracula," the old woman said, running one thin hand over the leather-bound spines, some worn so thin in places that bits of the bone and vellum beneath shone through, "It was a mark of respect, you see. For those that were so terrible in life, they seemed the fingers of the devil in this world. Vlad Dracul is merely the most famous...but far from the only one, or even the worst."

She smiled, showing the gaps where her canine teeth used to be.

"One of the worst was, perhaps, the Maiden Dracula - of no relation to the Order of the Dragon; indeed, she was born in Moravian Wallachia, in a hamlet which gave eggs and horse feed to the town of Valašské Meziříčí. They say she was the only daughter of a rough-faced farmer whose wife and died, and when she came of age she did all the chores of son and daughter for him - slaughtering pigs and chickens, handling the horse, bringing in the grain, all by herself. Perhaps that is when the rumors started, for she was a pretty thing when she came of age, and he would shy all the men and boys away that might have thought to marry her. So she was called the Maiden; and no other name but one has survived the centuries."

The smile vanished, and she fidgeted at her belt, where a plain knife with a wooden handle was tucked.

"Of course, there is more than what the stories say. You can only imagine yourself what it must have been like for the girl and father alone, how the townsfolk might have whispered - and there is another legend that says one day a man came into Valašské Meziříčí after a terrible accident on the farm, and that he had somehow gelded himself while sharpening a scythe. A terrible story, but farmers do tend to lose pieces of themselves...especially if they do not pay close attention to where they are in relation to other things."

She took the knife out, which slide from the sheath with the soft sound of steel on leather, and used the point of the blade to clean beneath her nails.

"The Turk was largely gone from Wallachia at that point, but as with all retreating armies they had left bastards - and these who remained behind had formed a band of brigands who struck where they could, stealing food and clothing and horses, sometimes women and young boys when the opportunity availed them. It was a small band, of perhaps thirteen men - though some stories say thirty-seven, and others fifty-one. It doesn't really matter, I suppose. But one cold winter the hamlet and town were sore oppressed by the brigands, who grey bolder and bolder, though they struck only by night. Still might they have lived another winter, except that in one daring raid, they broke into her farm, and stole the meat from their smoke-house."

Now she smiled again, and took out a soft cloth to clean the blade, which had a little device worked into the hilt of curious design - like a Celtic knot woven into a skull.

"The Maiden decided then and there that would be the end of the Turkish bastards. So she went into town - here the stories differ; some say she asked for volunteers from the women who had been mishandled by the brigands, others say she went to the town whores and bought them all for a day and a night - but she had three or five or seven women with her, and she led them to where a trail came down from the hills to the main road, and here everyone knew was the path that the brigands took when they came down to do their thieving."

"Now this night was no different, save that the women had lit a good-sized fire and laid out blankets, and when the brigands came down as thieves they found the women warm and waiting, saying how they had missed them and desired to know them again - and so what followed was an orgy of sorts, as each of the women lay with several of the brigands in turn, an event that has formed a curious folk-memory well-remembered in the annals of erotica, though the rest of the events are forgotten."

"Because when each brigand was finished and exhausted, and staggered away to sleep or piss, the Maiden came up with her knife and cut their throats; and with that same knife she gelded them exactly as she might a horse or a hog. So when the next day the four or six or eight women came back into town, disheveled and exhausted and hardly able to walk straight, they were led by the maiden, who had washed the blood from her hands in the snow, and carrying her skirt in her hands as though she had been gathering berries. She told the townsfolk the brigands would trouble them no more."

The old woman replaced the knife in her belt, and fiddled with the necklace of wooden balls around her neck, which at first could be mistaken for a rosary.

"As proof, she let loose her skirt, and the prizes she had taken from the brigand full onto the snowy ground like chestnuts. And that is why she first was called the Maiden Dracula, and that no man would try to marry her after that, so she died a virgin."

She ran her hands once more over the ancient volumes on the shelf.

"Of course, that is just the beginning. I did say she was one of the worst, did I not? Perhaps that is when they first called her Dracula, but it is only the beginning of how she earned the name..."

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Friday, October 17, 2014

Thursday at the Soul Market

Thursday at the Soul Market
by
Bobby Derie

"You don't understand," the priest said, his voice dry and old, "Lucifer is an angel of the lord, once among the greatest of them, and under his command a third of the host of Heaven. He will fight to protect this world from these strange demons. He will lay waste those pretenders, these old gods from worlds beyond our reckoning. There will be battle, and their fabulous blood will rain from the sky, and their broken bodies cast into the abyss. All this he will do because he knows that this world...and everything in it...is his. He can do nothing else; it is his nature. Not to bow, not to scrape, never to bend knee or surrender or seek forgiveness, never to relinquish his position or property. He is the rock against which the old ones shall break themselves. The tragedy - the joke - the terror of it all is, he could be nothing else. It is how he was made. It is his purpose. Someone must be the devil, and in his charge is the world entire. Any lesser being could not do what must be done."
Then he fell silent for a time. A long time. Perhaps he dozed, but Mariah thought not. She dropped some change into his cup and stepped over the tired old man in his soiled vestments.

The soul market was held on Thursdays, in one of the old squares of the East Village. Buyers and sellers would set up their tables in the hour before dawn, if they had them, or lay out a blanket. A few of the upmarket brokers kept stalls on the north end, with steel shutters with seven locks they would close down at the end of the day, but they were few and select, and tended to deal in volume rather than cash-on-hand.

Mariah shivered as she watched the quiet activity. There were other people waiting, like her. A business woman in heels smoked, one hand over a too-obvious bulge in her midriff. A young man with a bass strapped to his back and ripped jeans. A big burly man like a linebacker gone to seed, sitting on a portable stool, a child's coffin on his lap. Two teenagers that at first glance looked like Hot Topic goths, but the details were wrong - their jewelry was real silver, patina'd with age, the jeans ripped from age, the ribs showing from hunger, bright scars beneath the elbow-length fishnet gloves.

One old man - he had a wooden stall, on a cart, which had been painted by hand. He set it up in a corner with all the patience and surety as if that space would still be waiting there a century from now. He was short, perhaps a couple inches over five feet, and his green hat was a shapeless mass that concealed his head except a fringe of curly grey hair; his brown leather jacket was carefully patched, and there were pipe stains on his suit pants, but his glasses were new, and his shoes shined.

"Excuse me...sir?"

"Just a moment miss," he said, as he unfolded the front of the stall like a magic box, revealing the counter and the green slate with the prices listed in white chalk. "There we are now. What can I help you with?"

"I...where are the demons?"

He smiled at her, not unkindly she thought, though he was missing both canines.

"Angels, miss. The d-word is a term of art, here, and not one you want to misuse. But you're wondering about the brokers." He waved a hand at the other shopkeeps, some of whom were talking to a gentleman in a suit, pointing to their cardsweeps. The old man frowned at the commotion. "Must be an issue with the wifi. This used to be a cash and carry business, you know." He flashed her that incomplete grin once again.

"As for the angels...there are a few, if you look about, but they're not the only ones on the market. They tend to come later in the day - something about the time change. No, most of us here are only human." He clicked his teeth as Mariah nodded. "Or, perhaps something less."

"Now then - I don't suppose you're a reporter?"

"N-no." She swallowed. "I came to...well, a friend told me..."

"Buying or selling?" He said calmly.

"Selling." She said too quickly.

"Well, let's chat." He said, pushing his glasses up on his nose. "And perhaps we can do business."

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Friday, October 10, 2014

Gather Round, Children

Gather Round, Children
by
Bobby Derie

...and listen well to the scripture, for it has been written for you and for many, to be kept and told and read unto others, so that all may know the one truth. Within the secret history espoused and hinted at by those who think they see the shape of history, there are two narratives. The first is that of the inhuman, alien life and intelligences - the things that came down from the stars, or crawled up from earthheart, or were always and became incarnate for a time and will be again, or those who came forth from the times beyond our knowing...and as strange and powerful as they may be to us, in this place, in our time, when our seven billion strong infection spreads over the earth these past ten thousand years, we have raised our heads and seen the shape of their passing and knew we were not alone. That they who had come before or would come or who had been and will be again had also been to this place, this insignificant rock in the teeming cosmos, and raised up their cities and their monuments, had their kingdoms and their nations, to rule over new continents and young lands, to shape and populate and guide the world and its thing - how they had their day, before humanity, and how some of them still dwell in darkness and hidden places, and will rise again after the brief interval of man.

So it is written, and so it is said.

Humanity is the second narrative - the hidden reign of human civilization, in some form or fashion, going back far beyond the dim recesses of memory, almost all traces of them obliterated by time. Before Egypt and Sumer and Çatalhöyük were ages of man fallen into obscure and occult legend: Mnar and Doomed Sarnath, Hyperborea and Mu and Muria, the Worms of the Earth and the shadowy kingdoms of Atlantis and Valusia - and others, so many others, fallen and forgotten, their knowledge and histories lost to all save the Great Race, and in the dreams of those sleeping giants they worshipped and glorified. Many people there were, lost tribes who perished upon the earth to disease or disaster or lessons yet unlearned, and nothing remains of their people, nor of their simple wisdom, for words cannot echo forever unless carved in stone or in living hearts and voices. So too there were our cousins, those near-human peoples whom we once warred and married and competed against, and some small part of their blood we carry with us, but when the last Neanderthal and the last Devonian died, I think someone sat at their side and was troubled by the vast emptiness left in their wake, for we of our species knew we were alone. Yet even if their legacies are mainly gone, in the strange dusty corners of the planet there are still...relics. Artifacts of ancient humanity, or proto-humanity, which may remind us of how close at hand our mysteries are, how little we who would plunder the lore of Cthulhu and Tsathoggua can recall of our own dark sciences...and what we may yet regain.

So it is written, and so it is said.

Now we live in wait of the third narrative, the blank sheet we must write for ourselves. For whatever is written of us is known only to the Great Race, and mayhap in strange aeons there are barriers even to their own knowledge, and limitations to their strange survivals. For while we know that ours is to be an ending, we do not yet know the nature of that end, or to what purpose we can turn it. It is to us, my children, to decide what we shall become - shall we render ourselves unbodied as the Great Race, and while away the centuries as slow time travelers, minds eternal searching the universe? Or shall we arrest the great foe, and conquer the limitations of our forms, to become ageless within ourselves, fully encapsulated in the flesh and free from concerns of years and disease, so that we gradually strip ourselves of all the dross and taboos of our cultures? Perhaps we shall remain more as we are, but the definition of ourselves will change; with struggle and determination we may find new modes of existence that would be alien to those who had known us before, colony organisms, line marriages, rough beasts that suckle and hunt again, castratos that hasten the end of ourselves and our madness. We may reach out to the stars, and the depths of the ocean. Our seed may build mountains, and the mountains may breed cities, and the cities may choke the oceans with their filth and blacken the skies; we may run wild through the new forests that grow on the forgotten cities again, and our far children so strange that we are as forgotten as the folk that came before. All this we know, and it is our duty now to write...

For so it is to be written, and so it is to be said.

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Friday, October 3, 2014

Final Reich: I

Final Reich
by
Bobby Derie

The wunderwaffe slowed to a crawl, finally coming to a stuttering, lurching halt, the engine of the modified landkreuzer disintegrating, leaving behind a trail of oily shards of metal for several meters. The hatch popped open, and a pale form pulled himself free, sucking air in. Hauptmann Meinhard Muller, last of the Panzerabteilung, looked around at what should - if the calculations had been correct - should have been Berlin.

It was a graveyard of greatness. The skeletal frames of flying wings lay beached in neat rows where their pilots had touched down and abandoned them. Great walkers lay on their side or in roost positions, some turned over with their legs dangling comically in the air, their operators crushed and trapped beneath them. Along the shore of the river a massive unterzeeboat had rolled over on its side, covering the shore with a black film of oil. Over and beyond the wunderwaffe were more sane vehicles - trucks and tanks, bicycles and motorcycles, great mounds of horse skeletons stripped of meat and covered with flies, the frames of zeppelins and Junkers and Messerschmitts. Everywhere and on all of it, Meinhard could see the swastikas, the emblems and designations of the armed forces. Piled high and spread out across the landscape, the great ruined war gear of the Reich.

"Willkommen," a voice with an Austrian accent called to him, and Muller turned around to see a man not ten yards away, clambering on a path that wended past two great trucks stamped with deaths-heads. He recognized the uniform of the SS that the man was wearing, right down to the bright red sash around his arm, though curiously he wore no insignia of rank and had obviously been unshaven for days.

"Hello?" Muller replied.

"You are new, yes? We heard you arrive!" The SS man said. He was thin, Manfred saw, with a gray pallor to his skin, dark hair starting to thin, and red-rimmed eyes.

"I have just arrived, yes." Muller said slowly as he exited the tank, dropping easily to the ground - and almost tripping as his boot crushed through a child's skull. "But where am I, exactly? I was told they were sending me to Berlin - for the final battle."

The SS man smiled. "The final battle, yes. You are in Berlin, hauptmann - the New Berlin! The staging ground for the Reich. But you must be tired from your journey, yes. Come with me."

The SS man turned to walk back down the path, and somewhat reluctantly Muller followed. The thought flashed through his mind briefly that this could be a trap - some deception of the Russians as they encircled the city to capture forces intent on its liberation - but as he followed the SS man with the strange accent, new thoughts quickly pushed the suspicion from his mind. The path took him past weapons and vehicles that Muller had never even seen - or heard of. There were great rockets, teetering at alarming angles, some over a dozen meters tall, and the leering, crude forms of giant metal men, their hands no more than crude clamps. Laying in a row along one bend were sixteen corpses, each of whom had had their arm, and part of their head surgically removed, replaced with steel limbs and rusted skull-caps, some with steel teeth and glass eyes that seemed to stare at Muller as he hurried past.

It was the dragon that caused Muller to stop in his tracks, though, and the SS man had to backtrack a ways.

The great reptile lay stretched out upon the ground, its wings - its wingspan must have put a Messerschmitt to shame - were shredded, and fifty-caliber holes had been chewed into the heavy scales on its sides. A blackened tongue lolled from the evil, gaping mouth, where the ivory teeth had already been harvested. It was a thing of madness, a Wagnerian nightmare in desiccated, reptilian reality - and on its pale belly was tattooed its Luftwaffe designation.

"Come alone, hauptmann," the SS man said, plucking at his sleeve. "You have seen nothing, as of yet."

"Is this hell?" Muller asked, still staring black swastika-rune on its belly. "How can such things be?"

"If this is hell," the SS man said, "then it is one where we are masters. You will soon learn that many things you thought impossible - the things of myth and propaganda, scientifiction and mad rumor - are concrete fact. That our science and our faith have been rewarded with marvels. It is a challenge, I know. I too had to see it with my own eyes, and did not first understand. But you must know you are a part of the great work we do here. You have left behind the world that you know, your Berlin burns, her women raped by the Russians or whoring themselves out to the Americans for safety, the Fuhrer in his bunker...it is too late for that world. Far, far too late. The old Reich is dead. Now, hauptmann, you have been called to serve the Final Reich..."

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