I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
Some of their questions are answered, but before he can digest any of it the world dissolves again, changes, and Sleaze is made to bear witness. It’s piecemeal – the land, healed and then disintegrating again, ravens with strings of flesh hanging grotesquely from their beaks, children playing in their stolen moments.
These scattershot images spin away again, replaced by another. Two children, playing, while the ocean churns as fervently as Sleaze’s heart, because even before it happens, he can feel the dread of it, the axis of peace shifting. For why else would they be here?
He watches – he must watch, he must bear witness – as it plays out, a stupid accident, no one’s fault, and his heart hurts at it. He wants desperately to turn away, but he doesn’t. He watches the Stratosians land, listens to the wails of grief fill the air, knowing this is unchangeable—
And then—
And then maybe it isn’t. The rest of the group fade away, and something shifts again. He is corporeal now, able to be seen by the grieving parents, and immediately he feels ill. What is he meant to do? He cannot offer solace, nothing that would offer real healing. He could try to tell them what he’d seen, that it had been a series of unfortunate events but nothing malicious; certainly nothing worth the years of war and loss of life that will come after.
He feels the weight of their eyes on him. He is winged, too, but clearly lacks the traits of the Stratosians. He is unlike both groups, instead simply a single strange being, dark purple and too old for this, a man of too many worlds, worlds that have left him half-mad and—
And monstrous.
He’s felt it ever since he went to that nightmare realm in the clouds, the shadow-thing inside him. How it claws at the surface, sometimes. Begs to be let out.
He thinks. They are still looking at him.
(An aside –
His father knew guilt as well as he knew any lover. Some of the guilt was well-earned – his father was not without a host of sins – but some of it was not, some of it was assumed merely because Garbage has a predilection for it. It was easy, to fall on these swords, even those that were not meant to wound him.
Maybe some things run in the family.)
They are quick to blame. He knows this, he saw as much in the story the sprites showed him.
Could he give them something better to blame?
A monster, perhaps?
He closes his eyes and calls to that monster. It comes eager, the shadow-thing he was cursed with, shifting his body. His body shifts from its solidity into something more transparent, yet still thick, oily- a shadow-smog creature, strange and terrible. He draws himself up, thinks of the monsters he’s known in the past (and there have been many).
He can fall on this sword. He can eat this sin.
He steps toward them. He can smell the blood and early rot of the children’s bodies. He feels sick, but his features are amorphous, swallowed in the shadowy horror his body has become.
“I killed them,” he snarls, and he doesn’t let his voice shake, for he is a monster, is he not?
“They came to my cave, they bothered me, so I killed them.”
It’s a weak story – he is not a good liar – but he hopes they’re too busy looking at his horrific form to pay too much attention to the words, to bother with the logic of his story. He will be their scapegoat, their bogeyman.
He is aware, faintly, that they may come for him, for this. And he would fall, quickly, under their hooves. Would he wake up, then, back in Beqanna? Or never again?
It is worth it, he thinks, trying to convince himself, trying to be brave, to do this for them, it will be worth it.
If they believe him.
If.
Sleaze
