I never know what to write, I just get signals, little tattle-tale rats of ideas who walk in, bust out a joint, and pass me a story. I never know what’s going to happen next, it just does. It’s like the weirdest fucking cosmic half-way house in my head sometimes, said the Authoress to the Sirian .

Somewhere, in some Universe:

“My fellow Americans,” said the President in her most reserved, sympathetic tone, “I speak to you now, not as a President, but as a citizen of this great nation in mourning. Today, November the eleventh, at three twenty-three in the morning, Los Angeles was attacked by a nuclear warhead. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost. Our nation is in a state of emergency, and I know you’re all asking: What are we going to do about it? At this time, our Intelligence cannot disclose a full report, although we suspect that operatives of the enemies of Freedom, Iran, were involved in the attack…

Somewhere in another Universe:

“My fellow Atlanteans,” said the Queen Regent in her most sincere, compassionate voice, “I speak to you now, not as Queen Regent, but as a citizen of this great continent in mourning. Today, eleventh of El-Viath, at twenty three minutes Terce, Lateraline time, Lo Sarkos was attacked by a nuclear warhead. Our empire is in a state of crisis, and I know what you’re all asking: What are we going to do about it? At this time, our Intelligence cannot disclose a full report, although we suspect that operatives of the enemies of Freedom, the Uupain-Inlik are involved…”

Medea Culpa laced up her boots.

“A witch must learn to control her mind,”
was the first thing the young girl heard as she woke on the Mountain, bloody and covered in ash. Ice for feet, hair for a blanket, no clothes to speak of, just a thin dress worn ragged over her fasting body. The Teacher appeared before her now more lucidly than in the past; no longer a shadow thing, the glowing orb pulsated and breathed above her like a thinking beam of light. The beam spoke again:

“All things through fire are perfected; in air they are manifest; in earth they die, and in water they are resurrected, and back in the forge they will burn. Do you understand what I mean when I say this is the first of many deaths? This is only the first fire, the physical fire. Your body must be burned to be strong, the sword masters know this as well as any magician. Your life is no longer your own; it has a purpose, just as a sword cuts the air and flesh of the living, your life will cut the ideas and minds of the dead, to make them know they are living. Wake up, child, there’s no time to waste.”

The light burned bright and then blinked out of existence forever. In thin the thin air of the morning on the Mountain, gasping, bruised, and beaten, the girl became a witch.

Death like a mindless thing

The witch remembered initiation like one remembers their first sex; the tension and anxiety before the ordeal, the madness, fear, and doubt throughout, explosions of the mind and self at last as with the realization that no death is greater than the death of ego. But, like sex, these initiations vary in their frequency, and some may come rather unexpectedly. She thought of this as she walked through the forest where the bodies of hundreds of thousands of crows lay rotting, rough blood coagulating around their burst eye sockets like dried pomegranate seeds.

The greatest shock was she hadn’t seen it coming. Since her first initiation, she’d lived alone by the forest, as instructed by her Teachers, and built a home from the wood of trees she’d asked permission to cut. Forests like this one came from one root; in essence, all trees were the same tree, as all waves belonged to the same ocean. Had she just lived too close to them? Was she growing old and deaf? Her body was strong and felt the same as it had at forty-five, and her mind sharp. She walked for miles into the woods every day to hear their poetry as she gathered herbs to treat the townswomen of certain inconveniences. For the children of the forest to suddenly swell and explode without forewarning, no dreams or signs of their death, was of great concern.

She gathered a pack together, strapped on her thick sandals and wrapped herself in a brown cloak. The sky was overcast and no one would dare go near the forest today. If they did, they’d likely suspect she was involved, a situation best avoided for the time being. The witch walked out her door and steadily climbed the path to the Mountain. Whatever dis-ease afflicted the forest, she would not know it by staying so close to a dying thing.

Most people think of worlds as floating, blue and green marbles orbiting a gravity halo around a center star. Indeed, many worlds exist this way. But what one forgets to remember is that according to the eccentricities of Quantum mechanics, these worlds also exist in many places at once. In reality, all worlds are lined up much like a city apartment building; each residing in its own space, yet all inhabiting approximately the same location. Some universes live on the 33rd floor, some in the basement. It’s a real bitch when the power goes out.

Medea Culpa drifted slowly back to sleep, her head in the gentle cusp of her lover’s shoulder. For now, all was right in her world, despite the appropriations of a crawling chaos in the heart of Atlantis that only oxcytocin and wine would numb.

At the same time, Mary Kelly swallowed two shots of tequila and poured a third; the election results had just come in: 49 to 51, and the next leader of the Free (that was a joke) world, John McJabulon, a puppet well known for his staunch ideals of a One World Militarized Zone, gave his acceptance speech. In it, he stated that recent intelligence reports showed strong evidence that the terrorist attacks on L.A. had been perpetrated by Iranian-backed terrorist organizations, and that the United States would respond with nuclear power.

At the same time, the Authoress took a very long hit of a very large water pipe filled with purple cannabis and salvia divninorum. The room swarmed with salvia sea creatures; half of them her friends, the other half, merpeople in bluejeans. Blue halos appeared over each of their heads, and a small green man seemed to be sitting on top of the dresser. When she looked him straight in the eye, he winked one giant black pupil, then disappeared. The room normalized. Fucking great pot, she thought. This is definitely going in the Novel, even though the discussion isn’t quite as surreal as I’d like. She normally didn’t party this far out, but her friend’s insistence on no less than 95 pounds of crawfish and nearly that amount in beer easily persuaded her. Even with rabid technology at the heart of America’s panic button, it took about twenty minutes longer for the information that the City of Angels was now a wasteland to reach the party house than it did everyone else.

(INRI: Igni Natura Renovata Integra, is variously translated as “All of nature is renewed by fire”, “Fire Renews Nature Completely”, or “through fire, nature is reborn whole”)

At the same time, on the eastern side of a mountain by the sea, a warlock studied the strange claw-like tentacles of a dead jellyfish washed up by a blood-red sea. His stomach growled with hunger, but the site was too disgusting to bear thought for food.

On the western side of the mountain, by the woods, a witch stepped outside her hut and looked forlornly at the bodies of ten thousand blackbirds. They looked to have hemorrhaged; blood crusted around each orifice, eyes just coagulations of brown scabs. The flies hadn’t even had time to swarm yet, but it was early.

And still, at the same time, the Sirian intelligence operative spoke to her commander through reverse-engineered Pleiadian transmitter technology:

“It seems things are getting away from us.” said the dog-like spy, who’d known about the attacks on L.A. for seven years. Every time she tried to say something, the Authoress would admonish her and bribe her with food.

“Xenu’s behind this, I know it,” said the Sirian Intelligence High Commander. If you can, get us a sample from the next reptilian you meet. Doesn’t have to be DNA; it can be a clothing item. A toe would be perfect. We need to see what their collective bio-consciousness is preparing for, and if we need to send reinforcements, we will.”

“Of course. I’ll alert you as soon as the reptiles reveal something.”

“You’re a good dog.”

“I know I am. Thank you, sir.”

And in all universes, the powerful ruling class smiled as a ripple cut them one more slice off the big cheese; people are most easily controlled when they believe their worlds may be torn apart.

As Atlantis twisted in its final days in one universe, sorcerers roamed the Congo stealing penises in another, and as all universes who shared real estate with the third rock from the sun in the spiral galaxy somewhere East of Eden shifted slowly into a paradigm of complete insanity, two relatively wild domesticated primates in yet another universe decided to do something about it. Enter the Dragons of the Sea.

Part I: The Warlock.

It started with the jellyfish. The warlock lived alone in a small house by the sea on the eastern side of the Mountain. For a man who looked to be in his sixties, but was, in fact, much older, he was strong and lithe as any of the young men in town. Every morning he swam alone in the ocean and caught his own fish, and made his living selling dried bits of sea creatures to the superstitious men in the town for problems of impotence and the like. He made beautiful mandalas and blessing scrolls from the crushed shells of certain creatures and plants, which he traded with the townspeople for fresh vegetables and bread, since he could only grow a small garden in the sand. He did not take on apprentices and the townspeople generally regarded him with cautious trust: as much a part of their livelihood as the red-shelled crabs they gathered from the beach; necessary, but dangerous if provoked.

One morning, he woke to a sharp pounding and shouts at his door. Unused to such activity before he’d had time to catch his breakfast and cleanse himself in the cool salt water, he grumpily arose and folded himself in a long gray robe.

“Our fish are dead! Our fish are dead! The gods are abandoning us! It’s the End of the Sea!” cried several frantic men outside.

The warlock rolled his eyes as he opened the door. Beyond the group of fishermen with wide eyes and panicked shouts, the beach font was soaked brown and crimson with ten thousand rotting fish. Sickly white pods bubbled up from the foaming ocean like peeled eyeballs staring blindly into the sky; jellyfish by the millions. The smell was so wretched he doubled over and vomited thin yellow bile into the bloody sand.

The sea moaned and hissed. He’d read of certain arcane gods whose lives were longer than the stars and who sleep deeply below the waves, waiting for the right time to awaken and devour the worlds. The Eaters, the Old Ones, the crawling chaos that lived below…but surely, this was not their doing. He hadn’t received any dreams or foreknowledge of their coming. Perhaps he was too close to the sea; perhaps it had hypnotized him with its swells and surges so that he now moved in time with it, like the moon and the creatures below the waves. How could he have not seen this coming?

The Authoress awoke on the couch from a night of strange dreams, induced primarily by the visual and sensory input of watching science fiction, a raucous electromagnetically-charged thunderstorm, and drinking a little too much cheap white wine.

In the first dream, she saw an older man and an older woman climbing opposite sides of a mountain that looked eerily familiar. They both wore brown monk robes and carried small brown bags over their shoulders. A hawk followed the woman about a hundred feet up, and a large cat followed the man. They both looked extremely sad yet extremely determined. Down below, in an idyllic little town by the ocean, whitewashed houses and boatyards and grocery stores were slowly being covered in a thick, white mist.

In the second dream, she was at the circus. A small red haired woman rode a lion through the three rings, gracefully hopping over the partitions as if she were riding a pony. Suddenly, there was an explosion. The circus tent caught on fire at one end, people ran screaming and panicked, including the Authoress, who was a participant in this dream. But the red-haired woman kept on riding the lion until she walked straight into the flame and disappeared. Soon after, black helicopters showed up and arrested everyone who said they saw the woman riding the lion as they were clearly suspects in the terrorist attack that had ravaged the circus. The Authoress did not get arrested, but saw that those who did were marked with a big yellow five-pointed star, hooded, cuffed, and marched into black vans.

In the third dream, the Authoress had a child. Her pregnancy and labor were very quick, as though she’d thought the child into her belly and then proceeded to give birth to it. She laid down on her couch and opened her legs and gently pushed, and a tiny human being came out. It was not like real labor, she knew, but at this point, the Authoress was very aware that she was dreaming. She held the tiny child, who was only about the size of her large long-fingered hands, and nursed it. The child had blue eyes and no hair whatsoever and looked somewhat like an alien, as most babies do. After it fed, it started talking. It said that her name was Sarah and that she’d really like some more food soon. The Authoress, amused, asked her how the hell she learned to talk and where she’d come from. The baby said, in confused but clear English, “I come from someplace very far away.”

“Like, over the ocean?” said the dreamer.

“No, like a galaxy far, far, away. It’s called teleportation, Mommy.”

And with that, the Authoress shook herself awake.

Little did she know that her roommate, the canine-bodied yellow-eyed “dog” who was really an intelligence operative from the planet behind the Dog Star Sirius had recorded these dreams and sent them back to her home planet for analysis. Most dreams were useless, but sometimes a sliver of information from a Universe next door would slip in. The Sirians were very interested in these kinds of dreams.

When she was eight, Mary Kelly also felt the hard sting of death and violence in her own backyard. At the time she didn’t yet realize that just 12,000 years and one universe away, another little girl knew the same thing, and that in all universes with Terra as a homing planet, women and children had born the brunt of revolution and death for time immemorial. She was playing with her best friend, a boy who lived two houses down in a small sunny neighborhood where nearly everyone had a basketball goal and ran around barefoot during the hot Texas summers. He was the son of a private investigator and former Marine, and by the time he was five he was already well on his way to becoming an Alpha Male. Mary liked Alpha Males because they were more adventuresome and often got her into trouble. What she didn’t realize was that she was well on her way to becoming an Alpha Female and that (unfortunately, there were no Wikipedia entries for this one, proving..) they were fewer and farther between than Alpha Males. Alpha Males in all herd-gathering societies generally treated Alpha Females with distrust, mostly because they were used to dealing with Submissive Males and Females whose opinions were more easily swayed.

This was the lesson she learned when she was eight:

“Adam! Look what fell out of the tree! I think it’s a mockingbird!” The tiny creature, wet and squirming, looked like an alien with its big hungry mouth and tiny eyes screaming for comfort.

“Ew, it’s probably got rabies!” said Adam, and smashed it with a stick.

The baby bird screamed even louder, and now the mother mockingbird furiously dove at the boy, who laughed nervously and ducked.

“NO!” cried Mary, heartbroken. She pushed Adam away and cupped the tiny, crushed creature in her hands. Blood and tiny intestines spilled out from its side, and she couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down her face and onto her shirt. “Why did you do that? Why would you hurt it? It wasn’t going to hurt you!” she sobbed, staring straight into Adam’s precocious eyes.

“It was going to die anyways.” He lowered his eyes finally, deflecting.

Mary took the bird inside and decided never to speak to Adam again. It died in a small shoe box lined with soft cloth, and she buried it under a rose bush in the back yard. She never told on him, just like she hadn’t told on him when he threw sand in her eyes, even though when she threw it back, he ran screaming and didn’t invite her over for two weeks. She never told anyone about the bird, but she knew right then that something was terribly wrong with the world, when someone so young could kill something so helpless without thinking twice about it.

She was eleven when she read a speech by Chief Seattle on the eve of his people’s slow destruction. When she was sixteen, she read the testimonies of slaughterhouse workers who killed chickens for a living, and curled up in a ball and cried hard for three hours straight, and never ate meat again. When she was seventeen, she learned in a late night confession that her closest girlfriend, whom she had known since she was four, had been brutally raped by her mother’s boyfriend the same year that Mary stopped talking to Adam. She also learned that many children disappeared each year and had been ritualistically raped or sold into war, and she suspected there was a connection between the madness of the world and the torture of a life. She suspected that something happened on a metaphysical level when a soul was broken by violence. She did not know that Adam, even conditioned as a maturing Alpha, had been brutally raped by his adopted father, and that this lead him to believe that life was suffering and that Alpha-ness was about taking what you can and asserting your masculinity at every chance you get.

This is what Mary Kelly learned when she was eight. And when she was twenty-three, she learned that all universes revolving around the planet Terra were experiencing the same sad stories. All things were connected, like in that Stephen King book she read, and there was a center to all worlds that once held fast, and now was crumbling. But she suspected that when Atlantis finally sunk once and for all, something of the truth would be saved.

Medea Culpa ran her fingers through the soft brown hair of the sleeping boy, feeling his dreaming mind curl under her hand like the waves that crashed against the shores of Canaan. His face twisted unpleasantly for a moment, then softened. Snoring, he dreamed of a great white whale rising out of his body and diving smoothly into a deep dark hole in the ground. A thin tremor of pleasure rose from her root as Medea remembered last night’s sweet diversion.

Life on the tiny island of Canaan at the outer edge of the Atlantean Archipelago was certainly about to get more interesting. The price of carbon-bionic fuel was rising steadily, which meant food and supplies ships were increasing their prices to haul to the tiny island, which produced only 10% of its own food. The newly elected Queen Regent Hillarious Clintori of Atlantis had threatened nuclear attack on the people of Atum if they fired on the Ishmaelites, whom Atlantis considered not just allies, but the sacred sons of the Gods. The Gods, it was commonly believed, appeared suddenly thousands of years ago, made the Ishmaelites and a few other tribes, left them with explicit instructions not to kill or rape each other and to generally act like civil human beings, and then disappeared, only to be seen by the occasional woman or child who was ‘touched’ or by the rabid dreams of Lotus-eating madmen.

The alliance between the Ishmaelites and the Atlanteans had dubious origins according to a very few fringe radicals. They called themselves The Verac, which meant “Those who long for the Truth” in Atlantean. When Media was 8, a group of Verac organized at her mother’s farm in Canaan, holding meetings and organizing boycotts and peaceful protests. But they had since been driven off the island by men with pitchforks and burning crosses who believed that Atlantis was the supreme measure of civil harmony and that any dissonant voices should be wiped off the face of the planet. Medea’s mother’s farm was burnt and Medea’s cat, Felix, mutilated by the counter-protesters. Even at 8 years old, Medea swore to Felix that she would quietly do everything in her power to destroy the type of thinking that caused such senseless death, starting with herself. Her childhood had been trying, indeed.

The alliance of Ismael and Atlantis was deemed entirely logical by the rest of the ruling elite and many of the citizens of Atlantis, who didn’t really even know where Ishmael was. And who never cared to think that in the history of the alliance, not a year had gone by in which the Ishmaelites had not fired on someone with the weapons provided by Atlantean extra-Intelligence operatives. Most Atlanteans did not notice these sorts of deep political eccentricities, as they were largely concerned with amusing themselves. Very few ever even entertained the notion that ritual and black magick played a very big role in the political, economic, and military negotiations that went on behind closed doors. Even fewer briefly entertained the radical notion that the gods who had supposedly left a long time ago were still around and were regularly attending meetings behind those same closed doors.

At twenty-three, Medea did entertain such notions. She entertained them on a daily basis, and liked to believe that she was well on her way to becoming a small, quiet thorn in the side of the massive dragon death cult that secretly ruled Atlantis.