Author: Koi Lung Fish
Disclaimer: Based on characters and situations from Final Fantasy VII (© 1997, 1998 Square Co., Ltd). Used without permission. Text © 2001, Koi Lung Fish (Mark of Lung. All Rights Reserved.)
Subject: A character vignette on Vincent and the nature of his condition.
Once, fear hid in the dark, a shiftless thing of fur and fang and show-rib hunger, draped in shapes that spawned deep in cowering minds. Then one man gathered all the shapes of fear into one, and gave them a body.
See! as that lean and twisted thing passes through the darkness, at once all shapes and none. Now the face of a dead man provides the sockets for fear's red-wet-hot eyes, now the wolf-man's sharp mask bays to his mother moon because he wears someone else's horns. Now he is a devil, now he is a murderer . . . passing along the knife-edge of the forest, where the moon cuts the shadows of trees clean from the grass, as he seeks relief from his abscessed soul, the oozing wound within. Leaping, twisting, this-shape, that-shape, his shadow betrays the moon and lies towards her, caught in its own private writhings as the aching soul seeks something meek and tame upon which to visit his lessons.
Claws gleam, even in the shadows, now metal, now bone, now nail. They are instruments of teaching; this is how to suffer, this is how to feel pain, this is how to fear as death runs chilly fingers across your eyelids.
The man-beast-devil halts his hunt, ears pricked to voices in the forest. They call him, those of the light and warmth who freed him from the sepulchre his creator-destroyer damned him to.
(For when the untrammelled hunger of the beast-man he had made-unmade became so sharply, loathsomely clear, even that master of abominations thrust him back into the dark womb of manstrosity he spawned from . . . womb, tomb, birth is death to this filicidal abortionist . . . brother of thy son, incestuous lover of thy mother's shadow.)
He cannot bring himself to teach those liberators fear, for they are innocents, good people adrift in the wicked sea the bottom of which he long ago sunk to. They are calling the name of his one-time man-body, a smear of memory across his whirlwind mind, filled with the red-wet-hot imagery of slaughter. He has five bodies, five hearts, five minds, but only one appetite: for rending flesh, for the copper-slick taste, for blood upon his face, for pain upon his prey. His victims are text-books for the rote of fear he teaches with his claws. Two of the beasts within were once men, but dead men now they lie within him like prenatal stillborns, inverse abortions that move and grunt and know as their whole the hot taste for pain.
Even the thought of it makes him lick his lips: they are thin and pale. His hunger consumes his flesh; his unfixed body as narrow and as hard as whipcord, his sharp skull preserved beneath a lacquer of skin, he is the visage of mortality. Only the eyes are alive, red and wet and hot as his hunger, as the blood he spills and the flesh he rends.
The horned wolf-man howls within; it has the sharpest hunger, the sorriest mind. Stranded on the shoreline between the oblivion-ravined ocean of animal silence and the painful guilt-mined dunes of intellect, it has just enough wit to feel the straitjacket of its animal mind, just enough remorseless, morality-fetterless animal mind to be wracked and confused by the pangs of its human shame.
Idly, he sits upon his hinders and picks the carrion from his teeth, white buds of ivory better suited to the maw of a wolf than the jaw of a man – the jaw of something shaped like a man – with a metal talon, his brand; no other beast carries so obvious a mark of mans' meddling, no man has such terrible claws. It is his cipher, his sigil; the blend of man and beast in one destructive limb; the hand mated with the claw, skinned in bloody gold.
He considers the call of the ones he travels with, still they call for him, voices piercing the untamed darkness. Had he not eaten, he might, just perhaps, have hunted one for his nightly lesson; but he is filled with the red-wet-hotness of a dozen dismembered creatures, a wriggling squealing massacre, morsels of fur and flesh not fleet enough to escape his fivefold appetite, but not too dumb to learn the lesson of the fearful claw.
His movements are fluid, a river-by-night unchained by gravity as he flows between the tree-trunks; the twisted gait of the wolf that chewed of its paw to be free of the trap, the snake-sway advance of something wicked lightways bound; the shadow tags behind, wings fluttering like crow-black rags tangled in winter branches. There in that living shadow is a hint of teeth, of flashing eye. It is a monstrous thing that necromancy and science should never have drawn back from its grave beneath the lichened stones of Nibelheim.
And there he crouches, the very rim of the firelight in his eyes and the night at his back, again upon an edge, always standing between two poles. Man and beast, living and yet dead, flesh and machine; his eyes burn with the lifeblood of the Planet yet they are the very colour of blood, as if the wounds of his soul were visible in those shining irises. For a moment he lingers, torn, hesitant between the anonymous darkness of the wilderness and the taming, naming of the fire-lit circle before him.
tug-tug-tug, this-way, that-way; up goes the coin, spinning tiny suns as it revolves, flashing man-beast-man-beast.
He is the Erl-King in his waiting, the man of the wild, the rational beast, the instinctive man, the razor-edge between love and the scythe: the child raised by wolves and the wolf suckled by women. He stands in the shadow, between the light of all that men call moral, knowing, human, and the darkness of all that they name unknowing, irredeemable and without soul.
He is the sinner and he is sin itself; the devil and the soul he preys; they call him the knowing beast, the man without moral; they call him evil, and will not meet his eyes. In the tunnel of his gaze, they are smothered in the weight of sin; all actions undone, all deeds committed, he is judgement unequivocal. He is the balance, hung by the neck upon the scales of Judgement; in his eyes are the boundaries; in his eyes is the division between the righteous and those who fall to the wolves. He is judge, the knowledge of sin; he is sinner, the tried and the guilty; he is jury, the damnation of the wronged; he is executioner, the wolf in the pit.
Bare-toothed and snarling.
Down comes the coin, and it is Memory who lays her finger upon the scales once again, tips the balance and brings him blinking into the firelight; the wolf allows the collar and becomes dog for the daylight. Those who freed him, who saw him stumble when the first light in a lifetime seared those eyes that are his essence writ in flesh, they welcome him, and give him room.
It is only Memory that keeps him in the firelight. He is Terminus, who walks the boundaries, upon the edge of all things, the liminal man on the shifting line between the plough and the sword, the fist and the claw; he is the formless edge of Chaos, and they fear his very existence. The distance between man and beast is the thickness of a shadow, and when those about the fire look upon the face of the man-beast lingering between the light and the dark they will not, cannot, meet his eyes.
Author's notes & addenda:
Feedback excruciatingly welcome.
Hinders: British usage; the hind parts or rear of the body.
Erl-King: German legend, a malevolent forest spirit who lures people to their destruction. A negative aspect of Pan or Cernunnos.
Terminus: Roman mythology, the god of the boundaries and borders. One who divides the civilised within from the wild without. A liminal figure.
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