10.8231 N, 106.6297 E
Rajab 20, 1383
Al-Jum`ah
...
ا الله ساعدن
Ya Allah sa'idna
O God, help us
For we are all in truly need of divine intervention.
اللَّهُمَّ لاَ تُكَلِّفْنِي مَا لاَ طَاقَةَ لِي بِهِ!
Allahumma la tukallifni ma la ṭaqata li bihi!
O Allah, do not burden him with what he cannot bear...
These are your prayers I hear every night.
Which is why I will ask, did you miss me...?
Don't answer that, I already know. I already know what you're thinking, because beyond all the trouble you've made - you're still weak. Past all the booze, the sex, that singing hatred you hold deep in your belly; you're still that sniveling, cowering little boy I found in that cave so long ago. Underneath the pictures of those stars made by a people long forgotten, long damned, so far from human memory all which is left to remember them by are dusted, cracked mosaics of a primitive mind.
They were blasted by fire, turned to dust, and then washed away. Forever forgotten.
Which is what you will be soon, if you don't start LISTENING TO ME!
You! Little, insignificant, shriveled piece of goat shit! Why are we waiting on the lapses of some WITCH to help us, when I am THE ONLY ONE HERE WHO MATTERS! I told you those eyes would be a problem. I told you, you would not be able to control them! I TOLD YOU I am was, am, and will be more than YOU in every which way - you didn't NEED them. But you persisted, and pushed, and quickly became blinded by your own hate.
Literally and figuratively.
If you wish to burn the end of your candle so much, I am more than willing to see it done.
But you - craving power like a misguided whoreson, beguiled by every passing fancy that comes your way - have now made yourself, us -ME! Weak! As we sit and skulk and scavenge and HIDE in this stinking sewer with all the rest of the rats in this mephitic ulcer of a city. All to wait on the word of a wayward oracle. A woman disowned by not one, but TWO homes. A failure just like you are, clinging on to the bloated carcass of self-presumption, ignorance; only to sink once by your own arrogance.
"She's all we have."
Then we have nothing...
When your eyes first began to fail, we'd been hunting her for days. Whispers led us from village to village, places where the insurgency was only another sickness, something to be endured. Places where a woman, foreign and golden-haired, had come like some wandering saint, stitching up the broken, pulling the dying from the graves they belonged.
Again, her playing God.
At first, I thought it was a fool's errand, and became slowly contented with the fact you'd poisoned your body; I would find another host - I always do. It took two thousand years the last time, and it may take two thousand more. Fine. I am patient. But not so wasteful with my time as to chase after some warlord's whore borrowing her name, using her reputation as a shield. But no. The deeper we went, the clearer the stories became. And the woman whose hands had shed a million tears in the past, who drank like a sinner, now healed woeful creatures eking an existence in the Middle Highlands. Like some bloodless saint.
Her kindness, evidently, was a trail of breadcrumbs leading straight to her.
A boy in a burned-out village spoke of her first. A man who owed his life to her gave us a direction. A farmer with a mangled leg from an ARVN mine pointed us toward a river where the sick gathered, where her hands worked miracles against the inevitable.
It was laughable, really. Frau Doktor, hiding in a place like this. Wasting herself on people who had nothing to offer her but their suffering. No throne, no power, no place in this war. Just a tired woman in the dirt, playing healer to the damned. Oh, and the pig...the fucking pig...
I wanted to eat her - you should've eaten her.
Yet, instead you and yours had yourselves go to her like all the rest of the wasteful humanity surrounding her little hut. Like heathen farmers of old reluctant to relinquish old habits and past beliefs, they crowded her praying for answers, solutions, salves and sweet balms to aid their afflictions. Heh, she runs from her ghosts and still finds herself among corpses. Poetic, in a pathetic kind of way.
Just as you did.
We found her at dusk, at the edge of a village barely clinging to the living world. A place of thatched roofs and empty bellies, of sick men coughing their last into the jungle heat. There was no fanfare, no guards, no fortress to breach. Just a woman on her knees beside a dying man, her hands bloodied, her face tired, her breath slow and steady despite the weight of the world pressing down on her shoulders.
We tracked through blood and shadow to find her. To take her - she is the only one who can fix you, so at first you went down on bended knee and pleaded. She rebuked you at first. Then you offered her payment for services; a bribe to make her agreeable. She could've purchased whatever she needed to outfit her hovel in the forest, make it a bastion for the all infirmities which afflict your kind. Again, she refused. Outright laughed in your face that time - that I can respect.
It was only when you did the smart thing and finally listen to me, threatening to burn down every thatched hut, skin every simpering child, stake their mothers through the bellies, and prop them up high for their men to see, was when she finally gave in.
Typical.
A woman who thought she could open the door, step into the void, and then slam it shut again. As if the world between worlds was meant for creatures like her. Like any of you.
Your kind was not meant to travel beyond the veil, and yet you do. Like piss dribbling down my leg, you seep into every crevice of the Spillways. Polluting everywhere you go. This world and every other. The series of accidents which spat you from the primordial sludge were mistakes enough—genetic mishaps culminating in the unfortunate amalgamation of a species that knows nothing but hunger. A rapacious bacteria, spreading, consuming, infecting every plane of existence you can claw your way into. You were not meant to be more than the filth you are, and yet she—that woman, that presumptive little ape—thought she could force evolution's hand. She thought she could take the locks off the doors of creation and shape mankind into something more like…me
And how did that work out for her?
Oh, I'm sure she tries to be a good person. One can't fuck up as much as she, lose as much as she, and persist continuing down a path that'll lead only to more blood on her hands. And yet, I see her appetite grow watching you. Us! How she hungers for answers still. For perfection. She may say she's done with her work, but her eyes...Those honey-brown, warm, lustrous eyes. They spin a lie even she doesn't believe.
Her work isn't over - she still thinks Eden is calling to her.
Before it was simply an urge towards scientific discovery, curiosity bred from too much time dreaming by fireplaces and cramped library corners.
But now it is to atone - you thought you had skeletons in your closet? She has entire graveyard stowed away in the recesses of her conscience.
The jungle thinned as we moved south, giving way to fields, roads, and the creeping reach of civilization. Saigon loomed ahead—the heart of a revolution that had long since rotted from the inside out.
But then, your pain became too great.
I fell silent, retreating into some dark corner to stew in my rage. I told you your body would not - could not - react well to the Sharingan. Only those inbred fatheads were specifically attuned to its effects - they thought themselves clever, fancied themselves monster hunters. Ironically, all they did was make monsters of themselves.
And they called it "love"? Ha!
Pathetic!
Like you...
For a spell were Ong Ba Bi. The thing in the dark. A ghost in the jungle. Now? You're nothing but a blind man with a gun.
I'm not wrong.
Nor, I suppose, was the wood's witch.
She plied her medical know-how like the surgeon she was. Local herbs and salves kept the pain at bay. Rice wine and cheap whiskey—swindled from some poor bastard on a rubber plantation—numbed the rest of us. I couldn't help you with the pain even if I tried.
And there was much pain.
When we'd reached a hamlet guarded by VC sympathizers buried within an ARVN platoon. That woman -MY woman- Temari sweet-talked them, played the coquette, batting her lashes and giggling at their half-drunken boasts of glory. It worked. We were let through, and granted a safe house.
The surgery was simple. A clean cut. Scalpel, antiseptic, precision.
You still screamed like a bitch.
When the first eye was removed, you let out a howl from the seventh circle itself. For it was a sharp, searing agony as Frau Doktir carved away the flesh, severing the last of the optic nerve before plucking the damned thing free. You blacked out for the second.
I saw everything however.
And when you woke, the pain settled into something dull, deep, and wretched. Frau Doktor had done her work well, flushing out the Sharingan of all the debris from its vitreous humor, cleaning the sockets, ensuring the tissue would take them back. And was the worst part: the resetting.
I remember seeing your thoughts then. You felt it wrong, the entire ordeal. Like something that had no business being put back into your skull. The puppet man was the one who did it, using his wire to guide them once more into place. His hands were steady, but it was unbearable for you wasnt it?
"You see now?" I whispered to you as you lay in a pool of sweat. "You fought so hard to wield them. And now you fight to be rid of them. You are a fool, little rat. A pathetic, blind fool."
Yet... I'll give you some credit. You still managed to carry on. I was more than willing to wait on you to perish. I would claw my way out of you and into the next host I saw. Temari - MY woman perhaps. Or that idiotic milquetoast of a little brother of hers. I could show him what it means to become a man. And Frau Doktor would help me, too - you know she would.
But you're hate is interesting to me.
Why I decided to let you live.
"Oh, you let me live...?"
كفى - Enough! OF COURSE IT WAS ME!
WHO ELSE DO YOU THINK BENEFITS FROM YOUR WASTEFUL BREATHING!
انتبه لكلامك! IF IT WASN'T FOR ME, WE WOULD NEVER HAVE MADE IT OUT OF TUNIS ALIVE! THE MEMTI WANTED YOUR HEAD! AND SHE WOULD'VE GOTTEN IT TOO, IF I HADN'T STEPPED IN! YOU THINK BAKI FOLLOWS YOU OUT OF LOYALTY TO YOUR FATHER? EH!?
...
I will say, at least, you had strength enough on your own to will yourself to Saigon...That you made it here is testament to your endurance if nothing else.
Here, MY woman made herself useful again, playing to the egos of those mercenaries. "The Wild Ducks" or whatever the fuck they're called manning the checkpoints. They are arrogant, overfed, and desperate for attention. She played them well.
It was easy enough for her to snag a nurse's uniform in the process - Frau Doktor insisted we still needed antibiotics. Infection was inevitable in these conditions, and the only place to get what you needed was the hospital. So MY woman worked her charm, slipping through the cracks, stealing what we required. Puppet man scouted the city, mapping out drop-off locations and choke points in case it all went to hell.
And we?
We were sequestered to the sewers, tended by that damned weakling with those sad, his kind eyes. I've seen many unfit warriors pass through by the bars of my cage, and he has to be the most ungainly of all. I've seen Australopithaci with rocks more threatening than he. Yet, he sitsbhere before us. Cooking our meals, tending our wounds, asking every five minutes how your eyes feel...
It's nauseating seeing what we've been reduced to. A blind, broken thing, nursed by a coward, waiting in the filth beneath a city that will eat you alive.
But...
Unless...
We don't decide to eat it first.
I can smell it.
It festers in the cracks, in the gutters, in the dark spaces between all their little delusions of control. Tension. Confusion. Fear. Saigon is a rotting corpse dressed up in silk and neon, a city pretending it is still whole while the maggots eat it from the inside out. They can feel it. The shopkeepers. The whores. The warlords. The police. The monopoly on violence will only hold for so long. And then...?
Then, little rat, they fall.
Minh believes himself secure. But he is just another fool clutching at the reins of a beast he does not understand. A beast that wants to tear him apart. He pits the warlords against one another, thinking he can keep the fire contained, but the truth? The truth is that no one cares for him. The free world does not care for him, just as it did not care for Diem, just as it will not care for whoever crawls into his place when he is torn apart in some backroom, choking on his own blood.
This is the way of things. The natural order. The primordial truth. There is no peace. No balance. There is only the struggle. The fight. The survival. Until there is only one left standing."
And it will be me.
The politicians, the soldiers, the ideologues—they are all children playing with knives, thinking they shape the world. They do not understand that the world shapes them. And when the dust settles, when the blood pools and the smoke rises, there will be only one standing atop the mountain.
Me. And whatever wretched husk is fit to carry me there.
I won't wait any longer.
You've recovered enough.
Ready yourself, for I want the world to know what it means to be afraid again. Of me, and the guarantee of what I can do. You and yours may enjoy hiding in the shadows, but remember what you promised me in that cave. Your father's bones were not yet even dried yet by the Sahara's sands when you called to me, and I answered. With a promise that I will grant you the strength to make your vengeance reality, make the world feel pain as you have. As I.
And together, we will conquer.
Let them play their games, little rat. Frau Doktor's wheels are turning, your blonde-hair confidante continues to scheme on behalf of the Shepherds, but you have me. وَاتَّقُواْ اللَّهَ وَيُعَلِّمُكُمُ اللَّهُ Fear me, little rat, and I assure you I am all that is needed.