Paragenesis: Stories of the Dawn of Wraeththu (4 page)

Unperturbed, he became almost
evangelistic about our condition. ‘We must make more like us,’ he
said.

I was appalled and shook my
head. ‘No. You are a fluke. It is not meant to be this way.’

‘How do you know?’

We were not easy companions,
yet our similarities, and the fact that I had made him the way he
was, kept us together. He had changed so much from the wretch he’d
been. We lived in the office block where he’d undergone his
transformation. One evening, he made me climb a nearby hydro-tower
with him, where the rusting shell harboured clear water. He took
off his clothes and dived in, summoning me to join him. ‘We are not
part of the filth now.’ He sluiced my hair and rubbed the grime
from my skin. ‘I want the grief to run from your body with this
water. You must be renewed, like I am.’

I think the transformation had
affected his mind. He needed a religion to run.

‘How did you do it?’ he asked.
‘Tell me. Tell me.’

‘I don’t know. It just
happened. You were trying to devour me.’

The light in his eyes was like
that of the stars; cold and distant. ‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘Yes.’

I should have known he’d act
independently. One day, he took me to a building near our lair, and
here revealed to me his twisting litter of children. I was
horrified, yet also amazed. Twelve people, both male and female,
shivered and whimpered at my feet; all of them infected with his
blood. I had seen myself as an avatar of death, but remote and
accidental. Here was someone who was an active instrument of it,
only he did not realise the fact. He thought he was a god, with a
god’s powers. If I’d done something to end it then, what would the
world have been like now?

Of the twelve, only four
survived, and all of them male. We tried to soothe the agony of the
others with the healing power in our hands, but the experience was
harrowing. ‘I think this process cannot be conducted with females,’
my companion said, with scientific detachment. ‘But we must try it
with others.’

‘No!’ My protest went
unheard.

I would not help him, other
than to attend to his victims as they suffered. I didn’t even think
about killing him, or trying to stop it any other way. At the time,
it just didn’t enter my mind, but now I think it was because part
of me knew that what was happening was preordained. My companion
saw it as a cleansing ritual for the world. He loved the creatures
he made, marvelling at their beauty. I saw them as perverted
homunculi; as lovely as the angels of hell. Yet, despite this, they
were also part of me and I was part of them.

I under-estimated the regard my
companion had for me. He did not set himself up as a leader of our
developing clan of beautiful monsters. That privilege he reserved
for me, even though I shunned it. ‘It is your responsibility,’ he
told me. ‘You began this.’

‘Only because you were hungry,’
I reminded him.

‘Can’t you see the potential
here?’ he demanded. ‘This is the beginning of something. It is what
comes next.’

I could only look down at the
corpses of those who had not survived. The cost of the selection
process was too high. ‘This is murder,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘You are right. We
should give people the choice.’ As an inducement, he now had seven
successful transformations to parade before the eyes of the
desperate.

I never became involved in his
recruitment drives, and for many years no other human tasted my
blood. I cannot say that I wasn’t affected by my companion’s
enthusiasm, and grudgingly I had to accept the benefits of being
part of a community, something I had never previously enjoyed,
other than those few weeks of running with the girl-pack. This was
different though. With the girls, I had been a tolerated outsider.
Now, I was part of a group of individuals who all shared the same
attributes. It was both scary and exciting.

Although we could not effect
the change in women, a few of them, through persistent entreaty,
still joined us. In many ways, we had more in common with them than
with men. From our sisters, we learned about the wildest excesses
of adorning our bodies. We became tribal and developed our own
rituals connected with the inception of newcomers, or the simple
celebration of our estate. Sex became sacred, yet less taboo. There
was so much to explore, and so many delights concealed in the
labyrinth of our dual gender.

One night, we undertook a rite
to name ourselves, opening up our minds with the effects of
narcotic fungi. My companion became Orien; a name he felt held
power. As for me, I wandered the star-gleam avenues of my mind,
until I came to a place where a white shrine glimmered against a
backdrop of stars. It stood upon the primal mound of creation,
guarded by two pillars, and surrounded by the waters of life. Here,
I learned my true name, the person I was to become. I am Thiede.
The first of all. And the name we took for ourselves as a group was
Wraeththu; a word that held all the anger and mystery of the world.
The visions told us the truth: we were no longer human and must
forget all that we had been before.

We were close-knit, and did not
merely co-operate with one another. Laughter was spontaneous, and
in our wild nights of dancing, as new recruits struggled with the
process of transformation, I learned about the fulfilment that
close friendship brings. I was intrigued by the way the different
personalities within the group interacted with one another; the
partnerships that developed, the enmities. We weren’t above petty
squabbling, but if anything from outside threatened our group, the
ranks would close and seal as tight as a steel door. We were not
afraid to kill to protect ourselves, and sometimes that was
necessary. Various human clans and groups heard about us, and some
were afraid, and thought we should be eradicated. We were seen as
vampires, as predators, who stole people away in the night. In
fact, that was not true. We hadn’t resorted to such measures since
the first days of my companion’s explorations. We had to keep on
the move, but even so, humans would often sniff us out and come
pouring over the ruins, holding flaming brands aloft, intent on
burning us alive. Then we would rise up, howling, our wild hair
flying, our faces striped with the colours of the night.

We never lost a single brother
in our skirmishes. In our unity, we were immensely strong.

Everything that begins in the
world starts small, be it a mighty tree from a seed, or a deluge
from a single drop of rain. A cell becomes a child becomes a king
or queen. The greatest concepts are based upon the most fleeting of
ideas. Such it was with Wraeththu, the race that I spawned from my
fear, my pain, my ignorance. I stand upon the pillars of the world,
and look down to see the carnage perpetrated by the human race that
had been its guardian. I am amazed that humanity, with all its
cruel selfishness, ever rose to prominence, and that the world
itself allowed the situation to continue for so long. We are the
exterminators, who will rid the palaces of the earth of all its
vermin. We have no choice in this role, it had been decided for us.
We are the true messengers of the gods. The howls of slaughtered
innocents rise from the ruins, the whimpers of the bereaved, the
snufflings of the betrayed. I stand as a colossus above it all,
looking down. There is a star in the sky that is the soul of my
lost love, and my own soul has fragmented into a thousand parts,
into each of my children. But I do not grow weak from it, only
estranged. There is much to explore about myself, and for this I
need a real wilderness, where all the devils of the earth and the
angels of the air can come to tempt me and teach me. I cannot make
the inward journey here in the city debris.

Last night, Orien came to me,
worried that some of our brethren had split off to form a separate
group. I tried to assuage his fears. ‘This is the way it will go,’
I said. ‘We were the catalysts, nothing more. We must not interfere
with the growth of our child.’

He thought I was mad, or
damaged, and spoke softly. ‘The time will come, soon, for us to
move toward the city core.’

I nodded. ‘I know,’ I said.
‘You will.’

He touched my shoulder.
‘
We
will. You cannot deny us, Thiede.’

And I smiled at him to reassure
him, knowing that already I had left them.

The First

Wendy Darling

Since the time of the
Ascension, Wraeththu scholars have been hard at work studying the
many documents uncovered within the Aghama’s private library. Among
the chief treasures are personal writings. The following short
document was found tucked inside an antique guide to human sexual
intercourse, a circumstance which documents not only the Aghama’s
sense of irony but also frames the subject quite appropriately.

Ai-cara 20

As progenitor of our race, I
have had the privilege of witnessing many Wraeththu firsts.
Included within that is the first Grissecon. This took place within
the very early days, when Wraeththu consisted of a single wild
band. Living amidst the ruins of the city in which I’d come of age,
Orien and I led our group as we grew and, facing a hostile world,
discovered the nature of our difference from humanity.

In Grissecon, we discovered a
key to our own potential. The event was celebrated with a night of
frenzied dancing and even more frenzied aruna. It was a momentous
event. Still, I am writing today to say that this early time saw an
event in my mind more important than what we later called the first
Grissecon.

At the time there were only two
of us, not a band, not a tribe, not a race. Still, two was more
than I had ever expected. The one who later called himself Orien
had come to me not as a companion but an attacker, feasting upon me
like a vampire, and then succumbing not to death but to rebirth.
Orien’s transformation, only three days earlier, had been so
spectacular that I was left humbled and, both then and for a long
time afterward, completely bewildered.

He and I were still living in
the ruined office block where he had been born from his filth and
rags. Together we subsisted on what little food we could manage,
haggling for rice and killing pigeons, the gray-winged neighbours
doomed like us to the shuddering decrepitude of a city devouring
itself. We had no direction in life, only hoping to survive and
muddle through what seemed like the end of the world.

It was cold the night it
happened. The sun had sunk behind the sagging shells of the
surrounding office buildings, stone-clad steel hulks, their
once-gleaming rows of windows dirty with smoke and grime. In the
basement where we lived there was a fire, but winter was coming
and, Wraeththu or not, we were cold that night.

Orien was tired, I could see
that in the way his hands and jaw were faintly trembling as he
spoke with me, the way he kept rubbing his head. He had a headache,
he’d told me earlier. I’d tried to take away the pain but had been
unable to work the trick. No matter to him, he told me, as
overnight it would fade on its own. Whatever we were – we did not
yet have a name for ourselves – we were quite resilient.

From the first Orien had been
delighted with the results of inception, feeling pride and wonder
in both his body and his abilities. He had far more curiosity than
I had ever had and even in a scant three days, he had discovered
much. All day long he had been taking it upon himself to teach me
and now, trembling and tired with what I thought was pure
exhaustion and perhaps a headache from lack of food, he began to
share with me a new discovery.

As always, he prefaced his
lesson with the acknowledgement that I was probably aware of these
special powers, and would be either unsurprised or unimpressed. I
took my abilities for granted, he said, whereas to him were
something miraculous.

I told him there are no
miracles.

As the sky turned a deeper
shade of iodine red, Orien began to speak. Did I know, he asked me,
that we needn’t suffer the cold?

I laughed, telling him that of
course we needn’t suffer, at least so long as we could locate
blankets or fuel supplies.

Orien scowled and scolded me
for being “unimaginative.” (Imagine that! I was once called
“unimaginative!”) It was then that he explained it to me: By
directing our energies and our intentions, we could produce not
only warmth but, he had a strong suspicion, fire. So far, on his
own, he had only managed to produce heat, not fire. I told him that
considering the outdoor temperature and coming winter, heat sounded
like enough. I did, however, wonder how we could harbour the heat
and use it to our benefit.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “just
let me hold you.”

Hold me? A shudder passed
through my body as soon as the words had registered. I had never
been held in my life – except once, the night I killed my beloved,
burning and killing him with my essence. He had held me, stroked my
hair. It had been a new thing to me, sweet and beautiful, that
closeness, the lack of violence, the feeling of care. It had never
happened again.

Orien picked up on my reaction.
He did not even have to ask what the matter was. Using the
faculties borne of the blood that had transformed him, he knew. At
the time I didn’t realize how well. I was startled when he said, “I
was going to hold you and warm us both, but I see you don’t want to
be held. You have never been touched, have you? Never except with
coldness and hate.” Orien, for all our eventual differences, was
very good at making inferences.

“No, that’s not quite true,” I
told him. I followed with the story of my beloved. Until that
moment I had kept this from Orien, alluding to it but never telling
him the details. How could I bear it? It was too painful to relate.
Every time I looked at Orien, I thought of my beloved, what might
have been. Nevertheless, that night I shared my story.