Chapter Text
In the industrial sector of Fent, Alabama, there was once a street called Reverie’s Home. As the United States wasn’t the sort of place to facilitate wealth or chastity, one would naturally expect to find that Reverie’s Home looked and felt nothing like what a home should be. A seemingly never ending serpent of fractured, sun-beaten asphalt, the street meandered between rows of generic, weed-wreathed condominiums, which were akin in both shape and color to gigantic cinder blocks set in a nigh unbroken chain across the hills. From every building broken windows yawned, exposing their ragged, glass teeth; their pale facades girdled in cracks and soiled with with streaks of water stains; and the foundation squatted amongst mats of dead grass. Despite it being the middle of Autumn, it was quite muggy, and so hot that mirages pranced across the road. Old street signs—warped and faded reminders of a time when a population requiring street signs existed—leaned alongside bare oaks and patchy pines like dejected strangers watching each other grow old. To the West, one could just barely make out the silhouettes of factory chimneys stabbing the amber horizon, but the toxic pillows the towers belched were large enough to be mistaken for natural clouds. As the day came to a close, the crimson sun hung low in the sky, taking one last, fiery look at the emaciated Reverie’s Home before surrendering to a moonless night.
Already, the dormant crickets, the street’s chief inhabitants, were filling the dusk with their rhapsody, to the chagrin of no human neighbors.
However, as the shadows of trees and buildings made their final stretch to their limit, Reverie’s Home became the home of one more soul, if only for the night.
Her name was all but forgotten, just as much to herself as to anyone else she could ever call a friend. Memory, to the child who walked Reverie’s Home all on her own, had always been a frighteningly allusive thing. She had no recollection of her name, her parents’ names, their faces; she wasn’t even sure where she came from, beyond “across the ocean.” Her life had always been just a cloudy phantasm, beginning at some equivocal point approximately eight or nine years ago and attaining a pretense of clarity no less than three months before whatever the present day may be. Three months had always been the irrefutable duration of her evanescent memories, and she knew that because she had gotten into the habit of counting the days as they passed by. Whenever something especially interesting occurred she would make a small note on the back page of the hefty novel she carried on her being, along with the number corresponding to the day the event happened. The last entry in her account, which transpired on day ninety-four, consisted only of a single word: “Snake”. She could barely recall sitting on her haunches in the middle of an abandoned park by the Black Warrior River, watching a petite garden snake sway oh-so quietly across the pavement. The fading traces of a cool breeze born of gently parading water and the scarce rustling of grass as her legless friend sequestered himself in the foliage. The bliss was crippled, she remembered, when she reminded herself that, in just three months, when her count hits one hundred eighty four, those memories will fade and leave her with a confusing, one-word note in her prized book. Nights—or the few nights where she could find the convenience to sleep—were often hindered by spontaneously made-up daydreams, slotted right where her early life should have been. She never did this because she wanted to, but because she felt she had to, or else she would be left with stark emptiness, robbing her of the self awareness other people took for granted. She had no name. She had no story. Maybe that’s why whenever she happened to refer to herself in the third person, she would name herself for her nomadic lifestyle: the Vagrant. And maybe her lack of a history is why she obsessed over and indulged in stories. Maybe that’s why she fell in love with Syl-No.
The Vagrant briskly thumbed through the yellowed pages of her one and only possession: a thick and battered hardcover wearing the title Xindera’s Towers. The cover was decorated with a bleary image of what at first glance appeared to be a slender spire, but was in fact a pillar of tarnished rubies surmounted by a similarly colored blossom of bloodied claws and scimitars. The back cover lacked a blurb, but was supplanted by a more austere painting depicting a violently contorted shadow cradling a little blonde girl in it’s sinuous arms, and upon the spine was etched the name of the author: D.L. Crawford. Between these two covers was engraved Syl-No, the only world she truly knew. Despite not being a concrete creation of God, the inexorably poignant, vociferously vanishing Syl-No was infinitely more palpable than the crumbling one-tracked life the Grand Architect burdened her with. Like anything in her existence, the circumstances surrounding her procuring of Xindera’s Towers was a mystery, but quite unlike anything of weight it’s story was one the Vagrant had never forgotten and never will forget. The epic of Xindera and his failing quest was something that lingered and flourished at the apex of her consciousness, right where her nonexistent name would be. It wasn’t just the plot and the epithet of it’s antihero that adhered to her, it was every meticulous detail, each proudly amounting to an endless series of scenes and feelings every bit as bold as the world God failed with, if not more so. She read through the book only once, but since then she needed only to close and eyes and she was standing beneath the trio of cold suns crowning Syl-No’s pink skies, standing amongst deeply bowed sequoia trees the color of rust and a pastoral field of snarling flowers that smelled of dying embers. Syl-No wasn’t always a beautiful place—in fact, most of the time it was quite disheartening in it’s atmosphere—but it was far more real than Earth. There was but a relative handful of images in her head older than three months, let alone three years, but all of them were scenes woven in the image of Syl-No. Often times, always to a depressing but strangely wholesome effect, she would superimpose the characteristics of her imaginary microcosm over God’s meaningless macrocosm, picturing such things like the meandering roads on which she ventured as the island-spanning geoglyphs of Mazzra. Days like these, the buildings were the reposing faces of half-buried sleeping titans, the noxious smokestacks of steel plants were the lightning-bearing sentinels overlooking the hives of Tharisse, and the vast wisps of clouds were the wings of lolling sky lilies.
But as always, the reverie had to end. Too often the Vagrant would plunge back to the real world and thereafter stare long and hard at the tear stained cover of Xindera’s Towers, hopelessly wondering why she had to be born a child in God’s green Earth and not a Nohk in Crawford’s scarlet Syl-No.
She suddenly stopped at the intersection of her street and another, noting a garland of traffic lights wreathing the cracked blacktop. In blatant defiance of the utter lack of traffic, the lights still shone with a rather unexpected vibrancy. At length she watched green give way to yellow, then to red and back to green over the course of hell knows how many minutes. Idly, she pretended the three-shaded devices were the festival lanterns of the Beehmies, but the illusion cracked every time the light changed. Proceeding on she came across the obligatory street sign denoting the two roads. One being her temporary home, Reverie’s Home, and the other being Fuchsia Parkway. She bitterly mused over the the irony in calling a street “Reverie’s Home” when it couldn’t host any escapist reverie. Fortunately, the Vagrant thought, the sun was dissolving into a dimming haze of crimson across the Western skyline, so perhaps the coming darkness would spur her imagination.
Her attention strayed across the street, where a squat edifice—very much identical to all the others reposing across the hills—brooded behind an empty parking lot, which, judging by the tufts of weeds and grass inching out of it’s copious fractures, was well on it’s way to becoming more of a yard. The building itself was in no better condition, but unlike the others it still sported it’s old designation, stamped in faded black paint along the Westward facade: AUnit Z20. What was peculiar about this one building, however, was the cross of police tape stretched across the exterior stair well. For the Vagrant, experience was virtually nonexistent, but the impressions they left on her have always remained both palpable and reachable, enough to rival Syl-No. She approached and she saw the yellow strips of plastic set before her, and she immediately felt threatened, somehow associating the bold printed “POLICE LINE — DO NOT CROSS” with predacity. Logic, the sort of logic spoken of by state issued domestic enchiridions, told her the police were a force for good and that she was in no danger lest she were brazen enough to disobey the “DO NOT CROSS” signs, but instinct, the sort of instinct rooted in voided memories, said otherwise. She knew her that cops were predators. Just like the Hithers prowling through the nurseries of Flyscolinohk, they live only to feed, fuck, and dominate, and all other souls only exist as means to those ends. In the Vagrant’s conviction, the alleged protectors of the U.S. would have swiftly and callously seized her and delivered her to God-knows-where. For the moment her daydreaming was haunted by a vision of a men in blue, gold badge and black gun brandished, standing twice as tall as herself, unreadable expressions covering their modified faces as they clamped the Vagrant’s delicate arms in cold, white hands. She imagined the friction of bitter metal clamped around her wrists, the stagnant musk in the back of a patrol car, and the sickening sensation of not knowing whether or not she’ll live to see tomorrow’s sunrise or, worse yet, if she’ll live for two more decades as a thing of perverted amusement, living in the dark closet of an Executive. She’ll never know what experiences seeded these visions in her head, but no matter what these fears were real and potent, which was more than she could say for the remainder of her psychological spectrum.
She was, however, very hungry. A box of raisins swiped from a connivence store was her last meal, and that was three days ago. Needless to say she feared starvation, as any would, but fearing starvation more than she feared the authorities was a complex that only made sense in a famished mind. The absence of paddy wagons, helicopters, and the ominous rattling of military grade weapons opened the possibility that she could forage through the abandoned Z20 without calling upon the policeman’s wrath while the brittle ribs showing through her taut skin undermined what was left of her circumspection.
She mulled at length—long enough to watch the sun die Westward—and only managed circle back to her initial purpose. Ultimately, the decision was as no brainer. With the singing of cicadas and owls bringing life to a world behind her, the Vagrant approached Z20 with the gospel of Syl-No cradled in her arms.