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The body is a vessel, and within it holds a soul. The soul is like clay; it is malleable, it can waver and bend and be shaped into something brand new— or, in other cases, it can simply harden in place. Nobody truly knows whether or not the shape the soul takes— and the journey it takes to get there— is entirely in our grasp or not. It goes hand and hand with the timeless debacle of whether or not there is a God that puppets each and every inch of the natural world.
Fiona thinks there is a set start and a set end to the soul. However, it is up to oneself and the way in which one carries the body to sculpt the soul until it has reached its final touch. And with a little channeling of the divine through the body— one can find their way through this journey from beginning to end with ecstasy in their heart.
She can recall a time when she was once called the ‘perfect girl.’ She was only a child under a decade old, standing in front of all the towns’ people— or at least what felt like all of them in one place— at the head of a church as the priest at his podium preached to the heavens above. At this point in time, she couldn’t tell you why she was even up there in the first place or why it had been a testimonial to how much of a ‘perfect girl’ she had been— all she can recall is that on the walk home thereafter, her mother was the one to say it.
‘Fiona, what a perfect girl you are!’
But why? She’d thought, not just in relation to the descriptor of ‘perfect,’ but also to the notion of girlhood that was tied intimately to that concept of perfection. She was never fated to be perfect, but at this point in time she would not have known this.
In the mirror of her bedroom vanity she looked at herself, she stared long and hard. The eyes that looked back were her own, weren’t they? Or were they the eyes of someone— something looking to be freed? Even then as she wasn’t consciously aware of it, little Fiona could feel that something wasn’t in conjunction with something else– and that sometime the skin on her bones would be shed to make way for something more…
Was sinister the right word for it? Some may say so, but Fiona doesn’t think as they do. This thing was not wicked like the untrained eye might lead one to believe, but a blossoming and lush landscape that panned beyond the thin strip of it Fiona had been trapped inside. A place where any mortal word for the sexes holds no weight and will evaporate as soon as it is spoken.
But poor little Fiona Gilman still living under her parents’ roof and attending mass every Sunday wouldn’t know this, not yet. Her eyes were still shrouded with the lamb’s wool, and there would be a lot more time to come before she could shed it and bear her teeth.
Time passed as time did, with many more looks deep into the abyss seemingly contained in her flat little vanity. Fiona moved out. She went off into the hills and on a pilgrimage of her own to find… something. She wasn’t sure at this time what it was yet, but a calling had tugged at the strings of her soul and she knew then that it was time to leave behind the shackles of her home. Never before had she gone so far, but never had she felt so free.
A long, long trek was enough to make the physical world, herself included, seem almost unreal. There was an energy that pulsed throughout her, giving her a feeling that perhaps she was something more than a simple, lowly girl from a simple, lowly town. And each night as she found shelter to stay and a fire light to sit by, she thought more about the ‘girl’ aspect of it all. There was something beautiful about her own way of femininity, but now without the echoes of scolding voices expecting utmost perfection from her, she had room to explore new areas and philosophies that would break the mold set in place from her early childhood onwards. That is what she wanted out of this journey, after all, was something to break the mold…
The calling. The abyss that she used to stare so longingly into, that is what would do it.
Fiona flipped through pages upon pages in books, learned new languages and new ways to describe not only the world but her place within it too. But even so, no word could quite describe each nuance of how she felt. Formally, she was designated a newly ascended priestess, but that was only a little label that– compared to the grandness of the God she served under said label– served so, so little. It couldn't possibly describe the endless spiraling spirituality that coursed through her veins and how deeply connected she was to it: the bountiful beauty she found in every pulse her body procured and how entwined with the cosmos they were; the thought that each particle comprising her body came from the dust of the endlessness above and that each one has felt a gravitational pull towards one God and one God only– the almighty Yog-Sothoth.
It's when she first came across the name that everything finally clicked. All this time it was It who lay in the abyss of her vanity, it was It who made her ponder so deeply the ethics of her existence and it was It who finally got her to realize how inconsequential all earthly labels were. Every intense feeling that churned in her gut and second spent wondering about everything that surrounded her, it all made sense under Yog-Sothoth.
Even now, she doesn't believe that her identity has been carved in stone– because she knows that there is only more that waits in the darkness surrounding each minute and second to come. She knows that sometime soon, her soul will reach the end of its journey– and it's only then when she's made the finishing touches to the sculpture of her soul that she will be able to say with certainty what she is. Until then she opens herself up to the world– and allows herself to be a vessel for whatever may enter and show itself to her.
So long as she can grasp it in her very being, she can understand with utmost clarity– even if others couldn't necessarily do the same.