You only found me because I let you. Welcome to me.
Perhaps I’m a Dane. Perhaps I’m a Swede. Perhaps I was born in a country that no longer exists. Hutu or Tutsi. Bosniak or Serb. I could tell you what I am, and you’d still know nothing about me. I can tell you who I am, and what I say will bring you and I closer.
I want you to look at this boy. He doesn’t have much skin left. The heat of it did it, propagating itself through the substrate.
I have no memory of the pain. What I remember is flowers. After it had happened so fast, before medevac arrived, my mother kept directing my attention to a patch of flowers that remained, away from my injuries. “These are called wild pansies,” she said. “In the language of flowers, they mean ‘this is not the end’.” They don’t, but given the occasion I think we can forgive her for that.
Also, it wasn’t the end. My scars stayed the same size as the rest of me grew around them.
I am a soldier in a splendid little war. However hot the day, it gets so cold at night. Sucking the life from the chest. I was tired—more tired than I've ever been before or since. It was cold and dark and dark and cold—then it was summer and light and day. The sun blazed in her glory, close and red, and the world was warmth, golden-bright and green. I spent what seemed an eternity floating through my world of summerland viriditas. And I saw flowers: wild pansies. “Wait,” I thought. “Flowers, here?” That’s when I realised I was dreaming, and when I do that, I wake up.
I had never felt colder. My limbs had never been as leaden. Of my chest, I can not explain. I awakened half-alive, to a world of cold and night. Had I not, I doubt I would’ve seen the morning thaw.
I am a soldier in my private war against the world. I shall never again call anyone my master. Inspector leClue of the Interpol Literary Crimes Division, the old bloodhound, had me back-to-back against a sheer cliff precipice. Storm broiled around us, whipping up black waters around treacherous skerries, cutting as knives the froth. LeClue roared, “I have you now, Soren Saxil! You’ve committed your last literary super-crime!”
I thundered back, over the howling fray: “damn you and your world of prisons and pecking orders! Every cage you build, I shall find a way to spring open! Every wound you inflict, I shall find a way to heal!”. They were empty boasts. I had gotten too bold, made too many blunders, and now my every option but one was spent.
“Come willingly, or—Saxil! Don’t do it, Soren Saxil! No! No—”
I let myself fall. I chose death before servility. It is the romantic in me; it is my catechism against the world. When I hit the mad waters, everything went black. I saw no flowers at all.
When a person dies, the final sense to leave is the sense of smell. Turns out, it is the first sense to return as well, when one has been returned from the dead. I smelled the flowers. Wild pansy. Viola tricolor. Next, I heard her voice. Next, I understood that I was being dragged from waters, that I was heavy in her arms so frail, and rudely recalcitrant, dragged across wildflower-fields, and I was then indoors.
Vision—I saw nonsensical things for days. Her soft voice trilled and purred as she nursed me back to life. My eyes were open at times, I think, but my angel, I could not see. My angel was a beam of impossible light to me for a thousand years. Vision—it was returned to me, as life had been. My saviour was an ingenue, golden of aspect, her great eyes azure in the sun in those days—azure specked with gold. Slight of build. She tried to suppress her coughs around me.
She inquired about my scars. I told her, “my scars stayed the same size as I grew around them.”
She lived in her cottage alone, by those fields where the wind made wildflowers dance; by that sea. “I don’t have a lot of money,” she would say.
I’d reply, “and I have none at all.”
“Of course not,” she’d quip. “You paid it all to Charon!”
Viola tricolor. The sky had been the colours of it, in those days before it happened.
“I fear the other villagers shun me, I—” another cough shook her faint body. She tried to hide it, but I saw the blood. “I have an illness.”
The girl is no more. I had not the power to save her. All I can do is remember her, so that in this sense she lives on. Her, and the viola tricolor. This is not the end.
Thus, in my personal catechism, the viola tricolor means this: “this is not the end. For as long as there is fight and fire in us, the dream remains alive.” The image of it, intertwined with my life—and my deaths. I am Soren Saxil. I will fight God to end the Curse of Death. Welcome to the human wave attack on Heaven.
Whenever I’m in a pinch, I know I’ll win once my theme music starts (in my mind, it’s titled Ace Up My Sleeve, though)*. Whereas, if it’s this one, I have a long way to go .This one's for when I’m investigating an enigma. Here's the one for when literary super-crime is just fun, usually early on during each of my adventures. Here’s my chase music. Finally, there’s the theme to my mysterious past. That’s the theme to the 1996 action movie Broken Arrow, directed by John Woo and starring Princess Daisy and John Travolta.
*Think, like,
My theme music comes on.
“Aha! But you see, Inspector: I recently enjoyed a Virgin Greyhound! Enzymes in the grapefruit juice denature tranquiliser dart fluid!”
*The music goes wild.*
Imagine, if you will, a bathtub full of raw eggs. You step into it, and eggs crack beneath your naked soles. You lower yourself in, scooting your butt to get it through the slather of shell, yolks and whites. It is cold as it envelops your body, cold and pointy, enough to scratch the skin.
You stay in it for so long. The cracked eggs coagulate in every nook and cranny, caking up into leathery skins atop your own. Do you even want to get out of that tub, knowing how hard it will be to become clean again? Anyway, my point here is that I want to punish you by making you imagine this. Welcome to this. Welcome to me.
It is thick and sticky. It sticks to the mouth; it coats the teeth. Hard to wash out. The flavour is incredible: I don’t even want to be clean again. Kiss me again—this time, harder. Perhaps you are the author and I am the reader, in our quest to rip out and swap each others’ hearts?
It will hold together sandwiches. It will generously adorn whatever you dip into it. It’ll stick jealously to grilled mushrooms and skewered meats. It is hypnotic to you, is it not? You, transfixed like a deer by it—you, as hypnotised by me as I am by you. Here, in the world that contains only you and I.
Makes 2 servings.
Ingredients:
Directions:
I’m no hero. On the contrary, I am a scoundrel of the lowest sort.
Look to the horizon. To its blaze. Where dreams dwell. It’s far, but as we join hands and go together, we journey closer by the day. For each of us to be a free prince among equals. Boldness is the animating virtue of my moral system. We must first of all dare, in pursuing the object of my scoundrel’s code: the fulfilment of our dreams and desires!
What is eudaimonia—what is the flourishing and the blossoming of Life—but the continuous and consistent satiation of our desires? And how can we each of us keep our desires sated, unless we have the freedom to do so? And our freedom is confined within the bounds of our bravery!
Touch the images to be transported into whirlwinds of wonders and horrors both!
They have burned books before. Blood Tits is the one so hot, it'll catch fire on its own. A face-melting barrage of extreme porn and ultraviolence that’ll catapult Humanity to new echelons of self-comprehension and heal a broken world. The only summary that can do it justice is summary execution. Recipes inside.
Click here to unearthe the unearthly!
Danger! Adventure! Romance! Devious super-crimes and mysteries ancient and modern both! Whether you're one of notorious gentleman-thief SOREN SAXIL’s tireless enemies or ardent admirers, you’ll find in this frank and unflinching true crime autobiographical work a love letter to fine food and the enigmata of wine, to France—and to adventure!
Follow me on this grand adventure! The Age of Adventure has only begun!
Sometimes I think about how the guys at Id Software must’ve felt as they were just about to release the first Doom. Now is one of those times.
Now, I think about it a lot.
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