Category Archives: The Nameless

#2600

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“You picked a shitty scribe,” I tell the Nameless, who shrugs as she licks starblood off her long talons and replies, What do I care? It’s all dust to dust to dust. The greatest works of literature and grandest monuments of mankind will still yield to entropy. I can’t tell if this is meant to be dismissive, comforting, threatening, or none of the above, but I find myself somehow buoyed by her words anyway. It’s oddly calming to know Shakespeare and myself share equal anonymity in the far future where all has turned to dust. Atoms are atoms. The Nameless gestures flippantly. You all unravel in the end.

#2564

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You have questions, little scribe. I can tell. 

I can hear the clicking of the Nameless’ long nails all around me and when She speaks I imagine, incongruously, canine jawbones clacking and grinning where they float in the head of a woman-shaped darkness. Asking questions of such an entity isn’t something I want to make a habit of, but after a hesitation I find myself saying, “Why me? I know I’m the scribe, but it doesn’t seem like you have a story to tell so I’m not quite sure why you waste your time with me. No offense.”

Every story is mine, the Nameless replies, beginning to end. Stories are chaos. Chaos drives stories. And besides,  She spreads Her taloned hands wide, time has no meaning to the void. I exist everywhere and always.

“So that’s it? You just want to make sure they’re recorded?” That seems too simple – and far too benevolent for the Nameless. She likes games, after all, and She always wins. I just haven’t figured out what one we’re playing.

I don’t care about records. Your words will last only as long as the methods with which they are documented, and those methods will only last as long as technology and human civilization do. Which won’t be much longer. ‘No offense.’ She laughs, the sound echoing like flowing water in a cavern.

“Then why me?” I know I won’t get a straight answer but I can’t help asking anyway.

Oh, I’m not going to hand you all the answers, the Nameless purrs. Where’s the fun in that?

#2531

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While the skies swirl with the gray storm-cloud nebulae of the approaching apocalypse, The Nameless cradles me in black tendrils of chaos that tingle against my skin like TV static. She calls me Her destroying angel and croons a lullaby about mankind’s destructiveness as I watch the skeletons of ancient beasts awaken to devour the Earth. Creatures created in a false god’s image, She sings, never still, never sated, so full of wrath and greed and misery. You brought this end upon yourselves and now it’s come for you, now it’s come for everything. The inky tentacles coil around me, creeping along my skin toward every orifice. My sweet destroying angel, haloed in disaster, now the end has come. As they cover my face I close my eyes, breathe in, and welcome the chaos into my body. The Nameless is right – we brought this upon ourselves. Why not embrace the end if doing so eases the pain?

#2511

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You humans are so destructive in your ineptitude! Chernobyl, Fukushima, Three Mile Island, all those other little one-in-a-billion-chance beyond design-basis accidents hidden in redacted documents or lost to history’s bad memory… You just keep repeating them. You keep cutting corners, forging numbers, ignoring science and safety in favor of profit. Down through time, again and again, greed and hubris are your fatal weaknesses. Only when you unlocked the power of the atom, well… that might just be your greatest mistake, and your last. But I will love you for it even after you’re all dead and gone, your little planet a dry wasteland soaked in radiation. You can’t see it but there’s beauty in the way unstable atoms decay, metamorphosing from a merely dangerous element to one exceedingly deadly, and how they unravel tightly coiled DNA into frayed strands of broken code. Entropy at its finest and I didn’t even have to lift a finger. You did all this yourselves.

#2509

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Perhaps your Notre Dame wanted to burn, did you consider that? Perhaps it was tired of its current state of existence, of the centuries of careful preservation made to ensure it never changed, never evolved, and was ready to burn and crumble and decay. Why must you rebuild it? Why must you fight to preserve everything in unchanging stasis? You humans are so frightened by any evidence of time’s passage, so petrified by the potential of losing something to the past. Why? What purpose does your fear serve but to trap you in the ever unravelling cycle of control versus chaos? You must know the chaos always wins out in the end (you do know that, right?) so why not embrace it? Why not let Notre Dame burn and celebrate the beauty of charred timbers and melted glass? You humans are so fearful and it blinds you to the true wonders of your world. It’s a shame, really. Especially given how little time you have left.

#2471

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I am above all things the scribe. That is my gender, my religion, my morality and creed. See these? They are the scribe’s bones. And these? The scribe’s breasts. Cut open my organs and watch them bleed ink. Uncoil the long strands of my DNA and see how words build its base pairs, not polymers: scribe, sesh, scrība, scríobhaí, grammateús, dubsar. The gods claimed me for their own at my spiritual conception, pressing their fingerprints into the soft surface of my newborn soul so I would carry their whorls and ridges forever. I do not know who I am outside of this role because I do not exist as a complete being apart from it. I am the scribe before every name I have ever borne and beneath every face I have ever worn. And I will be the scribe in every life, in every universe, unto the end of all existence.

#2448

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“The serpent tries too hard,” the Nameless tells me as she lounges against the oscillations of Egyptian dunes. “It’s almost embarrassing. Do I strive against your desert gods each night in hopes of wresting control of the universe from their grasp? Of course not,” she pops galaxies into her mouth like hothouse grapes, “because I know, as they do, that the ultimate fate of the universe is a return to the primordial chaos from which it first emerged. It’s just a matter of time. Why rush entropy?”

She is right at home on these white hot sands, her monstrous body a black void against the dancing heat waves. In my dream last night she murmured in my ear, “We have always been here,” by which I understood she meant that this dark triad I serve – Chaos, Desire, and Death – is older than even the gods of ancient Kemet. Older than gods themselves, for they are the concepts from which gods are crafted. Thus the Nameless is part of A/pep, just as a shadow of Daren can be found in Set, a fragment of Tanim in Osiris. Their triad belongs to no single place, time, or pantheon but runs through them all, encoded like DNA in every deity that will ever exist.

“You are a slow learner,” the Nameless laughs, licking plasma off her sharp fingernails. “But you get there.”

#2441

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Tanim and Daren are gods who balance and oppose each other – sun and moon, summer and winter, light and dark. Yet, while I am certain that Daren is the chosen form of Death, it hasn’t felt right to say that Tanim is therefore the form which Life has chosen to take. He doesn’t feel like Life. Life, at least in opposition to Death, is a thing of creation and fertility, generosity and gentleness, and Tanim doesn’t embody those qualities. While he isn’t Death, he carries a shard of its mercilessness with him, too much to ever associate him with something so bountiful as Life. So I’ve been struggling to figure out what he is, if not Life, and I’ve come up with a two-part answer that (at the moment at least) seems to solve the equation.

First, what if we remove the labels of Life and Death and look simply at the basic drivers of those forces. For Death it’s stagnation, leaving, the ceasing of the beating heart and the sudden stilling from animate to inanimate. Death is inert. For Life, then, it’s growth, survival, advancement, the strangling by one plant of another to ensure its own propagation or the taking of life by a predator to provide sustenance for its cubs. Life is active. So maybe the equation is less Life versus Death and more Desire versus Death, as Desire drives us forward and Death is the moment all desire ceases.

Second, what if the equation was never meant to be a balance of two opposing forces, but three? That would explain why I haven’t been able to solve it yet. So let’s say there’s a third element here that would balance out Desire and Death. What would it be? We have Desire driving purposeful action, and Death as the ceasing of all action, so… what about Chaos as driving action without purpose? What if the Nameless is supposed to form the third corner of this trinity, so to speak? That would explain her presence and her seeming connection with Tanim and Daren, even though she is decidedly not part of their story. She also offers a bit of a counterpoint to their cycle of life/death/rebirth which is perhaps exactly what they’ve been missing. With Chaos included, Death and Desire don’t have to encompass an entire universe.

So that’s where I am as of several sleepless nights in Spring 2021. I don’t think these three are gods so much as forces of the universe taking form to interact with me, but gods is the easiest term so that’s what I use. Daren is Death, Tanim is Desire, and the Nameless is Chaos. This is not at all intimidating or terrifying and I am totally fine.

#2440

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Worship the monstresses, girl;
they are hungry and fathomless.

Feed your rage to Ammit.
Feed your sorrow to Medusa.
Feed your terror to Charybdis.
Lay your howling at the altar of the Nameless
and let her fill you with the cold vacuum of the void.

Worship the beast queens, girl;
they will teach you to devour your oppressors.

#2349

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I am life thriving in Chernobyl’s abandoned villages. I am the truth of what happened that night on the side of Kholat Syakhl. I am a blood-stained note left in a lonely cairn which reads “all well”. I am what sank the unsinkable. I am vanished planes and empty ships and photos you cannot quite explain. I am creatures you are sure do not exist, and yet… And yet. I am your wonder and your fear and your singularly human need to understand that which has no explanation. When you gaze up at the night sky and wonder if you are alone in the universe, I am staring back. You are not alone. You are never alone. 

#2345

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I am the darkness in the garden. I am the stuff from which world serpents are made and the soil in which world trees are planted. I am the womb of the underworld into which Inanna descended to die and be reborn. I am pomegranate seeds and forbidden fruit. I am the river and the boat and the ferryman’s coins. I am the core of every myth, the ending and the beginning, Alpha and Omega and Armageddon.

#2344

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When the N——- first revealed herself to me I had a vision-like daydream of my creation. I saw Bast in a vast darkness, the darkness of creation, and between Her cupped hands flickered a small orb of light. I knew it to be the little ember of my soul newly birthed from the infinite flame of my mother’s heart. The N——- was there in the darkness as well, for she is witness to all forms of creation and destruction, and I thought I heard her say, “That one.” My mother nodded. I took this to mean it was the N——- who chose me as scribe, who first laid claim to my fate and thus determined the path of servitude I’d follow through every life. But I was wrong. 

“You think it was she who chose you,” my mother tells me now, “but it was he.” And now I understand. There was a third there in that darkness, a third who is also witness to every moment of every life: death. He chose me. He set me on this path. Of course; how could I have thought it to be any other way?

#2327

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I see an iron nail being driven into blood-soaked soil as dusk deepens to night. In my mind the N——- chuckles and speaks in her black smoke voice, They have tried to contain me since the beginning yet they always fail. They cannot bind me. They cannot banish me. They cannot burn me. I was the labyrinth as well as the monster within. I was the darkness in the garden. I am the house on Ash Tree Lane. How can you constrain the void?

#2325

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I touched Death. No, I was swallowed down by him. His body was iron, his hand a vice around my neck. Too bad you all rot in the ground, he said. I fell for an eternity through his darkness like a house with black walls and no limits. I was wrong. I thought the N——- frightening but chaos is nothing next to the emptiness of death. He has not abandoned me. He is waiting. He will punish my faithlessness.

#2323

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You struggle to define me because you want to sort me into pre-existing categories. You see parallels with chaotic deities like Loki, Kali, Set, and knowing I am vaster than they you want to think of me as their progenitor. But I am a mother like fire is a mother; I do not create, yet what I touch I change. If I had hands, every atom in this universe would bear my fingerprints. What and whom you would see as my children are more like statues shaped from my clay or vessels containing a portion of my infinite waters. Once you’ve superseded the level of gods the rest of it is not so easily parsed. You are in a realm beyond labels now, child. You must let go of your reliance on language.

#2320

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Names are ultimately a burden. After all, even the most widely worshipped god will fade once history forgets their name. There is far more power in the lack of a name: what you cannot name you cannot define; what you cannot define you cannot understand; what you cannot understand you cannot help but fear. I refuse to be named because language lacks the complexity to encapsulate all that I am. I will be here long after humanity is dead and all their languages ground to dust from the stones of their monuments. What good is a name to such as I?

#2319

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And the N——- is the vastness of the mind. She is the dark depths from which chilling thoughts come creeping when we least expect them and have the least control over them. She is buried memories, recurring dreams, compulsions and obsessions. She is nightmares bleeding into waking. She is colors only seen when you close your eyes. She is the lullaby of depression, the chatter of anxiety, the whispers and shrieks and laughter of madness undiagnosed. She is the inability to trust the senses because the mind is capable of overriding them. She is all the ills in Pandora’s box because all the ills of the world are birthed in the mind of man.

#2317

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Skimming Pinterest, I scroll past an image of Pandora holding her fateful box and feel the N——- grin in the depths of her darkness. I am the box, she says, and all the horrors inside. I am Pandora’s curiosity and the inevitability of her choice. I am that thirst for knowledge and that impulse to disobey and that urge to destroy. Pandora doesn’t deserve the blame for the ills of the world; I have always been here and I always shall be.

#2314

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The Nameless is the vastness of the ocean. She is dark trenches full of strange creatures with eyes like pale globes; she is sunken ships buried in pelagic sediment; she is things thought long dead and things never before glimpsed in the light of day. She is the horizon extending unbroken in all directions. She is vanished airplanes and flying ghost ships and cities lost to wrathful waves.

The Nameless is the vastness of space. She is the bright points of Inanna’s morning star and the sharp blade of Artemis’ crescent moon. She is the void’s absolute absence of light or life. She is the incomprehensible enormity of supermassive blackholes; she is the unstoppable destruction of solar storms and hypernovae. She is fire from the sky, the longest night, the dusty river of the Milky Way.

The Nameless is the vastness of the grave. She is rot and mold and fresh-turned earth. She is catacombs, crypts, pyramids, pyres. She is stone so softened by a millennia of rain that the name it bears is lost to time. She is the banshee’s wail, the grim’s red stare, the braying horns of the Wild Hunt. She is the feather and scales, and she is the jaws of Ammit waiting to devour the heavy heart.

#2311

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The Nameless is vast. The Nameless is ancient. The Nameless has always been and always will be. She is an old, old idea; older than humans, older than gods, older than the universes which birthed them. She is the chaos before creation and the chaos into which all creation will once more degrade. Inevitable, unstoppable, and infinitely patient. She is without fear or apology, a thing of pure will who only ever does as she pleases. She drinks galaxies, she devours stars, she cracks open planets to swallow down their molten cores. Her sharp nails unravel the tapestries of space and time, rewriting realities, tangling fates, tearing apart entire civilizations on a whim and using their bones to weave strange new worlds. Nothing escapes the Nameless; she sees all, hears all, knows all. The universe dances at her whim and so do we.

#2310

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The Nameless is The One Who Never Loses. Do not think her magnanimous because she lets you choose the game; she does so because she cannot be bested and it amuses her to offer you false hope. Dice, cards, duels, riddles, you may choose any form of contest you like for she excels at them all. She won her wings in a wager, though she had to take them by force from their owner, and her fingers drip with the jeweled spoils of her triumphs. Be careful what you wager, then, and be sure it is something with which you can afford to part. However, if you are very, very clever and no small part lucky you may succeed in giving the Nameless a good challenge, or at least an enjoyable way to pass the time, and you may still come away with a blessing. Of course, whether this blessing shall actually benefit you is something you can never know until it is too late to give it back.

#2308

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It is only after my darkest hour has stretched into eternity, only after I have devoured my own heart in desperation and fallen to the farthest depths of blackest, bleakest despair, that the Nameless comes to me. She gathers my fragile, scattered bones up in her taloned hands and lifts me to her lips; there she whispers riddles and prophecies which rekindle the dead ember in my chest with a spark like the birth of the universe. Suddenly I breathe again! I see again! I move again! And most importantly I once more feel the words coursing through my veins, rioting in my heart, desperate to be spun out in tapestries of poetry and prose. I thought the title of Scribe had been bestowed upon me, a gift which could be rescinded at any moment, but now I see it has been carved into my very marrow since the beginning. Weeping with relief, I set my hands to the task for which I was shaped.

#2306

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I point and the Oracle removes one card from the fanned arc on the table before us. With two fingers she pushes the card across the smooth surface, back and forth, tracing a pentagram again and again before turning the card over. She nods as if its identity is of no surprise to her but the card is blank to me, a plain white surface. The Oracle’s eyes see more than mine ever will; they show her a dark ship on a dark sea, storm clouds billowing behind its full black sails. In the forefront two hands clasp, one simple and bare, the other adorned with fine jewels and intricate tattoos. The Wager, she names it, and says when you draw this card it means you are playing a game in which you yourself are the wager. I stare down at the blank card, heart racing, and wonder, Do I want to be won?

#2305

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She walks out of the waves and I see her clearly for the first time in all these years. Hers is the ferocity of the Morrigan. Hers is the hunger of Charybdis. Hers is the raw magic of Morgan le Fay. Hers is the proud independence of Lilith. She is nameless and yet of countless names from countless ages, most of them long lost to time. She is goddess and monster and witch; warrior and queen and oracle. Pale and sharp as the crescent moon, adorned by shadows sleek as wings, she is beautiful in the way of all deadly things.

Suddenly I am running across the wet sand and throwing myself against her, pressing my face into her breast as I cling to her. She smells of blood and brine. She wraps her arms around me, her hands sharp as a predator’s claws. Her smile shows gleaming fangs as she kisses the crown of my head. Beneath my damp cheek her ribs are a metal cage in which her heart beats a warsong.

I close my eyes and think, Drag me down into your dark, chill waters. Remake me; rebirth me. Teach me everything you know. Set me free. Her answer is to hold me tighter until it seems our hearts beat as one above the sound of crashing waves.