Death of 7 Billion Angels

Art by Zdzisław Beksiński

I'm a big advocate for and frequently indulge in automatic writing, a form of art popularized by the surrealists, where for a given period of time one must do nothing but write, with no thought given to what will be written, no pausing possible, and no attention given to restrictions of grammar, content, coherence, etc. No punctuation is allowed apart from the em dash.

A great deal of my work comes from such sessions: I set a timer for 2-3 hours, write feverishly and without pause for anything, and then comb through the pages I've produced, cleaning, cutting, polishing until I've got one or more finished pieces of work. In any case, this is all to say that what follows is one such work, and something I intend to create a setting out of. I find the idea of a campaign world dredged as completely as possible from the depths of my subconscious to be compelling, and hopefully you will as well. Here is the piece from which our world shall be hewn, I have called it (melodramatically but appropriately, as you will see):

officer cut me up so that my blood can see the sun — kill seven billion angels — kill them with old age and with bones that work themselves loose — lose their places and kill them with a series of sunrises each one more beautiful than the last — throttle them by the river wring their necks and submerge them in the water — dripping wet and glorious — halos slightly askew — eyes crossed — lips blue and bitten — lay them in a heap and cold in the night sleep beneath them — bring an oxygen mask to breathe under the smothering heap and a cuckoo clock for keeping time — do not get sidetracked think only of your hallucinations — bleed your cheeks with frostbite — snap off your thumb at the base and write with it — write on the back of one of the angels “there is nothing like this anymore” and let that be known — that after they are dead chicken-plucked and stone bruised where your fingers and thumb have bitten at them — no one is to touch another human — let this be enough violence for the whole of the world — let this sacrifice be the last lamb — let the pile of angels tower against the trees and melt in the day — let them join the river — join the river and let the rocks tear at you — join the ichor and silvery clay of angel’s flesh and you count them each by name — all seven billion and there are seven billion and you — you can smile and let the river carry you all away from the mountains and drain you into the vast meaningless sea

—

a boat is swallowed by a wave and then coughed out by another — a yellow hat is lost in a corridor and lands in a puddle much to the merchant’s dismay — the boat bounces away from the shore too small to be afraid — saffron in its belly the crew in its belly saffron in the belly of the crew — the hat is saffron yellow with a pink ribbon the puddle has ruined it — it has caught it spat upon it — it has clawed away at the delicacy of ribbon and velvet it has spun the hat around — the ship spins around and strikes a rock and is destroyed — the water is stained yellow the crew does not try to swim — they sink towards the ocean floor they want to be conscious — they want to see the strange earth that approaches them — what lies at the center of the world — lobster because they live for they think forever — continue to grow bigger the ocean floor far down past the floodlights and the chime and twinkle of radar and television screens far at the murky bottom of the world which they long to see — which has been worn smooth and solid by the ministrations of the ocean and the churn and pulse of the silt and the waves — the lobsters scuttle, each one so enormous that they pile over one another slow clacking their claws — they can fit forever around the little marble of earth that floats somehow disconnected — as though all the continents were free floating above the homes of these tremendous crustaceans — this is the case — they will continue to crawl like that until everything around them gives out and they are exposed to the heat death ray of the sun which will have sunk close in the horizon hot and burning poison — evil to boil us away mankind will not even be a twinkle in the mind of somebody who cared — mankind will not witness the smell of the lobster boiling in its man-eating world ending armor and they will writhe in the light and the dark and everything will be full of the smell of shellfish — the sailors do not see them — one does — his name is michael — and he sees the slow gradient shift in mass on the back in the back of the lobster as it continues to pace through the swirling murk at the heart of all things— around his heart even now the little vice grip pincers are pressing the flesh together and tearing it up and apart in little ragged chunks of meat — this is what everything is really made of that little heart-flesh he thinks — and now he enters a world of slow moving colossi as a mere bundle of wreckage — hardly a suitable offering for beasts of this stature — the lobster the slow twisted or its green plastic eyes and mouth and somehow it is smiling with its brethren they are like a group of holy men all driven quite mad with the knowledge that god will forever be beyond them —michael touches the mud and the wing of a dead angel long rotten — it tears away in its hands it remembers the air and it remembers desperation and a final sad flutter — and it twists upwards and he is borne with it and when it crests the surface and floats strange and molting and grey he is unconscious but draped over it — when he wakes he throws up strange fish and stranger waters and cold coins and chewed paper and fishhooks caught in plastic bags and his angel wing is still with him — and when he reaches the jagged rock that burst the belly of his ship he clambers out of the water to the very top of the rocks and tucks the wing into his shirt — it tickles and the tips stick up around his neck — he is very alone —he sings to himself — he dies of exposure on top of that rock angel wing and all — when a ship comes the next day and finds his corpse there they take his body and leave the wing which has begun to fall apart — bone is exposed like a transplanted tree it takes root against the stone and stretches broad and skeletal — pointing the way like a strange hand saying “turn back” and the peaceful ships that spot it say that there is no more use for such a landmark but it is comforting in a way — but they did not tell his family and the man is buried at sea

—

tea stained sky and forest like a dripping nest of eagles in the rain — a twisted net a flapping sack of canvas — a tattered coat with the name torn out of it — a feast of bread and sky and water — a hide stretched too thin over something precious — a child perhaps a bird wing crushed against the ground — a treetop spotted with pennants and scarves of runaways and vagabonds — a sleeping woman beneath the child under the hide is her child — the bird's wing is an angel wing her mother says giving it to her as she turns ten years old — and she has kept it tucked against her hip all this time — and now that the child is her child not the child of a ditch as it once was — she is hoping that after all it is the wing of an angel found dead in the river as her mother had claimed — and she is hoping that the tree will shelter her from the rain and maybe the snow — the sky looks like snow all dark — tea-stained and in the distance she can hear the rattle of a wind and the rattle of ice and the rattle of bones clicking in a far off cave— and she shivers and is glad that the child is too hungry to cry — and she clutches at her coat and watches the hide above her dance as the wind arrives — and watches as the scarves fill up with first rain and then snow — and watches as the wind catches at child and watches as the child is swept away and she cannot lift a finger— she watches all this the child seems no more than a bundle of cloth a rag doll a ragged baby — she is sorry to see it go but this seems fitting it catches in the tree and sways there watching her —