“Taskman,” the doorkeeper said at the alleyway entrance to one of the many buildings on the edge of Dimside and Southside. Dimside’s arched and domed architecture bled and melted into the stone pillars that dominated Southern Fae Town’s columned horizon. The doorkeeper was a shadowy figure in his little alcove he retreated to and spindled webs within between whenever a door needed answered. Xala walked past him behind Vulcan as Vulcan led the way through the building. Murals covered the walls of the hallway they marched through, each one more sporadic and nonsensical than the last. It was not an unlawful painting, no more than it might be unlawful for this building to be inhabited, but regardless they mesmerized Xala as much as any representational figure painting of oils and moving shapes. It was a sort of den that Colhern would love.

  And just like that, the markings, scribbles, fonts, and skulls degenerated into component parts and shapes, reconfigured, and blossomed into a horde of butterflies. They were stunning as Xala kept pace behind Vulcan, whose back had become its own terrarium of iridescent carapaces and wings. Wings. Their fragile, wispy, skeletal, crooked, bent, twisted forms fluttered gayly all around him. He reached out to caress the wall that zoomed past him and felt the horde as if it were rushing rivers of planes and legs. Xala lifted up and began to glide across the floor with them, eager to catch up to one of them, any of them, but never seeming to ensnare it before it blended into the herd. Xala groped at the wall, desperate to clutch any of them, anything, but they slipped through like water in a sieve or fluttered around his aching fingers. Sometimes he even banged his hand, the most recent one prompting Vulcan to turn around and grunt his disapproval.

  Xala paid little mind, hovered behind Vulcan, and chased the butterflies. He wanted to hold them again. He wanted to take care of them more carefully. If even one of them broke their wings, he knew he would get on his hands and knees to help it get back to health. They deserved to be healthy and colorful and resplendent. Forever.

  Xala was so busy chasing butterflies he did not realize when a deep, baritone voice commanded his attention. Like water off a duck’s back, it meant nothing to him. When it resounded again, the butterflies fluttered away, becoming duller and duller, until the material world returned. Xala turned his head to spot a peak of masculinity glaring back at him. Her eyes were bullish as much as her bovine features were — she was an Oxen tauran, a pyromantic breed born from the steaming forests of Olai’s geyser-rich domain. Her frame only added emphasis to her tone of voice as she said, “Vul, you best be joking.” Her eyes remained deadset on Xala as he pieced his posture back together and straightened his shoulders when he faced her. “This guy’s not well. He can’t be the one Tes wants to see.”

  Vulcan, without missing a beat, said, “He’s the guy. He’s been distracted lately.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “Here.” Xala stood beside her, just out of sight past her towering bicep and shoulder, as he inspected the weaponry along her belt. Leather wrapped around handheld crossbows that unfolded to fire their arcane bolts, a universal-knife that had tools and gadgets for any situation, and a machete that glistened with the Xyrum crystals slotted into its mold. He appraised the Shield Bracelet she wore around her forearm that, when pressed, would no doubt summon a shield similar to Colhern’s brassy ward. The thought of that protective ward made Xala’s eyes water and itch.

  “Agh, how’d’fuck?” She quickly sidestepped away from Xala, hand on the hilt of her machete, and held out a hand to keep him at an arm’s length. He did not move as she adjusted to his speed and stealth, noted it in her mind, and said, “Huh. And you’r’bsolutely sure?”

  Vulcan’s dejected nod signaled for her to press a button on the nearby door frame. She stepped away, let a few seconds go by, and opened the door once it depressurized its locks. The door rolled into its frame sideways and into the wall, allowing entrance to the opulent, beautiful, chirping room beyond. Xala and Vulcan stepped through, one filled with more awe than the other, as he inspected the luxurious marble, quartz, and crown molding. The walls themselves were arches that had figurines and scenes sculpted from the stone to form entire stories within their dance of representations. Even when viewed backwards, the stories branch out into new and different interpretations about cultures Xala did not recognize whose people resembled insects. Xala marveled at the insectoids that spun their stories along the walls and ceiling of the garden enclosure, whose center was illuminated by the circular skylight above, reflected by the glass and mirror surfaces deftly scattered around the room to brighten every corner. In the center of the garden was Tesgald “Tes” Jukmin, a Cyclopes giant whose forehead and eyespace was populated by a giant eyeball and a lack of neighbors. Even his ears and nose were flat against his skull, while his perfectly manicured and cosmetically augmented lips sat prettily. His languid body rose from its perch of origami flowers and feathers. The chirping birds all around them stopped their tunes and all eyes within the enclosure zeroed in on the foreigners. They assessed Vulcan, found him safe and known based on his previous visits, but locked onto Xala with an isolationist mindset.

  Tes’s voice chirped like a bird’s would, but with an intelligent bite that made his au naturel lack of attire all the more normalized, “Xala Svoboda. I have waited to hear that name and your eyes recognize it.” Xala’s eyes did. That made Tes happy. Tes smiled gruesomely, his chatter-happy chompers on full display as he said, “Be without ease in my garden of aviary delights.”

  Of course a Cyclopes was the one to get in his way. Beasts of ancient origin whose eyes direct imagery into a mind of crystalline perfection. Cyclopes have a brain capable of hosting all the moments of their life and then a thousand more lives, an amount of storage so comprehensive that they are of the few species whose minds can endure long periods of temporal stress and remain unhindered physiologically, the other organic one being Moors. Meanwhile, a Cyclops’s eyeball hosts another brain entwined with its nerves and sclera that is capable of Foresight. However, their ability is, in essence, a highly advanced form of pattern recognition and prediction. The information stored within a Cyclops’s archival mind is used to project past, present, and future events with as accurate as possible predictions, subjective to the Cyclops who looks in any desired direction. Only recently was the hunting of their eyes, usually to turn into Scrying Orbs, made illegal. The Uni-Eyed Revolutions only happened two-hundred-some years before Xala’s birth.

  Thus, Xala had no immediate desire to lunge across the distance and rip out that big eye and turn it into a talisman. Before that, he imagined all kinds of methods to destroy this garden-aviary and walk away with the Cyclops’s soul. Afterward, he imagined how he could dehydrate the eye until it was small enough to polish after many, many enchantments to secure its fortune-telling properties. Instead of acting on any such impulses, Xala stood up straight, confident, and perfectly polite as he bowed his head and said, “Your garden is beautiful. It is an honor to stand within it.”

  “Oh, aren’t we formal? I must urge you to remove such formalities with me. In this garden, only impulses are allowed.” His left leg bent down into a crouch before it sprung up and sent Tes forward a few meters before he landed like a feather beside Xala on one toe. His elongated fingers found Xala’s shoulder blade and guided it forward, deeper into the sunlit greens and blues, oranges, reds, purples, violets, indigos, yellows, greens, whites, crimsons, and magentas. His garden enshrined him as if he were being wed as he and Tes stared at each other across fields of emerald green. Tes sounded soft, the sunlit blue skies above allowed his words to get carried by the wind in Xala’s southern summer direction, and he said, “Your troubles are not my troubles, and yet my troubles are your troubles. All around this city, mayhem has been crowned. Children with feathers growing out of their ears, scales on their arms and legs, come to the House of the Feathered Serpent. They beg for our anodynes to their scruples, our warlike anoydynes of steel and blade and cudgel and hijacked sorcery, but it falls on deaf ears. We cleanse the land of disorder. The land is not in disorder. Every aspect of what I have witnessed has order, routine, intent behind it. At first, sacrifices were made on the altar of false faith. But now, I witness who must be sacrificed on the altar of truth. You. You are the deceiver in my garden, the serpent in my midst, the spider in the nest. Tell me, little spider, little jumping spider, do you think yourself a bird eater?”

  Xala felt bliss in Tes’s garden. It was wild, untamed, and yet so finely cared for it bellied on obsession. Quickly, he realized he felt bliss because it was the kind of garden he would make. Not the kind that was made with compassion and love, like Brook’s garden. That orc reminded Xala of the rivers that nurtured the lives they touched. He imagined the rivers that flooded temperately and gave abundantly. He imagined the rivers that tapered into existence thanks to all the estuaries and streams and creeks that fed its rushing, infinite maw. A garden did not have a river.

  Water needed to be fed by hand to these cumbersome beasts of burdenness.

  Xala’s trance flickered away as quickly as it had been induced, and he now sat in the enclosed garden across from Tes’s origami-cluttered nestbed on the emerald grass. He glanced up at the birds above. They were all the same species, just a mix of different feather colors and sexes, some of them clearly bruised and battered and neglected, while others were obvious Kings and Lords and Tricksters and Charlatans. They had the biggest, most fulfilled bellies, the largest beaks, and the most streamlined patterns with the most vibrant colors. “How often do you clip their wings and hide the body?”

  Tes’s resolve was challenged, his foolish grin trembled as if it rippled, but ultimately sat up and said, “I make no bodies and clip no wings. I merely transport to the next enclosure.”

  “And the next, and the next, and the next. I wonder, what do those birds in the most distant enclosure experience? Then, I’d like to compare it to the enclosure most literally distant to this one. How well do you tend that one? How much does it thrive on its own without your guiding hand? Compare the lowest hierarchical enclosure to the most foreign and distant enclosure, and see the mark of one’s system laid bare.”

  “The system works for those who live within it, regardless of how it truly operates. Systems of hierarchy and guiding hands have thrived around the world over many times. As I observe, your own system is born of a distrust and unruliness with our system. You may think of yours as wholly revolutionary and systemless, but when there is order to madness, then there is no madness. Only some perceived notion of enlightened intent. However, what it fails to realize is that what is enlightened and good for the current, shall be maintained as enlightened and good for the future.”

  “The conservative impulse is certainly that, but the left hand of the Goddess is that which incites change. Change is unstoppable, such is the flow of the universe, and thus it falls to the left hand to exact order’s naive path forward, lest it fall off course until it must u-turn into the direction of the tide.”

  “Spare me. You do not view yourself as the Left Hand of Oluhm’Ma. You are something different, something more indifferent and ammoral. The Left Hand does not destroy for the sake of destruction, but for the sake of creation.”

  “Just as the right hand creates for the sake of destruction, not creation.”

  “It is Quan’s mighty hammer that tempers the fluid metal of Oluhm’Ma’s domain. It is his hammer and forge that sharpens existence into perspective, lest it become eldritch abomination and unknowable formless bodies, whose bodies cannot even be correctly identified from the masses of massful chaos.”

  “Does chaos have mass? I always thought of it as rather intangible.”

  “Jest all you wish, but I know your riddles as much as you know mine. You stand before me as a Revolutionary Facade, Visage, Mask. Your face hides behind layers of irony so dense it might as well form a black hole. And like a black hole, you can detect it based on where the matter is leading. Money does not lie as a forensic tool because it is allegorical to matter across space-time, and when the money, when the matter, begins to fall out of circulation, out of the market, out of space-time, when it begins to stretch thinner and thinner, the black hole, the launderer, is revealed. Tell me, Xala Svoboda, where does the money go? Is it hoarded or reinvested?”

  “Can you imagine all those threads of fate leading toward me as the black hole? Are you so certain, as you see me now, that I am in such a predicament as that? Clearly, a black hole does not think as it consumes, and yet it is autonomous. I think as I consume, just as much as I am autonomous. Thus, is it not important to imagine, while you imagine a black hole, that I think entirely differently to one? Your half-court understanding of the situation is as clear as mine, perhaps clearer, but you must imagine me more capable than that.”

  “Arrogance is ugly on you, but repulsively natural. Like the way a dead body is a natural attractor to maggots. However, just like maggots, just like that which consumes, there is a byproduct. What is your byproduct, Xala Svoboda?”

  “What do I shit out?”

  “Precisely.”

  Vulcan had to fist his mouth to silence his giggle.

  “That is the extent of your half-court strategy. What I produce remains a mystery to you. Does that bother you?”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “It does if you wish to remain alive.”

  “Ah, good, then we’re down to the business. I will provide you with an experience of my byproduct. Heed my strategy, and watch the flower bud, because I am sick of excrement.”

  Tes’s face split open into its big, pearly, oily smile. He reached down at a nearby flower, delicately trapped it between two fingertips, and snipped off the head with a pair of clippers. His body moved like worms on a ribbed surface, bone by bone, until he was angled forward enough to slip the flower’s head into Xala’s hair, right behind the ear. He gathered his slender ligaments upright and said, “Then bud my flower.”

  Xala winced, but stilled as he felt the flower in his hair. It was cut too short. It could fall out with the slightest wrong movement. Tes meant for the flower in Xala’s hair to be indicative of their conversation. If it falls out, Xala dies. If it doesn’t, Tes was still listening. “This world disgusts the Dajilominim.” Xala spoke through a mouth that was neither Dawn-Kin nor Moor, but instead an Alim orc. He was a fresh arrival from Ariz. He came to embark on a study with the Mycologist Guild. He had no documentation, thanks to the rigorous immigration hoops he would have to soar, not just climb, through to see the inside of a government building, and thus was a stranger who smuggled himself into the streets of Fae Town. To them, his name was Xala Svoboda. A duplicate. An anomaly. To Xala his name was Malt Maltman. Xala arrived before Tesgald Jukmin under the guise of a Mishcharer Acolyte; his crimson robe blanketed the ground around him. “It is governed by those whose guiding hands lead to the downfall of the enclosure, not just the residents within. The one whose hand guides this family of enclosures that make up Feltkan has failed with her left hand, but worked too ruthlessly with her right hand. She is a guide who must be removed entirely from the caretaking of the enclosures. Caretaking must be democratized across all the inhabitants of the enclosure.”

  Tes’s head tilted. His eye darted around the room, landed on Xala, and asked, “What if the inhabitants of the enclosure are too foolish to maintain the enclosure? Let alone a family of them?”

  “Then it must fall, displace itself, and become an abandoned ruin until those who know how to run it return, or innovations are made in order to inhabit it once more.”

  “How cruel and harsh. What of all the lives who live within the democratized enclosure at its end? Must they all starve with nowhere else to go?” He gestured up at the metal grate in the skylight, barely visible thanks to all that redirected sunlight. “My enclosures are such because they are enclosed. None may travel into my enclosure without my say. None may leave without my say.”

  “Then if it loses you as its guiding hand, and cannot support itself once democratized, whose democratization can still include you, then all within must die. Only foreign intervention can stop the death of democracy when its members have failed to maintain their enclosure. Something must come and break the metal grate that severs it from the rest of the world’s many enclosures, whose enclosures rapidly appear to us as sprawling planes to frolic within.”

  “I’ll have no such frolicing. It detests me. It detests me how those who say they love to frolic, those within other enclosures and then meadows and planes, have such distaste when I arrive. I prefer to appear as I am, naturally, but it is thanks to the frolicing masses that I cannot. That I must become modest, hide within shades of the rainbow, but not every shade, and conform and conform until I am naught but a bundle of drab clothes with blood bursting from the seams thanks to all the weight and pressure.”

  “Ah, but here I am. Transient of transients, foreigner of foreigners, from one of the furthest enclosures, a snippet out of time itself, and suddenly I was placed back into the world. The Dajilominim experiences this as well. I am just as much him as he is me.”

  “Are you more like him than he is like you?”

  Xala’s expression became more neutral and less praisal. “Can any acolyte of anything possibly be less like the thing they love than the thing they love is like them? Through my radical adaptation to the world, I have integrated into it. I have become synonymous with it.”

  “Have you? Or are you an eternal foreigner? Can you ever love something of this world as much as the one you came from? Does the one you come from have any of your love attached to it at all? What enclosure would you feel most comfortable within? Because, if it is not this one, or that one outside, then which?”

  “None. All enclosures are bound to make me bristle, because the enclosure I covet most does not yet exist, and yet I can reach out and grab it anytime I think of it.”

  “Then why not build an enclosure of your own make within your own mind? Spare us all your degeneration of order and system.”

  “Do you often lie to yourself for the benefit of others?”

  “Some of the wisest do.”

  “Are you very wise?”

  Tes chuckled. “Not very.”

  “Nor am I. Nor do I wish to be particularly wise. I aim to barrel through the world as a manifestor of truth, but armed head to toe in lies.”

  “Ah, and thus you understand that you are not god. According to the Codes of Lilith, there is no difference between the theorist and the terrorist. Even the most cherished desire disappears in their hands. This is why Xa has black hands. Bring both of yours to every argument. The one-handed king finds no remedy. When you approach the Gates of Triunity, however, cut both of them off. The Truest Deceiver has no need for theory and is armored head to toe in terror.”

  “Tell me, can you explain that sermon as well as you’ve memorized it?”

  “Would you permit the occasional stutter?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Then, perhaps. So, not-a-god, why do you think yourself worthy enough to carry out a non-god’s will in a god’s manner? Why should you decide who the guiding hands of our enclosures may be? We perform the Left and Right hands of Oluhm’Ma, but do we merely mount them? I never considered myself a conduit, but instead as some other mechanism that does not touch, merely gestures.”

  “I’m sure you rarely touch that which is conducted, but make frequent attempts on the conductors. I can only imagine how often your hands touch someone.”

  “Are you offering yourself in some other’s place?”

  “No. Merely observing.”

  “Ah-yes. Are you imagining my death? You’ve alluded to it often enough. Without me, the enclosure dies, while I have disappeared with no reason. You imagine I touch often, but you refuse to be one of them. Once I have touched all things, and you are not allowed, then I must simply die if that were my life’s purpose.”

  “I think of death often. Yours is indiscriminate. I am a death for every kind of person kind of person.”

  “Are you? If you were, then why would you care so much about every kind of person?”

  “Because, despite thinking of death for every kind of person, I am a kind of person. Thus, I cannot kill every person. Such would be suicidal. If I was suicidal, I would carry out my deed more quickly — strike off the easiest person on the list of every person to kill. I operate a tinge more complexly.”

  “Complexity? Within you? No. No, I think something far more simple is going on. I wonder, just wonder, what kind of things would the Grandmaster sniff out of you? Clearly, my sight does not reveal you fully. But, he could. Oh, he would,” Tes’s throat undulated and constricted around the air inside before he sighed out an almost lustful gust. “So, change the enclosure, the meadow, the world. How can you be certain I will remain in this new world?”

  “I argued for democratization of the whole enclosure, of all enclosures. That means you are also an inhabitant of the newly democratized enclosure. Consider that the voice who democratized all others will often be the one others look to for further direction and guidance. The guiding hand who gives up his own power, somehow, gets put right back in power. At that point, you can choose to work cohesively, democratically, representationally, or some other manner of statesmanship. As one of the harbingers, you would have the potential to become the focal point of the enclosure, rather than its eerie guiding hand.”

  “Then what? Would I have your guiding hand to guide me?”

  “No. I have no interest in living within democracy. All states are in variances of anarchy. There, I thrive quite happily.”

  “And when all variances of anarchy are cleansed?”

  “Then I will find the next enclosure.”

  “And when there are none left?”

  “Then I must find the next world, universe, infinity.”

  “The next infinity?”

  “Yes.”

  “How odd.” Tes, a man locked within an enclosure of his own making, now looked around his den with a different perspective behind his one unblinking eye. “I’d much rather stick to the enclosure I know.”

  “Then participate in it more honestly, so that the credit does not go to someone else, some liar, some poster-child, some Great Man of History.”

  “You think the Great Men are mere puppets of the guiding hands?”

  “Limit the number of guiding hands, no. In reality, where there are unlimited guiding hands, absolutely.”

  “So, it’s always been democratized? At least, among the guiding hands?”

  “And the guiding hands of those guiding hands, and so on, and so on.”

  “And who is the utmost guiding hand? The singularity?”

  “I have no interest in believing there is one. I don’t think guiding hands necessarily reduce in number overall across the different versions, but rather get displaced elsewhere. The utmost populations of guiding hands are constantly in democratic, universal, diversified alignment, but not singularity.”

  “You are no ordinary acolyte.”

  “And you are no ordinary accountant.”

  “Really? I consider my enclosures fairly indicative of my profession, as my profession is indicative of myself.”

  “Is your profession repesentational of yourself, though?”

  “Semantics.”

  “Quite.”

  “No, I suppose not. Though, if it were, then, again, how can I survive democracy?”

  “Do you find no thrill in simply finding out?”

  “I am not an adrenaline junkie. I am a risk avoidant. Though, I am curious. Very curious. I understand you are not fully affiliated with the People of Mishcharer, but they are certainly echoing these sentiments, veiled under many layers of superstition and illusion. How did you convince them to let all this faith-hidden ideology run rampant?”

  “Would you have taken my offer if you were in their place? If you had their readiness, their doctrines, their beliefs?”

  “Huh. It was almost too easy to make them fall in line, eh?”

  “Precisely.”

  “As if the world was waiting for it, like a seed trapped in the transit, never finding the right conditions to take root, until right now. Now, your Dajilominim is waking up. Not some foolish messianic god, but as the manipulation and eruption of forces buried within the collective unconsciousness. You’re gardening.”

  “Now do we meet eye to eye?”

  Tes chuckled like a bird cheeps, and all the until-then silent birds in the aviary exploded into a joyous orchestra. They parroted him in syllables as he said, “Yes, we definitely understand and meet eye to eye now.” The birds resumed their subjectively aimless chirps and lives within the enclosure. He spoke alone when he said, “In order for your gardening to affect the Feathered Serpents meaningfully, you will have to explain your plan to the Grandmaster. How do you think you will fare in his presence?”

  “I will die. Something else will be born.”

  Xala left before Vulcan. Xala continued his competition with Tes, the two eventually walking away appeased, and ended on the truth of his plans. The same ones he had given the People of Mishcharer and the Grave Snatchers but in a Feathered Serpent format. They were the primary fighters within Xala’s rebellion. They had the training and experience that order and mafia rule gave them, now they needed to diversify and expand their members. They needed to offer aid and knowledge to the people, just like the Grave Snatchers and People of Mishcharer. They needed to be emblems and idols the people could flock to for guidance and safety, just like the other two. Rapid expansion supported by extreme wealths of wisdom and knowledge, surrounded by social upheaval, and Xala created the perfect environment for discontent toward the other, toward the surface, to flourish. It integrated enough populations in Fae Town that there was no need to other nulls or mages or cursed folk and thus create animosity toward a specific group. Xala aimed their fury, their desire for rebellion, at that porous mass that upholds civility within unjust times.

  When Vulcan caught up, they stood still as they looked out over the cityscape of Dimside and Southside’s meeting. It was a ridgeline between sunlit stone forest and idyllic glittering night. Vulcan glanced back at the building they just escaped from, grumbled something incoherent, and said to Xala, “Half the time I can’t tell what that guy’s talking about, why were you matching his crazy?”

  “He’s not insane at all. He’s enlightened, but the way a bird with its wing clipped can be enlightened about flying. He doesn’t really perceive how shallow his life is.”

  Vulcan sat in those words, winced as he looked up at the cavern ceiling, and eventually said, “Still sounds crazy. You are what you are.”

  “Are you?”

  Vulcan shrugged, “Yeah, pretty much. Sure, my body changed, so did my life, but I am still an orc, I’m still a guy, I’m still a brute. If that ever changes, then yeah, shit changes. I’m no longer alive, I’m undead. If I spent all day thinking that I was still alive, I’d go nuts. Oh.”

  “Hm. He still thinks he’s flying.”

  “Then he’s a nut.”