The First Log of the Burning Scribe
I am compelled to write. I type continuously on a keyboard. The click of the keys and the hard plastic under my fingers are all I know now. I do not see. Yet I know things. Images come to me. I know things even the Nobles of the Chancel of Kobe do not know. It is a curse for the cost is myself; I do not know who I am. I cannot remember.
The memory has been burned from me. When my eyes were pulled out, my spine melted, my hands bound and my desire fried, Lord Drake took my soul. He took it and swallowed it and at the same time, he let me know. He gave me images, but I do not see them. I feel them. They course through my mind like a psychic drip into the veins of my consciousness. I cannot ignore them. It is as if I am there. So I write and I describe them. If I do not, they burn the delicate sensitive skin of my brain and all that is left of me. And so I am compelled to document what I feel.
When the Nobles of Kobe choose me, they did not know what was to happen to me. They picked me randomly and gave me up to their Dark Master and Lord, Drake of pain and lies. I was a humble servant, a devoted subject to the Lords as I had been all my life…
But then the lies were shattered. I was forced to remember Kobe before… and I still remember Kobe after. Two sets of memories, full of holes where I should have been, two parallel worlds, both equal, both true, both lies.
I remember the newspapers and the TV coverage of the murders in excruciating detail. There were one hundred gruesome deaths over one hundred days. The victims were tortured and then torn apart and left on display on major roads and other public areas for the morning commuters to find. I can name them all. I have lived through each murder. Why do I remember this? And then the day of fire, the sky darkened, earthquakes cracked the land, people screamed in horror, buildings became dust and no one came to save us. Did I have a family? What happened to them? Christ, Lord Drake, who were they? I remember how the people were twisted and transformed. The past was changed as if it was a play-thing, putty to be sculpted, Kobe was ripped out of history and a great tower was raised by the hands of the sick god high into the monstrous sky and three mortals were made Nobilis and invited into the realm of gods. They do not know the cost of their EnNoblement. They do not know the horror and the lives taken in their names. Kobe was taken out of the world, made separate.
I watched as Lord Drake made the Nobilis of Kobe, poured his blood into their dead vessels, their bodies and saw their minds transformed into Nobles of Reality. It is the most beautiful and the most grotesque sight I have ever seen. Divine light and dirty human excrement, delight and joy that burns and horror and tears that comfort… he erased their short term memory so that they couldn’t remember their transformation.
In this new Kobe, we lived as if it was always this way. The tower twisted and turned in ways that now make me wretch in disorientation because I know it is not natural. I remember the highest garden with no walls so that it looked like it was a green hill in a sea of white clouds. Lord Drake would appear here. I remember the parks that clung to walls, houses that hung from impossible ledges, and lifts and corridors that defied logic. Yet for a time, this was the natural order for me, I knew the ways of the place. But I can’t remember what I use to do, who I knew…
Lord Drake created three Nobilis. He took a European photographer, ripped him apart and drove his soul deep into the cities of the world. Louis Bucket became the Power of Urbanisation in that moment though he still does not know what that means.
Then he took a cat, as a sick joke, and gave it the estate of Endurance. The creature, Mr. Snuggles, was transformed and stands tall equal with humans.
Then the Enigma. Already his image is vanishing from the world but I hold onto it, refusing to let him go. An ambitious man, driven by secrets and power, he happened on a device created by Drake. The black humour of Drake is evident in the device’s function, for it initiated the transformation of Kobe, though Matthew Ballard believed it would reveal the secrets of the universe. In a way it did, I guess. Secrets that burned a city and took my soul. Finance and Secrets were the estates given to Matthew. But he is changing right now. He is becoming and so he rewrites the past. His becoming…
Lord Drake told them nothing and gave them a quest. Create an Anchor and Prove their worth. Easy and impossible both at once.
Mr. Snuggles sought out a cat-torturer, Robert, a young confused boy. Snuggles cruelly played with him. Snuggles is fulfilling his role as easy as Lord Drake laughs at humanity. Baset, Power of Cats, filled Robert’s house with cats and slaughtered his parents in revenge for his acts as mortals. Baset dragged Snuggles into her lair and showed him “the mirror”: images of the Spirit World poured through me as Snuggles saw and I witnessed things that were more unreal than the twisted world of the Nobilis. Baset showed him her cages of humans half turned into cats and degraded into domestic pets. She gave him a girl as if it was trinket.
Matthew Ballard found his ex-lover, Deseire in New York. She was haunted by half-memories of him and the disaster of Kobe. My heart felt for her but only for a moment. She half-remembered while it burned right through my soul. He took her to Kobe, showed her his new world. And Matthew started to prepare the tower-city, to improve it.
Mr. Snuggles and Ballard decided to translate the Voynix Manuscript as proof of their new status. But this was the seed of Ballard’s change. Even now his Nobilis brothers do not know what happens to him. He is changing. His is becoming the Enigma…
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