I have never stopped writing. It’s a passion as powerful, if not more so, than the need I have to make narrative art.
Few, I think, of the people who buy my comics know that I have two published purely prose volumes. The first was ‘God Killers: Machivarius Point and Other Tales’ - a short novel and some semi-related short stories. The second ‘Paradise Rex Press, Inc.’, which featured an astonishing afterword by the great China Miéville.
I have decided to start sharing some of that work here, along with some previously unpublished short stories, all of which relate to the Kiazmus - a network that links all planets hosting distantly-interrelated forms of mostly carbon-based life. It is at the heart of the ‘God Killers’ book, and gave me a means to experiment with many approaches to writing. Some are verging on the abstract and inspired by the ‘new-weird’ movement of the 90’s. Others are more traditional. Below we have a work that took its inspiration from epic Greek and Roman poetry (including footnotes!) and which sets up the template for the whole concept of the Kiazmus.
This is all over 25 years old, and I’ve included a few illustrations that once, a quarter century ago, I imagined might sit along side this offering in a prestigious coffee table art book.
KIAZMUS
There was once a cold and empty place.
Lonely civilisations lived beneath blind stars.
Stranded sailors died on desolate rocks, their ships
splintered upon the hostile shores of faraway lands.
The Weeping God loved Its children, despairing
that they did not know one another, living alone
as they did in such emptiness.
So it spun for them a great web, casting it out over
the stars, so that It’s children would never
again know loneliness.
And we, the children, have walked those gossamer
trails that bind the stars, and we are not afraid,
for we know we are not alone.
And we know we are loved.
The Weeping God has forged for us a way home.
A bridge across the darkness.
Sailors need never die alone on cruel shores again.
He has bound us all in the infinite web that they who
know of it have come to call:
“KIAZMUS!”
Anon. 1700BC.
KIAZMUS FOREWORD
by Professor Frank Scopegate.
Tangiers. 1978.
Whilst it can hardly be doubted that the text translated in this book is of an Earthly origin, much of it can only be explained by visual placement within the context of the Universe at large. Obviously this represents some major problems for orthodox archaeology. The apparent age of the Kiazmus tablets recently unearthed near a Berber settlement in the Moroccan desert, some two and a half to three thousand years, suggests that the composer could not have had any true understanding of the greater nature of the physical universe. He would have had no concept of planets, stars, wormholes or genetics that the text implies. Yet attempts to translate the prose as metaphor have, for the most part, yielded unfathomable results. For the purposes of this translation I have chosen to interpret as literally as is possible, and so while it may be rooted in mere analogy, I choose to read it as fact. Where the text implies ‘planet’, I have written planet. Where it appears to be describing voyages that span the universe, then that is what I have interpreted it as meaning. When it apparently speaks of extra-terrestrial races, that’s how I have referred to them.
In essence I have intentionally placed myself outside of orthodox study, and attempted to present the most literal translation of the Kiazmus text to date. In this abridged version I have striven to provide a more consistent narrative and have chosen to omit the Book of the First Cycle of Relevance through Rational Rememberance and Reason, starting instead with the first chapter of the second book from which the text takes it’s name; Kiazmus. Much of the first book describes what appear to be the belief systems, legends, demographics, flora and fauna of the desiccated ‘planet’ Althlathu, the setting of this epic. The second book, Kiazmus, stands as a bolder, more narrative work, the controversial nature of which has led it to be much overlooked by academics as a work of fancy, with little or no relevance to either history or archaeology. There is little indeed to tie it to what we know of our world today, but it stands at the very least as a great work of the imagination in the truest tradition of the Epic poem. From Gilgamesh, through the Odyssey, to Beowulf. And perhaps most startling of all is that it’s primary protagonist is female, while her familiar is not of any race we know of today, or have encountered in other primitive mythologies currently studied.
The Kiazmus tablets stand unique as a vast work that draws no parallel with any period of civilisation known to man. It is as elusive as it is alluring. It defies categorisation and leaves us reeling at its implications.
Where possible I have included information from other tablet segments that apparently relate to the saga, depicted upon the main Kia tablet, and deepen our perception of the mythology - or as I’m fancifully suggesting, the flora, fauna and legend of this incredible alien landscape so richly and vividly depicted by a hitherto undiscovered civilization so very long ago.
KIAZMUS
The Coming of the Lost
Catspur has only just danced for us. Soon the scatter-shower will come, glittering where her trail fades.
A holy time.
I have learnt well, so they tell me.
But I am a child of the Weeping God. If I do well it is because He so wishes it.
They tell me that once this was a land of lakes, and that more than half the world was submerged beneath water!
Not so now.
But by the will of the Weeping God, whose tears bring life, I may wring from the hard rock that is our home enough of this sacred element to create beauty.
An offering.
And though I’m told I have no eyes, I can sense every part of it as I can our world.
For it is I as I am it.
Not long will it last, this precious bloom, but its brief glory will be sung of.
And I will mourn.
And so the second cycle of Relevance through Rational Rememberance and Reason begins.
This brightening-fade the scatter-shower comes.
And the Weeping God will test us.
We will go down to the Bitter Lake with all the sacred trappings of our blessed God, and there we shall await the pure bright moment of the scatter-shower.
And should its brilliance awaken such beasts as legends tell of, then perhaps it is good that I have no eyes...
The Weeping God will mourn us should this be our Transition-manifest.
And so with great joy we enter into the celebrations that honour the Macra and eternal Son, our Lord.
As one of descent, in whom the blood of the Weeping God flows, I am Raised in my Sixth Cycle to Macran; Holy Mother of the Tribe of Amalthus.
My aged Maga-Macrain bears witness and gleans to source with joy! The Silent garb me in the mantle of Macron. And the Sacred Rhoag, born in the image of the Weeping God, is bound and brought forth.
And we rejoice that a new cycle begins.
And I rejoice that it should be my good fortune to be Macran at this time.
Excerpt: The Book of the First Cycle of Relevance through Rational Rememberance and Reason.
“And Catspur did dance, signalling that the Weeping God required His children to do Him great honour. And Alepha Rhuatha Meg, the fifth Macran in the cycle of Past Relevance and Contemplation, did lead into our midst a mighty Rhoag bearing the mantle of the Blessed Weeping God. And the Rhoag was raised high upon the altar and washed and fed and clothed in the finery of our God. And for three flights of Ashar he was our God. On the forth flight the Daggered arm was struck from him and the Rhoag was split open with the God’s own Dagger of Restraint. And a great fire was built within the Ashen Hall of the Petrified Tree, and the gifts that the children of Lineage had raised in honour were harvested and Stuffed into the Rhoag. And the Rhoag was impaled on a mighty spike and roasted, that we may eat of our God, and in so eating be him, and he us. And the great head of the Rhoag would be stripped of it’s tough hide and fashioned into a new helm for the Macran that the God be within the Macran, and the Macran be within the God. And the leathery wings would be made into gauntlets.”
And together we raise up a feast from the earth, and when we are spent the Rhoag is slaughtered, and eaten, so that we are all one with the Weeping God and he with us.
And after five flights of Ashar we trek north to the Bitter Lake.
Awaken!
Oh! Awaken! Awaken!
The mountainous Sleeper arose!
Stirred by who knows what powers when the scatter-shower gleamed!
And, in it’s bitter anguish that there still swelled but dust in it’s ancient basin, it carved a deadly trench with thrashing, and honoured us with the promise of a Transition-manifest Opus.
I have heard it said that in the second cycle of Relevance through Rational Rememberance and Reason one will come:
One who would be lost.
A Messiah-eh.
I have run my fingers over the carvings and gleaned their contemplation’s.
I have immersed myself in complex thoughtscapes, passed through the Analogous, to the Conceptual-pre-emptive, to source.
I found nothing anomalous.
And therefore have I found anger such as I’ve never known when those that raised and taught me, those that have called themselves seers and servants of the Weeping God were blind to the wonder of what transpired.
From the sky he fell, as the scatter-shower glistened, encased in the very sign and symbol that it is my right to bear upon my chest!
And with that unfaltering providence that is the Weeping God’s way, he brought down upon the ancient Sleeper a Transition-manifest that ended mightily it’s desiccated loneliness, sending it finally to the seas of it’s dreams.
And how they fled, my teachers!
And how lost my saviour.
He came to me then. A mighty burden across his wide back. Quiet. Gentle. Knowing.
And he saw my mark, my pride, and was attentive. And drew it in the sand.
And I saw within, and trusted.
Excerpt. The Book of the First Cycle of Relevance through Rational Rememberance and Reason.
“...And did the tears of Catspur not call on the mighty Sleeper? And did not that monstrous son of Orn awake? Did he not bring down upon your people a Transition-manifest Opus in his anger that the seas of his father no longer surged and eddied in his halls? Were not all but the very swiftest crushed by those vast shanks never meant for land, as he dug once more a new chamber in which to sleep away millennia? Oh, Khallus! Was this not enough?”
The Passage
Long it was, and hard our passage through bitter lands I had heard no tell of.
In sign and touch he put his trust in me and I in him.
And I learned there that though my lost benevolent saviour was of a race and form I had never imagined it was the very same Weeping God he put his faith in.
And he saw in me a vessel of that power, for I am a daughter of that God, and he bade me do my God’s bidding, trusting my senses to show us the way.
And it was in this way that we crossed first the whole of the dead sea of Truth to places I’d been told no longer existed.
We dined on the gifts of the God that I raised in his honour, and my Lost One was all hung about with vessels full of more water than I’d drunk in a lifetime.
And the relics I saw! Glimpses of what was to come! Vast petrified husks of vessels that once glided over seas, and yet others that I was to learn sailed the voids between worlds! All these I reached out and gleaned by the will of the Weeping God, beloved of sailors.
And I wept for the lost and the Lost One wept with me, for he had sailed in the void and dreaded such a lonely fate. My teachers I came to pity for their ignorance, and I came to see them too as stranded sailors unable to return home.
Their seas long-since dried up and gone.
Oh sailor, know you well what heart you take on returning to land after years adrift! So was I moved to find in the low lands and valleys, where once plunged the depths of our mightiest oceans, fertility and life! Tough plantation bristled at our passing. Hardy bitter blooms spread over exposed rock and stabbed at the tender probing of my fingers.
And, wonder of wonder! There were, in the gaping potholes that lay commonplace about these parts, free-flowing underground streams of the sweetest water it has ever been my privilege to taste!
Excerpt. The Book of the First Cycle of Relevance through Rational Rememberance and Reason.
“It was with heavy hearts that the last of us finally came across the Dead Sea, named by Alepha Rhuatha Meg as “of truth” for that which was revealed to those who yet lived. No more than 300 of the 10,000 who left Neptek made it to the wells at Amalthus, that once frozen and terrible land, and of that 300 only 100 survived.”
Rememberance and Reason
It was within the depths of a cavern, one marked with the sacred symbol of the Weeping God, that the cycles of Rational Rememberance and Reason were made valid and clear to me.
Their purpose no longer hidden.
Sad it is that we do forget what we strive so hard to remember, no matter the rituals we build for Rememberance.
Leaving behind my lost saviour who seemed to sense it was a journey to be made by one of the lineage alone, I journeyed into the sacred heart of that deep place. And in the light that danced through cracks and holes in that vast cavern roof there flourished life in such abundance that my whole being wanted to be out, over, in, and of it.
And by it’s wanting; so it was.
He found me then.
A Sayer.
Speaker of the Sed. Reader of Reason.
His sight of me set him atremble, and he shook as he knelt, gasping words I almost recognised as my own.
He was of a stature far bulkier than the men of my kind.
A hunter of prowess.
Yet he became as a child at the gentlest of my touches!
And there happened a union.
In contemplation we gleaned harmony.
And in harmony we gleamed Rational Rememberance at source.
He touched my eye sockets with a gossamer arm of ether and I joyously Remembered with Reason.
And I swam.
I swam till I had not the strength to swim further; then I swam on some more.
And I drank till I feared I would anger my God.
And here I fell, for I drank still more.
I remembered our beautiful blue and green land as it had been.
And in every gathered hub of union there was, watching over us, a vast effigy of the Weeping God.
And we would remember we were not alone.
Then as I swam up towards the light I became confused. The water was hot, and rich in salts.
Devoid of life as our own precious wells.
Atop an ancient water tower I gleaned the putrid sulphurous sea that had swept all life before it.
And still, looking down on me, the image of my God.
And I saw then why he wept.
I would have stayed there, lost in despair for all eternity, had not the Speaker called me back. And here he told me that the Weeping God called to me, and required of me a service. That he had not forgotten us, though we forget the Reason of Him.
And he bade me return to my Lost One and lead him to the God.
Then, as we walked, I felt him slip away into his ancient forest, and it was to a distant echo of rapturous, feral song that I emerged new into the light.
And I thought of the Weeping God gazing out over creation, and felt my resolve strengthen.
Excerpt. The Book of the First Cycle of Relevance through Rational Rememberance and Reason.
“Have you so soon forgotten? Did not Ashar, thwarted as he was in his lust for fair Catspur, curse forever her father, mighty Orn, god of the Oceans and Wind, for fanning the flames that entrapped him? It is he who has boiled away our seas in his madness. And we, may the Weeper forgive us, have helped him.”
Travails
Many the perils we faced in the long period following my awakening. Often I believed I saw my God, like the Benevolent Mother Macra, the Universe Herself, wide armed, inviting embrace, almost near enough to touch.
Many the times I was week, and cried bitterly to return to my home, wishing that I could blissfully retreat into the comforting embrace of that ignorance that had hitherto been my life.
And sometimes the Lost One wept. His strange, haunting moans echoing across the bedrock. Often times he railed at the skies, bellowing like a great beast.
There were days I was too week to walk, and he silently bore my weight along with his own great burden. And yet other days where we both rested in the shade of the bleached bones of ancient Levithians.
On days like this my companion would draw maps of the heavens in the dust, moving my hand over intricate web-like patterns and marking these strange lands with the sign of the Weeping God. When I had the strength I would raise the gauntlet of the God, the symbol of the Third Arm of Creation, and bring forth a bloom for us to dine on.
But I was week, and the blooms were wretched and insulting.
There were times when I was reminded of the Second Daggered Arm of Restraint, such was my frustration and anger, but it was the First Arm of Fate and Guidance that saw me through. This was my connection with the God. Where by providence I was eternally bound to both blindly lead my God and be herald for Him and those who sought Him.
And through blindly leading would I be led.
I also learnt that not all races of this aged planet were benevolent. There were those who sought to stop us in our travels. Those that jealously guarded their territories with a violent hand.
Many indeed were the times our lives faced an immanent Transition-manifest!
And the day came when no route of passage availed itself. A vast fissure, as though Althlathu herself smiled, opened like a wound in the scorched earth. And at this time our hunger and weakness was great, and there seemed no hope in that desolate place.
And the Lost One laid down his mighty burden and set about it. And with tugging and pulling and gentle coaxing it swelled to an even greater size.
And the greater the size, the lighter the load until it swayed in the hot desert breeze an undulating bubble, barely brushing the earth.
And the Lost One affixed this once more to his broad back and took firm hold of me.
He leapt then, as though in leaping he could cover that vastness of space in a single bound! And at first we fell, but with more tugs and pulls the great bundle began to rise, so that we were the burden of it!
To fly is a wondrous fearful thing. We soared like a great mountain Roarche above that lethal canyon and were a fair way across when, like a scatter-shower, deadly projectiles whistled by, thudding into the heavy sacking of our support. With a terrible hiss it shuddered and swayed, and we began a fearful descent into a dance of arrows.
We hit hard that jagged edge. The lost one digging his mighty red fingers into the very rock itself so it seemed. I climbed up over his broad blue back and hacked at the ropes that attached him to his salvage. It’s weight, once more great, threatened to dislodge him and drag him with it into the depths of the fissure’s dark maw. But at the last it came free and fell away into the gloom.
Whatever treasures he had saved for himself were now gone, and with it what little stored water we had.
Excerpt. The Book of the First Cycle of Relevance through Rational Rememberance and Reason. “”I shall have thee, accursed hulk! Thou that hast torn mine very heart from its port and moorings! I shall avenge my beloved son and noble captains, beast, by Orn’s will I shall! So swears King Amalthus!” And in so saying, the great Ornish King leapt from the rigging of his palace and into the dark broiling embrace of the sea below. And days it was the Levithian thrashed in that awful embrace, and oft times threw it’s vast bulk at the very rocks that jutted as it’s own foul teeth from beneath the waves. But it could not shift the vengeful king.”
The Weeping God
How many the Flights of Ashar after that we walked I cannot recall. I have lived my whole life knowing the harshness of my world and it’s many ways to surprise you with a sudden Transition-manifestation. But I had gone farther than any of the Tribe of Amalthus since the times of Ragnorax, and the Fall. And before then never more than two Flights of Ashar’s distance from the wells.
And then we saw him, as I had seen him, a colossus straddling the horizon! The long curve of his wings, faded behind thin clouds, bearing the heavens!
The Weeping God!
And I found in me then the strength to raise a little offering to the God, and we fell upon that little bloom as hungry children.
And in another Flights walk we reached his base and began to climb.
Round and round that spiral path, the symbol of the God’s Heart, we traipsed. Each footfall an agony. At Brightening-fade we rested, and indeed we slept. And I don’t believe I slept better before or since than I did in the lap of the Weeping God.
And when Ashar raised his head over the rim of Althlathu we climbed the length of another flight till at the next Brightening-fade we reached the Temple carved within the shadowy cowl that was the head of the God.
And I Gleaned the Kiazmus for the very fist time!
How had we lost our way? How could we, the Weeping God’s children, have forgotten this, His very soul and nature? How had we come to wander so far from His myriad pathways, His all-encompassing embrace?
And how had we come to miss the point of the teachings? To glean so wrongly what the ancient carvings imply?
Oh foolish we! That the very mark and sign adorns me is an offence I can scarce bare, and I weep with knowing that I know not.
But the Lost one found strength then and came to me, lifting me up to face the God. He embraced me, and weeping himself, stood back, gesturing that I should mount the steps to the podium and glean my God.
So I traced my fingers over those ancient stones, and they felt familiar to me. I gleaned the gossamer trails that spread out over the symbols and carvings of this sacred place, and the light spread into me.
And I unfolded into Him with joy.
And so my Father opened himself to me and we became One.
I, the Weeping God.
I the Magogaplex.
I am on every world, the Gate Keeper.
I am older than I can remember.
I am infinitely powerful.
Infinitely helpless.
Blind leading blind leading blind.
Tethered strength.
Wondrous creator.
Child of Macra, the Universe.
I surge through the Kiazmus, a swarm.
Vortices of probability entrance with tantalising variables, googaplexian beauty.
Hokum wedges shatter carefully cast vortex maps.
Flux craters shudder on the mapscape’s apex as fanned fool denominations hastily spin neutron hexes in the etherwhere.
Some are lost.
There are also many sentients I would not wish to be here, but other matters press me.
And at my heart are the lost sailors of this infinite sea, guided by my children.
By me.
And I would see them safely home.
And at once the unbearable loneliness of being just one hits me, and we are out.
I unfold my mind to better glean this new place as a sensation I have never felt before tears into me and fills me with rapture.
I am cold!
I don’t know how far we must travel to find the next opening. What perils we might face. But I shall find the door to the Kiazmus and reunite with myself once more.
I know now what I am and what I must do.
We will dance across eternity.
Tread mightily upon the stepping-stones that weave their way between the stars.
I have gleaned the sum of all things.
My Lost One must be taken home.
I shall lead him there.
END
Excerpt. The Book of the First Cycle of Relevance through Rational Rememberance and Reason.
”Has it come to this, brother Khallus, that I, Ragnorax, who have loved you always, must be the bringer of transition manifest in you? Let me tell you that my heart bears such an Opus as has never burdened a man as wholly as it does me. Nay, nor as completely. That you bade me lead our people into that accursed land be crime enough! That I did it denies me forever the transition-manifest that is my birthright. I shall see an end to this, beloved brother, though it shatters forever the sacred ring of our ancestors, and tears down the house of our noble lineage. And, when you no longer walk in this world, I shall return to the Dead Sea of Truth and see that my soul burns forever in the pit of it’s vast belly.”
Excerpt. The Book of the First Cycle of Relevance through Rational Rememberance and Reason.
“All manner of maker, of mason and wood-smith, erector of temple and tower was employed in its craft. And slowly, over 300 cycles, the people of Neptek raised from the island-city a statue of their God. And within the cowl that hid his face they built him a temple and housed there his heart.”