But see, amid the mimic rout,
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.
– Edgar Allan Poe, “The Conqueror Worm”
It’s Aft-Hallows. The treats are tallied. The white sheets pulled away.
The masks come off.
It’s been many cycles since I searched the Freed Dome for that re-image. For that lost word. I walked through many Governs, Festives, and sub-cultics trying to find it.
Trying to find the true face of Amarak.
I’ve been gone long, deep into the Interface, deeper into the Land. And still, I didn’t know how one word would lead on, to the place of the Interregnum, and the heart of ultimate divise, of the Second Great Disunity.
My parens always told me to bury the plague-bare. To avoid the Nats. A commonsensical. The Nats, the Novax, helped the Disunity. Ended the Disunity. But did they?
What is sickness? Is it just the body, or gleaning itself? So many words from so many places in the knowing space in my head now. The Rangers in the Badlands had a secret. Many secrets. In their Interface, sep and divise from the Repolitik, I saw a legend.
The scholars of the Freed Dome Collective said that the Forty-Fourth Precedent was the last. But there was word of Forty-Six. Fore the Novax, the legend says, they said Two Teeth held Amarak, barely, two pinpricks of an old man. Two teeth, and four, keeping back the blood red tide. An in-oculate, a grafting, against disease. The Predicts say two women could have saved the Politik, fore and aft.
That was when the Novax came. The true Novax.
They did not see. They refused to see anything.
There is another view. We never had Precedents. Only Presents. A Forty-Sixth Present of the Demos, beyond the Forty-Fourth, tried to save us from the sickness coming. But the Land has always been tough soil. Tangled. Twisting. A morass. The Repos, and their Fiefs and their Barrons called our Land a Swamp. And they never fallow, but always grow it. Ever-growing cycles. Revolves. That seeming’s that Aft-Hallows has always been a Colour Revolve: an Orange Revolve that tried to rule Time. One look between the veils, a moment, a box opening is and isn’t, death and non-death …
And then, no more Present.
The Rangers have an old saying. When the death birds fly, they make no eggs. They also have another saying: the Orange Revolve is always led by Red Caps. The Freed Dome Collective is fallen. The Tripartite squabbles. Secret festives. Opportunes. Eagle-Eyes everywhere. The Interface compromises. The factions are occupied. It is only the start.
I think about what I gleaned about the Nats, and the Novax. And I see. It has never been Nats. You can’t run from something that isn’t there. And the Novax isn’t just sickness. It isn’t only a disease. Two Teeth cleaved the red deep under the binding of the blue, but it could only do so much agont the rot underneath. Agon the maggots. There is no cure, no in-occulate for the chronic Revolve. Death’s greed for life. For hate.
And this answers my query. We didn’t know. We did not learn. There was no Present during the Interregnum. No real Present Aft. There is no real Present now. Just Ever-Now, for Amarak.
(C) Matthew Kirshenblatt, 2025.
Mythic Bios 