The Grandaddy of Evil; Ian Watson and the Inquisition War Trilogy!

 A REGISTERED CRIPPLE 
"When they were heading away from the barricadethrough the host of pilgrims and tents, a scrawny liver-spotted hand clutchedat Jaqs hem.

 

'Charity for a registered cripple' croaked an elderlyvoice.

 

Smouldering thuribles of incense dangled on chainsfrom a gibbet-like frame. Backed up against the base of this frame was arickety cart with small iron wheels. Upon the cart crouched a ragged crone. herface was wizened with age. her stringy long hair was white. Yet her rheumy blueeyes were keen with a light of tense intelligence. In those eyes was a qualityof anticipation for which expectancy of coins alone could hardly account.

 

Grimm scrutinized her circumstances. Thethurible-gibbet protected this cripple from being trampled accidentally. Ahandle jutted from the rear of her cart. It might be pulled or pushed. Here shecrouched under the cool red sun, begging.
...

 

'Was the temple breaking your legs, mother?’ Surelythe Occidens Temple did not need to create and exploit cripples, pitifully toswell its coffers.

 

The crone rocked forward, as if in sudden anguish froma cramp of the bowels.

 

'Oh yes, it was breaking my legs!' was her reply. 'Yetnot in the way you're meaning.

 

Grimm hunkered down by the cart. Soon s did Lex andJaq.

 

The crones name was Herzady. One thing she had neverbeen was a mother. Defiantly she declared herself to be elven years old.

 

Who else on Sabulborb would dream of counting theirage in local years? She had lived long enough to arrive at double figures. Shehad endured more than a hundred and ten Imperial years - the vast majority ofthem spent in this cart. Grimm was impressed by Herzady's longevity, eventhough to a long-living Squat a century was rather small beer.

 

'Pretty impressive for an ordinary unenhanced humanbeing, particularly in such reduced circumstances!'

 

A century earlier, as a young girl, Herzady hadattended that Holy Years unveiling in company with her pious parents. Duringthe bedlam which ensued, her mother and father both lost their lives. Herzady'slegs were permanently crippled. A compassionate priest had taken pity andprovided this cart. For decades Herzady had awaited the next Holy year. Whenthe unveiling came again she was watching from a safer place than on theprevious occasion.

 

Bedlam?

 

Oh yes. At the unveiling fifty two years later therehad been homicidal bedlam once again, due to the hysteria of the pilgrimsintent on seeing... what could not be seen.

 

Could not be seen, what did she mean by this?

 

Why, Herzady had been all ears and eyes for decades.She knew that the visage had faded, aeons since, into invisibility. On theclimactic day of Holy Year when the high priest of Occidens in splendidprocession carried the requilary out along the walkway, briefly, to open thesacred container, what he would expose to the gaze of hundreds of thousands ofpilgrims was a cloth which was blank, apart from a couple of stains vaguelylocated where the eyes might have been.

 

'Pilgrims are glimpsing almost nothing sired! How theyare straining and struggling to see!'
.......

 

Gently he said to Herzady, 'Being crippled, crippledbecause of adoring him, you are partaking in His vaster malady.'

 

'I am waiting, she replied bleakly, 'for many morepersons being crippled and killed the day after tomorrow, as surely must behappening. Then I am dying contentedly.'

 

it was to witness this calamity that Herzady hadendured indomitably throughout the five decades since the previous holy year!The crones persistence was pathological. her lucidity was madness.
...
The little man prompted her; 'Hundreds of people dyingoutside that courthouse earlier on today. All imagining the True Face beingunveiled early - and panicking.'

 

Galvanized by shock, the crone sat bolt upright uponher twisted shrivelled legs. She gasped tragically. 'Herzady missing so manydeaths....'

 

Her wizened face spasmed in pain. A thin spotted handfluttered to her chest. She slumped over.

 

Lex checked her pulse. In his hefty hand her wristlooked no wider than a pencil. Herzady was dead. Of a heart attack, of a brokenheart.

 

It was Grimm who reached to close the crone's gapingempty eyes.

 

'Huh' he said, 'saved myself half a shekelanyway.'" 

 

Blanche drawing Jaq Draco as... Sean Connery?

 

BEHOLD

I return to the beginning; the original Black Librarynovel and first Warhammer 40k fiction. Dan Abnett dedicated the first volume of‘The End and the Death’ to Ian Watson, likely out of respect to this originatingseries. 

I read one book in this series many many years ago and Idid not like it at all. I thought it was dirty and weird. Uncomfortably so. 

Now I think it is a work of GENIUS! Clearly I have migratedto one end or another of the I.Q. graph meme. Which end I cannot say....

 

 

PULSING ALBUMEN-WOMB

 

“A dreary slope of great boulders, poised on a scree,extended downward into murk. Upward likewise. In the upward directionrococo-metallic towers were visible. A small fleet of grotesque vessels mighthave impacted in the terrain. Evilly flamboyant, these towers were canted atabsurd angles to one another in defiance of gravity, yet they were linked byeerily wrought bridges along which prowled tiny figures.

 

In a bilious sky hung an hourglass sun. Two suns werejoined impossibly at the waist like a double yolk within a glutinous pulsingalbumen-womb of glowing gas. This absurd sun made the eyes and the spirt ache.How was gravity thus defied? That double-sun should have cohered into one sunaeons ago. Two such celestial bodies could not exist side by side.

 

‘Chaos’, breathed Jaq in horror.”

 

 

ITS THE UR-TEXT 

It’s all about the FUKIN STAR CHILD BABY! It’s all comingback! Perfect circle!

Ok so what is this story actually about? Essentially an Inquisitorwants to bang his Callidus Assassin, that’s the main driver of the plot. 

Let me try again.. 

Our story is about Inquisitor Jaq Draco, who encounters asuper-mega conspiracy within a conspiracy of the Inquisition to create apsychic ‘Hydra’ and turn all of humanity into a giant singular hive mind andthereby ‘save’ it. 

Over the course of three books [SPOILERS] Dracoaccidently exterminatus’s a planet, fights genestealers, enters a space hulk,visits a demon world, goes to Terra and infiltrates the Imperial Palace for achat with the Emperor, sleeps for 100 years, enters the webway, visits Ulthwecraftworld, gets into the mythical Black Library and steals the book of theApocalypse, gets his Callidus assassin girlfriend killed, hides out on a nuttypilgrim world, steals a relic, escapes into the webway again and performs amysterious ritual to undo fate. Other things also happen. 

The over-plot is all about the Sensai, the Star Child,the schitzoidal mind of the Emperor 

Very old 40k lore from Rogue Trader says that when theEmperor fought Horus he cut out all the actually nice parts of his psyche andcast them into the warp so he could win. These more fluffy bits have been floatingaround out there for 10,000 years and are about ready to reincarnate into theStar Child; the actually-nice superbeing who will create the golden path tohumanities hopeful future. 

Roaming around in the galaxy are the Sensai; 40ksoriginal Woke Warriors who roam the galaxy fighting oppression yes this is realand I am not making it up.

Meanwhile in Games Workshops two active series, inthe final books of the Horus Heresy series, Dan Abnett is finally creepingtowards the Final Confrontation with Horus where all this is actually set up,and has been reintroducing the idea of secret immortals in 40k. And in the ‘presentday’ Dawn of Fire series by mainly Guy Haley I think, the idea of the Star Childand the Emperor ‘awakening’ has been reintroduced. 

So, essentially, the Horus Heresy series, the currentDawn of Fire series and this Inquisition War series, the first one published,form a coherent whole, or are being formed into one. It was all just onegiant saga all along… 

And it’s amazing how much of a 40k book it is, right fromthe offing, rich with ripe dankness. Within 200 pages of the fist book we havegenestealer purging, exterminatus, a squat on a trike, a space hulk, the Eye ofTerror!, actual Terra and a month long oddesy through the imperial palace leadby the Star Child (probably), and a MEETING WITH THE EMPEROR. The sheer amountof stuff, of details, of incident, combined with the wild euphonia of the prosereally adds up to make a funky stew

 

 

TENDRILS IN THE SPINAL SOCKETS

"During stages in Lex's novitiate as a futureSpace Marine he had been initiated dauntingly enough - by a feast of foulexcremental unfood and other formidable ceremonies.

 

The forced rite of initiation which took place like aravishment within that Chaos vessel was execrable and almost unspeakable. Howcould Lex obliterate from memory the Kiss of Corruption, the Communion withChaos, the Prayer of Perfidity, the spells and the invocations? And all thewhile he was experiencing the slither of tendrils within his spinal sockets.These invaded his nervous system, generating nauseating visions of thefragility of the comos, of the feebleness of reality which demonic fingerssought to unpluck and reknit with such vile success.

Lex in torment saw the whole cosmos burst forth from amere bubble in the energy warp. A sparrows fart the universe was!"

 

 

IT FROM THE 90'S

It’s kinda, no, scratch that, incredibly pervy, richand ripe with strange life, overflowing with crazy stuff, wild with colour. Itfeels a lot like David Lynches Dune in its gleeful perversity and generaloddness.

 

The vision of 40k is absolutely one torn from the pagesof early White Dwarf, Realms of Chaos, Rogue Trader and other early vibranttexts; 

“And so Meh-Lindi approached the monster on thethrone: a leering fang-toothed, armoured hog of a grandsire alien. Its eyesglared at her from under ridged bony brows. One of its lower, humanoid hands,adorned with topaz and sapphire rings, contemplatively stroked a fierce claw-handthat rested on its knee. One of its hooves tapped the floor. Loaves ofarmour-bone jutted from its curved spine, and it rubbed these against the carvedback of its throne grindingly, as if to dispel an itch. Its spatulate tonguestuck out, tasting.”

 

 

And is absolutely riddled with often ridiculous andsometimes really quite discomforting sexual and bodily weirdness, especiallysurrounding the Callidus Assassin Meh-Lindi who starts the book doing exercisesin a giant ritual hamster wheel and then examines herself in the mirror nakedat length while remarking on her boobs as women so often do. Then she gets apseudo-plastic Genestealer skeleton implanted in her body in an excruciatingsurgery scene.

 

 GROTESQUELY MUTATED RAMPANT GROINS

"Were the screaming tethered female prisonershallucinating while abominations were perpetrated slowly and perversely upontheir flesh? The Slaanashi Chaos Marines had certainly used hallucinogenicgrenades -as well as boltguns and meltaguns and terrible chainswords, andheavier weaponry too. Were hallucinations intensifying the already appallingsight, and the implacable cruel touch, of pastel-hyed armour exquisitelydamascened with debauchery upon the breast plates and the shoulders? Was thatwhich was already monstrous being multiplied far beyond the brink of sanity?

A few tormentors had shed items of armour, exposing grotesquelymutated rampant groins, their organs of pleasure bifurcated and more, withsquinting eyes sprouting from them, and with drooling lips.

Others had no need to shed armour. Chaos Spawn hadmaterialized: wolf sized creatures with legs of spiders and bodies of imps,with questing tentacles and phallic tubes. Jaq himself almost believed that hewas hallucinating. A snake-like umbilical cord connected these spawn to theswollen groin-guards of their master - who stood back, roaring and whinnyingwith delight, as they guided the spawn in the ravishing of their captives, soakingup the sensations of these roving external members."

 

 ITS A TOY COMMERCIAL 

Even at this early stage its clear this is about SELLINGPRODUCT. We have to put the toys on display and while I think probably Watsonenjoyed the breakneck pace and sometimes delirious invention of the blizzard ofencounters, its also true that Inquisitor Jaq Draco encounters pretty much everymodel that you can buy right now; Genestealers, Eldar, Space Marines,Chaos Marines, Harlequins, Titans, Commissars, 

And the Space Marines and others are fashionable inan exquisitely 90s Warhammer style;

 

 

 

TINY SILVER PENTACLES

"Strapped in the gimballed control seat,protected by padding and armour, the princeps faced those great slantingeye-screens. Bronze bones framed the screens. Across an array of lesser datascreens diagnostic icons shuffled like phosphorescent beetles. A spaghetti ofcables led from his reinforced mind-impulse suit into ducts. Cables coiled fromhis shoulder pauldrons, and wires from his impulse-helmet - which now swunground to scrutinize the newcomers.

 

Behind a goggle-visor: weary blue eyes. below thevisor: a hooked nose with sapphire rings through each nostril, thin lips, and adepilated chin tattooed with tiny silver pentacles. 

 

DAMASCENED GROIN-HAUBERK 

“Grimm urinated into the open helmet of the Chaos Marine.Sizzling softly, the webs became a gingery mat clinging to horrid contours abovethe gaping metal-fanged jaw. 

From one of his pouches Grimm produced a bar of marzipanand began to gobble. 

Lex snapped his visor shut to scan data and diagnostic icons.When he opened it again, he announced, ‘My waste storage unit may bemalfunctioning somewhat.’ He murmured a prayer to Rogal Dorn. 

Grimm cocked his head. ‘Does that mean your mighty metal legswill start to fill with muck? 

Lex’s gauntlet lashed out. He stayed the blow before itcould pulverize Grimms face. 

‘I can recycle and detox my own waste for two days,abhuman. This suit is ancient,’ he declared. ‘Reverently repaired.’ His groin-hauberkhad visibly been renovated with a damascened silver engraving of a potentwarrior firing a storm bolter.”

 

 A VERMLLION BADGE OF NOBILITY 

“Scar tissue on Hachards chin stood out whitely asthough he had been punched. His cheek-tattoo was of a skull skewered by adagger. His teeth were painted black as a signal that any smile of his wasdark. A vermillion badge of nobility -a stylized power axe – adorned his rightknee-pad modestly so that, whenever bending to the Emperors image duringdevotions, he should kneel upon this heraldic honour. His gloved hand strayedto the Imperial eagle emblazoned in purple on his lavender dress cuirass, as ifto emphasize his unquestioning loyalty.”

 

 

 

THE PROSE, INVENTION, DIALOGE AND TEXTURE

Its mad with dankness.

The tumbling maddening harlequinesque prose combines andoverlays with the deranged invention

Watson is very clearly going carefully and joyfully offhis tits with his prose, his word choices, idea combinations, rushing butever-uneven rhythm, hold onto your hat at the start of every sentence andparagraph because you don't know how it is going to end, like a fairground ridethat segues into some other ride in the middle, and again before the end. AKNOWING SMIRK is the emotion I am detecting here but not the joyless Dreamworkssmirk of the empty ironist who abstracts themselves from their own ID through aveneer of eyebrow, but an Orson Welles-type smirk of a plump gourmand ofwords and concepts who is about to gorge themselves on sounds.

 

 SOLIDIFYING OGRESPOOK – NIGHTMARE INCARNATE! 

“Night rolled towards them like a velvet curtain, orlike a negative of an aurora. It hid from view those leaning towers. In thesickly sky an eclipse was eating swiftly across the leftward sun.

 

This was not how night fell in any sane reality!

 

The curtain of darkness halted before it reached them.Within that darkness flapped moth-like shapes, faintly phosphorescent, visiblein violet.

 

More such moths swiftly gathered, They massed to forma giant humanoid figure bestriding the shrouded land. The hulking figure gainedsubstance moment by moment as Lex continued to engrave Azul’s eye.

 

On the shoulders of the figure were mounted whatappeared to plasma cannons. Great grasping powerhands dangled. Around theankles of that solidifying ogrespook capered shadows – reminiscent of thathorned spiked suit of armour which had lain in Ulthwe’.”

…

 

“Jaq was sighting his force rod tentatively at thelooming colossus, muttering prayers of his own. Just then an extremely low moonsailed into view. Astride the capsized crescent sat the vilest of creatures, ason a saddle. Such saucer-eyes, such a parrot-beak. That tentacled fiendresembled some kraken from the deeps of an ocean. Its tentacles trailed down,becoming vastly long threads. With these, it began to fish.

…

 

“Here was nightmare incarnate. Another thread snared aChaos Marine, plucking the armoured brute from out of the darkness. ‘That ain’tno helmet,’ exclaimed one of the Imperial Fists, ‘that’s his head – ‘

 

To the amplified horror-struck gaze of the Marine itwas evident that the grotesquely metamorphosed Chaos warrior was guffawing withinsane delight as he was drawn up to share that surreal perch with the daemon.” 

……………………

 

 

THE DIALOGUE feels like a kind of arch 70's fantasysomehow, declarative, anquished, arch, pointed, ridiculous. Theatrical. Is hejoking? Is he screwing up or screwing about, or both? We will never know… 

 

HOMOGONIZED ENTRAILS 

“Lex’s voice rumbled sympathetically. ‘I understandloss, Sir Jaq.’

 

Loss?

 

Jaq had long since lost his holy office. He had lostthe fellowship of his ordo. He had lost his cherished funereal ship, whichmight well have been blasted to pieces in that eldar dock by Imperial forcesquite incidentally. Now he had lost his…. Helpmate.

 

‘Reckon we can steal this hyper-lance?’ Grimm askedLex. ‘Can you use it? Must be ancient and revered to be so powerful. Shall wepull it free? Reckon that’s wise?

 

‘No-oh-oh-oh!’ Such a howl burst from Jaq’s throat, ahowl of universal rejection and misery. Pull the great blade from Meh’lindi’sravaged ribs and homogenized entrails? ‘No!’ he cried. ‘She shall not betreated like some harpooned sea-beast!’

 

ITS AN *ACTUAL* EPISTOLARY NOVEL

 

Or at least it tries to be for a while. 

Most 40k texts are fake Epistolary novels; remember inthe grimdank future no record can be trusted and unreliable narrators andwhatever, but *in effect* books tend to be written from a floating 3rdperson perspective and are clearly not 'in-world' texts in any way, andfurthermore, texts part of the same general series are clearly attempting totell a coherent story where all the details match up, and not presenting adracula-style collection of missives or whatever. 

So there is a certain fakeness to the 'everything is trueand untrue' shtick. But the Inquisition War, while written in a 3rd person, doesfully purport to be an in-universe text, (apart I suppose, from some framingstories where some people are reading it and asking "why did he write itabout himself, in the third person?") These ‘novels’ are actually strangechunks of paper found in the entrails of the Golden Throne, transcripts of areport of something and Eldar Farseer maybe said, or just a funky book from theInquisitorial archives. 

They kind of give up on this somewhat , actually themiddle one is the only 'impossible' report as it ends with Jaq raiding theBlack Library, 

I do love the idea of it being a theme with Inquisitorsthat they commonly write their own experiences down as pulp novels and hidethem in archives, a useful technique since the truth must be disguised withfiction and fiction with truth, an ever-deniable record which may representtrue events, or the shape of true events. 

 

FURNACES OF NAUSEOUS LIGHT

“The ribbed wraithbone walls of an immense dome rose sombrelyupward. Across the zenith stretched a lake of night. A vast sky-light orenergy-field excluded yet also revealed the void of space.

 

That funereal lake was polluted by diseased luridgases. Hues of jaundice and gangrene and blood and bile stained those billowyshrouds. Suns within the sickly veils of gas, and of vile corruption, of a cancerspreading through the void.

 

It was the Eye of Terror – where Chaos spiled intoreality. Where warped worlds of unnatural geometry orbited furnaces of nauseouslight. Where daemons ruled.” 

 

 

(many of) THE BAD BITS ARE NOT THAT BAD ACTUALLY 

Ok the perving on the Callidus assassin, including herconstantly stripping naked, putting on sysnskin, examining herself in themirror naked and noting the shape of her breasts (watson what the fuck). Prettymuch everything to do with sex is anguished, overwrought, obsessive, horrificallyand malignantly autistic in a negative sense.. however, is this Watson being a charismaticnutter or brilliantly illuminating the perverse compression of natural humandesire in a nightmare future? I refer you to the IQ graph above.. 

The meeting with the emperor is relatively well done andnot that dumb. It takes a super-competent inquisitorial team about a month toweave their way through the palace, constantly changing identities, being leada crazed path of opportunities by a prescient fragment of the Emperors soulitself and they only get through the Eternity Gate because a larger gestalt ofthe Emperor casts Time Stop and pulls them through.

 

The last book is a downer with the team hiding out on onesingle world instead of having a crazed rollercoaster time, but there are stilla host of deranged moments and a sad, hurried end.

 

 

JAQ DRACO WILL RETURN! [SPOILERS!] 

What happened to the Ordo Hydra? 

The Sensi are coming back! The original Woke Warriors forour Disney Plus future! 

The Star Child! 

At the end Jaq Draco DIES but his spirit is trapped inthe webway where he can commune with dead Eldar seers. HE COULD STILL BE INTHERE! Its going to be great if he pops up randomly in some future book. 

Meh-lindi the sexy, dangerous Callidus assassin issort-of resurrected in the end! I fucking BET Abnett or *someone* will beingback the only Callidus to successfully impersonate a Genestealer AND and Eldar(though not at the same time), she is still out there! 

Grimm the Squat! That utter legend! Will he turn up onNecromuda? 

Probably GW aims to escape the looming tentacles of thehysteric left and the pink captialists “WHAT ARE YOU DOING THERE NERDS? IS THATFASCISM I SEE?” by shattering the Galaxy, turning it into something like Age ofSigmar with bits dominated by Primarchs and godlings, and brining back theSensai and the Star Child so that you can finally tell your mum “No mum I anplaying the good-guy anti-fascists actually!”

 

Hey its from Rogue Trader, its scripture so you can’t complain.

 

JONATHAH KEEBLE NEEDS TO PERFORM THIS BOOK! 

That’s it! Imagine him reading this stuff. It would bewild!

 

 

 WE ARE MANY

“WE ARE MANY, INQUISITOR’. The voice boomed in hismind almost gently – if gently was how an avalanche would sweep away a doomedvillage, if gently was how a scalpel might strip a life to the bare, achingbones.

HOW ELSE COULD WE ADMINISTER OUR IMPERIUM – ‘

‘AS WELL AS WINNOW THE WARP – ‘

‘HOW ELSE?’

 

The Emperors mind-voice, if that truly was what itwas, had dissociated into several voices, as if his great undying soulco-existed in fragments that barely hung together.

 

‘SO DOES THE HYDRA THREATEN US?’

‘IMPERILLING OUR GREAT AND AWFUL PLAN TO STEERHUMANITY?’

‘PERHAPS, IN A PART OF US, SINCE THIS HYDRA PROMISES APATH?’

‘SURELY A MALEVOLENT PATH; FOR HOW COULD HUMANITY EVERFREE ITSELF?’

‘THEN WE MUST BE MALEVOLENT TOO. FOR WE HAVE EXPELLEDOUR SENTIMENTALITY LONG AGO. HOW ELSE COULD WE HAVE ENDURED? HOW ELSE COULD WEHAVE IMPOSED OUR RULE?’

‘YET BY VIRTUE OF THAT WE ARE PURE AND UNCONTAMINATEDBY WEAKNESS. WE ARE GRIM SALVATION.’

…..

‘NOTHING THAT SAFEGUARDS HUMANITY CAN BE EVIL, NOTEVEN THE MOST STRENUOUS INHUMANITY. IF THE HUMAN RACE FAILS, IT HAS FAILEDFOREVER.’

….

‘WHEN WE CONFRONTED THE CORRUPTED, HOMICIDAL HORUS WHOONCE USED TO SHINE LIKE THE BRIGHTEST STAR, WHO USED TO BE OUR BELOVEDFAVOURITE – WHEN THE FATE OF THE GALAXY HUNG BY A THREAD – WERE WE NOTCOMPELLED TO EXPEL ALL COMPASSION? ALL LOVE? ALL JOY? THOSE WENT AWAY. HOW ELSECOULD WE HAVE ARMOURED OURSELVES? EXISTENCE IS TORMENT, A TORMENT THAT MUSTNOURISH US. EVIDENTLY WE MUST STRIVE TO BE THE FIERECE REDEEMER OF MAN, YETWHAT WILL REDEEM US?

 

‘Great  lord ofall,’ whimpered Jaq, ‘did you know of the hydra before now?’

 

‘NO, AND SURELY WE SHALL ACT IN DUE TIME – ‘

‘YET SURELY WE KNEW. HOW COULD WE NOT KNOW?’

‘ONCE WE HAVE ANAYSED THE INFORMATION IN THIS SUB-MINDOF OURS,

HEAR THIS JAQ DRACO: ONLY TINY PORTIONS OF US CAN HEEDYOU, OTHERWISE WE NEGLECT OUR IMPERIUM, OF WHICH OUR SCRUTINY MUST NOT FALTERFOR AN INSTANT. FOR TIME DOES NOT HELT EVERYWHERE WITHIN THE REALM OF MAN.INDEED TIME HALTS ONLY FOR YOU.

 

‘WE ARE AN EVER-WATCHFUL LORD ARE WE NOT? DID YOU HOPETO GAIN OUR UNDIVIDED ATTENTION?’

‘HOW ELSE SHOULD WE SOUL-BIND PSYKERS AND OVERVIEW THEWARP AND BEAM THE ASTRONOMICON BEACOM AND SURVIVE AND RECEIVE INFORMATION ANDGRANT AUDIENCES ALL AT ONCE, UNLESS WE ARE SO MANY?

‘AND YET STILL WE MISS SO MUCH, SO VERY MUCH? SUCH ASTHAT WHICH GUIDED YOU HERE.’

‘OUR SPIRIT GUIDED YOU.’

‘NO: ANOTHER SPIRIT, A REFLECTION OF OUR GOODNESSWHICH WE THRUST FROM US.’

‘WE ARE THE ONLY SOURCE OF GOODNESS, SEVERE ANDDRASTIC. THERE IS NO OTHER SOURCE OF HOPE THAN US. WE ARE AGONISINGLY ALONE.’