NOTICE FROM THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE COORDINATION AND PROJECTS OPERATION COMMAND OFFICE
The following Project is INCOMMUNICADO-ACTIVE. The activity of the deployed Affiliated Asset is not to be interfered with and is aligned with the goals of the Centre, but the asset cannot be meaningfully directed.
Communications from SPC-166 have been attached at request of Deployment Monitor A. Clef.
Selachian Pugnātorial Capabilities
SPC-166 denotes the monitoring, management, and augmentation of CERISE CERES, a highly mobile self-motivated Centre-associated agent capable of infiltration of Neo-Sharkic gatherings and activities. CERISE CERES's activities, while exceeding the range of violence deemed to be suitably pugnatorial for Centre affiliates, nevertheless streamlines Centre processes in efficiently allocating pugilists to maximise Selachian Pugilation per Pugilistic Action1.
Specific Project Components
SPC-166's primary component is CERISE CERES, a European female human approximately thirty years of age.
FILE 166-ATTESTATION-00002 "BLOOD"
My earliest years were on a boat.
The great mothership of the Botswains of the Cog of God was a behemoth of bronze, spotlights and signal flares dancing across its hundred decks at every hour of the day. It was said that ten thousand Botswains dwelled within its halls, every one of them fully learned of the Holy Books, and ready at a moment's notice to dive beneath the waves. It was a floating city, able to spend eternity on the waves, with farms and flocks aplenty. Ready, should crisis befall the landbound peoples of earth, to take them all in. Prepared to sustain humanity should the Sharkic Empires begin the Final Benthic War.
But I was not on the great mothership. Oh, no. It was a distant beauty on the horizon to me, for every day of my youth. I was on a smaller yet still impressive ship, of ancient logs tightly wound about each other as if they had grown that way. A Convent, for those who swore allegiance to the Botswains but had heterodoxies just slight enough for the church to tolerate.
The Sisters of the Cog. The only mothers I can remember.
The other Botswains, on those distant floating fortresses, wore vestments of filigreed brass and bronze. I only ever saw from afar. They rarely visited, never lingered. But the Sisters wore fearsome armour of chitin, the dull brown of crabplate to the brilliant blues of lobsterplate, held together with neither stitch nor seam.
My outfits were chitin as well. Sometimes they would outgrow me, and I would hear the Sisters whispering about how they would clothe me appropriately. And one morning I would wake, from restless dreams of distant storms, and see a new set of armour awaiting me. I have had little use for other garb throughout my life, even now.
I have had much time to reflect upon the Cog as a faith, in the years that have followed once I met the wider world. There was one Sister who, against the recommendation of the Reverend Mother, fought to have me fully educated in the history of our order and our purpose.
Everyone in this world knows the basic tenets of our faith, at least in broad strokes: that human existence upon this planet is like passengers on the boat, and God, through the Boatswains, is to guide us to the far shores of the Driest Land, where we would no longer have to toil and row. To live is to flee the Devil at the Bottom of the Sea, who haunts the waters of the world, an exoskeleton of chitin and keratin, to which the Sharkic Empires sacrifice teeth and nails. Of course, this theology been complicated with the discovery of Corbenic and the promise of eternal purpose. Faith often incorporates fact, but some facts are harder than others.
In the ancient-most records of the Cog, our theology was simpler. "Dry land" was the boat of life. Driest Land was a distant and far shore, mountainous and towering, free from the seas, free from the bondage of the Sharkic Empires. But then the faith spread, became the "true faith" of western Europe, yet then we learned there were hundreds of thousands islands in the Great Ocean and even other continents, not just the one Supercontinent and its flotsam, and then it didn't make so much sense that "dry land" was a boat. Some texts make reference to "God's fleet", a transitory attempt to bring the whole world into the fold, but that fell apart when you looked at other nations. At the Jianese and how, since the days of the Xia, they had never adhered to the Cog. At Cipangu and their rejection of it. At Terra Australis, or a hundred other places that had never heard of the Cog but converged to other truths about our reality.
The discovery that the world was a sphere was a blessing. In a decade — a blink of an eye for men of faith— all the texts changed. No more tawdry justifications about God's fleet seeking the Driest Land, which existed in the few remaining unexplored parts of the world — no, now we were passengers all upon God's boat, which was the world entire, and the Driest Land was beyond the corporeal. All very neat and tidy.
The reconciliation of Corbenic remains an active point of debate. Undeniably it is drier than any place in our world, yet its promised violence offends the orthodoxy's love of peaceful and just reward. And for that reason the faith is dying among the peoples of the land. What good is a hope of an afterlife of safety and peace when the Centre promises an afterlife of revenge?
I'm grateful to her, that Sister who thought I deserved to know the truth. She's dead now. Died in my 17th year, in an assault on a Sharkic Karkinopolis2. Doing what she loved.
CERISE CERES possesses the following Deviant features:
- Ungulate features: antlers, hooved feet, and a short tail reminiscent of the common reindeer. (Cosmetic.)
- Passively induces growth of plant life, which has developed into directed ability to trigger acute explosive plant growth. (Primary feature.)
- Causes reversion of worked and unnatural materials. Grown materials do not undergo this reversion. (Primary feature.)
- Possible conceptual association with the concept of "Nature", which cannot be investigated due to lack of cooperation. (Theorised.)
- Severe sensitivity to pollutants such as complex hydrocarbons not found in nature, undergoing allergic reaction. (Mitigated.)
FILE 166-ATTESTATION-00013 "HOMECOMING"
When I left the Botswains, I was a child no longer — a young woman of twenty-something, on dry land for the first time. And yet I felt still a child.
Ah, dry land. Dry Land. To hear the Sisters speak of it was to hear it conflated with that land beyond peace, a place where mortal drudgery all fell away. Dry Land, Driest Land — to those who had sworn themselves to the mission, there was little difference to speak of. Where the floor did not rock beneath your feet, and so any quakes were evidence of Sharkic hydrofracking; where fruit was abundant, and grew on trees wildly dotting a verdant countryside instead of being planted in rows and carefully monitored for genetic stability; where water flowed from springs and rivers, fresh to the taste until it made its ways to the brackish deltas and met the Great Ocean. When rain fell, it could be mild and gentle and warm, instead of the harsh and buffeting storms I knew.
Their stories and nostalgia enchanted me when I was young, gave me a taste for a world I did not know. "Child," they told me, "you have yet to see the wonder of God's Creation. To see old growth and canopies stretching to the horizon, instead of the masts of the fleet against the endless waves. To smell perfumes in the air, and dry winds upon the skin. We have raised you, but you shall not know the true purpose of the world until you have known it."
I am saying nothing that Centre pugilists or Global Organization sailors do not, when they return from their long tours at sea. I have been to sea and to dry land so many times in my life that they have blurred together into pure sensation. But the wonderment of those first moments on dry land will never be forgotten to me.
I first came to shore in Kernow — Cornwall in the common tongue — in the Pan-Celtic Union, on the shores of a bay formed after a great rainstorm. There was once a town there, the name of which no one remembers, and even still I could see the bare shapes of ruins beneath the surface of the water, and some roofs poking out above. As I watched, the ruin nearest me crumbled, falling apart into the water.
The sea claims all in death.
Land and sea had begun to reclaim the structures of the bay, barnacles growing on crumbling walls lapped at by the waves. What fascinated me most was the green — sheets and lines of grass winding their way into the gravel of the shore, new growth trees on the distant banks shaded by venerable leaves from the few trees that remained after that terrible storm that sunk the town, their unlucky brethren naught but rotting trunks in state on the forest floor. There's wild greenery on the sea — kelp tangling rudders and tickling the hulls underwater, mosses that cling to Karkinopolities, the green stain that infects wood after years of surf and sun — but nothing like living trees that train for the sky and drink greedily of rain and sun, and those unconquerable and verdant meadows, and flowers.
I did not wish to linger, though it was beautiful. I had been entrusted to the Botswains with a mission, and they had fulfilled it; now it was my time to fulfill mine.
I didn't even make it to the road.
The old road that led to the bay was decrepit, unmaintained since none had cause to follow it to some town lost to the waves. And yet I was scarce twenty feet from it when I felt ill. I stumbled in my boots. My skin felt warm and oddly hollow and hard, and my chest seized. I grasped at the air desperately, a woman in hunger, and above the scent of brackish water and grass and forest I could smell something foul and unfamiliar. I fell to my knees. When I touched the grass my hands felt as if they belonged to another. I lowered myself and lay there on my belly, breathing in the grass, ignoring the malingering scent.
There I lay for hours. The sun was setting when my head cleared and my breath returned, the cooling air flooding into my lungs like salvation itself, and I came to my feet again.
The road was gone. Conquered, in totality, by the grass that had so enchanted me. I kicked off my boots and touched that grass with my hooves, and it was everything that ever should have been.
While CERISE CERES was raised by the Botswains of the Cog of God, evidence suggests she no longer adheres to their orthodoxy. Analysis of her communications suggests she has developed a heterodox variant of the faith, incorporating elements from Centre scientific/pataphysical frameworks and personal revelation. She is psychologically aligned with Centre ideals with acceptable deviations. As her variant of the faith does not appear widespread, it is not believed to be evangelistic.
FILE 166-ATTESTATION-00650 "CONCRETE"
I dream of the face of God. Even still.
God is a vast leviathan.
God is not one of them. Not one of the Selachians. God is something far beyond.
The Sisters did not believe in intelligent design. Not in the sense that Fundamentalists do. God did not guide humanity and its cousins into their current shapes. If God had made man, then the Sharkics must be greater than even God to pervert the shape of creation so blithely. And that would be no God at all.
It would be the worst heresy to say that God is dead. I see the hand of God in everything I do. God is wounded. God, they tried to slay you. God gave up separate being and became one with all the Cosmos. God's hands are clenched into just and wrathful fists, for God is injured.
I ate my twin in the womb and became one with her and was devoured in turn. This I learned in my dreams. This I still do not know — is it me or the universe?
When the Centre tried to uplift the Cetaceans, through some cosmic accident, they broke free, spread through the seas, taught their martial art to every one of their kind through the seas, and now they hold the line. For Karkinopolis, there is Podurb, thousands of cetaceans in induced eusociality, ready at a moment's notice to lend their fists to the cause, whether they be great blue whales spanning thirty metres, or pygmy whales barely two metres long swarming around them like bees about a hive, or visiting dolphins from freshwaters, envoys from Changjiang or guerillas from Amazonia, spending only so much time in the salt before they grow ill and must return to the fresh. Civilisation, or something like it, in the deepest seas.
They have no fires and no forges. They build no bricks and work no metal. They have no electricity, for their song and chirps carry over miles undersea. They weave no cloth, they keep no cattle, they have no prisons, no chains of bondage upon any regardless of birth or creed.
And yet they fight.
After these dreams, I cannot help but see the hand of God in that. They were chosen. It cannot be any other way. God chose them; God is on our side against the Mistaken Beast, the deluded demiurge that defines this world.
God's blood is spilled, strewn across the cosmos. Red. Ruddy. Crimson. Wine-dark. Vermillion.
Augmentation Summary
FILE 166-ATTESTATION-00017 "REALISM"
I returned to the ship, told the Sisters what had occurred.
At first, I thought I had a disease. Allergy, the Sisters told me. It was part of God's plan. And so I must stay only where I knew was safe. On the boat with them, where I could stay dedicated to religious study and combat training.
But — like a heretic, or perhaps a teenager — I doubted. God had charted a course for us all, and yet there were false gods that acted upon the world with wrath and impunity. Yaldabaoth, totem-corpse of the Sharkics. The Mistaken Beast. Perhaps they were one and the same — I never investigated those heresies all too deeply — and so I wondered if they were God. Now, of course I know they are not.
The Sisters know about the faith as clearly as any other Botswain; they know its evolution and its archives more deeply than any of the faithless. That does not mean they know anything about the true nature of God. That is what faith is for, its very purpose. To know without evidence. To believe in the truth.
I saw God in the starlight and the scarlet. I saw God in the grass reclaiming drywall and stone. I saw God in blood upon my knuckles as my fist slid against sandpaper flesh.
After I touched the grass in Kernow, I came to see my disease as God's blessing. Deviation, the Centre calls it. One of the many reasons I do not like working with them.
As part of SPC-166, CERISE CERES was biologically grafted additional adrenal glands with triggers to enable heightened epinephrine response associated with parasympathetic triggers, which activate upon allergic reaction. CERISE CERES was also given bioengineered secondary and tertiary hearts in order to maintain blood flow even in elevated stress situations and extend longevity given prolonged physiological stress and high blood volume.
FILE 166-ATTESTATION-00044 "EXODUS"
When I first met my father, I did not know who he was.
He found me there, in Kernow. I had taken to visiting that bay of sunken ruins. There was some magnetism that drew me there, and I loved to watch it decay, see the broken buildings crumble into the brack, count the shattered stumps that poked over the face of the waters and see, to my joy and surprise, that some of them had new growth, green sprouts snaking upwards. Unnatural, unhealthy, that a tree might grow in the brine. But I wished it, and so it did.
I never expected to be interrupted there. The road had long been fully reclaimed by the grass — all but gone after I had my episode, but now the greenery stretched to the horizon. All that remained was decay and the new growth. And I barely recognized the sound of footsteps upon softness. Animals never bothered me, so I only realised I had a companion when I felt a presence that did not depart.
He was a hideous man, and I felt I could have killed him where he stood, made the yeast on his skin burrow into his flesh and devour him from within. He was not wearing the hat that I later learned was his signature, and he was wearing thin-looking clothes of linen. Yet despite his hideous visage, I felt neither pain or dread nor the itchiness of oncoming allergy.
He told me he was with the Centre, and that the Sisters had told him I would be here. That he had once lived in this town and was glad to see it fall into the waves. Grateful to me for helping it fall faster, with venom between his teeth. I told him that I had done no such thing, which I believed at the time. And I asked him what he wanted.
He told me he was aware of my condition. That the Centre had an interest in it — in me — and would be willing to help me overcome it. My condition, he said, was a spiritual and metaphorical one — I did not question how he knew such a truth, or why I agreed with it without question — but it was also a biological one, and biology could be conquered. Wouldn't I like to see the world as it was, that beautiful world the Sisters spoke so wistfully of, instead of this rotting husk of a once-beautiful, once living village? It would not be without a cost — but if I were to seek that world myself, I would pay that cost in hours spent convalescing, inching ever closer to death.
We must have looked a strange pair, a man whose face constantly shifted, a young woman who clung too tightly to her boots and had antlers. I accepted.
I stayed out there while he called his fellows — the Centre is wealthy and powerful and has a worldwide reach, as it must to rival the Sharkic Empires — and they brought me transformation. There was a contingent of sparse-clad Centre wrestlers, their arms resplendent, their legs functional. The Centre brought a "biomancer", what the Sharkics call a fleshcrafter, a defector from the Neo-Sharkic lodges of Bath. They were as naked as new birth, and yet they had shaped their flesh like the tendrils of a sea anemone, drooping and obscuring their nakedness. They laid their hands upon me, and I am told they grew me two more hearts.
And then, from his pocket, and out of three layers of linen bags, each one sealed with beeswax, my father pulled out a shard of plastic trash.
My chest seized and the blood in my ears pulsed hard, hard, hard. I felt fear. I felt terror, and death and doom in the pit of my stomach. Yet within that heartbeat I heard another, and beneath that surge of death I realised it was not my death I sought.
I felt rage.
The plastic crumbled away, and my lungs cleared.
SPC-166 also includes rudimentary meditative instruction provided to CERISE CERES to minimise collateral damage given the positive correlation of its Deviant capabilities with heightened emotional states.
Activity Record
SPC-166 is not formally within the Centre's chain of command. Deaths of Neo-Sharkic cultists through botanical vectors may be attributed to her unless evidence suggests otherwise. A full record of suspected and confirmed actions is available through CICAPOCO request.
FILE 166-ATTESTATION-00045 "JERICHO"
It was no gift given freely, as I have said. My father, in giving me the ability to function around these constructed artifacts, sought my help in his line of work. My benefactors had come from the Neo-Sharkic lodges of Bath, and now I journeyed back with them.
I could not use their helicopters nor their jet skis, and so we canoed the way there, when possible, and walked when it was not. It took a week, and my father and I grew close. He did not tell me who he was, of course, and he reminded me of the Sisters. Wise, clever, and sad, though he hid it well. He had a gift, one that he swore not to use, and he controlled it through discipline of mind and breath. He taught me some of those exercises. I remember them well, but have little reason to use them these days.
And then, after a long journey, we came to the island citadel of Bath, the honey-yellow walls of its heated pools visible from across the English archipelago.
The Neo-Sharkic, on average, is wealthy. And Bath had benefited from that wealth. It teemed with opulence, fine silks and wools, marble statues on every corner, gilded furnishings everywhere.
I was so angry. For that whole time, my hearts pulsed blood through my veins, and I felt the constant rush of adrenaline. My father watched me from the corner of his eye, asking me if I was alright, if I wished to return to the ruined countryside and focus on my breath again. I felt like I owed him, so I carried on, and took care not to take my anger out on him.
The Neo-Sharkic does not restrict his transformation to that of just a Shark. The Centre hates that word; I find it a ridiculous taboo. The Neo-Sharkic transforms his hands to octopus tentacles, gives his fingertips the grasping polyps of the barnacle, imbues his spine with the power of the electric eel. He gives his arms the force of the mantis shrimp, ironically mimicking the Centre's power. From the faith he picks and chooses the rites that justify the most powerful adaptations throughout God's creation.
The Neo-Sharkic does the rites without the meaning. The meaning is reduced solely to the physical transformation and the impact it has on others. The social status, the fear induced by the image of the Shark, and the condign power it grants are both means and end. And these were the young and wealthy who I saw in the baths of Bath. These self-made chimaera of ocean dwelling life, laughing and merrymaking and gloating, concerned with wealth and sex and drink, as their human peers either grovelled or cowered.
They paid no mind to me, for in my crabplate and with my antlers and hooves I could have been an eccentric distant cousin. It is not unheard of for a Neo-Sharkic, in learning of the tiger shark, to mimic it as a fusion of tiger and shark.
I have studied the Sharkic faiths in their oldest form. I have studied what the Botswains and Centre call evil. The traditional Sharkic has land-dwelling cousins, humans who practise the rites and let their youths decide whether to embrace the seas. To join the War Against Evil, on the side of Evil.
But is it truly Evil for a wounded beast to fight for its own existence? The Centre speaks of the Mistaken Beast, the selachian creature that makes possible our reality, and if that mistake should be unmade — then we would cease to exist, wouldn't we? The traditional Sharkic who undergoes the transformation is making a selfless choice — to grant us continued existence, by becoming another target to be punched. Without the Sharkic Empires, what would the Centre be but butchers, as opposed to warriors on a holy crusade?
My father was an elite pugilist for the Centre, an infiltrator of the highest degree, trusted with high-sensitivity and multi-step missions. He had taken a career change from being a diplomat with the Global Organization of Countries, though of course he was truly a covert agent for the Navigators Unseen who used "diplomat" as a guise, and so was well known for his mastery of emotional repression and lying in wait to strike. The average pugilist joined the Centre because they held that rabid fury and lack of impulse control, and what little prudence they might have had was cleansed from them through onboarding training. Hesitance and long-term selachian population management was the domain of Centre scientists and boxercrats, not pugilists, and so my father was unique in being on the front lines while having a penchant for both.
That was how he justified taking me to the baths of Bath while leaving the other pugilists behind. Even though the blood tore through my veins every second I spent in that city, and my hearts each felt like they would burst, and everywhere I trod, grasses and weeds sprouted from the ancient limestone. Everyone here, no matter how they acted, was small fry, but they could lead us to the big fish.
Our targets were in the largest of the baths. Some rich brats, whose names once danced upon my tongue like lemon and thunder yet are now forgotten among a thousand faces who underwent the same fate. Five of them or so, surrounded by a veritable gang of sycophants and aspirants. They wore the fashion of the day (as they always do), yet their skin changed to sharkhide so they could spend hours in the water and never prune. What marked the rest of their forms was variety oriented towards viciousness.
The traditional Sharkics are a full society. Some accept that they must graft themselves with leeches or remoras, embracing their station as bottom feeders, or root themselves outside of prisons as the clamguard, spending their mortal lives to enforce confinement. Inglorious jobs — yet these Neo-Sharkic youths all wanted to be the Invader, those who surged from below the sea, with sharpened fangs and lashing whiptails and all other sorts of instruments of violence.
I hated them, utterly and totally.
We sauntered towards them, wading into the steaming water of the bath. They took notice. They took offence. This was their bath, for them and their chums. As one, the five rose to meet us, gliding through the water, lithely, lethally. My father, of course, took them seriously not at all, joking and quipping at all their attempts at intimidation. Yet I felt my rage grow tinged with fear — fear for this mystery man who knew my flaws and weaknesses all too well, whose misgivings so oddly mirrored my own.
He goaded them masterfully, drawing them closer, making them stand on their two feet instead of staying crouched in the water where they might be able to bite at his legs. And he had a smug, shiteating grin, because he knew they couldn't touch him. Their threats to bite off his fingers, tear his beating heart out of his chest and eat it whole, twist his gonads with their tails and claws until he begged for death fell on deaf ears and a cocky smile.
I admired him deeply. I lacked any of his poise.
One of them made a crude comment about my beauty, and something he would do with my antlers.
I saw red. And the next thing I knew a watermelon vine had burst from his bowels, and grapevines snaked and sprouted from his mouth. He slumped over and fell into the water and bubbled until he bubbled no more.
And now they all turned on me, my father forgotten. I had led them from taunting to violence, ruining whatever plans my father had laid. My stomach dropped, then, my rage turned to heart pounding fear. Fear and rage and impending doom — they're all the same but through different eyes, dependent solely on if you're the winner or the loser. Yes, there was red — but I hadn't known I had done that, and so I could not, at the time, do it again. Distantly, I could hear my father's voice, saying my name — horrified, proud, concerned, terrified — and I wondered if today was the day I died.
Until two sharp clicks brought me clarity.
He had a gun. He'd had a gun all along, or long enough for it not to matter. A gun is useless to a pugilist, because if you shoot a shark it becomes dead, decaying meat, not needing to be punched. And yet he had one.
There could only be one reason why. Even in my quaking, shaking high of rage, it was to end me. I had the strangest sense of deja vu, like this had happened long ago in my childhood, or that something like it echoed across the myriad worlds.
But he didn't. He shot the Neo-Sharkics instead, one by one, before they could react. Something I have seen no other Centre pugilist do: He saved my life, and left the creatures unpunched.
I was shaking. I was screaming. My blood pounded like hammers on drums, faster and faster, never stopping, unable to stop at all. I fell to my knees in the baths tinged with blood. My heart should have burst and put me out of my misery, but I had been given an extra heart, an extra engine that forced the blood through my veins and to my brain and kept me from the fins of death. Crying, sobbing, pissing myself a little. And all the while grass and trees and the wild flourished in Bath, hearing my agony.
I remember little of what happened next. Just arms around me, familiar and comforting. Cold air rushing around my legs and hooves as the heated water dripped off of them. Resting against a shoulder like a cradle.
The next clear moment, I was cradled in my father's arms, on a sandbar a few kilos away from Bath. The city was overgrown, as derelict as if it had been unmaintained since the withdrawal of the Roman fleets, old-growth trees towering over the facades, their roots burrowing into the foundations. As I watched, one of the buildings crumbled, shattering the waters with a cataractous tumult as it fell.
And so we watched as Bath sank into the sea.
He's on desk duty now, for having proven himself unreliable in the field for a second time. For the last time. His judgement was compromised by emotion, choosing to prioritise a destructive asset instead of pugilating four selachian entities. But I think he did nothing wrong.
"Shark" is a term of menace, of doom, that sword of Damocles that hangs above humanity and destiny. The ultimate predator, the ultimate purpose, the ultimate enemy. Those children were not "Shark," and to punch them would achieve almost nothing at all.
We don't speak often. We don't wish to. We understand each other fully.
CERISE CERES can be contacted for advisory and informational purposes via designated liaison, currently Alto Clef, under the SPC-166 engagement parameters. Liaison Clef has stated that he has no ability to direct CERISE CERES's movements. Furthermore, CERISE CERES does not engage primarily in pugilistic action and should therefore not be considered for requests of that nature.
While CERISE CERES's current actions are aligned with the Centre's goals, she may have reason to turn against the Centre. Contingency VIRIDIAN VIOLA is in place for such events.
FILE 166-ATTESTATION-08128 "HOWLING"
To the brave Quixotics of the Centre:
Do you know what the Centre is?
It has embraced violence. Yet in such a way for it to be tawdry.
I once had the privilege of watching a Podurb against a Karkinopolis, an army of whales and dolphins giving their lives to punch through the carapace of a Sharkic crab city to pugilate the meaty bits within. This was the apex of their lives. To die in glory so their fellows could punch.
Botswain theology was never originally meant to account for sea dwellers who were not our enemies. To the Botswains, God's kingdom is the Driest Land, and so the Devil is at the Bottom of the Sea. In the Abyss. And yet the Cetaceans live and grow there, and they are as righteous as anyone else. So the Devil cannot be a place. It is the absence of God, the shell that is left behind when God is stripped of sacred meaning. The Botswains got close, saying the Devil was a shell, a husk deep under the sea — but a husk is the shape of that which sheds it. And if the Devil is a hollow leviathan, of chitin and bone, of the shape of things without the ruddy vitality that gives it meaning, then God is the wholly embodied that fills that hollow.
I can feel in my bones when a thing is of nature, and if it is of God. This universe is built on violence. Violence is what moves us forward, what justifies our very existence, what we must embrace and accept. Life is nasty, brutish, and short. What gives it purpose is something worthy of dying for.
Dry Land isn't a place. It's a state of being.
I returned to the Botswains and the Sisters for the year after I met my father, but I could not return to study, to war, to deployment and strategy against the Sharkic Karkinopolities. So I returned to land. To civilization and society. To the Sharkic lounges of London and Baile Átha Cliath.
There was something about those Neo-Sharkic youths, killed far too young, that enchanted me, despite my disdain for their lifestyles. Their embrace of selachian features felt alien to me, as the Sisters had always encouraged me to hide my hooves in lobsterplate greaves, and rejoiced whenever they slew a hammerhead Sharkic, as only they wore helms that could accommodate my antlers. I had grown up with such shame, and their embrace of what I hated most in myself intrigued me.
To every neo-Sharkic I meet I present choice: to fully embrace their transformations and join the Sharkic Empires proper, so they can play a role in the great scheme of the cosmos, or else turn away from the Shark Arts entirely and live normal, mundane lives. Very few take either offer. They prefer to remain in stolen comfort, exploiting the fears that plague our society, never diving beneath the surface, never accepting the laws of the natural world. They wear the husk of meaning for their own enrichment.
That defiance of nature is Evil. So if they will not embrace nature, Nature shall embrace them.
The Centre, bless your hearts, adore technology. Plastics and rubbers and metals. You've tortured the definition of the word "punch" and "shark" until you can justify anything any monstrosity so long as it fits upon a fist and hits a thing with teeth and hunger. Which is such a quaint and adorable folly; violence is its own justification.
Yet despite that you try. You know why we exist. You saw the face of God, and instead of turning away to enrich yourselves, raised your fists and struck it.
I respect that, and so I leave you to your own devices. As you leave me to mine.
I am Meri Epon Clef, unmaker, child of Scarlet, child of God.
