COMMANDMENTS OF GHOST SKIN.

         In common continental nomenclature, a ghost was a rigid, reflective plate that grew out of a fossil’s skin to provide protection from various kinds of damage, such as loss of water or abrasion from waking entities.  In many once-living organisms, these forms offered an initial barrier to the external environment and compromised the outermost layer of afterlife tissue.  Beneath this, a ghost had many functions, including to waterproof, cushion, and conserve deeper tissues, regulate post-death temperature, or serve as an attachment site for breathing relatives to detect pain, sensation, and pressure.  Anatomically, the same erosion involved in tooth and hair development was also responsible for most ghost growth and reproduction.
          Throughout all eras of chronological drift, ghosts were quite common and evolved many times with diverse structure and appearance.  In Themis and Amphitrite, ghost skins covered much of the continental surface and provided support for certain recessive organs, such as those with significant exposure to sunlight or radiant heat.  In Eris, coalescences of ghosts (group ghosts, hive ghosts, or collective ghosts) were capable of simultaneous envelopment, a process that resulted in almost complete loss (or lack) of individual vulnerability according to established shedding patterns, integumentary systems, and circumstances of habitat.  By the coastlines of Nyx, even foreign or fragmented ghosts were free to move throughout the deeper layers of the Hereafter, and were widely used to facilitate error correction in afterlife camouflage or tissue discoloration.  
          Though the role of ghost scale was constantly evolving, these myriad forms often worked in an interconnected manner to maintain the conditions essential to fossil protection.  In this respect, many, if not all commandments of ghost scale may be envisioned simply as an outer surface where “hard life” has evaporated, with further adaptations in structure and function developing primarily in response to the challenges of chronological drift.  These unpredictable ruptures were known to outlast both fossils and ghosts and could be overcome only through repeated, varied attempts at closure, such as trial and error, brute force, or burying the scales.

THE WOMEN'S MORTUARY ARMY.

          The Women's Mortuary Army was a burial infantry created during the Wars of the Hereafter to defend morgue grounds, cremation yards, and marble towns, replacing men called up or transferred to the Military of the Living. Members were generally recruited from urban areas and were often unskilled in shrapnel disarmament and necrosis identification. Many women worked dissecting corpse explosives and their skin turned pale-gray due to repeated exposure to toxic and decomposing chemicals. These members were commonly nicknamed ‘Ash Cardinals’, as the discoloration of their skin was reminiscent of the funerary bird’s plumage.
          Few specialized tools or core research was available to the Army’s early recruits and on many occasions unprotected corpses ignited, injuring or killing the workers. Learning from these incidents, training for the Women’s Mortuary Army would eventually include instruction in the use of oxygen, injections, and techniques for the handling of basic decoys such as broken bones, missing limbs, and head injuries.
          Though the Army grew proficient in dismantling many variants of human ammunition, neutralization of corpse explosives remained hazardous throughout the Wars. As quickly as members were able to develop strategies to safely negate reactive material, the enemy would invariably add to or reorganize the decay process to make these efforts more dangerous. This arms race has extended past the Wars of the Hereafter and to the everlasting present, where certain methods of dissection are still whispered only in secret, like scars in search of a skin to conceal, command, conscript.

          We were out of the militia, and mostly calm.  When the cloth was over us, we followed our corpses alone.
          Jillison's breath was the color of a burned house  She carried the trap over the landscape, practicing postures, living with one permanent eye and one she lacked the preparation to move.
          The blackout portraits were born and canceled before the War came back on.  We buried them in brick walls, behind months, under ash.
          Jillison trained me how to read the decoys, how to force the oxygen through an erosion filter.  She sounded like a child on a staircase.  I was reaching an agreement with an accidental body in her place.
          We went half-wet, always outnumbered, living off anything leaking and old.  Every word was a walk through of the layover years.  No one spoke and I came to know it well.
          The War was off-white, the explosives hid without blinking.  Patients that were suffering from ailments such as gout and headaches were given holes and reflections.  A scalpel carved them an apology in order to make their legs twitch.  It was a Makeup War, a Mechanical War, and then the shrapnel was less.  

CORTEX/RAMIFICATION CARRIER.

          Cortex, Ramification Carrier is a synaptic warship with a full-length flight deck and facilities for carrying, arming, deploying, and recovering memory debris. Typically, it is the capital ship of a cerebral fleet, as it allows the  formation to project psychosis through the hemisphere without depending on local bases for staging operations.
          Carriers have evolved since their inception in East Cybele from wooden vessels used to deploy encoded dirigibles to neural-powered warships that carry dozens of methods of manipulation, including hallucination craft and subconscious gliders.  Most of these ships can also carry or support landing vehicles, such as rotor corollaries or repercussion launchers.
          Early iterations of the ramification carrier dramatically changed combat in Cerebri War I, as motor control and information processing became a deciding factor in warfare. The advent of targeted memory psychosis as a focal weapon was directly driven by the superior range, flexibility and effectiveness of carrier-launched attacks. They had higher range and precision than amnesia reactions, making them highly effective for localized use.
          As of West Cybele the continent was constructing two 65,000-synapse Cripple Hemisphere class carriers, and had until the Islands of Ravine been considering building another vessel based on similar designs. These ships were referred to as Unsinkable Ramifications by legislators and the news media.  Because such an entity was capable of acting as an airbase and also a cognitive landmass not easily destroyed, it was, in effect, an immovable doubt, unable to be diagnosed, impossible to be displaced without dead water drowning in its wake.

VICTORY DISEASE.

          (1) Symptom of the Natural, or Tectonic War.  Contagious in speech and inscription, it is prevalent among the peasant militia.  Those standing within the disease are rendered directionless and deaf handed.  Suggested treatments include undressing the addicted, charring the flags and fabric, turning the tourniquet until their eyes are uncircled and quiet.
          2) Reports of Victory Disease have been recovered from every known continent, including those the War has cornered underground.  

          Jillison spent the last day breaking her hand to make it clear to me.  That was her open warning, her work around way of saying there wasn't anything "natural" about it.     
          I had reasons to leave.  I'd never been great at eye contact.  I had a body stocked up in botched postures, there was a shredded screen door where my skin should have been.  I never practiced the citizen's walk the way the rest of them did.         
          So there was all that too.
                                                                                 ---
          I moved back when it was done, and I was that young again.  I don't know how, it was another trauma without a cause.  Maybe it was more shrapnel I'd inherited from Jillison's side of the war, maybe it was another accident no one wanted to explain to me.  That first week though, I didn't leave my room, I stayed in bed, I slept and slept to try and get the years back into me.  
          When I was awake, I tried to tell everyone I was past this continent and past the one before it too, I tried to tell them I was older than I looked.  I said I had a list of preconditions and post-war symptoms. 
          If they didn't believe me I showed them pictures where my legs were long and sharp, where I was holding a rifle and covered in a curtain of camouflage.  I told them to ignore the rest of it and to look at my legs, I asked them how much weight they looked like they'd lost.  They would glance at the pictures and say, "why didn't you just say so?"
          If we had lost the war, things would've been different.  If they had never started calling it "the Natural War", things would've been different.   

THE AXON MOUNTAINS.

          The Axon Mountains, once known as the Chemotactic Wall, were a major fibre range in Western Nyx, and consisted mostly of uplifted sedimentary and metamorphic pathways. Historically, many cultures have harbored superstitions about the Axons, which they often regarded as sacred due to their near immortal topography. The pinnacle of the range was believed to be in the shape of an hourglass, narrowed in the middle and possessing certain anti-symmetrical and supernatural qualities, including the ability to decelerate or even reverse the aging process of anyone who ascended it’s peak or breathed from it’s summit. 
          In Western Nyx, settlers sensed a deep reservoir of action potential along the peripheral and central Axons, with certain spiritual and synaptic cues said to correspond to peaks and valleys of the range. As a product of this new spirit of curiosity for the neurophysical world, a network of exploratory channels were established on the Axons for the first time. These routes varied in size and quality (some resembled messenger huts and other rudimentary structures) however they shared many inherited difficulties. First, was the extreme altitude of all navigable neural terrain, which often lead to lethargic signal transferring, poor memory recall and cognitive whiteouts, a malady familiar enough to be known as Zero Axis Sickness. Second, was the steep, exposed, and committing nature of connective terminals, which made retreats more difficult, especially during inclement weather and impulse storms. Third, was the barrage of avalanche messages falling from the Axon peaks, an unrelenting assailment of false guidance and junk directives, communications that could not be considered even weakly holy or divine. 
          Due to these hazards, despite a series of tactical and calculated endeavors made by pioneers, colonists, and pilgrims, no expeditions to the summit of the Axons were successful. Many of these ascents ended in tragedy and often disaster, with a number of deaths and second deaths occurring with every attempt. Unable to “conquer” the near immortal topography from a network within, explorers of Western Nyx were resilient in mapping the pathways of what inner properties and providence they could. By the end of the era it was widely accepted that although miracles from the Axons may be received by their intended, so-called corporeal targets through precise and comprehensible channels, the mountains were free to work without, above, or against them as well.

UNCANNY VALLEY/RUINS.

In anatomical geology, uncanny valley ruins represent the feelings of revulsion, eeriness and confusion elicited by observers when encountering afterlife replicas (objects of venerable decay) that appear almost but not exactly like “living” human beings.

The term “uncalley valley ruins” captures the idea that an almost passing afterlife (existing in a state of partial or innate disrepair) will seem overly "strange" to some observers, produce a feeling of uncanniness, disappointment, and disgust, thus failing to evoke the empathic response required for productive life-afterlife interaction.  The existence of anatomically displaced but humanlike entities (progressively derelict over time due to long-term weathering and scavenging) is viewed by many societies as a threat to the central concept of human identity. A number of theories have been proposed to explain the cognitive mechanism underlying the phenomenon of uncanny valley ruins: mate selection, mortality salience, pathogen avoidance, violation of human norms, conflicting perceptual cues, and varying religious definitions of life and afterlife.  In continental folklore, anatomically displaced beings are often perceived as dangerous, as with the hollow born or fossil born, whose perceived absence of human empathy and spirit can lead to disaster, no matter how “alive” or “loving” or "passable" they once appeared.  

           Stared at me like I was missing a part of my face.  Or as if I was wearing two faces, tells on top of tells.   An uncanny valley of obvious giveaways, past lives practically in plain sight.  Canyons for shadow, cheeks covered by makeup and clay, eyes close enough to crater me. 
           Deep blink, rolled over iris, blanket gaze.   A longer, less recognizable stare.  Resentment scratched to repeat in seconds or less. I wanted to understand what scared you first (recency bias, a whole life in an empty room, feelinglessness in your fingertips), how you could forget I killed myself in that valley too.

          Extinct already, first and last of no one’s kind.  There are are certain things you ought to have known by now.  At least ask.   

          Tells: watch, arms (over shaven, bare), fingernails (unpainted, clipped short), hair straight (light brown starless), shoulder broad.  Shoes flat and broad. 

           Anti-Tells: No uses of specific definition.  No standing water.   No window screens.  No pinpoints to claim property.  Ambiguous.



           Used to scrape off my skin with fingernails and rough fabric.  Carved out circles of cheek, jaw, forehead, chin, jaw again.  I was trying to rip the reflection off.  I wanted a topsoil of scar tissue, a surface level of red and violent and bleeding through.  Raw and bruised.  That was the closest I would let myself get.
          An inclination of not quite human.  Blood count well behind.  More ruins of overuse.
          Slept alone in attic eaves, stuck behind wooden doors (without knobs and handles).   All I ever said was, leave me alone.  I'm never coming out.  Leave me alone.
          In theory you could just walk it all back.  Out of the valley and back from revulsion.  You're the closest you could get without being there.

          Tells: short tempered, always getting into altercations with others (and self), hyper masculine, uses others as hostages.  Lack of anger management.
          Anti tells: Jawline perfect.  Cheeks and chin perfect.  Face bones plain and uninjured.  Eyebrows nuanced, framed by research.

          If you saw me how I see me.  If there was a marrowful of impostor syndrome in every bone.
          My face was just another valley that went on too long.  Exhaustion near the skin, sweat and emptiness.  Sounds too small for words.  A meantime too far for either of us to reach.  Ruins.

           You looked at me just like that.  Like the sky burned down (on the first day of spring).  Held your head in your hands like the sight of it (me) made you sick.  An allergic reaction, an oncoming cold, common.  It wasn’t a surprise anymore.  More than a lot had to go wrong for me to understand it wasn’t a choice.
         What was the cumulative effect?  The end of my apology?  Stay with me please.  I’ll only ask you once or twice.

THE SYLLABLES OF SPRAWL/THE SECRET OF THE WAY THINGS ARE.

         The Seven Syllables of Sprawl, also known as the Secret Language of the Way Things Are, and the Smaragdine Tablet, is a compact and cryptic piece of Hermetica reputed to contain the source of the prima materia and its transmutation.  It was highly regarded by Nyx alchemists as the foundation of their art and its geomantic tradition. 

         The original source of the Smaragdine Tablet is unknown. Although Sprawl is the author named in the text, its first known appearance is in a book written by domestic census takers between the second and third continents. The text was first translated into curse tablature on the seventh continent. Numerous translations, interpretations and commentaries followed.
         The layers of meaning in the Seven Syllables of Sprawl have been associated with the creation of the pollutant’s stone, laboratory experimentation, phase transition, the alchemical magnum opus, the ancient, concrete, symbolic system, and the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm.

         1. There was another recovery time we called our own, an ending to an era of empty threats everyone knew too well. 

         Just to be clear, they said they were studying anatomy.  That’s what they called it.  By autumn, we had worn out explosives as a kind of worthwhile armor.
         What did you expect to make of that place?  More symptoms to walk across a trench?  More coffin locks and costume designs?  Had you taught yourself to use your hands differently?  
         Lack of exposure is often confused with dislocation of memory, I didn’t realize you could still surprise me.
         There was the story about your parents too.  More than enough craters to tell.

         2. Morning came like a clear mirror in a collapsed mine.  They said the same sky was still our knot to come loose.
         There was a longer explanation, but what worked best in it’s absence?  I cried all day, circles deep beneath my eyes.  I didn’t have to say a thing.  It was a change.
         We waited to wake up, worked together on a note about changing weather and winter coats, and then you went home

         3. Still blind enough to build a backup sun again.  I couldn’t say it to your face.  I think you went to see a doctor, a kind of atmosphere resolver.  There was a desk full of letters I never pretended to read.  
         Yes, unknown.  Yes, out of focus.  Yes, coming apart.  
         Yes, a silhouette lit with matches and hidden underground.  Strictly speaking, over and over and over again. 
         I tried to keep track of  our most obvious tells.  A lump of clouds in the lungs and throat.   Survival knives.  Beginning of injuries. Scar tissue collected like it was the only way home.  
         Syllables of sprawl and how long we said they were the secret language of the way things are.

         4. You ripped a proper cut, pulled me by my jacket.  Two missed asteroids behind each eye, and then another little storm, a blackout stage, a reconstruction site.  I forgot if it was a map or a photograph of us. 
         What did it cost to pick it apart and hold it?  Your hands were hollow knots, a skeletal theory, a collection of coiled bones and skilled remains.
         It was an education in exchanging voids, another outline of chalk we wore when they broke the husk off of our skin.  The fifth and sixth, of how many now? 
         The Hereafter has the highest turnover rate of any infinity.  No one lasts long.  Least of all, those close enough to know.

         5. When I was only a silhouette and salt water, when I said a final break isn’t always a false surrender.  Different stakes at different times.
         Your dressing was drained of any liquids and left with hair and muscles preserved.  
         They linked our syllables in simple, shallow pits, and I could read them still.

         6. Another month was a mechanical failure.  It wasn’t just nothing, though maybe a reach to calling it a willing retreat.
         If we could have stayed in one place and survived.  Like captive animals, kept for display, invisible twins in our place.  I was beginning to think it would never happen, and then it was happening.
         An echo is a kind of choice, a means of backlash weaponry. You told me we could almost kill a man just by targeting him there.

         7. Traces, shadow, names, corpse.    
         On the shores of an unspoken hieroglyph.  More than one but less than three.  With mistakes of sprawl in place, it was possible to die in the afterlife and this death was permanent.
         We hid there twice for every time they passed us overhead.

THE PARASITES OF ERROR/REVOLT.

         The Parasites of Error (also known as The Parasite Revolts, or the Infested Rebellion) were primarily used to weaken and demoralize migratory hosts and exiled inhabitants of Eris, non-natives against whom the generally quick-moving and itinerant nature of such pandemic clouds would be most effective.  The widespread use of these internal contagions, and wartime advances in the composition of amnesia mimicry, sleeping sickness and similar symptoms, gave rise to the commonly expressed view of Eris as "the contaminated island".
         In East Eris science, the Parasites of Error were not solely viewed as "mistakes of anatomy” but could also be seen as differences between estimated or measured values of the individual and the accepted true, specified, or theoretically correct values.  Universal infestations were recognized to affect the judgment of oneself as well as an attitude toward the self.  This might include an inaccurate or incomplete diagnosis of beliefs and emotions such as triumph, despair, pride and shame as well as other untreated behavior caused by disease, injury, syndrome or other ailments.
         In this sense, symptoms of parasite infection may not have always been obvious and were frequently confused with other deficiencies, lacks, and miscalculations of intent. It was possible for conditions of malaise, cellular apathy and solitary desperation to occur upon initial exposure or long after exile, and by mid-island, it was assumed the vast majority of non-native inhabitants on Eris had harbored small or practical Parasites of Error for at least some transition period, during which their initiation to the island was completed.  At the perimeters of the Eris, certain pandemics were discovered with complex life-cycles and cognitive coordination, these Parasites of Error seemed capable of spreading contagious revolt through a sequence of separate hosts.

          Jillison said the early gods were insect sized, which gave them even more power, as they controlled giants rather than miniatures.  She said heaven could be a pore in the skin, a cluster of small pockets and openings, and no one would ever know the difference.

ONCE UPON A METEOR RIOT.

         A meteor riot is a large-scale, temporary act of chaos or disorder caused by the collision of celestial objects (silicate minerals, ionized coding, encrypted and metallic material) upon the continental anatomy.  Riots often occur in reaction to perceived disinterest, loss of attention or attempted retreat.  Targeted areas may vary depending on terrestrial development and the inclinations of those involved.

         Few meteor riots are organized or concentrated enough to create meaningful change upon the continent.  Instead, they typically arrive at the surface of the skin at their terminal velocity and, at most, create a small pit.  Although the extent of the crater will depend on the size, composition, degree of fragmentation, and incoming angle, the psychological (political) and physical (economical) effects of a meteor riot may still cause widespread distress.
         While a riot may initially be sparked by a specific event, scholars, commentators and commissions have identified a number of celestial and continental conditions that may underlie these uprisings.  These conditions are frequently associated with self-decay of a society or continent, and often include: poor healthcare, poverty, desperation, mineral loss, loneliness, instinctive inadequacy, co-dependent pressures, or any combination broken from the above.

         A meteor riot may last as long as there are still mistakes for us to learn.  Mostly melodramatic, maudlin, underimaginative, I knew that much about myself by then.
        When we met I should have warned you, sutures, yes, always hungry, yes, barely ever go home.  Track marks on top of track marks, asterisks of flesh itching or missing or mostly gone.
        You can crater a sky by coming too close to it.  Even if the past has yet to make its impact, even if you wait there, ready for it to crash.

        The term cryptoexplosion (or cryptographic cemetery) indicates a collision of unknown outcome and effect.  The term is now largely obsolete.  It was once commonly used to describe sites where there was evidence of a large-scale impact upon the anatomical surface, but no definitive evidence of an enduring crater.
        Although the tectonic processes of the continent quickly destroy much of the cryptoexplosive record, at least one impact site has been partially identified and described.

        We kept getting younger everywhere but on the outside, it was that kind of continent again.  Finds and then falls and then fragments.  I was close to forgetting we even met at the end.
        Expectation can become its own kind of sickness, almost contagious but never strong enough to save us.  You said you could recognize the conditions of it coming towards you immediately.  Lips tight against teeth.  Organs turning over and over.  A whole stare where half words once were.
        What would you remember about me?  Only an outline to you.  Mostly transparent.  Would you remember me at all?
        Parallels will pull apart when they strike a shard of glass.  Withholding, it’s a type.  A common weathering to cover a crater’s edge.

        Have I given you my reasons yet?  I wanted to tell you.  No one else has to know.
        Liked the way you kissed me, liked the cartilage you called your voice, liked the bruises you broke through my skin.  Liked the codes you wore and the escape clause you kept from view. Lost them all from the original and still I hoped to understand you.
        One night.  Leave a mark on something, maybe.  One night.  A meteor riot, measured only in missteps.  Less and less the later I went back to it, but most likely that was right.
        Acted reckless, acted helpless, acted like I was still a continent behind.  Desperate and selfish.  Are those excuses?  Refractory elements?  They aren’t good enough.

        The air was all dust, the best I could do was stop there instead.  Not because I was afraid of what you would say, not because I knew the absences that always came after.
        Felt the blood conversion, the back away asymmetry, a cautiousness in clear view.
        Watched you carry your past behind cuts of sky.  Behind gravity (the remaining angles of it).  Soon I knew the shadow of us would be there too.         Who or what is Jillison?  I didn't know how to answer you.  I tried to ignore the later stages, the layers of velocity, the resolutions I should’ve known by then.
        Didn't intend for (romantic) attachment? Had to remember that's how it always happened. A mirage of warm blood and by morning, gone again.
        You said most outcomes are over before they occur, a meteor riot may have one, or two, or many causes.  I tried to stay there with that.

        Here is what you taught me to remember.
        Fragile as ash fall and anyone could be just like us.  An attempt, not an accident.  Atoms against atoms, all light is the afterlife of mass.  No impact left to tell, we were hardly there at all.         Faceless and leftover and forgotten easily.  I wished I could remember why it mattered to me. Shock stage.  Strewn field.  It shouldn't matter to me anymore.         You called us a replacement of clear tells, a temporary instinct until the intensity was gone.  You told me you had a system, a forensic meteorology to forget the feel of it.
         
         What remained when the dark was near? Another disappearing proof.  A decay from one night to the next.  Doubt (miles of it).
         I had to remember you were accurate about most things, distance especially.  You followed principles without repeats, mapped imperatives and templates, calculated machine languages for a living.
       You didn't say it was a labor in data, an analytic exercise.  You said the beauty of infinity was building it a body again.

         Crater glass may be formed from the silica of the continent as a result of cryptoexplosions or temporary collisions.  Commonly, the glass will appear hazel, dark brown, white or black.  Internally it has a texture defined by elliptical lines or distant entanglement.
         A possible explanation for these chemical differences is that, in addition to being mainly composed of meteor riot components, the glass may also contain a mixture of unexplained metamorphic effects.

        What was I thinking when we said goodbye?  Are you going to try and make me say it here, again?         Magnetic susceptibility.   I missed you.         Tectonic deformation.  How could I think I missed you?         Overburden pressure. Shouldn't have looked at you like that, like you hadn't figured me out already, like I couldn't have just asked you what you wanted (if anything). Melodramatic, maudlin, under imaginative. Kept making the same mistakes somehow.        Vertical stress.  Still didn't understand how an impact could come that close and still not last.
        A skyful of craters and by summer's end I knew you were right, any one of them could take my place, any one could be just like me.  I gave it a week, and then a few weeks, and then I told you what I thought you wanted me to say.
       Once was enough, always and only.  The rest I can see through or the rest you can keep.

BLISTERED CITY/WHEN BUILT BY VICTIMS.

          The blistered cities are permanent distributions within the upper layers of the continent, typically caused by forceful rubbing (friction), burning, freezing, chemical exposure or infection. Most cities are filled with a clear liquid called citizens or people.  However, blistered cities may also be filled with blood (known as capitals) or with pus (if they become infected or overpopulated). 
          Historically, in Hestia, the blistered cities were common and understood to mean those urban areas that could be crushed, pinched or aggressively squeezed. The belief in this distinction is also prevalent in Themis, where the presence of extreme temperature was thought by many to differentiate a 'city' from a 'town' (an earlier form of swelling).  Cities of these periods were deadly places to live in, due to health problems resulting from contaminated water and air, and communicable diseases.
          In Cybele, it is believed the blistered cities may be prevented by complex systems of  sanitation, utilities, land usage, housing, and transportation.   The concentration of these developments are meant to cushion the city from underneath, protecting it from further damage and allowing the area to heal.

          We listened to them list the flaws of the first born territory. Forehead, temple, chin, upper lip.  And that was just the circle they saw first.  They blotted out as much as they could, but the color was always off.   Too red.  Too bulky.  Too gray.
          Jillison said every accident could be used to give a scar a starting point.  He said they should've done the same.
          They were standing still and holding the rail and talking in place.  Trying to outguess the location of outgoing graves.  I told Jillison it was all a race away from the remains, none of them would ever get there anyways.

          Their buildings lived their blisters for them, but they didn't know the difference.  They let the lights and concrete occupy them from within.  They said it was enough to contain the causes that wouldn't come, the substutions the took skyline from them.
          Sometimes a reward was given to a room with a breath they remembered well.  Sometimes an empty promise completed the construction by itself.
          They avoided corners and tried to pave over any pock mark that propped up.  They caught themselves in traffic and prayed to stay there.  Every intersection was sharp enough so they never had to see through it.

          Jillison was familiar with the first born territory.  The force, feel, and face of it.  He knew it wouldn't be long before the buildings were hungry for more than half lives and heavy breaths.
          Jillison said that was the way a city always went, they constructed a denial and then they couldn't keep it.  It was too close for comfort and they couldn't stop it from happening.  It was always the decay you know versus the decay you don't.
          He watched them and I could already see a crash site under his eyelids.  He asked me what else they thought a city could do? It was scaffolding that formed a mouth and asked for more.   It was an architecture of vices and abrasives.  It was a way to swallow the scars that had saved them too many times already.
          His instincts were unknotted all over the floor.  He looked at me and I could tell it was time to exit through the getaway skin again.

TRUE PROTEIN THEOCRACY.

          Protein Theocracy was an inner-continent strain or sequence conceived as a supreme entity or principal object of worship.  Arguments for and against the dominion of such a transcendent strand were prevalent at the peninsulas of Cybele, where even microscopic faith could follow the originator as a personal obligation, i.e. "the common bond and domain.”
          As the Unfolded Reformation spread through the continent, variations of molecular theocracy begun to diversify rapidly, with the most dominant schism occurring among those who adhered to the traditional tenets of linearism, in which the divine strain was seen as the creator (but not sustainer) of the continent, and those who accepted continuous nuclearism, in which the strain was considered indistinguishable and intrinsic to the continent itself.  To many converts and disciples this revised synthesis would come to represent a pure or true protein reign.
          Depending on sect and location of the continent, these incarnations of Protein Theocracy were capable of performing a vast array of functions within the society, including synthesizing social stimuli, catalyzing symbolic action, replicating ethics and moral responses, and transporting collective behavior from one location to another.  Regardless of these and other perceived contributions, the revelatory doctrine of any true Protein Theocracy remained the same: to bond all molecules into a waking body, a weighted being, a warning shelter for expectation, impulse, and regret.

          Jillison was the link I let them have. I didn't believe in the rest of it.  The nameless chain, the celestial and cosmological coursing through everyone and all that... I couldn't do it.  It wasn't because I didn't want to.  The consequences were obvious.  I was already as stripped and shivering as the symmetries would let me be.

Your father had his practiced catabolism, the chain that came to claim him, give him a name, and then what?   His eyes looked for long and nameless savings.  I watched him hunched over, cycling through a list of the twenty standard compounds, whispering their spellings to himself.  It was all maintenance of associations, deanimation, the growth of a closed system.  He told me once the purpose of the transcendent strand was to prove that cause and effect was the only location left inside of us.  That's when I stopped for good.

So no, I didn't read any of the code books they kept there, I didn't try to synthesize an overall shape or structure.  I'd woken upon to enough wasted energy already, lost enough heat to keep common nowheres from completing me.  If it was all eternal tertiary, then so be it.  I wasn't going to argue anymore.
Jillison got further than I ever could.  I watched her as a child, as a collection of leaves and skies, reading and rereading the Native Conformation and the Helix Script.  I still remember her telling me the line she liked best, the one that promised a sudden pulse to pull the bandage from the hands and bury a hunger in its place.

THE GARDEN OF HALOGENS.

        The Garden of Halogens, originally just “paradise”, was the first, last, or only providence of identity that contained elements of all three familiar states of gender at standard temperature and pressure.  This diversity allowed a maximization, in terms of function and emotion, of what may be done in the landscape.  While it often provided a safe haven for self-transformation, the location and purpose of the Garden was highly reactive, occasionally widespread, and also itinerant (multi-continental).
        The term Halogen (“salt and sea” / "come to be”) was initially used to imply the fluidity of the states of gender, as well as a representation of identity as a process of self-generation, “stretching current”, or salient waveform.  This was in contradiction to traditional interpretations of gender as a solid or concrete habitat.  On certain continents, the phrase was further meant to allude to the cleansing or disinfecting properties of the Garden, and the significance of its curative nature.  The ambiguity of the phrase permitted it to be adjusted according to periodic concerns and proposal of impact.
        It was widely accepted that all halogens formed characteristics of masculinity and femininity when bonded to a social structure, and most were produced from the embodiment of sea water, salt and minerals (including the ivory, bones, teeth, blood, eggs, skin, and hair of organisms).  Due to their complex compositional nature, the middle halogens, were often prepared for their curative or medicinal purposes.  Generally these identities were part of the pre-existing continental habitat, but within the Garden, their specific elemental requirements were managed in a way that was enhanced rather than damaged by the process of companion planting.
With regards to depth of continent and perceived security of inhabitants, the Garden may have grown quickly or could have been created over time, area by area.   On multiple occasions, it existed for ornamental purposes, or was revealed by the intermixing and cross-pollination of aspects of all three states of gender (with concern for their protective layers, active textures, and chosen contradictions).   Though the curative properties of the Garden of Halogens were commonly overlooked by dominant continental hierarchies, their appearance and effects could be restored through the work of extensive coping mechanisms (including “the wildfire method”), cropping techniques, and careful observation.  This cultivation was typically undertaken by one who had seen their whole self in the Garden, a state of salt water, shivering as soon as it started to still.  Their view of paradise was often elementary: an undertow of pulse and skin, torn from everywhere and then grown back together again. It felt far past a probable cause, like a pillar of salt was the only thing left protecting us. Jillison said not to give any ground and I agreed for once.
        I told them to try, try and rearrange me. Ignore the obvious elements, the original skin, the birth site, the scar tissue. Loosen the skeleton out. Use whatever topsoil or subterranea you have, save just what you need.         What else was left to ask for? Jillison said it took an hour either way.         My hands and face were barely showing, we kept coming back to the same instant. Not as point or location, not as a landscape of anatomy or contradiction of skin. There wasn’t any true purpose to it.         That was one way to understand paradise. Trapped together in temporary veins, I didn’t need a checklist of chemical compounds to know.         Every afterlife had to end somewhere, that's what Jillison kept reminding me. There would be a melting point, a boiling point. Her plan wasn't without flaws or pain, but prisoners have their limits too.          What if there was holy water in a harvest of salt? It was no mistake our wounds were wide, even if they tore apart the entirety of our terrain. None of those continents ever belonged to us. Not actually. I wouldn’t miss them when they was gone.
        I was calm, I crossed off that decision forever ago. Or the answer is obvious, you can’t change the way you’re made.         Eos, Hestia, Themis, Eris, Amphitrite, Cybele, Nyx. Seven total and soon they would know the undertow that sunk through them all.         Call it a hollow hour, I chose it as our one to last. Didn’t matter if we never got there, never mind the blood on the door. We didn’t have to back away from an opening anymore.         Jillison spread salt over my skin like stars against a windshield. She asked me if I remembered what reactions can and can’t be outlived? I said we had hidden our survival too long now, outgrew the ghosts of two men already. What were the consequences then?
        A hole underground, a full disinfectant filled to the top. They would go and take their early looks, make whatever initial judgements they could.         Jillison told me to patient, she said there was another side to the violence to come. She was developing a solvent to strip away surface layers, to show them exactly where we hid. A soft, silvery, metallic liquid. A solution.         So I waited there. Under the soil of the transfinite rift, searching a skylight for arms and shoulders and knees and legs. Any walls of a body to unbuild, any opposite path for a breath to hold back.
 Blacked myself out for ten years? Buried it for twelve? I slept while Jillison planted seeds and cures, reached through the cracks in scar tissue and clay. Only an hour passed, in halogen time. It still didn’t feel like less.         Did they think I would just waste away? A decade later and I was waking up on my own. Jillison said it was true.  She fought for our grave until it grew into a garden above.
If they ever asked, I called it a home to begin. I told them there wasn't any difference, what had dissolved was only flesh and blood, not the bond or belief within.