Yufet by Patrick Kapera

I am an innocent man, yet I am touched by a darkness I cannot fathom. I walk Her empty streets while all the rest sleep, afraid or too sure of what they will do and say to me if I am recognized. "When a man falls," they say, "he is to be pitied, not condemned." But the truth of the matter is that they hunt us down like animals, slaughtering us mercilessly, never understanding what or who we have become.

I can still remember a time when I would have done the same, when I was as small and timid, shirking away from every shadow...

"What must I expect during the Test?" I ask my good friend, Lazara, at dawn of the morning I am to be knighted.

"Insight," he replies, in his typically enigmatic manner. Am I to become as evasive as he? Do all who are judged by the Stone become hopelessly introverted, able only to see the black of their enemies against the white plain of their own desolate hearts?

"What are you thinking, Yufet?" comes Lazara's voice after a time. He is seated at the ledge of the second-story balcony, his legs dangling beneath him in the fresh morning air.

"About a dream that came to me last night..." I answer, the images flooding into my mind's eye like vague phantoms of another person's life...

I am walking Her dark, empty streets imperiously, filled with a sense of dreadful purpose. Every lonely alley fuels my search with so much more angry lust. I am a puppet, an agent of wrath bent of fulfilling my dark master's desire.

Before the night is through, I will drink life's blood in excess...

"What happened... in your dream?" Lazara prompts, intrigued apparently by my sudden mental departure.

A gruesome sensation is growing within me, threatening to tear me apart if I do not let it out. But I am unsure how to do that. It has been so long since I let anything go.

"There was a girl," I respond, my words reflecting the trembling deep inside.

She is beautiful, precisely what I would have desired when I was young and free, before learning first-hand the evils of the world. Her spirit is bright and colorful, with a joyful hope she spreads to everything she touches. I approach her from behind, calling out to her only when I am confident that she will not run. I smile as genuinely as I am able, praying that it can hide my true intentions. She is friendly enough, welcoming my company, and tells me that she is only here waiting for a friend that is to meet her. A lover, I think. Why else would they be meeting in such a dangerous location at such an unreasonable hour?

This is a special occasion, my thoughts continue, and I tell her so, my laughing voice coming out like dancing leaves. She asks me why, but she is not afraid - not yet. I am saving that for later...

"You jackal!" Lazara exclaims at me, his beaming face the picture of envy. "Who is she, this girl? Do you know her, or are you dreaming up fantasy women now?"

"She was like the sun, so young and innocent," and before he can comment further, I let slip as well, "Far, far too young for the likes of me..."

She asks me something unimportant as I struggle to decide who should die first, and by the time that we see her suitor sneaking through the quarter, I have made my choice.

The vista of pain pulled back across his pallid face is almost as delightful as the weight of her lovely nubile form as it goes limp within my clutching hands. Her last gurgling breath rushes through me in a hot flash, my mind races into oblivion, and the cold sweat breaking out all over my body feels like a shower of the finest blood-red wine...

Lazara can see by my shaking form that something is wrong, and his smile wanes. "What do you mean, Yufet? What happened in your dream?" The rush is upon me again, and I am conscious of the violence of the night before. It had been no dream, no flight of fancy gone terribly awry. I had killed two people in cold, bitter blood, and hidden them in the sewers where they would not be found until long after their identities could be discerned. I am a monster, and I am unashamed. The pathetic, whining slime that I become each day is there to please an audience, to keep those who would question my actions at arm's length, so that I may continue unfettered. My work is never done.

"Yufet, what is it? Why are you making that sound?" I am only distantly aware of my ragged, heaving breath, and the effect it must have on Lazara.

Animalistic impulses war upon the hated calm inside me, and I know that I will finally let go again - soon...



I walk slowly toward the tall black Stone, my heart pounding within my breast, trying to break free through my aching ribs. I am afraid - of insight and of truth. I am not ready, I think as the Ebonites flanking me back away. They cannot judge me - only the Stone can do that. They will wait until I place my hands upon it's cool surface, so that the ancient wisdom of their Prophet can assess my standing among them. Then, they will welcome me as a brother in arms, or strike me down without conscience.

It is their way.

I look about the Temple, and see only the shallow faces that they want me to.

The Ebonites are a stoic, sacred people, loathe to part with their secrets. But what of mine? What will happen to all the hidden words I've never told anyone? All the lost things only I have seen? Will they be taken from me? I do not want to become like them - without satisfaction or sadness, anger or even contentment ? only existing to enforce their own distorted interpretation of the Prophet's message.

Why am I here? I believe in Mekhem, and his mission. But I'm not sure that I believe in his followers. They say that the Prophet resides in spirit within the Stone - that he is testing those who seek enlightenment. But what if they are wrong?

My judgment is at hand.

Looking at the Stone makes my eyes hurt. The layer just below the surface ripples in slow motion like an upended glass of jelly, and within (or beyond?), I can make out something swimming toward me. I have come too far to turn back, I rationalize. I have spent too many years striving to understand the Prophet's message, and cannot risk turning away from what could possibly be the end of my quest, regardless of the appeal of that end.

"I need to see," I whisper as I reach out to the Stone. "I need to understand." And as my palms meet the infinite blackness, I can feel them drawn in with a flashfire welcome. Searing pain arches up the bones in my arms until it feels as if they will be ripped from my sockets or burned away forever. I can feel myself slipping inside, lost to the obscure alien realm beyond...

The pitch of my ascendant passions heightens again as I watch Lazara fall to his death at the steps below. His screams are mercurial laughter to me, the sound he makes at the end a dazzling symphony of snapped bones and ruptured organs.

I know now why he never answered my question, and where he went after "leaving" my place. Lazara is dead, snuffed out by my own hand, as so many others that came before.

He has always been aware of me, my inner demon, as I have remained the ignorant vessel for his insanity. My relentless quest for illumination has become twisted and distorted, mangled by fear of the truth and human frailty. He is a monster, and I am so very ashamed of him.

"But there is no need," the voices come to me in the black nightless expanse, intruding on my thoughts as my body plummets into hell. The words emerge in my soul like raging flares of emotion, detached, without identity. "What?" I call, but there is no answer, and I realize that I have asked the wrong question. "Who?"

Their empathic response is a long time coming. "No one..."

And in the endless moments that are stolen from my freefalling form, I know that the Ebonites are wrong. Mekhem is not within the Stone, but something else is - something old, outside what we consider reality, and bent on our eradication...

Moments or millennia later, a muted fire appears above me, and I float up toward it, motionless. My surroundings become semi-solid, like oil, and a panic sweeps through me. Mortal fear that I will drown suddenly returns to me, and I flail my limbs to reach the surface.

When had I stopped caring whether I lived or died, and why was it different now?

Breaking the surface is like cutting a path through sackcloth with a spoon, and the air of the rank room beyond burns within my lungs. I am somewhere else now. The walls are jagged, like we are underground, and there are cave mouths everywhere.

Surrounding the pool I am floating in are several dark figures, chief of whom is a man with only one eye. A long-tailed monkey leaps up and down upon his shoulder, its shrill excitement echoing through the chamber as it points a long, bony finger at me.

I am dragged from the mire, and rolled on my back. Several of the figures hover over me, their wicked smiles unnerving. "Welcome," the Monkey Man slurs. "What... happened? Where am I?" I stutter through the foul-tasting broth.

"You failed their Test, young one," another answers. "You are among friends."

"I heard... felt... something in the Stone..."

Low chuckling from the onlookers does not improve the tight ball of anxiety working through my belly. "Who are they?" I ask, wanting to rise, but too weak to crawl.

"Gods," the Monkey Man says, "remnants of another age, when things were more clear."

"And you," I ask, the ball in my throat now, and rising. More chuckling, as the men, in turn, reveal small tattoos upon their bodies - of long dog's heads with pointed ears and feral grins. "Jackals..." they hiss together, and the world fades away behind them, leaving only a trace of humanity, scarred by neglect and venal hunger.

I walk Her empty streets while all the rest sleep, afraid or too sure of what they will do and say to me if I am recognized.

"When a man falls," they say, "he is to be pitied, not condemned." But I fell long before my condemnation, and I no longer seek their pity. The monster I was and the man I want to be are one now. That has been the gift of the gods within the Stone. Reconciling their evils with those that I have wrought has given me new strength, and a new mission, and I will not fail. I will hunt them down like animals, slaughtering them mercilessly, for I understand precisely what they have become and who they serve. And though I bear their mark, I will not ever bear their stain.

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