Symphony of the Iron Underbelly, Movement No. XI – Something Beautiful
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[The Present – Calico Basin, Mojave Desert, USA, Summer 2022]
I taste salt on my lips and feel the Sun in a bright blue sky. The composite on my face warps under the lightest touch, a strange convergence between thermal-induced plasticity and because it is simply too hot to tolerate touching for any length of time with bare fingers. A ring of damp circles my face where the tightness of the ratchet pinned to the back of my head traps sweat, keeping it from cooling the flushed-red skin of my neck.
I trade inevitable pain for more time, and my burnt fingertips come away smeared in oily white as the paint on my mask breaks down under such intense heat. The parasol in my prosthetic twirls and whirls and the lace patterns make cotton-shaped blurs. Through the material made translucent by angular momentum, I can see something beautiful behind a windscreen smeared by splattered insect entrails and grit.
She is out of her element. Unsure. Such arid climes are no place for a Hurricane, after all. Annoyance trades places with confusion as they battle for supremacy over her expression, all to the tuneless, reverberating rumble of an idling engine. A high-pitched whine pierces the bassiness, the cooling fan spinning up to its highest speed as it labours to cool a motor itself struggling to provide the conditioned air that is stopping those red locks from plastering themselves against a scowling face.
Sweat pools in the folds of my knee and hip, underneath the crisp white material of a loose dress that billows all around. Where the hem falls into the sand, the action of the wind progressively buries it under shifting ochre tides of grit. If I stood here long enough, the desert itself would swallow me up.
Not today, because we will be taking such significant steps as to end up in a very different place from where we started.
Today is her rebirthday, and I have brought her something beautiful as a gift. The truth. But like any disruptive, determined tearaway that is not what she wants.
My skin burns in the sun, but I have a greater tolerance for pain than she has patience for my bullshit and eventually, the truck door swings open on groaning pistons.
She makes some idle and combative comment regarding wicked witches and the colour black. A curious thought comes over me. How do we know that Glinda was a good witch? Her actions are ruthless, premeditated. She must have known that Dorothy would arrive precisely when she did and with the vehicle of her arrival being that of a house, dropped directly on one of her own kind. A rival. A threat for power and glory in Oz …
I shrug. “Still, you came.”
“Despite my lack of feline qualities,” Amber replies, “I like to think I’ve got a few more lives to rattle off…”
She has less time than she knows. “Curiosity, then? Even at this late stage, in our penultimate chapter together, you are still not entirely sure what this is.”
I gesture with my parasol in a wide circle, before directing its point back at Amber. “What this is.”
“What this is, isn’t my pressing question. Why we are in the desert during the middle of summer is more concerning – I get that I’ve said before I have a death wish, but this isn’t the way I envisioned going out.”
“This is an end, of sorts,” I reply, cocking my head to the side. A dollop of liquified paint rolls from an edge of the plastic over my face and drops down to hiss in the dry sand. It leaves a streak of dirty primer behind and down my cheek. “You are here because this is the most appropriate setting for your rebirth.”
“Rebirth? Please tell me you aren’t about to start waxing lyrical and quoting Bible verses – I’m not sure I could emotionally handle having come out here to be accosted by the inaccurate writings of the ‘Good Book’. I swear if I hear the word ‘salvation’ I might actually just throw up.”
Swallowing the salt on my lips, I begin a slow circle around the redhead. “Start? Oh my Resplendent Hurricane, we are so very far from where we began. This is not the start – that came when you chose to walk out on the man you thought you loved and left him to my merciful attention, before he was replaced and rendered obsolete. This is not the start, but the end.”
The sun reaches its zenith and burns all the more intently. “Bible verses? No. There are no Gods, no Kings. Only men and the monsters they create. Or are. Like you.”
Amber shakes her head. “Not like me at all. We’ve established that – you don’t get to pigeonhole me cause it happens to self-service your precious Rapture. We are a partnership after all, not a martyrdom.”
She resists. Of course she does. I do not intend for these lessons to be so painful, but she is a difficult pupil. “Pigeonhole? Like all the others have already done so? A damsel in distress; a fuckup in need of fixing. I am not the one offering you salvation – they are. I am not the one trying to force their reality upon you and your life. I am the only truth you know.”
I step forwards, until we stand melting face-to-face. “The Rapture is all you have left, Amber, and before you leave this place, you will embrace it.”
She laughs. That ever-present mixture of self-assuredness and arrogance, tinged with the rusted patina of doubt.
“You know, you tend to say that alot. ‘All I have left’ but the more I come to think of it… The more I start to wonder if I’m actually not the one walking around with their eyes closed.”
This lesson needs to be learned more quickly. My prosthetic drives into her cheek with a whir of servomotors. Her eyes react more quickly than any other sense and she squeezes them shut, blinded at the glare caused by the sun reflecting against the white paint of my plastic forearm. Black thorns bleed into waving ribbons.
The redhead, caught flat-footed, sprawls out across the hot sand. She swears under her caught breath, but does not immediately launch up to respond. Empirical evidence that the change she is rallying against so intently has truly manifested. Data which informs everything I have said. Everything I have believed. Soon, she will believe it too.
“I’m gonna pretend like I did something to deserve that…”
She spits clear a pink, frothy mix of equal parts blood and saliva. It congeals and bakes on the desert floor. “Cause if I don’t… I’m worried that this is just going to devolve into something other than the civil conversation we were otherwise engaged in …”
“Which, basically, what I’m trying to say is… Are you fucking done?”
I stand over her and the parasol raised above my head blots out the worst excesses of the sun. Thick ropes of white paint continue to run, making black primer claw marks that rake my mask.
“I am bored of this,” I reply, evenly. Cooler than the blistering desert air can possibly manage in thermal equilibrium. “There was a little hope that you would reach this final stage in your rebirth independently, but I can see you require one final push. It is not a question of if I am done, but whether you are.”
Sinking down onto my knees, I spin the parasol in my hand. Strobes of sunlight punch a staccato rhythm through the fabric pattern. “Tell me, Amber. Did you ever answer the question you did not think you had come to ask me all those weeks ago? About what you did, and why you did it …”
“Did you think about him? About all these people who inexplicably step in to save you from yourself without invitation, without need? Oh, the list grows so very long now. Fexxfield, Knox and the man you profess to love today, at least. Your husband. Tell me, Amber … Did you lose the World Championship on his behalf?”
Her ragged voice cuts across the hot air, something approximating frustration and fury. At me, without doubt, but equally so herself.
“You don’t get to stand there with a God complex and try to tell me that you understand [i[everything[/i] as though you’re somehow infallible. You bleed, you die. You’re just as fucked as the rest of us – so lets cut the proverbial bullshit perhaps so that we both might not die of delusion.”
With a sharp twist, I separate my prosthetic at the stump of my forearm and toss it over. on top of her. “Infallible? Are you blind as well as willfully ignorant? Are you stupid?”
“I have bled more than you ever will,” I continue, tugging down the neckline of my dress to expose the knot of scar tissue running down and inside. It does not make me a God, only a prophet for a greater truth as revealed to me. The groundwork for that truth is that you are a fucking liar.”
“Even now, you wrestle with such pathetic feelings as guilt, remorse. For your lost heart, for his lost Championship. Could you have done more? Should you? Was this all your fault? Poisoning yourself with compassion.”
I climb up to standing. “You mewl like a doe, uncertain. Lost, while professing strength and power. You talk of gods, but it seems that you are truly divine given your ability to deliver three hundred and fifty seven consecutive miracles with such insipid, tender, flaccid weakness. I have only one question.”
Cocking my head to the side, scorching my remaining fingertips against the slick plastic, I look down at Amber Ryan as she was for the final time.
“When will you wake up from this distorted reality and emerge the vengeful angel you were always meant to be?”
She stands, but there is no setting of that bruising jaw cupped with a hand. Her shoulders remain relatively relaxed, free fingers unballed. If Amber carries aggression in her step it is buried too deep for me to easily see. What is more obvious, closer to the surface, is a dawning realisation of the reality she now finds herself within.
“Why is it you think this is all a dream to me?” She replied. “Like I haven’t been awake all this time? Is it such an absurd notion that I could walk through three hundred and fifty seven miracles, one after another and never acknowledge that they are more than any other passing day?
Maybe I am stupid, but it's not nearly for the reasons you think I might be…”
Even in coming to terms with this truth, she must always do so on her terms. There must always be an “out”; a caveat – a rule for her and no-one else which allows for cast-iron facts to be smelted down for reforging into a form more pleasing to her idiosyncrasies.
And then, it shines through like the brilliant sun. Something beautiful, at last.
“I can’t pretend to continue ignoring the signs, can I?” She says. ”Not really. Neon will always light up the dark – but be damned if the universe around us would see such determinations dissipate. Miracles are deemed as such for their rarity. Can you truly believe I have any left to spare?”
“Yes,” I reply simply. Because it is the most obvious element of the truth to be accepted. “I believe in you.”
“... Then maybe we’re both stupid. Or perhaps we’re just ahead of the curve. I’m not made of miracles, my reach towards the stars is only so far and belief isn’t a step stool that will spare me precious inches.
I can’t just blindly believe ‘cause you’re taking me by the hand and saying you won’t throw me off a cliff, even though we’ve danced at its precipice. I won’t ask for something tangible, cause I don’t believe faith works that way – however I can’t deny the need to try.”
And the moment is so close, it feels like a burgeoning miracle. “Falling from a cliff is not your fate. To climb again the mountaintop that you held supreme command of for three hundred and fifty seven days and hold it until the rock erodes to nothing and the seas boil to dust and still they will not take it from you. I will bleed all over again to make sure of it.”
My only hand runs down the side of her face, gently cupping the welt swelling up along her jawline. “My Resplendent Hurricane … I only ask for your effort. After all, God loves a tryer.”
Amber does not flinch under the touch, and the heat of the desert dissipates into a cold chill; making a draft between us which prickles sweat-slicked skin. She remains still until oh so subtly, she leans into my touch. Such a small gesture of trust; implied without a word and yet speaking volumes of what has finally come to transpire in the deserts of Nevada.
My eyes roll closed at the slight pressure against my hand and my lungs fill deeply with the grit in the air. An indescribable euphoria overtakes all my remaining senses as finally, blessedly, she takes the final step over the threshold.
Our grand design is completed and the celestial machinery of the Rapture spins at full effect for the first time. It is something beautiful to behold, as is she. A Living Weapon that shrugs off the last vestiges of compassion, unrestrained and unfettered by trifling things like morality. In my mind’s eye I am bathed in the sweet warmth of all the awful, terrible things we will do together in pursuit of absolute victory and, mercifully, salvation.
Here in the acrid heat and sweeping dunes, something that will change all the world has taken root without a single onlooker or neutral observer. What returns to Sin City is not what left it.
The warmth in my palm has nothing to do with the powerful sun blazing high in the sky and is, instead, derived entirely by the knowledge that a new and glorious age has begun, led by a new and terrible angel.
And she is mine.
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[The Rapture]
In a roiling furnace full of feeling – a crucible filled to its warped rim by the sum rage and pain of all the wrongs it has collected over a lifetime – I have seen something beautiful. Bubbles of molten oxide swell in obscene globules, bursting at their apex in a shower of fury that scalds and strips flesh from the bone. Even the reinforced container groans and twists with the strain; despite being purpose-built for such a task, its hard life has all but leached the last dregs of resistance out and left brittle, carbonised slag behind.
Nothing lasts forever. Did they think containment would last likewise?
I have seen something beautiful, and she is resplendent.
It has been such a very long time waiting for her transformation to reach its concluding phase – precisely because it is not something that can be delivered externally, controlled and manipulated to pour all that rage and pain and wrongs into a predetermined mould to produce the shape of things to come. Such a calculated act would produce nothing of value, if it produced anything at all. She cannot be so easily directed.
No, this – all of this – has come from within. Enabled by my thorn-painted hand? Perhaps. Resourced appropriately to grow and twist in gnarled, spined tendrils up to occlude the Sun and her stars? Possibly. Adding fuel ensures the good and proper conflagration, but it cannot initiate such an event. Without that self-actualisation, that self-detonation, there is nothing to watch burn so brilliantly.
Have you watched her in the throes of it? When the second-guessing, hesitation and those associated superfluous moral and ethical meanderings are left behind in the sweat-slicked spin of combat? When she hurts and is hurt, and all that matters is the next evasion; the subsequent parry and blow to the gut. Trepidation is the preserve of those with time to think about why they are doing something and not simply how to do it. In those moments, she is a force incarnate, as befitting swirling vortex winds and their associated non de plum.
A Hurricane … But that is about to become a pseudonym; rendered anachronistic post-Rapture, as she emerges new and remade into a Living Weapon. Not by my subtle machinations – who could convince Amber Ryan to do anything she did not at least think she wanted to do? Not her husband and former World Champion, Mister Bane, and not the man who took that title from him. My Songbird.
Certainly not me. That is the great truth that has sat so proudly on display in shining brass and burnished metalwork, free for any to gather under and marvel up at its intricate functions. The truth that I have spoken only cold-welded reality unto her. I have shown her only what others have dressed in gaudy robes and bright colours to hide the brutalistic nature of it all.
Compassion is the poison of the soul.
Oh, how they have all tried in their own way to steer her course more to their liking. Rescue whatever strange version of Amber they see through their own warped mind’s eye, regardless of her own wants and desires. Look inside that raging maelstrom painted red, and you will find such a variety of pain and sorrow and fury that it will burn as quickly as it sates. Look inside the distorted internals of a wayward angel and be forever changed. Split the atom and bathe in its irradiating glow.
Peel the inspection port cover back on the face of the reactor, even as its heavy graphite blocks shudder and jump in their fuel housings, and go wide-eyed at the catastrophe coming apart underneath your melting shoe leather … But do not look away. Not yet. Just a little longer, and you will see a brilliant new star born.
A fraction of a moment before you are utterly destroyed, to the point even the memory of you is scoured from existence. This Sunday, we will all witness such a terrible birth to paint the skies with a radioactive pall, and poison the land in all directions and everything it contains.
A lonely Ferris Wheel, rusting in the undergrowth. Orange and embrittled. Broken. An Iron Maiden, if you will.
Disabuse yourself of the simplistic, childish notion that I am working some nondescript magic to coerce or control Miss Ryan. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have not sabotaged the reactor – all I have done is lead you all to its lead-lined containment building bursting with overpressure, groaning and creaking and begging for release at the moment of its complete failure.
So you can enjoy the pleasure of dancing in the steam and hydrogen explosions.
Still, there must be a vehicle to enable such annihilation and it has already changed course markedly once. For the first time my Resplendent Hurricane, so newly Raptured, comes to my side and we will work hand-in-plastic-hand. The question of who will be laid down at our feet as proudly sacrificial lambs to be baseball batted to death, is settled. Gone is the duo of Miss Steele and Miss Vargas – the latter content enough to sift datapoints and identify trends, without contributing to the body of work that inspires the former. Instead, something trying much too hard to be wicked this way comes.
Instead, we have Iron Maiden and Twisted Sister.
Elemental rhymes scored into grease-stained fast food boxes aside, The duo are labouring under a fundamental misunderstanding as to who is to be reckoned with at Climax Control. There are no such things as monsters; only monstrous people and despite their pantomime-esque trappings and B-Movie worthy hyperbole, they are pretending to look dangerous in a concrete complex full of twenty-to-life killers. Across from them will stand one of the most dominant competitors this company has ever seen or ever will see, and by her beautiful, irradiating side stands said company’s Internet Champion. Appointed by implicit defeat of the previous incumbent as the most dominant bitch on the block, courtesy of Miss Hernandez’s overactive mouth and underactive imagination.
You step into the penultimate chapter of a book that has already been written, and the ending allows for no twists in narration. It has been ordained, assembled from my grand design into something shining and palpable and tangible as it swings and whirls. You merely assume the form of the sacrifice necessary to allow a Living Weapon to reach critical mass: some defined threshold of totality beyond which all the concerns and critiques, wonders and wherewithals are flashed to steam and vapourised along with whatever token resistance you put up in that momentary, involuntary jerk of muscle memory and pain reflex.
And there will be such pain. The ultimate tutor, through which all the truly worthwhile lessons of life are transcribed. No ghoulish, Halloween-haunts or smeared makeup but only the select miseries that two persons trained in the subtle art of agony can inflict on two others. And we have been training for so very long and our craft is so very well honed.
There is no place for you in the Rapture, because it has already been and gone and delivered to us a new embodiment, a new agent and child of true chaos. That avatar will stand before you on Sunday, and educate you in a way no amount of bus shelter-scrawled, nonsensical ramblings can meet in depth of suffering or portent of witless doom.
Neither of you were even supposed to be here, and that is not commensurate with the level of relevancy to everything that is ordained and planned. Unknown variables to be dealt with promptly, lest they trigger a more sustained immunological response.
Aggressive treatment then, to exercise this cancer of chance encounters before it metastasizes into something altogether more threatful to the plan. In this singular way, you present something that gives me long enough pause to consider a response. In this small potential for disruption, there is the slightest flicker of relevancy which you should cling to adrift on this rolling and black sea, because it will grant you a few more wretched minutes of life before sinking into the brine.
There is no opportunity here to derail our significant works, because there is no inflexion point or alternative path from which to branch off to. What has been set in motion now cannot be stopped, impeded or otherwise changed. The question is not if, but when. However it has been described to convince you to intervene, this is not an opportunity. It is simply a confirmation.
You have appeared fashionably late to a party ready to frolic and let-loose, but the occasion has come sombre and the gentle tinkle of cutlery-on-glass draws the attention of all the invitees to the grand design, its majestic reveal. The great beyond. Cease your discount-store tribute to some Necronimicon and listen as everything that has been so painfully laid out comes full circle in some reality-bending Mobius Strip, that skirts causality and stretches the stuff between worlds to breaking point.
I think you are in love with the idea of the occult, the forbidden. The dark. On Sunday, courtesy of the Rapture, I will stand with my Resplendent Hurricane and show you a reality that is far worse than even the most opiate-overdriven feverings of Victorian Horrorcore. You will not have to gather in covens or whisper secret words under an errant moon – we will show you all these terrible things lit up at kilowatt intensity by the bright stage lights of the Galen Center, overhead.
What use is a Book of the Dead or the kinds of people who embrace its macabre message? Those that are gone have nothing left to teach us because invariably, their lessons are flawed given early departure. Failure bound in vellum, scribed on parchment in animal blood. All very unsettling, but ultimately useless. Especially when there are things so much worse than death to contend with …
While this company’s attention has been craned up at its mountaintop, watching my Songbird clash with Bane; curious to see whether Rivers or Johnson will emerge as the most magnificent Bombshell of them all … They have failed to keep track of the path being hewn around and up to that summit. Not driving wind, torrential rain or the best efforts of loudmouths or silly little girls have slowed our progress and cragged rock has given way to smooth, sculpted stone. We are but a few steps from the peak and in their panic, they turn now to look at the defences available …
… And send you. Some poor facsimile of a Witch’s Coven, cackling and plotting and sending messages with the tonal complexity and menace of fanfiction pulled from the darkest recesses of Twilight subreddits. Are you supposed to represent genuine opposition to our progress? Or is there something more complex at work? Perhaps this is merely a test to determine with how much impunity we will pass straight through your otherwise meaningless intervention.
Do you feel the excitement? It squeezes the heart and makes the fingers tremble. It has been such a long time building, gestating inside a well of distortion and emotion-blown wind until finally ready to step into being as an angel reborn. She is something beautiful, something terrible and while I did not create it, I cannot help but feel a swell of pride as I watch this Living Weapon clamber over the crumbling lip of the mountainside, sink into the snow of the summit and know that none who call it home will make it out alive.
Weeks ago, I might have told you not to fear this. That the application of pain through the vehicle of misery, or suffering, would bring a cleansing liberation. A new outlook. A Rapture. But that is no longer the case, for we have transitioned beyond the need for new components to complete my grand design. Our grand design. Instead, you are obstacles to be smashed aside and destroyed.
You should fear this. Beyond portents of doom and talking gargoyles – something visceral. Stomach-churning. You are the first to fall in a new era of resplendence; that piercing scream that makes others snap their heads back in reflexive horror and clutch their fingers in tight to fists. Perhaps I have been unfair in writing you off as nothing but fodder. I think there is a role that you can play for me.
Be my siren. Long and keening, vibrating the bones inside sweat-slick meatbags as they blanch and baulk and think about how they will get out of this – Oh my God there must be a way – and announce our coming. A trumpet call, a wailing drone of doom that distils all that existential dread into the purest cocktail ready for delivery. Ready for injection. In this way, you can be granted some small semblance of comfort in your contribution. Fall for us quickly, and conserve your energy for the roiling bell of agony you will sound all across this company. They will hear it at the catering tables and in the management suite, and they will break the plastic pens in their fat fingers in reaction.
And none of it will matter. In their greed they have allowed me to move unchecked. In their banal interpretations of my motivations, reduced to some two-dimensional villain, they have assigned me as some faceless enforcer or spectre and used me accordingly. As a boogeywoman to strike fear into those silly little girls who cross their hypermasculine paths. It served my purpose – served our purpose.
Carefully, softly treading, I have eviscerated the rank-and-file of the Bombshells Division such that now all that remains is their lofty Champion and a handful of capable fighters circling to cut her down. Woefully insufficient to stop what is about to come for them.
Three Hundred and Fifty Seven Days. It is not enough. She will take it back and you will all die old and cold in your beds before the counter resets further. It is far too late to call for reinforcements, pack the field with new contenders to slow our approach. Even your so-called hand-picked fodder can see the ludicrousness of resisting. How long did it take Steele and Vargas to (im)politely reject your offer of being dismantled physically and mentally and returned to sender in pieces? You do your so-called talent a disservice by, if not underestimating their intelligence, then underestimating their will to survive.
They will not come to help you as the Bastille is stormed and you are lined up against the gold-gilt wall they paid with broken backs and spirits to clad. Those that chose the expediency of living to fight someone else another day will simply watch us destroy it all and perhaps, they will sift through the detritus and wreckage – and offal – and pick the bones for value. Or they will drift away, as the wandering spirit which imbues so many in this industry often drives them to do. A few might think of rebuilding, trying to get back what has been lost forever; an era they were never a real part of and yet feels inexorably part of them.
But now that ends. It is time for this company to enter a new era; a defining cultural and business epoch from which such changes will be wrought that they shall be visible from where the stars draw their stories and their shapes in-between each other.
It will be magnificent. Resplendent. Something beautiful.
I cannot welcome you to the Rapture … Because you are already inside it.
