Into the Void: 5 & 6

5- Dandelion

"Lust's passion will be served; it demands, it militates, it tyrannizes."

Marquis De Sade

And through this thick mourning walk down yet another grim and narrow corridor, which only the night-mind may conjure its won devils--awake, with ready despair and debilitating the heart, and the hidden score of the dying.

He found the body there as it had been left, as the city birds drew dense and dark like a malevolent cloud overhead; and this only protectorate remained well away, dispelling his own demons with a cold and cruel mind-- distancing his soul with talk of myriad differences between ordinary weeds and flowers of beauty.

At the heart of it all was a young androgen hybrid, her head shorn and his eyes removed.

The creature known as Dandelion had been created, or given, to a man that he had called father. Such a deception within The Pure-bred world would have been met with an indignant rage, though those whom knew Dandy well suggested that he might willingly and wanting to return to him. If not for the death of the man that he knew as father, Dandy would have never came here at all. He suffered the loss more as a lover than a son.

Among The Pure-bred, such unions were known, and yet rarely discussed--save from the comfortable distances of somebody else's life. That the Green Houses of hybrid prostitution remained, enduring in the shadows of this civilization and made a mystery by a meaningful ignorance was something a tad less scandalous in the public eye. It is one thing to share another creature's bed, but to love it as if it were a human being...

Like once great ships that lay down in those hollow shadows of the ocean, such heart-wrecks were often lost without any trace beyond the disappearance. The man from the Ministry of Silence might often find a few of them, given that there was a perceived need to employ his agency. He was not sent in to discover the murderer as he was to wash it away--and cleanse the situation for what the bulk of The Pure-bred population was not yet ready to accept. There was an especial effort made for those pertinent identities, for whom such scrutiny may become problematic to those heads of state, where the world may be perforce to alter what values it still considered to be sacred.

To share a their bed with a hybrid was still considered a deviant practice, but to love them was tantamount to treason against your own kind. There was e'er that fear and wonder that the brids may one day assemble and rise, for which the Humane Acts of 2041 were enacted, to prevent such abuses against them. As the young lawman, standing among his brethren and discussing what sort of loathsome creature Dandelion must have been may suggest--enforcement was sporadic and often unpursued.

Unalike most of those books that he received, for an end to be completed with a somewhat more moralistic bend--he was never given an identity to protect so much as it was feared that such killings would stir up unrest and open hostilities...

To be a driving wedge in betwixt truth and reality, and keep them set apart for the general welfare of this great civilization.

Once blood has been spilled, all creatures become anxious.


6- The End of Juvenal's Dream

"The meanest flower that blows can give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

William Wordsworth

From the house of Dandelion's father, the agent of silence moved through society as a part of one migratory mass--indistinguishable and unpronounced, until his eye was caught by the same dark puppet as he had seen before. Though its face was painted black in the evening's shade, he recognized the creature the instant, as that he had first beheld it. Locked into its own separate space, as the citizens mulled about its distraction unseeing--it stood, with its arms held apart and its hands empty on a fountain's concrete edge, and began falling backwards as the agent began to move quickly, stirring those around him to begin to panic. He reached the fountain side, and peered within to find only several small coppers and silvers sprinkled down amid the tiled bottoms--as if it had disappeared into some hidden platform and descended down into the world below the city.

It was here that his first act must begin, at the city university. For the father of the Dandelion, alive or dead, was an identity that must be preserved and left... unclear, if nothing all the better may be made of this situation, given to the Ministry of Silence.

He walked inside, and to the elevator, driven through the heart of the teetering rows, up the all singular columns raised heavenward. He had found the creator of uncertain flowers sitting alone in the library--insinuated himself in between the sections of arts and science.

To the world below, he was known as DaVinci--a young outlaw alchemist of extraordinary talent. The truth was merely that Juvenal Williams required a means to finance his own loftier expeditions into the world of salves, procedures and medicants that may, some day, have saved us all the horror of death... if such things were even possible. It was yet to be determined what side may succeed him best in this life--great physician or infamous renegade.

"Can I help you?" He asked, the body matured and yet the mind and heart still hazy, and unclear--and his tone merely an imperfect reflection of what he imagined should be.

"Yes-perhaps, hello." The agent offered forth his hand, and Juvenal stared down toward its extension a moment before he accepted it and their hands, first embraced, created an ordinary neuro-reaction that neither would have to immediately consider the implications of such simple gestures until they had both parted unto their separate ways. "I have been told that you are the young man to see."

"I have no idea who, nor why, anyone would tell you that." He said suspiciously.

"DNA can be altered, but it never lies," the agent said as he sat across from him in one of the padded chairs offered by the library for its many myriad students.

"Are you a professor here?"

"No Juvenal Williams, or DaVinci the black alchemist; I am afraid that I am not." He said as he glanced down to the book in the young man hands and only needed to see the name Charles Baudelaire to recognize it.

"I am Juvenal Williams, but as for the rest, I have utterly no clue as to what you are talking about."

"Utterly?" The man repeated as he seen the title of the book, Fleurs Du Mal. He had no read The Flowers Of Evil since he was a young seminarian in the court of the Ministry itself. "I am disappointed to hear you say that DaVinci."

"Are you crazy or something? I told you..."

"I know what you told me," he interrupted and overspoke him. "Yet, they claim that confession is good for the soul. As I am likely the last person that you will ever see, I would suggest that you might use your time more providently."

"Look, I do not know who you are, but one shout and I can have several other people's attention on us." The hackles at the back of his neck raised, as did his blood pressure and his eyes set as if he was intent to remember every detail of the man's face.

"Very well," the agent said, and then peeled the thin sheath away from the palm of his hand and tossed the false layer of flesh into his lap. The agent watched as the young DaVinci stared down into his lap, his mind working against those chemicals that had been speeded unto his heart, and then flushed throughout every system. "The book that you are reading seems appropriate, as your liver has become your greatest enemy." The agent stood as he watched the young man's eyes grew dull and heavy, his tongue thick in his mouth; and he moved closer to speak a whisper into his ear. "Safe journey, young prophet," he said and then moved away as Juvenal's head lulled back, and he tried to regain the ability of self volition before the sharpest pain he had ever experienced in his brief life exploded inside of his lower bowel.

Bile and infection flooded his system where his appendix had exploded, the added narcotic not a question of the pain so much; his death not to inflict a punishment, nor to end genetic crimes so much as to preserve the silence.

It was not the man for whom Dandelion called father that the agent had predetermined that Juvenal's dream must end. It is commonly known that alchemical experiments are dangerous, and they were--even had young Juvenal created a near perfect creature in his young Dandelion. There can be no exception made for genius, or that it might even be suggested that such creations were possible outside of the industries that produced the hominid hybrizations through the legal markets. If anyone outside of the Ministry had become aware of what had just happened, they would likely assume it was a protection of the profits of the wealthy--or some another form of conspiracy...

A lesser black market alchemist would not necessarily have had to die. Their own creations maintained the ideal that genetic experimentation was a threat to the public, as well as the individual. The belief that, outside of the confines of what protective legislation had been enacted, a viable creature could be made could only, too conceivably, lend to chaos.

Such beliefs fell well within the provenance of the Ministry of Silence.

Uley