In beginning it was nothing, just like it was in the end.

Light.

Darkness.

Tangled webs.

The spinning of snowflakes…

Him.

Yeah. There’s that.

There’s always that. Him. But then, he’s nothing, so I suppose in the end it’s all the same.

Endless repetitions. Birth and rebirth…

Life is overrated – but so is death. Because in death there’s only nothing – there’s no mist. There’s no awareness. There’s no time. Like anesthesia. A coma. There’s no green fields. No fire, no brimstone. I am the worst of sinners, I am the first of believers, and I’m still dead – embryonic.

Life is overrated.

I wake up and maybe it’s a hundred centuries past. Everything looks the same. The same sea, the same sands. Like lemmings, we travel to the right place. The proper place, and livid bones stare back at us from the deep…

Something out of nothing: it’s always like that with me. Life out of barrenness. Light out of darkness.

There are silver marks up my legs, like scars, where pink fades to gray. Memories trickle back and I remember they are scars: remember fighting, remember blood so acrid and so deep in my nostrils. Remember begging, god, begging him… remember being on my knees. I remember…

Remember fighting for them, though I am no woman, never was, never been, never will be, I fought for them – the Amazons. Hah, Amazons! More like sex kittens. Whores and harlots and saints and angels, virgins and libertines and slaves – it never mattered. I was not one of them, could not be, though I remember macaw wings beating scarlet and viridian upon my shoulders, remember her, god, remember her. Remember him splitting me apart and I cannot remember the first from the last time we fell together, together and together into the darkness…

Oh, but that is all so dramatic! I am nothing like this.

Maybe it’s the dying thing! Life is overrated, but so is death! So is love! So is drama! So is the whole ever-fucking-loving mystery of our condition!

It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter at all.

I stare at my own image and what I see is a body that was left undefined, unrefined, roughed and slackened and slimmed, battered and worn and wrought – I see eyes wild like a loon’s, eyes the color of amethysts and hair the color of rose wine: rose-gray like Aryan flesh and the cheeks of cherubs – I see hair tangled like a halo around my narrow, indistinguished face, I see someone – something – neither male nor female, but both.

Take me from every angle, every light and you will see violence and imperfection, chaos and order, scars and burns: I am a mother to monsters and a father to ghosts. I am neither sacred nor damned, because I cannot – and do not – define myself in terms as naïve as black and white. I am undefined by nature, neither dead nor alive, like Schröedinger’s cat: quantum mechanics. Blips in the dark. The ghost in the shell.

My name is Räendel. I remember that now.

I am immortal, and I cannot die.

Räendel.

Nothing...