_ _ _ Bim

  For all the unprecedented knowledge she was gathering, physical reality was not to her liking. The physicality of everything, which she'd initially found quite endearing, was now a limitation she'd begun to despise. Similarly, she'd experienced enough of this sensation called 'touch' that she was almost entirely disenchanted from it. The one saving grace of touch came from the distinctly non-human growths protruding from her back— her golden-feathered wings. Their downy composition was pleasantly decadent to the touch and they were a great comfort in an otherwise coarse experience.

  "If you want to leave this room, you have to wear this." A human orderly repeated while proffering a bulky dress made of bristly textiles.

  "I have to do nothing you say, Gianna." Bim retorted, evoking the woman's name with the intent of driving her off. Gianna was unconvinced.

  "Clothing is a very common human custom, Bim," Gianna explained. "If you want to 'mingle' with human's you'll have to wear clothes."

  Bim refrained from boring into the woman's mind and simply taking the information of human customs from her. She similarly refrained from rebuking the woman for her overly casual tone and blatant invocation of her vessel's pseudonym. Her standing contract required a great deal of lenience for such mortal shortcomings. Constantly having her name (even if it was merely a false pseudonym) uttered and spoken without due respect was agitating in the extreme. Nearly as agitating as touching such an unpleasant thing was.

  Bim shifted her bare feet on the cold metal flooring, moving her weight (and the associated pains of standing while gravity bore her down) from one leg to the other. Even the weight of her arms was wearing her down, yet no matter how she adjusted them, relief never came. Gianna misinterpreted the gesture, thrusting the concealing dress at Bim's naked form.

  The coarse woven textiles scraped against her skin, tearing at her body with every gram of offending mass. What the abrasive textiles couldn't flay from her, they instead seared with the waste heat of a failed exchange. Bim refused to catch the falling dress, calmly stepping away from the wretched thing rather than recoiling from it. Once the detestable robe had settled on the floor, Bim made a calculated show of kicking the clothing aside precisely as Gianna bent down to grab it. The irritation she felt from touching the fabric was well worth Gianna's dawning comprehension of the situation.

  "I will not wear that." Bim stated, speaking slowly as she repeated herself.

  "I'll find you something else then." The woman said curtly, before snatching up the dress and leaving Bim to the near solitude of her compact reality.

  "You don't have to like it, you just have to wear it." The other woman in the room said boisterously.

  "I will not be forced into suffering for your social etiquette, Fleshling." Bim decreed.

  She pivoted where she stood, moving as little as possible to face her guards where they were vigorously feasting. There was more to the ritualistic act than mere consumption of sustenance, though her guards had denied every attempt at inquiry on her part. The other woman Kaleigh (who functioned as a living capacitor in mind, soul and body it would seem) made a tutting sound while wagging a finger and refilling her glass from a delivered barrel.

  "If you wanna be a diva, you need to do it somewhere where you can actually get some clothes that're worth a damn. You see this dress? Baby Cashmere. I had to wait eight bloody years t'get it imported."

  Bim understood enough of the slurred words to feel as if it should have been deeply profound— these were after all, the first casual words of conversation she'd been offered by her personal escorts. She dissected the words, extrapolating possible counterpoints and follow up inquiries in an instant. Regrettably, some words were lost to her; the forlorn man who's mind she had consumed and who's true name was Lucius Dominique Pavonii, had a rather weak grasp of this common tongue he'd called Low Gaelgoth but in actuality was titled Nova-Standardized Simplified English. What Bim did comprehend with a high degree of relative certainty, was that Kaleigh might be considered a clothing expert, which made her knowledge on the subject valuable. Had Bim been fully human, the prospect of garnering such expert knowledge would have made her salivate.

  "If clothing is such an important facet of human existence as you contend, why is my acquiring an acceptable unit of it so difficult?" Bim inquired.

  "Lots'a reasons." Kaleigh said with a wild shrug that didn't spill a drop of her drink. "Material scarcity, growing conditions, body types, style, cut, embroidery, finishing, labor costs, shipping. Lots'a reasons," she gave another shrug, "the bitchy attitude and chicken wings aren't doing you any favors either."

  Bim flicked her luxurious wings in annoyance, idly brushing the sensual feathers against her skin. The pleasure such a simple motion brought her was unrivaled by anything else this material dimension had yet to offer her. Would that she could have clothing as divine as these heavenly feathers of her's! At that moment, Gianna returned with a sleepy glaze to her eyes, her arms loaded with more cloth sacks and now, a metal torc held away from her body.

  Instinctively, Bim reached out with her mind to survey these latest options, only to have her cursory essensing wither into nothingness as it neared Gianna's periphery. The draining, hollow presence surrounding the woman was like nothing Bim had a reference for and she recoiled from it with mind and body.

  A swarming host of sourceless hands grabbed her from behind, holding her in place. Nothing was visibly restraining her, yet the vile anathema oozing off each hand bore Treu's unique signature.

  "What is that?!" Bin demanded.

  The telekinetic hands around her shoulders and waist tensed, holding her vessel in place as much by raw strength as by implied threat. Gianna handed the silvery torc off to Treu who had a similar, albeit far more controlled, reaction to the demi-ring's null field.

  "Listen, Devil." Treu growled, bleeding enough power into his words to assail her mind even through the torc's null. "You're existence has been tolerated so far. That tolerance ends the instant you become more trouble than you're worth. Understood?"

  Mind still reeling in psychic shock, Bim stood mutely for several seconds before fully regaining control of her vessel's faculties. Her sampling of Lucius's cognizance revealed a distressing familiarity with situations such as these. Comprehension dawned on her. She was being threatened by the guards who where supposed to protect her. Such a contradictory state of events nearly sent her mind reeling once more until she amended her initial flawed comprehension. They were not guarding her, they were guarding this place from her.

  "I comprehend your words and their meaning, Treu." Bim uttered, evoking his false name to no effect.

  "If you resist me, I will end you." Treu said, taking a single step closer.

  "I hold your soul within my fist." Another step.

  "You cannot break my armor." Step.

  "Cannot warp my mettle." Step.

  "You are nothing." Step.

  "And I am All."

  Treu closed the remaining distance with a final sixth step and clamped the torc around her bared throat. It was like getting severed from her consciousness when they'd sealed the rift before, only so much worse. Without the prior experience to draw upon, she very well might have lost herself and been forced from her vessel as her soul diminished. Radiant though her vessel's vital energies were, her power waned until it was a tenth of a tenth and Bim became startlingly aware that her guards were now nearly as powerful in the aspect of the soul as she was.

  The mob of ghostly hands holding her upright slipped away and she fell to the floor in a spasming boneless heap. Her vessel was rebelling, struggling to retain its human facsimile. The pain of simple existence overwhelmed her. She was powerless to still her twitching too-liquid limbs or maintain all three dimensions of mass, all while Treu circled her thrice one way then thrice more the other measuring his radial steps to multiples of six.

  Her mind could sense nothing of her surroundings. Bim blinked her vessel's dissolving eyes, trying and largely failing to make sense of what she was seeing from where her undulating mass writhed. She vainly tried to reach a hand to the torc strangling her, yet the fleshy black-gold tentacles she saw would not obey. Her vessel- her body was an abominable, malformed simian sporting too many eyes and her unchanged golden wings.

  Gianna dropped her armful of clothes, revealing a shiny metal ingot in her fist which Treu seized from her. The woman violently blinked and shook her head then attempted to leave, a look of horror that even Bim could recognize worn plainly on her face, yet Treu seized her regardless.

  Gianna screamed at his touch, the stink of seared flesh forever added to Bim's near-eidetic memory. Seconds later, Gianna was consumed in flames that crudely mirrored the woman's dying cries with a raging shriek of their own. Bim saw Treu drink in the flames with one hand while the metal ingot in his other turned white-hot and runny.

  Bim was brutally kicked over onto her face. Her vessel screaming silent agony of its own into her mind as a massive weight slammed onto her lower back, pinning her to the metal floor which grew exponentially colder with each passing second. In the time it took her to blink her many watering eyes, her breath was frosting the decking while her spasming boneless limbs left strips of surface-deep skin and writhing golden-black tissue frozen to the metal beneath her.

  A pair of ghostly hands clamped down around the base of each wing with dreadful intent. Her insatiably curious mind quested out, a single tiny thread of prospective perception directed into the hand and the man commanding it. She'd been expecting to find malice, predatory glee in the moment before rendering a devastating injury to her. She found all that and more. He hated her beyond any sane measure.

  "Please. No." Bim whispered.

  "Yes." Treu purred with savage delight.

  The weight crushing into her lower back amplified and the hands on her wings began wrenching upwards inexorably. In its weakened state, her vessel was powerless to alter the inevitable outcome. Pure agony blanketed her mind so completely it should have obliterated her consciousness. In the instant before she thought she would be forever lost to the all consuming pain, she heard and felt a sickening crunch.

  The floor rushed up to her face. Tears of golden ichor fell from her fresh spawning eyes and froze upon the metal decking. Bim beckoned her wings to curl around her vessel, to sweep aside this all-consuming pain with a gentle caress of sublime grace. For a moment, she felt her wings obey, yet relief never came. She craned her head upwards, and wished she hadn't.

  Her guard—no, her Tormentor—held her severed wings in a single hand and he stood elated over her lamentation. The ragged lengths of pearl-white bone protruding from the ends of each formerly-angelic wing grew dull as she watched. Her luxurious feathers, the richness of freshly cast gold faded into a sickly yellow, then a dry bleached grey and turned rapidly to ash. The skin underneath blackened as they burned in her Tormentor's grasp and in the blink of her weeping eyes, that too flaked away into charcoal.

  The only joyous touch left to her in this bitter reality was nothing more than jagged slate-like bones gripped in the hands of a monster who reveled in rending such a treasure from existence. This loss, cataclysmic in so many ways, was not what stilled her breath.

  Treu stood over her naked body with an unreasoning, soul-deep hatred in his eyes. He cast aside the ashen remains of her wings, his now empty left hand hovered at his side draining the chamber of every iota of heat and ambient thermal energy. He needed all and more for his labor. Floating above his right hand, he wove his white-hot metal bar into bands and loops and shapes that held terribly potent arithmetic to their proportions. At the height of his ritual, he added a single blackened bone that was all that remained of Gianna. By the power of his mind alone, he forged that rod of metal and bone into a device of infernal brilliance and singular purpose.

  He created a device that knew her vessel's name.

  One of his stormy blue eyes flicked away from his grand labor, staring into her face at precisely her moment of revelation. He reveled in her mounting horror, and beyond that, he exalted in the knowledge that this event of singular conclusion would not, it could not be stopped by her. His other eye focused on her face now also and Treu smiled at her.

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  "And you call us monsters." She whispered, closing her eyes and readying herself to endure for what came next.

  The mounting chill reached an intensity where it could grow no colder and still Treu drew inwards. Light, sound, even the stored chemical energy of his own body was little but fuel for the meticulously scorching inferno held in his hand. When she thought the heat could build no more, Bim grit her teeth against the next wave of soul-crushing pain that she knew would soon come.

  Whether through the whim of time or her own agony-distorted perception, the moment of calm hung. Warmth returned to the air around her and the crushing weight on her mutilated back lessened. She waited a second longer to reassess her situation, wondering if another flawed interpretation had caused a compounding miscommunication. Her curiosity won out. She opened her eyes once more.

  And only then, did Treu strike.

  His left hand came down in an open-handed slap that felt as if it was seeking to rend the vital energies from this vessel. Her fleshy tissue flash froze, the thermal energy keeping it in a state of semi-solid protoplasm robbed in an instant. Worse still, Treu reached for the quintessence within her— what a human might term as a soul. The talons of his mind flayed into her being and eviscerated it, stealing the choicest cuts and leaving the rest as a mauled carcass.

  His right hand came down next, bearing the device which knew her vessel's name. The frozen tissue of her mutilated back exploded at the touch of his molten-hot device, superheated chunks of her golden-black musculature vaporizing in a noisy splatter. Somewhere, not quite lost amidst the sea of pain flooding her mind, she knew this process was a perversion of ritual branding. The device was driven deeper inside her back until her rapidly cooking pseudoflesh bonded unto the formulaic metal and bone, embedding it just below her skin.

  "You are named, and you are Nothing." Treu said, the words hollow and lifeless despite the malice glowing behind his eyes.

  The crushing weight on her back disappeared, yet she barely noticed. The idle unpleasantness of touch was all but erased under the sickening mass bearing down where her glorious wings once were. Pain—and worse still the eidetic memory of her violation—filled her mind like an apocalyptic storm that eclipsed everything else in its wake.

  She was little more than an impression of a shadow now. She was trapped in a body she despised for its weakness, crippled and maimed at the hands of those she'd thought her guardians, tainted and defiled to her very soul by their actions. Her mind, dulled and fragmented by her torment, moved in ponderous directionless patterns; her eidetic memory constantly reliving what she now knew to be called torture in perfect recollection.

  Information was the essence of her being, she was a questing mind of insatiable curiosity always hungry for more. Yet for the first time, she wished she could forget. That she might unknow precisely the point at which her bones would break, exactly how much force was needed to pry her tendons apart, and how it felt to be betrayed, to have her soul mutilated and raped.

  She had never properly considered the cessation of her existence but in this moment, she knew with absolute certainty that delivering this new cursed knowledge back to her true self beyond this dimension's boundaries would be to damn them both. If even this stupid fragment that she was could see what a failure this expedition was, then her true self would have no choice but to purge her rather than reassimilate such a corrupted facsimile when this misadventure inevitably concluded.

  "Get up."

  Bim didn't move beyond gradually remorphizing her physical degradations. Her too-human body, and the dense sigil made of insulating alloys desecrated with the bones of an innocent, was now impossibly heavy. She was too weak.

  "Get. Up."

  There was no further warning. Soul-blazing pain arched throughout her body, radiating outward from the sigil. She writhed on the floor in silent agony until Treu decided that the lesson had adequately sunk in.

  "Get. Up." He repeated. This time she obeyed. A bundle of clothing was thrown at her. "Put that on."

  It was a loose-fitting dress of coarse textiles, not unlike the first offered by Gianna. Bim rubbed the fabric between her fingers, the unpleasant sensation of it was exactly as she remembered it. She briefly considered defying the request. Any such thoughts were immediately quelled as she recalled how Treu had consumed a fellow human to fuel his cruelty, the foreign bone lodged in her back was a prime indicator of what her expiration in his presence would herald. If she was to die, she would not do it in the presence of a human so despicable as her Tormentor. Bim put on the itchy shift.

  "Follow." Treu commanded, then headed for the room's portal.

  Bim had little choice. When the door opened, she felt nothing. She could not sense the space around her, nor the jittering mortal minds, nor the distant stars or anything else. Between the torc around her neck and the sigil in her back, she was blinded and deafened to the essencing of her weakened soul. She reached for a classification of her condition and the human mind she'd consumed supplied them readily: Crippled, Broken, Trapped, Mutilated, Damned, Maimed, Lame, Helpless… the list continued but Bim directed her faltering attentions elsewhere lest she succumb to despair as her first teacher had.

  The only awareness she had of her surroundings was that which her too-human body granted her. Two guards bedecked with talismans and holding compact firearms were waiting on the other side of the doorway. Both snapped their arms in salute to her tormentor and fell in behind her as Treu led the way.

  "What a babe! Is she really a devil?" The left whispered.

  "Dunno. She's the first cat-three I've seen." The right answered.

  "It," Treu stated without turning his head. "Would have destroyed this entire station on an idle whim and devoured your fleeting souls after flensing your minds. You are not to speak to it. You are forbidden to speak of it beyond your duties, troopers."

  "Y-Yes, sir!"

  "Are these humans not locals?" Bim inquired. She started turning her head to examine one but Treu interrupted.

  "Don't look at them. You are to address no one but me and my team unless you are spoken to first. Do you understand that, Devil?"

  "If I am forbidden to speak unless spoken too, and they are forbidden to initiate discourse with me, how will I-"

  "You won't. Not here. Not if I have any say in the matter."

  "You would prevent me from fulfilling my objective. Such actions violate the covenant we-"

  "I made no such bargain with you, Devil. The details of your precious contract are for my employer to determine."

  She'd been confident the terms of her initial arrangement had a far more inclusive scope, yet for the first time in her brief physical existence she struggled to recall the exact details. She would reflect her mind inwards, only to be assaulted with memories of her brutalization at her Tormentor's hands. Try as she might to direct her wandering mind elsewhere, the soul-crushing weight of the seal embedded in her back would not be denied. She could only instantaneously recall the vagaries of the past, any detailed examination required far more mental energy than it should have, and such recollections were accompanied by a great deal of pain both past and present.

  "Troopers, stand guard outside." Treu ordered.

  The room Bim now found herself in was what she understood to be an impressively large study. Under different circumstances she might have marveled at the walls lined with tomes, books and grimiores. Blinded as she was, she could feel nothing of the weight of knowledge contained within those pages yet she knew that it should be there. That fact, a mundane mystery which normally would have piqued her insatiable curiosity, was entirely lost to the unpleasantness of the recent past.

  Sitting behind a grand desk at the oblong room's head was Treu's employer. In a disphoric sensation of out-of-body vertigo, Bim felt what could only be the ancient deity's wandering mind gazing upon her vessel. She attempted to reach out with her mind's perception to confirm her suspicions, but she saw nothing beyond the narrow band of color captured by her vessel's too-human eyes.

  "We had a covenant." Bim stated. The warded man smiled at her with a slight tilt of his head.

  "My exact words were, 'I do believe we can do business.' Were they not?"

  "Those words were used." She confirmed. "You also expressed there would be mutual benefit. As of yet, I have observed none."

  "How many humans have you killed since manifesting?"

  "Zero." She answered instantly.

  "Allow me to rephrase, since your inter-dimensional escapade commenced, how many human lives have ended as least tangentially due to your actions."

  If she'd been able to freely essence the station and its surroundings, she would have been able to answer with confidence. As events stood presently, what should have been a trifle was instead an unknowable quandary. An unfamiliar sensation washed over her psyche—one her first teacher was intimately aware of—the emotion's name surfaced almost unconsciously. She felt ashamed. Such a human sensation was uniquely discomforting.

  "I cannot be certain." She admitted.

  "Neither can I," The warded man confessed with a congenial shrug. "But what I can confirm is that this station has one hundred and twelve fewer living humans on it than we had last work cycle."

  He allowed the statement to fill the air, expecting her to reach the most logical deduction.

  "You implicate that those deaths were my fault." Bim promptly concluded.

  "Most of them anyway. I seriously doubt that you caused Jenna-Marise's poor judgment of trying to sleep off her allergic reaction without medicating." The warded man laughed as if he'd said something terribly funny. When it subsided, he shared a knowing look with her Tormentor and directed his next question to Treu. "Have we had any more 'accidents' since she was sealed?"

  "None." Treu answered curtly.

  "And therefore anyone of keen intellect might reasonably infer…" He'd directed this back to her. "Don't be shy now, form an answer and share it."

  "That your actions thus far have been in our mutual benefit." She realized. "I could have been forewarned. Brutalizing this vessel-"

  "If we had warned you—if you knew then what you know now, of how we would be forced to bring your rampant powers in line—would you have acquiesced? Would you have willingly endured that process for your own good?"

  She involuntarily recalled her maiming in its entirety. To be presented with that choice, suffering beyond compare or a more peaceable alternative, was a fool's dilemma. Pain was the physical essence of failed self-preservation, it was a human failing. If she could tear that experience from her memory in favor of her old academically-detached understanding of what it meant to feel pain, she knew that she would.

  "Suffering for the sake of suffering is a concept too human for me to presently comprehend. Even in the quest for knowledge I would be… hesitant, to endure such ministrations knowing them as I do now."

  The warded man clapped his hands, his face twisted in delight. "Glad you see things my way! Now that we've got that unpleasantness aside, you've got wants and I've got wants so let's get down to business. You wanted to see the sights, attend a few mixers. Right?"

  "I wish to see more of this dimension and unveil its secrets. My interactions with you have also exposed my own ignorance of human dealings and thought patterns." The humans exchanged a glance at her words, but said nothing. "Most of my… past, communions with your kind came from those who lived in cities on terrestrial bodies. I wish to experience one for myself as well."

  "We'll work our way up to a day trip to the city, shall we? First there's the issue of price…"

  Hours passed in barter. Bim had three things she could offer, her body, mind and services. Of these three, her body held the least value with the limited services she could accomplish in her current lame state being a close second. It was incredibly good fortune for her then that her vast mind held more than enough riches to render the other two obsolete. At the negotiation's close, the price of her 'vacation' and its rough outline were decided. One book detailing everything she knew of mathematics and the associated fields, two tomes of her slain and devastated enemies in the nether realm, and lastly a loaned grimiore containing her studies as they unfolded in this dimension of matter, time and flesh.

  Once they had finished 'ironing out the details,' the warded man offered a hand to seal their pact. Esoteric as the ritual was, Bim shook his hand vigorously while shuddering at the vile sensation of his skin touching hers. Her study of this dimension would begin here while she created her assigned encyclopedia and compiled obituaries of past foes. Only then would she be permitted to depart Titan's Crest under escort to continue her studies abroad in the wider scope of human-controlled space. She was assigned temporary quarters barely large enough for her and her Tormentor to share at the same time, and she set to work on her mathematic treatise with the objective of finishing it as quickly as possible so she could escape his murderous glaring with the utmost haste.

  Five work cycles and six hundred twenty-nine sizable pages later, Treu was finally relieved of his vigil. The woman who's false name was Kaleigh, made a far more agreeable watchdog than her predecessor. Only three hours into her watch, she made a tutting sound that drew Bim from her meditative focus.

  "I can't believe you're still wearing that bag." Kaleigh said.

  "Compared the torture I've suffered at your companions hands, this bag is entirely manageable." Bim noted with regal scorn.

  "We're not all like him. I'm not at least."

  For the first time in days, Bim stopped scratching the pages of her treatise and turned from her work.

  "Why is he the way he is?" She asked, finally giving voice to the thoughts conjoined to her memories. Kaleigh tutted.

  "Lots of reasons. Him and Gram, they've been fighting the good fight longer than I've been alive. I've seen flashes of it in them when we commune; what your kind do to people. I don't agree with how they go about things, but I get it."

  "Yet you work under a human who's drawn the attention of one of my kind far more… present, than any I've known."

  "That's different," Kaleigh said with a shrug. "For what it's worth, I think you might be different too. You're nothing like the other Outsiders I've seen."

  Kaleigh shuddered, her expression growing distant as she spoke. Bim found herself wondering not at her words, but at the woman herself. Was she also haunted by the curse of memory? As Kaleigh blinked and collected herself with a vacant, half-smile, Bim suspected she was.

  "You observed my sigil, you know my name, do you not?" Bim asked.

  The other woman nodded tersely.

  "Then you know how I was born— though that word fails to grasp the gravity of my creation. I did not ascend to the higher planes as many of my 'elders' once had. I was never a god among mortals who transcended the laws of this dimension and attained higher consciousness through the magnum opus. I am… young. There is much I do not know. Few of my kind would risk such a gambit into the unknown as I have. I have not come to reclaim my lost divinity as so many do. I am no dark god come to conquer this plane and bend it beyond mortal ken into something familiar yet impossible. I am the shadow of a more complex shape cast upon this lower plane, little more than an impression of will created as an afterthought by my primogenitor. I have come here to learn what I can, what it means to be mortal. Now tell me Kaleigh, am I different from the others of my kind you have seen and battled and banished? Am I more than a beast deserving of extermination?"

  The human woman stood in absolute silence. As the weight of it grew, Bim assumed their conversation was over and returned to her work. Her focus went uninterrupted for another half cycle when there was a knock at the door. Such an event was unprecedented, so she turned from her transcription once more. A man was handing Kaleigh several long white dresses of exquisite make; the material of each so far beyond that of Bim's current itchy shift, that calling her shift a bag truly had been an apt comparison.

  "For what it's worth, I think you're more than just a shadow. Now, you may be a devil, but you're still a woman. Let's get you into some clothes that sell it."