Tale of the Monster Zane (in his own words)



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Where do you go for the truth on who a man is, what he has done, what he has become?  To the man himself?  Am I supposed to know myself whether I am righteous, evil or insane?  Such distinctions are clearly relative.  One only ever attributes evil, for example, to another, relative to one’s own righteousness. But we are all of us righteous, in truth and in irony.  We are righteous, not for our perfection but because we long for perfection.  And our righteousness should be a cause of gladness for those of us who are infatuated with the idea of our own sin and imperfection, those of us who have put those items on like coats only to find that they weighed our souls down until they could barely crawl, let alone fly.  Some people may believe themselves weak.  Some readily believe they are insane or guilty or bad or useless.  But just as nobody believes he is worthy enough to be counted as truly good (they may say to themselves and others that they are but in their heart of hearts they don’t believe it), nobody believes he is worthy enough to be counted as evil.  That would require another kind of perfection they are unwilling to claim.  Those perceived by others as being evil are, when glimpsed through their own eyes, but prey to their own weaknesses – either that or righteous, but never evil.

But I am no self-despiser. Self-pity is not the only option for the earth-bound.   When I look into the mirror I see no victim.  Nor do I see a persecutor.  I don’t even see an emperor.  I am only Zane.  This measuring of the goodness or the evil of a man is for those who are still young, still listening to nursery tales about monsters rather than seeing with their own eyes what goes on before and inside them each and every day.  For those that have the will to continue seeing the miraculous, even as they age, each day amazes, each day brings extraordinary discoveries.  And everybody is equal to their experience.  So, I am Zane – nothing more, nothing less.  And I need nothing more.  And I could be nothing less.

I was born in Zelenium, the spiretop dream of the elven realm, a slave, but a privileged slave.  Some would say that made me lucky, some would argue the reverse.  As I say, all distinctions are relative.  And life is a terror for those who believe in luck.  It was forty, zero and ninety-seven, almost four thousand years ago.  What a time to be born into.  The Age of Descent had been thickening like treacle for fifteen hundred years.  The elven dream was painted as pristinely as ever, but the stench of what lay beneath had grown so pronounced the whole world could barely breathe for it.  The least gifted of idiots could tell it couldn’t continue much longer.  As the machines of the dwarves discovered darker and darker depths beneath the world’s skin in their attempt to hollow out the planet the elves delved deeper still into their own shadows, hollowing out their own souls in the pursuit of the darkest, most fermented of pleasures.  Their ensnarement in dark magic had inevitably grown from their unwavering belief in the idea that mortals could wield power, one over another.  Year on year their self-made trap tightened its hold on the last vestiges of a nation’s sanity.  Such a brutish destiny for a people that had once been so beautiful.  They had been a race on the cusp of ascension, but somehow, somewhere, fear had crept in.  They had leapt greedily when they should have paused to help those below them.  They had fallen.

But I should be careful of my oversimplifications.  There was much in them that was still worth cherishing, even at that late stage.  There were those amongst them that were not wholly lost, those who would not willingly see their own people descend further.  Thanks to elves of that ilk I spent my childhood in slavery without really understanding what slavery was.

To be a privileged slave in a privileged house is a curious and contradictory thing.  It was what I was born into and, therefore, the only thing I could have expected.  Normality to a child is whatever they first encounter.  So I spent my childhood in slavery and even now consider that I have never in all my life been so free as I was then.

I, my mother and my father were owned by Jansaraz Ilsimrae of the House of Zanteasan.  Jansaraz was an elf rare to those times.  While his brethren plummeted to the depths he climbed, stoically, ploddingly, reaching up and back to loftier times, entranced by the fine magical lore of previous ages.  While his contemporaries puffed themselves up and scrabbled one over the other for the slightest tatters of status within their grasp he wilfully sought to be quiet and go as unnoticed as could be.  He did not lie or conceal his work, but he made light of it, encouraging his peers and the outer reaches of his family to see him as an odd but harmless anomaly within their society: a quiet, studious elf with curiously warm blood.  In a people ready, willing and able to indulge any and all of their whims, from the slightest to the most extreme, what was one eccentric individual?  It was considered good taste, after all, to be openly selfish.  This was honesty.  This was integrity.  If Jansaraz liked to lock himself up with his books pining after archaic magics that were painstakingly slow and ineffective then it was only right that he should indulge such perversion.

Thanks to the so-called eccentricity of Jansaraz I had as little idea, as a child, of my misfortune at being a slave as I had of my fortune at not being beaten daily as a matter of due course.  It was only later I discovered that it was considered in those days an important rite of passage in the raising of a human slave from birth (at somewhere between five and eight years of age, depending on the child’s development) to force him or her to witness the torture of their parents.  Thus was the psychology of the slave kept strong and keen, handed down as a family debt.  Since I brought down the elder races it has been speculated that I must have been treated most terribly by the elves, to have summoned so much passion and determination, to have risen as I did and strike them such a blow.  But it was not the receipt of their cruelty that made me different from the millions that went before me – how could it be? – but the uncommon kindness of one elf and his immediate family, sparing me from the full excesses of their kind and allowing me to believe I was as valid a being as any one of them.

This belief abided in me long enough, grew strong enough, so that when the time came for me to become worldly, to learn how things really were beyond my owner’s walls, it was able to survive that shock.  By the time the love bloomed between myself and Jaeteahza, Jansaraz’s youngest daughter, I was old enough to know that the rest of elfkind saw little more, when they looked at me, than a trained beast.

Jaeteahza had been away for some years.  After protectively schooling her at home until she was twelve Jansaraz had sent her to some distant and sympathetic friends who lived on an obscure island in the southern ocean so she might be kept from the worst ravages of elven society during her most vulnerable years.  She was younger than me.  When she left it was as my adoring childhood friend, my mascot almost, who I had initially missed yet promptly forgotten.  When she returned it was as a sweetly innocent, disarmingly knowing elven goddess.  She was at once a girl and a woman, delighting in her own beauty, the beauty of the world, the beauty of those she held dear.  The darkness, of the world and of her own people, was not unknown to her, but she shone through it.  I cannot say she was untouched by it, for the angels of existence cannot be as they are by cloaking themselves in denial, by being untouched.  No, she knew the world’s torment and she knew her own, but she was open enough to life that its darkness could flow right through her without leaving a trace.  It was when she was faced with the very deepest of shadows that her smile would emerge at its brightest, her knowledge of love would be most strongly affirmed.  Sometimes to look upon her, simply to think on her, was to feel as though a sledgehammer had been taken to my heart.

I too had changed during the years of her absence.  Compared to an elf I was still slow and clumsy, my features heavy and unrefined, but I had been given little awareness of this and tended to walk unselfconsciously, with my head as high as my owner’s. Jaeteahza saw my lack of vanity, my inevitable unconcern for status.  She saw the simplicity of my soul.  I had assisted Jansaraz in his studies and experiments and I had come to be a mirror for him, reflecting the higher virtues he mourned the loss of in the elves.  I helped him with his growing proficiency in the use of light magic, my attention entirely held.  Sometimes I was the subject upon whom he practised; sometimes I was even able to help him see his errors.  I learned things no elf had practised for millennia.

In her absence Jaeteahza had also been studying the higher aspects of ancient elven magical lore, but from the female perspective.  In private we shared what we had learned, combined the two strands of wisdom and knowledge, took flights through inner landscapes created by our joined imaginations, exploring each others’ psyches together, each emboldening the other to travel further and face more than we would have alone.  I swam with her in the pool at the centre of her heart, where an oak tree grows on the bank, a tree house hidden in its boughs.  Swallows dissected the blue sky and an old woman dwelt in the woods, never seen but often heard making a strange and haunting music.  Jaeteahza touched the flower of my childhood that grows on a mountainside inside me overlooking a land of valleys, forests and rivers, where villages, towns, cities and countries of many different designs are laid out and easily visible, and planets of all sizes and colours can be seen in the daytime sky.  We walked together on a mysterious shore, whose location and meaning was unknown to us, and the rolling of the waves whispered something in a language we didn’t understand.  We lost each other in a labyrinthine marketplace where each stall sold identical goods and the traders kept their faces hidden behind striped cloths.  Though we couldn’t see each other we could still hear each other, but the landmarks we identified for the purpose of re-meeting appeared in identical pairs that led us further and further apart, and it was only when we stopped speaking altogether and closed our eyes and wandered aimlessly that we finally felt the touch of each others’ fingertips and we were back together.  We faced many terrors together, knowing fully they were but reflections of what we feared in the material realm, which in turn were but reflections of what we feared in ourselves.

We understood well enough that were the world to find out about our love it would mean an agonising death for me, and perhaps for her too.  Instinctively we kept it from our families.  Though they loved us and would never harm us, it was not conceivable that they would allow the relationship to continue.  Simple common sense could not countenance the idea.  Though in elven society humans might have been coolly deemed useful for the practise of all manner of sexual deviancies – for as commodities we were wholly at the disposal of our owners – the thought of actual love flowing between the two species was beyond taboo; it was an abomination.  To continue, we knew, was pure folly.

But then, what is not folly?  And where love weakens us in some respects it makes us strong in others, where it blinds us and renders us foolish it also galvanises and makes us resourceful.  Thus are we transformed by love in the face of fear and made fit to ascend beyond our beginnings.  Through acts of skill, passion and ingenuity that dazzle me to this day we managed to keep our love affair alive and undiscovered for three years.

As far as the outside world was concerned our discretion was impeccable.  In public Jaeteahza treated me with the most studied, contemptuous condescension that indicated she had a particular attachment to possessing and tormenting me.  This was good psychology for, by the ornate etiquettes of the day, she was claiming me as her own private pet.  It would be disrespectful for other elves to interfere with this twisted pleasure of hers by tormenting me themselves.  Thus did she protect me.  Our families suspected, of course, but the bonds within Jansaraz’s walls were strong enough to cope with most misdemeanours if they were not openly flaunted.  Who could complain, after all, when the head of the house himself was perpetrating acts designed to utterly overthrow the current society?  And indeed, it was Jansaraz’s own indiscretion, not ours, that proved the undoing of the entire family.

It is difficult to account for and I have only my best guesses to guide me, but I was young and didn’t see all of it.  It seemed to me at the time that a madness descended on him, for when his activities finally came under serious scrutiny he did the most foolish of all things: he acted guilty.  Jansaraz knew better than this.  The obvious course of action was to be completely open about everything he had done and only keep his intent to himself.  Throwing a little scornful enquiry at those who were so interested in the private lives of others would have been the standard way to misdirect attention in such a situation.  But instead he tried to cover up what he had been doing while, simultaneously, continuing with his experiments covertly.  Perhaps he had fallen in love with his work just as I had fallen in love with his daughter, and his fear of losing it impaired his judgement.  Perhaps the work itself had unbalanced him.  Many of the magics required self-knowledge at a deep level for the light frequencies to be tuned correctly, and there was nobody experienced who could guide him.  My strongest suspicion is that he was planning something even more radical than I or the rest of us who shared his private thoughts knew of, something far reaching and profound, something that would save the world from the elves and the elves from themselves.

But I don’t know.  To this day I don’t know.

Whatever the mysterious causes of his actions were, the consequences were plain enough for all to see.  There was nothing particularly unlawful in what he was doing, but when an elf of long established wealth and resources showed signs of weakness it was a simple given that rivals would move in to show their own vitality and put the wretch out of his misery.  The vultures began to circle and Zelenium society watched with interest to see who would claim the lion’s share of Jansaraz’s family riches once he discovered the good grace to be crushed.

For a time it looked as though he might survive to continue his work by jettisoning lands and properties voluntarily, diminishing his wealth and standing but keeping his family intact.  It was a manner of resignation the elves found particularly distasteful, but it would take a scandal on a significant scale to grant his enemies enough free rein to challenge him with ‘eloem symarene’, a state of such disgrace that the entirety of ones possessions, and indeed the dependent members of ones family, could be claimed as trophies by anyone who could show they were more fit to have them.  It was a challenge rarely employed for it could backfire severely, but on those occasions it was executed it was relished with utmost glee by the jaded palettes of elven society.  When symarene challenges were successful the challenger would be granted possession of whatever of the loser’s belongings they desired.  What was left became available on a first come first served basis to any and all members of whichever caste the disgraced had previously belonged to.  The protocols regulating the procedure were elaborate and time consuming – not to ensure that justice was served and dignity maintained but rather that the sport could be prolonged and properly savoured.  On the final day of the dispersion of property the disgraced was allowed to reclaim a sword of their choice and was put out onto the street.  Many classics of elven literature had dealt in the subject of the betrayed victim of symarene who had fought his way back from disgrace to reclaim what was his and inflict a just fate on his challenger.  Such a romantic and heroic feat had yet to be witnessed in reality.

Two years passed by and things seemed to have quieted down.  We were all now living in a much humbler dwelling, but Jansaraz had managed to keep his foot on the lowest rung of his caste .  He had lost the pretence of many friendships and avoided fostering any new ones so that he might pursue his work without having to explain himself to others.  He had as little to do with elf society as possible, just about managing to remain on speaking terms with the neighbours.  After a year of harmonious work, cocooned in a peace that was welcome, though it felt artificial, a held breath in which we all dreamed of a time and place where we could openly be ourselves, Jansaraz was suddenly and unexpectedly visited by one of our neighbours who was, disturbingly, accompanied by a representative of the Kingstate’s Inspectorate.  There could be no happy reason for this.

The neighbour, an elf called Alraezol, had shown himself to be a helpful if unimaginative individual when we had arrived in the area.  This was a set of qualities Jansaraz had been glad to be met by at a time when friends were in short supply while the market for curiosity in his affairs was bloated.  The official was called Molinzast.  He was a grey-looking individual, stamped with the look of the bureaucrat, one of those rare elves that had allowed himself to become flabby.  As a pair they were distinctly underwhelming, yet any servant of the Kingstate could prove to be a harbinger of catastrophe and my guts had churned with anxiety accordingly.

Alraezol declared he had a matter of utmost importance to discuss and that it was important that the entire household was present.  Jaeteahza and I girded ourselves magically, sensing each others unease from different parts of the building.  In the reception chamber where Alraezol and Molinzast were waiting to impart their business I kept to the back of the gathering, close to the door, ready to flee at the first sign that our secret was out.

We had long prepared for such an occasion and maintained two well-provisioned boats that could simultaneously hide us and embody the initial stage of an escape at a moment’s need.  The location of one was known only to Jaeteahza, the location of the other to me. In this way we had even protected ourselves from each other in the event of only one of us being caught.  We had the means with which to disguise ourselves, magical and mundane.  We knew psycho-magi effects that would facilitate our slipping by the awareness of the most ardent of pursuers.  We had contingency plans to cover the occasion of our separation, places we could meet, ways in which we could leave messages for each other.  And we had devised all manner of measures we might take, individually or together, as a response to being taken captive.

Our precautions were far from melodramatic.  Elves are arrogant, but with good reason.  Even at the height (or should that be the nadir?) of their decadence, they remained an atrociously dangerous people, even on an individual basis, who feared little in the world save each other.  This internal caution kept the elf nation honed, even when there was nothing else to threaten them.  So there could be no room for complacency on our part.  Avoiding apprehension at all costs could be the only primary goal.  If this failed there should be no underestimating those forces that had been sent to detain us.  We would employ the most decisive of actions within our means to clear our way to freedom and we would do so without hesitation.  Whether it was an army, an elite squad or a single champion, the assumption would be that we must use full force, and at the soonest possible moment.

Despite all our preparation, when I saw that Alraezol was only accompanied by one out of condition bureaucrat, and that they were paying neither myself or Jaeteahza the slightest attention, I did relax by a degree, guessing Jansaraz had incurred some legal process through another act of his eccentricity.  My feeling was that some serious revelation was at hand that would have far-reaching and probably dire consequences for the family, but not one that would require immediate fight or flight.  I had feared complacency so much, guarded against it so diligently, that I had inevitably written its invitation in my own hand.

Molinzast informed the gathering that Alraezol, acting as a representative of Zymogen of the House of Zardia (Zymogen had led the inspection against Jansaraz from the beginning and evidently still felt compelled to finish what he had started), was officially challenging Jansaraz with eloem symarene.  Should Jansaraz fail the challenge his properties, his wife and all his daughters would be claimed.

An awful stillness drowned the room and I felt Jaeteahza’s mind touching mine, prompting me to brace myself for action.  Despite the ways in which I had disciplined myself through the practise of elven light magic I was no elf and fear gaped inside me like a gorge.  When Jansaraz finally managed to ask in a wisp of a voice what the grounds of the challenge were Alraezol stepped forward and pointed at Jaeteahza, then at me.

My fear reached a crescendo, rising and engulfing me.  It was everything, my entire existence, and yet, at the same time, it was nothing for I leapt into the air without pause, propelled by the automatic imperatives I had magically branded into my own third level awareness, and I hung there, incandescent, a heated wire.  All of my learning turned within my inner eye, a tremendous luminescent organism of clockwork, each interconnecting cog a magical understanding, each movement of the mechanism triggering sequences and consequences, unravelling fate.  I cast a beam of radiance at the neighbour and the bureaucrat that was drawn directly from the seventh level.  In my estimation this was overkill – no unprepared, dark-hearted creature would be able to function in the presence of those frequencies, indeed were they dark-hearted enough they would wither and die.  But what would that matter?  Symarene had been declared.  The elf nation had done with us, the entire family.  It was time to look to our very survival.
Alraezol, who had spied on us for pay, lit up, burning from the inside out with white and green flames that emerged from his skin like feathers.  He couldn’t scream for his vocal chords had been seared away.  He stared and gaped and the conflagration illuminated his mouth and eye sockets.  Then his outer form evaporated with a hiss.  The colours of his spirit spiralled amidst a shower of sparks and were gone.  Molinzast observed this with an arched brow but did not himself deign to burn.  Instead an indigo aura had become visible around him, beyond which could be glimpsed the ghost of a jewel-bedizened cave.  It seemed utterly impossible, but he was protected.

The room suddenly filled with a dark, cold blue green night water that only Jansaraz, Jaeteahza and I could see.  I watched as my owner and my lover, each submerged, gasped and crumpled to the floor.  The energies they had been silently gathering over the last few seconds, as a backup should my attack fail, worked against them, taking their consciousness with it as it was snuffed out by the biting cold.  As the water reached my feet I cast my inner eye over the offensive and defensive options I had fitted together so intricately, quickly following causes and effects to the proper countermeasure, and there in the shining, moving, multidimensional schematic I had built inside me, for the protection of all I held dear, I arrived at the proper place only to find a gap.  And there was Molinzast’s dark emerald and sapphire water bubbling up through it.  The cold passed through and beyond me as though my very purpose was to conduct it and I fell into freezing darkness, more owned than I had ever been.



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What to say of the days that followed immediately from that meeting?  Only as little as possible.  All that Jansaraz had owned or cared for now came into the possession of Zymogen: his house, his wife, his daughters, my Jaeteahza.  We were all his playthings, save for Jansaraz himself who, in time-honoured fashion, would be put out onto the street, a single sword his only possession.  But, before this could happen it was decided in due process that, because of our ‘weakness for archaic sorceries that maligned the elf nation’ Jansaraz, Jaeteahza and myself should have our eyes put out and our tongues removed.  It was for the public good and was carried out with all urgency.  In addition to this, Molinzast was ordered to implement whatever precautions he deemed necessary to ensure our magical abilities were irretrievably crippled.  By the end of that process we were barely alive and various apothecaries and healers were brought from the torture gardens of the king state itself, appointed the charge of rendering us healthy enough to endure our ordeal in its fullness.

On the closing day of the proceedings, after all of Jansaraz’s belongings had been accounted for and claimed, Zymogen celebrated by way of providing a spectacle for the enjoyment of Zelenium.  On a sharp spring day when the blossoms of the snowlace were caught on the beams of the morning sun Jaeteahza was manacled to a post in front of the Zardian Pavilion in Azaere Park so that she might hear me tortured to death while the crowd offered ingenious suggestions as to what might make me most vocal.  As my pain and anguish was thrown into sharp relief by the nearness of my love and the proximity of my death, along with the knowledge that one would separate me from the other, a tiny, lost fraction of my being simultaneously wandered through the sunlit rooms of a large, unknown, empty house by the sea.  Even as my body twisted in spasms and thrashed against its bonds, even as my incoherent howls incited moments of hushed appreciation from the crowd, a speck of my awareness walked untouched from room to room, knowing nothing of identity, knowing nothing of time or place, knowing only daylight and stillness and a deep, resonating peace that was all but complete, disturbed only slightly by an elusive curiosity, a longing for something it could not identify.

It was true that, because of the skilful measures that Molinzast had employed to ensure our magical abilities had been completely shredded, neither I nor Jaeteahza could meet any more in our shared inner landscape.  And yet, just as my defences against Molinzast had been cursed by a gap in my understanding that had allowed his spite and malice to pour through, so too was Molinzast’s appreciation of our craft deficient.  He believed our light was no match for the density of his power.  He believed our warmth was simple weakness in comparison to the conviction of his coldness.  What he did not know, and could not have understood, was that there was a single grain of my soul that was also a grain of Jaeteahza’s .

It was a strange thing, a thing we had not expected to find, had not looked for, had not even dreamed of.  It was not a thing we had created ourselves, consciously, deliberately or accidentally.  It was not that we had intended this shared atom of being: our souls were our souls; they could only be as they had ever been.  It was not that we had taken a grain each and merged them together; it was not a promise or a bond of love.  It was only something we had discovered in our long days of soul searching together – a tiny, barely perceptible miracle in an existence that was nothing but miracle, a thing that had always been there, since the dawn of dawns.  The mystery of it had occupied us constantly since we had encountered it, and we had made many conjectures on its meaning, but there had been no one to enlighten us.

Now, as the life bled from my body on an oaken x-frame in the sunlight, the last vestige of my soul to remain in contact with the material world wandered through the anonymous rooms of the sunlit house, unconcerned, and it finally understood where it was.  Molinzast had done an excellent job of ensuring that Jaeteahza and I would not be able to achieve any communion on the inner planes.  We would not be able to connect with each other in the worlds we had discovered together, and even if we did, we would not be able to communicate.  I touched the walls of the sunlit house by the sea and suddenly knew that the house itself was Jaeteahza, the fragment of her that was also me.  And I knew that from where she hung on her post, sobbing for my suffering and for the loss of me, there was a distant fraction of her that stood on a beach, motionless, at peace, looking out across the sea, feeling an invisible presence move within her, walking from room to room, touching her walls.



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My body was taken to the gardens at the back of the pavilion, thrown onto a compost heap and left to rot.  Jansaraz was given his sword and wandered through the park, blind, mute and all but broken, the crowds bowing to him as he passed and calling out to him, telling him that they were bowing.  He was found dead on a street the next morning, a knife wound passing through his temples, his sword gone.  Jaeteahza was taken by Zymogen, back to his house, to be kept as a trinket, to be enjoyed, toyed with, to be used for bitter pleasures, to be a cup of suffering that he might sip from at his leisure.

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So why is it that we come here?  Why is it we come into the material realm, the illusion of separation, if the first thing we wish to do upon hearing of our eternal, divine nature is leave at the soonest opportunity?  So many enlightenment seekers: running around, seeking to escape the wheel of return, desperate to ascend themselves off the planet – not for the glory of awakening in itself but as a base means of escape!  Oh, beautiful children of light!

It is a reflex, that is all.  The closer one comes to escape the more clearly one sees there is no prison but the one we would take with us anyway.  The closer one comes to heaven the more easily one realises they were there all along – they always had been.  For there is no other place, except in dreams and fictions.  The language of life, with its happenings and accidents, its pains and torments, is a language we invent ourselves for the soul purpose of telling ourselves stories.

In the tale I had written to myself my body waited patiently behind the Zardian Pavilion for the final part of my soul to leave so it might decompose in peace.  But I was happy in my house by the sea, and had no intention of leaving it.  Days and nights passed by, and it was not until the sky and the sea outside blackened, and great fissures opened up, gulping the sands and the ocean down, and the entire world outside Jaeteahza’s windows broke up and fell away into space and we were cast adrift in the cosmos, that I understood I must return to save her.  It was not hate that brought me back to life, but love.  Dragging a reluctant spirit back into this world I reclaimed my shattered body and began to breathe once more.  Somehow or other I would return to Jaeteahza and free her, though, for the time being, there was nothing I could do beyond lying in the filth and sighing weakly at a thousand agonies.