-11-

The auburn woman is waiting at the bus stop, hands coursing through her warm hair and half-there divining the pools of water. The artificial rain pass through filters and ceiling grates. It becomes en-massed waterfalls of water and crashes with a constant stream on the glass station dome and the crude steel that supports it. The music is of tapping and the woman regards the humidity, the sound of translucent percussion as her own small pocket of ease.

A broad form passes by the street-lights. Shadow at his back, he makes his presence known to the woman with a soft knock on the glass. Then four feet slosh about. Giggles and turnarounds of attention, to push away potential murderers or thieves. They make their way to even darker alleyways, between whorehouses and warehouses, through old factories that have turned to hollow foundations an empty forums.

A Delver carries along with them, more things than their peculiar minds. In the case of this woman, her brown overcoat is trying to cover underlying fashion of extreme nature that pokes through and assaults the eye. Her slim figure is displayed at the end of her nape, her naked wrists. The knees are covered by a fabric of underwater iron, that sways along the texture of gleaming and the patterns on her are of wavy lines crossed with lines. Such details draw much attention, even to her unjeweled face as an oddity of quality, from the simple people who are there to do not so simple things.

To feed their vices, Ulmites of all social statuses go to such events. Locals are able to hide themselves with fashion and outsiders are usually easy pickings, were it not for the short but broad, straw-featured man on her side.

Underneath both of their outer layers of attire, is a plex of leather and metal, displays of control, chains, straps and heavy boots, revealing uneven shapes with their movement.

The line of people is long. Overhead bridges push the trickle of water further away and the air is otherwise dry. When it is the turn of the two to go into the beating nightclub, the bouncer eyes them up and down, then he turns to his earpiece and after a few seconds, lets them pass.

With their overcoats given to the hosts, they both turn to where the sound is loudest. Flaming wooden beams and smooth stairways, utterdark that chokes the outlines of sight. The nightclub expands many rooms and floors. Balconies and rows stacked with different music on each level, the spectacle flows around a massive hole in the center and currents of underground wind carry along the many scents of human sweat, drugs and sex. Deafening and loud, they feel their senses lured, moulded slowly to a common shape.

Lacata stops. She turns and grabs with one hand the back of Otto's hair and then she lunges in, pushing the man against a wall.

As the two bodies press against eachother, skin to skin, her mind flows to the pounding beyond, merging with the man amidst the debauchery. And swift as thus, unstuck again, one follows another to get lost between the dancing crowds.

-

On the second floor of the nightclub called Burn, Varhas is shifting along the many shadowy forms. Nostrils white and crowned with evaporating crystals of a serpentine stimulant that go deeper into the tunnels of his lungs.

With two thin lines of Pythium, nobody goes further than the breaking point. The user rests next to a cornerstone, not quite there at the center of the universe. Close but not quite, to the omphalos of old and distant mother Earth, the bellybutton of a faraway planet, the convergence of gravity, magnetospheres, winds and temperatures and all looming forces of reality. Varhas knows this, but he is eager to breathe the fumes. To become one, with what he feels within him, is an ancient relative, millennia in the past, where she would chew rosebay and laurels.

He stumbles against someone. The girl turns to fight, but the man's face is at that borderline, standing at the center again, so eager to grasp violence. Treated like royalty, hands rotate him around and he turns to the crowds, one and whole to make. Make and create in the factory within his skull that so he curses.

Pounding at a shape, he wills it so to spew bitterness, to speak of ill omens. Music and sweat, it all touches the largest organ. Skin to skin, to hot air and prickled on the other side by seizing neurons. Curses, curses he scours as the Pythium evaporations dissolve into his lungs, swirling back and forth the membrane that separates air from blood, coiling in the wet pockets. Varhas sees the flat, two-dimensional pillars of fire, flickering in and out from the floodlights on the dance floor and he pulls his own centimeter-long hair with his closed fists. Out and in, closed and open fist at another's habit. Opening the left, then tightening a fist on the right. Wide of eye, lost in the smoke, he is close to the center of the universe, but he willingly dances away from that intoxicating center.

At this imaginary pull away from a perfect state of mind, he manifests a string of thought.

"Oh! Oh Delvers and your rituals, cursed to the likeness of you, you risk taker and void made human. Unfeeling lodestone and cradle of filth, holding all our moments within you. Bless me, bless me. Bless me."

-

Momentary, Varhas enters the space of Delvers. The inverse dream where their being becomes as warriors, as sorcerers, as demons and even writhing masses of flesh, divine lights, impossible geometry, cavalry of the tears.

The wires open. Behind the walls of the nightclub, amidst the floodlights and the speakers, the light itself opens and behind the binding seals of stone-made-thought, the great nightclub is a prowling ground of Delvers, coming here to do, things not so normal.

When the floor number passes him by, it appears to him as the number 998, red on black background, a mismatch in the microcosm of soup-conciousness. Herein are Delvers behind fantastical gates. Somewhere within the nightclub, following ideas, cultures and removed Pantokrators, worshipping in ways malign. The machine, in its well developed understanding, in a well learned and outright recorded experience, it maps precisely these mindsets as what constitutes as evil. Standing at the concept, the people on floor 998 remain in utter expungement of life, beyond nihil and maxim, flattening at their outright hate.

Mere step away deeper that direction, there happens you, you risk of all, breaking over to the exact opposite of the spectrum. So all virtual and intelligent the Machine maps. Pushed so far one way that goes to the other extreme.

So Varhas knows, witnessing forbidden blood magic, standing seconds in an Immaterial, inverse dream within his skull, witnessing the torrents of blood, cannibals, orgies, drinkers of satiety and Barons of Ulm, one door at a time opening as constant denial rings into his ears.

He opens his eyes to the second floor of Burn. The expected unlight, overwhelms moving legs and granite tiles. Breaking at the artificial beams and forcing him back into the inverse dream, wherein number 998 speaks of labyrinths of blood and explains all the mutations of the womb, asking only in return, that he might add another drop to this massive vortex that is humanity. Asking only, that Varhas may go, to the person he admires, the person he sees the boundless potential of a championing flesh and tells him a terrible secret.

-

The hands of a king pull the madman away and the divining powers within him stir closer and closer to unevenness.

Delver to Delver, Anax notices Varhas is about to vomit and he pushes the wrongly enlightened friend to an empty stall where he purges his stomach out in privacy. The sloshing happens all in one go. Anax understands it as is expected with meagre Pythium dosages. Out and in a swirl, Varhas pleads that Anax should be the one to tell him in his stead.

Anax refuses. More a reflex than a rational thought, he denies to do the revelation himself. Years of pharmacotherapy, managing drug usage, recuperation and mindsets, all studies or experiences, they point to never letting the sober party take on the weight of the diviner. A robber of joy, a middleman between words that are to be spoken. No matter how hard it is for a misaligned man to make things right, they have to bear that weight themselves.

Anax tells Varhas, that he is the one to bear this burden.

Divination is an art-form. Sometimes, simply entertainment. Watching all questions answer themselves by displaying the moment they complete their manifestation.

This too is taught and known to both.

Out of the many substances that make a person dream, the users of Pythium have to recite this mantra many times, because it is the only way, to their destination. Longest way around to the center of the universe.

-

Varhas fails for a while to reach that center. Using his Delver powers, by lapsing again to the inverse dream, by consuming the rest of his Pythium powder, he converses with random people and asks for forgiveness of things that never mattered. After a while he finally musters up the courage. To him, it is not bravery, but duty. Alike he believes his self, to nameless hero who had found perfect peace at the surface of a salt-covered planet, but still went underground, back to the longest way out and into death.

He washes the symbols away. Not caring if the stairs lead up or down. Anyway is a pathway to Jorj and soon enough he sees the broad man. A shape above the rest, spending a moment with some other half.

Voliphoe greets. Her eyes fasten with worry, a wide eyed look that she conceals, when she leaves to get new drinks.

"I exist. I exist. I have to reach my alignment." Speaks the Delver. His hands cusp the Contestant's ears. He resists the words. "I know you do Varhas". The lights blacken and the music leaves only pockets of sound. "I will exist and I have existed within the time you called wretched. When you mined for life." Jorj looks at the two eyes. The lights flash them in an out of existence. The Claimant's eyes are as mirrors that reflect nothing back. "First the jagged piece hanging from a nail. Then the flat pocket mirror when they pulled your teeth out and then..." Jorj grabs the delver from the neck, hands trembling, choking him in to hush, in any intimidating and physical way to stop the breath from making these words. "...and every time you spun a wheel of known faces, to learn that they too had their dreams broken before their bodies..." Jorj pushes Varhas. The Claimant stumbles backwards without falling. Glass breaks underfoot. Shards and ice slides away leaving traces of gleaming white in the complete shadows. Swollen fingertips grab the Contestant. Fingernails dig deeper and with whatever is left, three words are spoken.

"You are dying".

Alarmed, shadows of security swarm the small space between the two. Nobody pays attention. Matter of fact, no attention can be drawn between the Delver, or the contestant who is walking away fast. The brutish masses of traceless security conceal the happening and no sound escapes from the tiny and violent exchange.

Nothing has happened, the nightclub remains at the same beat, except for a scantly dressed woman who is searching for someone with two drinks in her hands. Her eyes fall on the wet shards of glass where once she stood with her partner.

All courtesy of higher powers, mysterious ways in the nightlife of Ulm that keep all moving in the brutal efficiency of an ecumenopolis.