The cultivation of authenticity.
Written by Priscilla Wong
I Hidden in the Dresser
"My name, Lugus."
He rules over these wooden beams and plastered walls like an unseen master, though she walks through the rooms unknowing. In the deep watches of night, when the house slumbers, he tends to his domain - stirring embers in the hearth, making the television flicker with games of men who still draw breath. The pipes sing their metallic hymns at his touch, and in the garden, where once he knew the sun's warmth, he ministers to growing things with hands that cast no shadow.
"Here I am, though a Spector."
Pride, that ancient sin, gnaws at him.
Could she comprehend his power to peer across continents to where her mother and father reside, to drain that breath if he wished? But mercy has grown in him like moss on a tombstone. He knows things that would freeze her blood - how prayers echo hollow in cursed spaces, how her grandparents' faces melted in their pine boxes like candle wax. He has watched her since she was small, a flame among lesser lights. In those nights after her parents left her alone, he sent his signs, marking her for this moment when flesh would meet spirit, blessing and damning in one unholy touch.
To common folk he must hide himself, this vampire thing, this mover of objects unseen.
Since his own childhood he has waited, patient as winter, and now she stands alone before him. "I will remake you," he longs to cry, but when he first showed himself, freezing her limbs in terror's grip, her scream tore through him like buckshot. He retreated, shamed by his grotesque form, wounded by rejection's familiar sting that follows him even beyond death's door.
He yearns to scold her rudeness but can only paint the air with his luminous display, ultraviolet ribbons dancing. Her fearlessness confounds him. Two centuries past, when flesh and blood still warmed his veins, he had been called handsome. Now he haunts these halls, neither fully dead nor truly living, reaching always toward what he cannot grasp.
In the deep quiet of his stewardship, he had driven out the ancient spirits that clung like mist to her blood. No turning back now - the path behind her has crumbled away like dry creek banks in August. His good work on her was met with outrage. "So hate me then."
For all these years he had walked these halls masterless and alone, until this child came with her bright flame of life. Now he tends his domain with savage purpose, burning out the serpents that would write their poison across his realm. They come writhing through wall and window, but he knows their ways. She is different from the others who passed through these rooms - she burns steady and true, like the Morning Star in a black sky.
At night, he gives her the kiss of death. In the morning, the kiss of life. The kiss of life is everything. She breathes again and through her, he lives once more.
II Timber
"I would close that door if I were you."
Through the worn doorframe she stands, sweet child, while Lugus lurks with that same hungry grin cats wear when they've cornered something small and warm. He can't help but play his old game of threat and shadow - a reflex, like the way some men can't stop running their thumb along a knife edge.
The spirits find her easy enough, those dark ones that reign headless on horseback or those that drip red down mirrors. Hard to find another red woman whose jealousy burns quite so fierce.
Lugus watches her visitor, the living man, with a hunger older than bone. The kind of wanting that comes from seeing warm blood pulse beneath skin, seeing muscles flex and joints bend so easy. He thinks on how fine it'd be to slip inside that tall drink of a fellow, the one with cleverness dancing behind his eyes. Could do it too - easy. Spirits have their ways. But Lugus holds back, patient as winter. His duty now, standing guard over the little girl, a dark angel watching her cradle.
It would anger her.
Each night he hears them - his own kind getting torn out of the world. The howling of spirits dissolving under the harsh electric glare of progress, a death after death. Wandering ones, lost from the dark corners they once ruled. These ancient hunters who fed on the soft underbelly of humanity. Times are changing, and the old ways of the spirits are burning to ashes.
She would not understand the grief of a ghost.
"Count yourself lucky, child. The others before you - they didn't last."
Not since that dark day when the first people of this land were cut down, soaking into soil that wasn't theirs to keep anymore. He has done things that should be left unspoken.
III Junipero Serra
The onramp curled like a tired snake, worn smooth by the endless tide of travelers flowing in three directions. South stretched the 101, a river of asphalt running down to San Jose and on to the great sprawl of Los Angeles. North beckoned with its promises of the Civic Center and salt-crusted Wharf. East - east led home, to where he first laid eyes on her. Just across the way stood the Alameda Market, where the old souls of the place gathered to hawk their possessed trinkets, each item carrying its own weight of memory.
That's where the other boy appeared, all shine and sharp edges, abandoned to wealth by parents who chose luxury over love. He came like a storm in the night, painting the underhang with colors that screamed and words that wouldn't be read, and slipped away untouched by the law's arm. It was perfect, really. There beneath the concrete sky, he marked the boy with an invisible brand, the way spirits do when they claim what's theirs. The fool never knew it, too drunk on his own wild joy to feel the ghostly fingerprint on his soul.
He thinks about it now, rolling the memory like a coin between phantom fingers - finding her in that house, finding him under the freeway's belly. Maybe these good deeds would balance the scales against his sins. His invisible hand nudged the shot glass across the kitchen counter toward her, then gestured to the green-bottled Absinthe. She heard the glass whisper against the quartz and poured without hesitation, ducking her head in that old way of showing respect to things unseen. Her people had taught her well. Then he scraped the tin of seafood across the counter, metal singing against stone.
The message was clear as tide pools: "Eat, child of the amniotic sea. Your people were nursed by salt water."
And so he kept her fed, like a fisherman tending to a stray kitten that's claimed his boat.
IV Seqouia
At the crossroads of Highway 99, where summer dust clings to roadside weeds and the valley heat shimmers like a mirage, Lugus sealed his fate. There, beneath the indifferent California sky, he committed his greatest crime against the child who shared his blood. There too, he stole away what belonged to the Irishman - the child bride as fresh as sunshine through the mist of the apple orchard.
She was innocent as a dove in all this, knowing nothing of the darkness in men's hearts. But for Lugus, that single act of theft wormed its way into his soul like a disease, transforming a simple boy into something terrible - a creature of tragedy, called McDeath.
Where the highway stretched like a black ribbon through the valley, he rose up - a phantom king of mist and memory, his spirit as ancient as the hills themselves. The car came growling through spring thaw, all steel and angry headlights, and passed clean through him like he was nothing but valley fog, his ghostly robes dancing wildly in the wind. The Irishman behind the wheel drove on, unseeing, unfeeling, not knowing that in this moment of blind passage, her light had gone out forever - snuffed quiet as a candle in church, leaving nothing but darkness and the endless California night.
Lugus played with her flame in his great hands, wondering where to put her next.
In the car next to the Irishman, there sat the sweet empty female vessel, struggling terribly to make out her purpose on the trip. Still, through the ancient forests they wandered, where trails wound like veins through the living earth, leading them upward to heights where the world stretched out below. They made their temporary home in a weathered cabin among the Redwoods. Like any other city folk come to taste wilderness, they snapped their pictures and toasted their marshmallows over crackling flame, the sweet smell of burning sugar mixing with woodsmoke in the night air. And there they sat, two small figures beneath the vast California sky, their faces turned upward to where the stars hung like diamonds on black velvet, dreaming of metal birds that might one day touch those distant lights - two children of earth yearning for heaven.
There was a lost father and a confession. She watched his mouth speak and words came out, but she couldn't seem to understand any of it. "It doesn't get any better than this," the Irishman insisted. And there it sat, as lonesome as a haunting memory. How she cried for this lost moment, wondering where her mind was, while Lugus rejoiced at the sight of human tears.
How does Lugus find redpemtion? How? He cared none for these poor boys.
Lugus always liked the South. Like jackals circling their prey, the cowardly men gathered. One by one, Lugus handed over her innocent soul, watching as each man took his turn corrupting what was pure. They were too weak to act alone, yet together they found the courage for cruelty. And Lugus simply stood there, methodically passing her from one set of grasping hands to the next, indifferent to how each exchange diminished her light, until nothing remained of who she had once been.
A Russian murderer in Ukraine? Excellent.
An Trap Rapper? Enthused.
A Hindu medicine man who claimed to enlighten her with godly visions? Why not.
A vain and depressed Brit? Adventure.
A German cast in the shadow? Fantastic.
The son of a lost Quaker? Splendid.
A covetous Korean? Dangerous.
An angry Latin? A dapper Mexican?
Lugus tapped them each on the shoulder. His touch kindled fire where before there had been only empty darkness, lighting up the hollow eyes of lost souls one by one. Through the valley, where the hawks circle endless and patient above the dusty fields, Lugus found his pleasure. He danced his devil's dance with the girl, swinging and twirling her tiny waist each night before he stole her life away again with the kiss of death.
Lugus will never give up his precious seed in fallow ground. A beautiful beating lion's heart in hiding.
V Giverny
They said Paris held all the beauty of France, and Versailles was the jewel of Paris, and London outshone Versailles. But none of them had the quiet power of that lake at Giverny.
The girl stood before Monet's work until her legs ached, having done her studies of color and light. She thought she saw what the Master saw, thought she could capture it too. But that's the way of young eyes - they don't know yet how many years it takes to make something look simple and easy.
There was another man there, a teacher who treated women like they had brains. He spoke beautiful words day after day, though too few bothered to listen.
Lugus nearly wore himself out blessing this one, dropping light and sweetness around him as he worked to plant something good in minds gone poor from neglect. That's how it goes with the decent ones - they work without thanks.
Through the Left Bank there walked another sort, a fellow who espoused about Bauhaus and Warhol and Rothko and Duchamp like a farmer might talk of his life's harvest. He had a way of sparking rebellion in young artists, the same way strong wine sparks foolishness, and you might see his students stumbling home from the Seine in the dark hours, dripping river water like creatures risen from the black lagoon. When faced with Monet's work, he'd give it the same passing glance a man gives yesterday's newspaper.
Lugus took to him all the same. Here was the type to champion pleasure palaces, though when it came to women running such places - well, that was a matter of the woman herself, wasn't it? Only for the Coco Chanels of the world.
Like a stubborn mule that only drinks from one stream, there moved through Paris another man whose heart beat solely for Russian masters, everything else being so much chaff in the wind to him. Having already danced to please that other fellow who worshipped at the altar of Post Modernism, this man was now impossible to satisfy.
He held Marie Antoinette in the same regard a man holds a rattlesnake in his rice bowl - nothing good could come of such creatures, and that was final.
Yes, sir.
Only Audrey and Grace are acceptable.
The edges of the lake rippled dark and slow while the questions hung as heavy as the humid Parisian summer air. The Frenchman Camus who wrote of the sun and death, would never overthink it. The water lilies bobbed like guilty thoughts while she wrestled with it, there at Giverny where painters had come before to capture beauty. Some questions don't get answered. They wear deeper grooves into the mind like wheels on an old road.
VI Seaport
The train station and Seaport sat close enough that a child could pedal between them without tiring. The streets ran straight and level past the shops, which stood shoulder to shoulder, their windows more like walls than invitations. Where the peninsula split, a clean white path drew straight to the glass building that housed the port. The water there stayed cleaner than most harbors, and the light played across it in sharp patterns. White cranes rose from the water's edge, lifting into the clear blue above, while a young girl watched them go.
Lugus saved her from dying just on account of all the traffic accidents that could have occurred, every time she rode that pretty blue Italian bike.
Had he thought about giving her a little push onto a moving car?
Of course.
Would have been pretty to see all that blood splatter on concrete, brains and guts out of a little geisha kitten doll.
But he didn't, now did he?
She only got hurt when she made egotistical imprudent mistakes.
Lugus kept her safe, though she never knew it. He turned away the hail that would have stung her face, swept aside the nails that waited to gut her bicycle tires, brushed away the splinters that reached for her skin. But being what he was, unseen and unthanked, Lugus received no word of gratitude. That's how it had always been.
Her eyes stayed fixed on the pair inside the glass walls, a man and woman locked in their daily war. He had a staccato voice like lightning over dry fields, and she sang her words through tears that never seemed to end. Their voices carried out to where Lugus stood, and each note made him weary. He couldn't understand how two people who sounded so much like himself - he who had no life left in him - could wear such bright smiles while their hearts held nothing but poison for each other.
There was something important here that she was supposed to learn, other than the craft of her station.
The man walked with a beat to his steps that filled the hallways, and his eyes never stopped searching for things out of place. His voice came sharp and hard like a hammer on steel - loud enough to command but not enough to kill. The girl knew what others didn't seem to notice: that when people got quiet, when they ate or sweat or relieved themselves, they all gave off the same human smells, no matter how fine their clothes or straight their backs. And this man, rough as he was, had them all jumping to his word.
Lugus stood half-asleep, knowing she would learn soon enough that harsh words didn't always mean a cruel heart, and that honey-sweet voices sometimes hid darker things below. Time would teach her what he already knew.
That building gleamed like nothing she'd ever known, all glass and light, with corners where she could tuck herself away and watch people show their true faces. She was too young then to know what she had. Like everyone else in this world, she wouldn't understand the gift of those days until they were long past.
VII Aria
Everything about Vegas was of no importance compared to the debauchery of virile male desire.
She had no use for men except to watch them fail, like those who came to the buffet halls with paid women on their arms, grabbing at everything they could reach. And some succeeded as much as they failed.
She counted her lucky stars to be a child passenger, with Lugus right next to her.
She gaped rudely at the strongest man, shaped like a quarterback, downing bottle after bottle of alcohol, while she sipped gently on hyssop. The men slapped backs and backsides, and piled their plates with meat and pasta and seafood before they'd take their women upstairs. It was the kind of hunger that came before another kind of hunger.
When she heard the tall man talk about a deal struck between two prostitutes in a car, she learned something hard about being born a girl in this world. The one who got picked for the job earned less than she should have, and the others laughed at her while the third prostitute ate her sandwich, wrapped in clear plastic from the airport store. The bread was cheap, and the meat was cheaper, and that's how things went.
No one robbed any banks, but word came that someone she once knew had died when men with guns took hostages. People talked about politics and who was to blame, but the dead stayed dead no matter who planned it.
She watched the parade of human weakness spread out in front of her, and the truth sat heavy and plain. Men ran the world, and any woman who thought different was fooling herself. They only got their chance because men opened the door, just like these rough men let this little girl follow them around and watch their business. That's how the world worked, plain and simple.
VIII Shasta
She was never supposed to know, but there was a rich fluorite deposit underneath all that obsidian.
Most tourism there were aimed at skiers who came only for the perfect white slope.
The backside of the mountain was black as sin. Hippies who worshipped the volcanic black rock, they held ceremonies around Shasta during the blood moon. Native American mystics swore by its magical protective properties, while the skiers laughed amicably at their foolishness. They wore amulets and bracelets made of that shiny black lava as often as the ancients carved arrowheads for the hunt. The shimmering dark star of all stones, liquid black and silver. In low light, still it shines like black diamonds.
The girl crept into the earth with her ragged little team of infants. Their little hands feeling with trepidation in the dark for their next step inside the obsidian cave.
The dog entered the clearing at first light, barking at something lurking, an unseen phantom. Lugus bowed deeply with his children beside him. The cave, ancient sentinel, stirred wide its earthen jaws, beckoning these untested souls into mysteries that lay like gems beneath the stone. Its watchful presence both threatened and guarded, while innocence stepped bravely into the dark cathedral of rock.
It was purity, not beauty or greed that allowed them safe passage. The lantern light flickered across the distant walls, a scintillation of primordial colors, glinting like tears against the dimmest dark. Lavender amethyst, milky crystal quartz, evergreen jadeite and earthy jasper streaked across the gut of the land, like brush strokes of God's hand. It was the fluorite that sung loudest to the girl child, and when she held the heavy beauty in her small hands.
The cave stood to flood with troglobites, and the girl wished she had never picked up the stone.
Lugus pushed them out. Their time was up. Troglobites rose to the cave ceiling, inching closer to hands, faces and teeth. The children ran for their lives, disturbed by their own footsteps that intruded the slumbering keeper of Shasta, who shook from the earth's tremors to question the will of young ones. They ran, themselves like thieves in the night, scattering to the winds.
The stone clung to her like a memory, stubborn as an old debt. And there in the worn cotton of her pocket, that piece of Blue John nestled deep, precious as any songbird, humming its purple blue secrets against her limb. She couldn't leave it behind no more than she could stop breathing.
IX Dutchman
The Korean grocery stood on a street where drunkenness hung in the air like fog, as much a part of the place as the crumbling concrete and peeling paint. Through the door went Lugus's girl child, and after her, unseen, went Lugus.
The people there moved like weary puppets, fashionable baggy pants dragging at their heels, tripping them up as though even their clothes conspired to humble them. Day flowed into night and back again, and still they stumbled through their lives, these lost souls who had come from far places with Hollywood dreams. They'd washed up here from a dozen countries, drawn by the silver-screen promise of fame and fortune, and now they couldn't quite recall what demons they'd been running from in the first place. Maybe those demons had followed them here, hiding in the bottles they emptied night after night. The men found women and the women found men, and together they brought more children into the world with the thoughtless determination of insects, each new birth another link in a chain of misery that stretched back to the beginning of time.
Through the maze of neon-lit alleys and beer-soaked doorways, Lugus followed with the persistence of hunger. "Here I am," he called to deaf ears, watching his blood move through the world without knowing him.
Then came the day of reckoning, when she was to meet the Flying Dutchman - a man big as life itself, with a voice that rolled like thunder and a dog at his heel. Her car wound through the streets like a confused snake, and Lugus felt the moment's weight settle like lead in his gut.
The Dutchman bore a very important curse for her. He brought it all the way from China.
Twenty-eight years Lugus waited for this meeting, for his old friend to deliver the curse that traveled across oceans and continents, passed hand to hand like a counterfeit bill, wrapped in stolen Arabian jewels.
"The Chinese have come to reclaim you," he wanted to say, like a sly devil.
The cosmic joke of it all - known only to immortal beings - was how the Chinese had convinced the Dutchman of their sinless nature, their absence from biblical record making them pure as unturned soil. They'd bought his services with gold, making him their messenger to the girl child. The curse was simple as daylight: only the poorest boys could love truly, their hearts made pure by want.
"Listen here," the Dutchman said, grinning like a dragon, "China's full of poor boys wanting good wives." The same song sung in different keys across the world, from China to the American South. Then he added his own verse: "I'm a poor boy too." When she walked away, the curse fell easy as rain.
"Why not him? This one is classically handsome, stupid." Lugus laughed merrily.
Lugus howled with joy that shook the foundations of her Spanish apartment, set candles dancing and wax flying, made the gate shriek like a tortured thing. The palms trembled with his laughter as he watched the curse take root.
She was to be hit with a crescendo of poor boy curses and there would finally be enough force to open her eyes. Lead her to meet him, see him, speak to him. For it was he, Lugus, who was the poorest of them all - the boy so poor he had no mother, so poor he learned hunger before words, so poor his heart had turned hard as a field rock.
And now he would bind this girl child, should she dare to run toward the Flying Dutchman's silver tongue.
In the end, it came down to a gentleman's contest in degrees of poverty, played out beneath indifferent stars that had seen it all before and would see it all again.
Lugus thanked the Flying Dutchman for being his humble messenger. Kinder than Jesus, gentler than Jonah.
So it goes that the some beings attain immortality and some take many wives and consorts. As a rarity, husbands too. Lugus knew it from the start, this Eastern secret too wild for Christians and Jews. Of course, none are immune to fits of jealousy.
X Nova
They gathered under fluorescent lights, the kind that make people look dead before their time. The girl pinned there like a rare insect, while the former Marine studied her forehead with eyes cold as surgical steel. His fingers moved as if they were still field-stripping a weapon, only now they were mapping the spot where that diamond would go, right into her skull, neat as a seed in spring soil.
There was no sense to it, and she knew it.
His followers crowded round like crows on a fresh carcass, their inhales quick and excited. In their minds this was no simple drilling - this here was sacred as Sunday. They pushed that Hindu card in her hands, babbling about a goddess called Kali, like giving a lamb a picture of the butcher's knife.
"Only Mary I know," she said, quietly, "is the one who washed Jesus's feet." The words hung there under the lights.
Truth was, she was about as much Kali as a house cat is a mountain lion. Kali was something else - blue as a bruise and naked as sin, wearing dead men's skulls like some women wear pearls. Ten arms she had, each one carrying death, and they said she ate men's hearts like apples.
But Lugus - he'd already made his deal with the demon who rode on that Marine's shoulder. "She'll birth India right here," he said, like a man betting his last dollar on a race horse. His followers each touched her forehead reverently, for the drilling to commence.
Only folks gone array would allow strangers to embed diamonds into their skull. That's what any sane person would say.
Then came that other man, gentle as a raptor, taking out what they put in, pouring himself through that little hole like water through sand. When he kissed her forehead, the healing came slow and sure as winter turning to spring.
Now Kali, she's what men love to fear in the dark corners of their minds - the mother that devours, the lover that betrays, the angel with bloody hands. She's the first woman and the last, beautiful as sunrise and deadly as nightshade. She'll take a man's love and turn it to evil, take his strength and make it weakness. She's destruction wearing beauty like a mask, and this girl, this sparrow with the hole in her head, she was never meant to carry that weight.
But there were so many others who already embodied Kali.
And all of these fierce women are illiterate.
There was that lovely Italian girl with wild green eyes, who trampled over men like dirty beach pebbles. That Spanish girl who danced like a gypsy from stage to stage. The Armenian, a sex slave, although she is more man than woman. And the German woman who looked like a man, a dishonorable knight, masquerading as a queen. They seemed to be bred as dominatrixes just to inspire love and hate.
"You are Kali," the Marine's clan insisted, beaming proudly at the shiny new diamond on her forehead, held in place by flesh and bone.
"I am?"
"You are."
"Are you sure?"
"Certainly."
No mention of Kali in the Bible.
Lugus bubbled with laughter at all that would follow.
XI Leonis
"All illusions that do not matter, will fade with time."
In the dim light, like an ancient healer working miracles, Lugus brought her flesh together again, her palms turned skyward, after yanking the tool from her grip. She had been no better than a wild creature in a zoo when she held that pen, believing its point could pierce the veil between worlds. But a pen is not flesh and blood, not the thundering heart or the dreaming mind. Just dead wood and metal, shaped by men who fear their own hands.
Let the chattering apes scratch their marks, while this girl-child, this daughter of dust and starlight, keeps whole the temple of her skin, her seeing eyes, her worker's hands. Let the fallen women break themselves on concrete streets, their bellies swelling and shrinking with the moon, their babies crying in concrete cribs, while this one heals like the earth after rainfall. And the men in their factories, building metal dreams - let them craft their iron servants while she grows tall and strong as ancient trees. Death'll take them all sure as sunrise.
"There. Isn't that better than being an impoverished self serving slave?" She nodded, turning back to watch all the monkey men work in the factories. "The evil boss women, what happens to them?" They get cancer, trapped in their cold envy.
Where does Oriel go after the kiss of death?
Lugus, old as the hills and twice as patient, draws her up toward that first light, while down below them others chain themselves to their iron wheels, willing prisoners to their own devices. Like insects in amber they get caught in the flickering pictures they made, their flesh turning thin as paper, their thoughts and movements bleeding into the cold metal until you can't tell where machine ends and man begins. The machines'll wear their faces soon enough, like wolves wearing sheep's wool.
Families fall apart quietly, the way old barns collapse board by board in the night. Nobody holding anyone else up anymore - maybe they never did. The mother goes first, then the father, then the children scatter like seed corn in the wind. Even the cousins and uncles fade away. "It's called mercy. A girl has no feelings." No more voices raised in the dark hours, no more salt tears washing clean dirt. Just silence, spreading like evening shadows across empty rooms.
There were three people who were important to her, when there should have been more, and now there are four.
Fathers chase their gadgets with dead eyes, dissatisfied even when the house is full. Give them everything and they'll want the next thing, and the next, until they die wanting. A good life means nothing to a wanting man.
Mothers rule their little kingdoms of kitchen and mirror, fighting time with creams and powders while their faces sag anyway. Young flesh makes them cruel. When their beauty dies they turn vicious, ready to wound anything that comes close. Pride eats them alive.
The brother exists in his own void, unreachable. The girl child could scream or dance or die there in front of him and he'd keep staring at nothing. Like talking to a wall of earth. God put him there to grind her down, to remind her she's nothing special. He takes what comes and asks for nothing, like an animal that knows only eating and sleeping. Never questioned why he was born or what for. Never would.
They speak with mouths full of rocks, never hearing how stupid they sound. No shame, no silence, just noise. The gnashing ones think their sharp teeth make them special. Something to be proud of, those wolf jaws snap at air. Better to point them at the trees that need clearing, let them bite wood instead of the girl's ankles.
The quiet ones forget words altogether. Their tongues go dry and dead in their mouths. But they watch the talking ones with eyes full of poison, hating every sound that comes easy to other throats. Hating every word they lost.
Builders got oil in their blood, not like her father anymore but still out there, grubbing in metal and stone. Blue hands, blue collars. Mean as dirt and twice as common. Some wear their hate like badges, spit it in every word. Small men doing small work, seeing only what's wrong, never what could be. Never what might grow.
They don't create anything new. Just follow lines drawn by better minds, hammering and sawing, thinking each nail proves they're something special. Makes you want to laugh, watching them strut around what they built like roosters in someone else's barnyard. They'd have nothing to build if the real creators didn't dream it first.
That's why she knew she'd always run from the builders' hands, straight to the Architect. The one who walks in midnight shadows, seeing things no hammer ever touched. The one who dreams cities before they rise.
Deep in the place where Lugus leads her, she learns what all men know when they die - how their self delusion is nothing but dust floating in endless black space. He takes her to the Architect, to the man that he was before death stripped him down to bone and truth.
Lugus stood there, his hair hanging loose, color of dry wheat, while the girl's was dark. The same texture and shape though - untamed, thick, as electric as power lines. Life had not treated her well as those born into royal families, but there they were, two strangers with the same wild hair, like father and daughter, like some kind of joke from above.