(№4.3)

So, once upon these times, there nestled deep into the gorge of the mightiest sweet river prominent - the Nile - a tiny and fine village, yet to these epochs considered even a metropole, effervescing with vitality and life at the borders of these grandest stream in the entire world, where people lived happily their limited forever, contriving art and skill, honed with fervour and certitude to be the very best of their time, cultivating decorum and science, consigning their existence with that blissfully warm gut-feeling of knowing with certainty to have created something that would survive thousands and thousands of years and wars, mutiny and suffering of their children, in favour of their rites and personality, that would speak for them when they could not, having become the concrete ashes and dust and sand, the very bases of the hostile desert all around attempting to gulp them down, if it wasn't for the oasis they have claimed, the river that would flow in masses still long after their end. They were their work, their fabricated objects, their art that was destined to grow to be the very future, rendering them immortal at last, ever cemented in memory.

Another girl of another timeline, being born long, long ago, before the stars were even given their legitimate names by folk that still lived the life of barbarians. A girl, who would cause the world to drop to its knees, checked in horrific suspense. But how a famous English king in the uncertain genuine future would come yet to say; It started with a lass and it's only fitting to have it ending with a lass. Wise words, tailored universally for many more occasions.

She wasn't unloved, nor condemned, shunned or abandoned in woe, no, no, nuance and affection were moreover interesting if experienced and still transcending to condescension, troubling factors to maximise the pain in the end.

She once possessed a caring, decently-providing family, a good life at the hugest river and nothing else to complain about.

The girl was quite a lovely and adorable persona, so her family named her affectionately after the name of a white spiriting flower that seemed to flower and flourish indeed anywhere seen in the mud-caked basins of the flux to guarantee an erudite dwelling, yet was so pretty, rich in scent and colour jointly, no one mustered courage to rid off the tares threatening to overcome the ecosystem and worshipped them instead.

Just like this girl. Fatality proven in retrospect to be borne the erring of an overflowing nurture and pouring affinity.

Her nose aquiline in form and gesture, her hair fiery, an angered red, specked with strands of copper, the framing curls shining golden in the noon sun and blazing scorchingly like an untamed wildfire at dusk and dawn, beseeching eyes a staid grey, blotted with sprinkles of yellow, she grew in time to fill out the form of a stunning beauty, skin tanned in the short autumn and bronze in summer, smooth and immaculate.

Her family was everything to her, occupying her heart in many aspects, incorruptible and everlasting, as it would be for many Egyptians, not only as decreed by religion, but also by the belief in blood, reaching from the broad, tangled branches of her father's side bred and purely living at the current for many generations and her mother's family carving right back from the far, far European, very distant shore, unfathomable to her sometimes, how a whole different world could be found right across the Mediterranean Sea she had not seen but once upon a long time ago.

As her mother and father deemed her worthy and sturdy for the working's needed in the community, she was pledged even at very young age to perform the labour of a patcher contributing furthermore to nourish her family and steadfast her place amidst.

The afternoons she'd spent in the golden rays of her hometown, singing and cleansing clothes in the many tributaries of the Nile, bleeding blue against the parasol that consisted of the bleak, colourless, beige scenery of a broken wasteland around.

Her life lay out perfectly rationed with a lengthy, fulfilling extension and witty width of copious adventures and challenges she must face, a husband fairly deferential and loving, gifted with a sly mind added to black ringlets and the gorgeous honey-esque hue of his skin, raising ahead, they would have their entire army of wondrous, scrumptious and phenomenal special children with her affectionate features and his talented mind, both at once in a distant spot, maculated with the stains of old age and wrinkles confining in the bursts of laughter they had shared, either would part the Earth content and peacefully pervaded, gone in the hissing tentacles of the spitting flames and reunited with the souls they had lost at last after both their hearts weighed in comparison to the holy feather upon declaring to be pure, abandoning her readied children ere to achieve their eternity in paradise, in closing reconciling with their parents and siblings deceased before.

A touching image, a depicted fairy tale and about a flame trickling and scattering away with any breath breathed, with any drink drank and pleasures delved, seeping out, until ribbons of grey-scaling smoke left to eddy out of the wick and the wax meant recycled, remelted, reformed for another candle.

Stirring, really, even my cold soul, a life we could all wish for, but the universe is seldom that merciful, reluctant to be keen and lean and embrace the singeing tragedies and sung maladies like belligerent fire tongues raining from the sky in an arch of doom and pain and it rarely allows for only so much happiness and joy. The story is neat and pretty, drab and sallow, bleak with all its polished perfections and devoid of passion or fury, desperately monotonous, frustratingly pedestrian and dulled, much like the edge of a favourite, loyal blade who once was the best at cutting and maiming, but now lays beyond repair in its drawer tomb forgotten and condemned to a worser fate than allowing it to be smelted, denied its lawful purpose, the touch of sun and the taste of gore forever.

It had also never happened yet as a slight, tiny proposition. The finest boards of story were out of consideration, so the worst miseries of them all sprung into action.

It came to be as everything should, and unfortunately for this amenable and unknowing soul still trusted with remnants of reliance, her downfall was certain when a spirit gave her an inspiration to craft something the world hasn't seen, right when she was plagued with the gift of fruitful inventions and unstoppable, bothersome muses nagging away her concentration, singing the entire day about the great and grand idea she was to usurp destined by a higher power. Brimming with sudden epiphanies and the promise of an ever changing idea, willing to have her shatter and banish her entire life away for a sickening obsession.

The idea was in her head, bugging her sleep, lulling her silly heart, manipulating every of her actions and compelling her dreams to vividly efficacious impressions that made her deeply fond of that sudden and unexpected spark.

She didn't sleep for four days straight, until she decided to work on that beautiful idea of hers. Her fingers itching and shuddering with the bearing impulse to do something, to invent, to make a belonging only attached to her and to none other, all rational, clear thoughts eradicated and vanished, save the longing for briskness.

At dawn of another productive, custom-made day auguring with the frank nature of normalcy and routine, mundane procedures, she gathered long before her brothers and sisters, and mother and father would wake up all the utensils she plotted worthy for that thrilling endeavour and ventured brimming with anticipation into a brief palm wood nearby, shrouded by morning fog and protective layers of emerald green leaves, not even the gods could catch a glimpse of what exactly she did amidst these thick trunks of trees in spurring motions.

She needn't cower longly about the worries of her parents, for at that time trust was all on her side and they would not suspect a deed of evil from their oldest daughter, an act of contempt and betrayal governed in the future, by someone that was her and was not. 

She cut some smaller and slimmer palm trees down, those who's wood still was bendable and quite easy to work with. Whilst she had worked, her mind drifted apart, daydreaming about the honour and dignity she would receive from others, the worshipping her invention would garner and ensure, the dripping, gazing reputation of hers drawn in marble and chiselled in stone preserved for the future, a fate only reserved to heroes and great explorers.

When afternoon lay angled and the sky shone in a beautiful reflection of the river next to her, the hands of her keen muses had moved and controlled her muscles as they were theirs, cut and severed, bent and moved until it was done and she was coated in slick sweat and a slight crease of sand crowning her neck like a tight necklace only queens would wear, but she finished eventually, tired and sore, void, somehow content that all that swollen inspiration and haunting, smarting sensations to just wanting to be able to do it, to get it out of her system, until now, when the happiness of completion lulled her.

A wooden object, smooth and cut and ushered with a  svelte bow.

With weird slim ropes spanned in between a body and a column she had used her own red hair to mend and stretch.

It was a vision incarnated, of glory and honour, an image of furore and beauty, attached only a scratch out of her scope, the promise of conniving, evilness seeping in her veins and chiselling the sturdy lines of the future, carved and marked by her hand, issued and supposed to wreck her life to ruins with a slow and painful death, a broken soul and all her friends and family, her persons gone and rid off this world, should she turn her back now to them, to the highest and most prized possession the Egyptians valued, for the sleek, fragile, splintering feasibility of depthless creativity and mad brilliance, tugging the straws to eventually endanger the world by a nefarious god eager for drama and pain, bloodbaths and many skeletons scattered as unsettling remains for the many contents fought and won and lost there on a genial, innocuous field, gore and flesh long soaked the soil and consecrated forever to have it all happen again with even more casualties than before.

She halted conspicuously as if sensing any of this, dying fierce rays alighting her hair and putting her heart at ease, easy breezes caressing the naked, delicate skin of her calves, meaning she overrode the visions content in stupid ignorance.

Her limbs quivered evermore with foreboding premonition and the craving to act, to do, to create even more. Clear, blissful intent sprawling out of her stroking curiosity and easily defeating the tedious, unstable walls of mundane routine, rather a dust catcher than steadfast threat to the battering wave, flood of creation and hinted insanity building up in her. Her art, her longing consumed her, the one to devastate all for rather a collective gathering of accidents and misfortunes. She will destroy herself to tend to a rightful homage to what her mind and the god concocted and even further, even the world on the palm of her hand, for now she could own the whole universe by the mere fantasy of her mind, be at any place she wanted by mere imagination, crowning her more powerful than even the gods bickering and slandering above ignorant to the fervent, heated passion feelings and concepts of a human being could assume. An entire world belonged to her truly. Her inspiration would dismantle her piece for piece, brick for brick, limb for limb, tearing from the very confines of her yearning, endless heart, a fire burning now even higher than the sun itself. Honour and dignity aside, she herself could engrave herself much immortal with what she would spare and leave the Earth for others to come find, infinity in every waking moment and every moment belonging to her and only to her. Happiness was just as fragile, momentarily wavering, but when wasn't it? That moment she was lost and found alike, completely inchoate.

And so the journey began. 

She made paint out of the flower sprung from the river bed and brushes out of strands of her red curly head and painted on papyrus and palm leaves alike, spun her little tales and ideas of gruesome and wondrous stories both, written down or chiselled by her hand into perennial stone, only to frustratingly rid of her thwarted projects and threw them in the splashing blue of the viable stream or dug tombs into the hot sand, buried them deep under a pile of reality especially in her earlier days, unsatisfied and furious of her incapacity to bear those visions she couldn't quite reflect, produce what brew and simmered their in her colourful, arduous mind, missed the mark by a whisker to be united with the mere idea of a creation in reality and worse whatsoever, it was all responsible to her own failing. With another artist born comes an equally imperative urge to strive for absolute perfection and accepting nothing less, simultaneously fighting against their own bar rising higher and higher, until goals develop to be unattainable and impossibly unachievable. Yet that wouldn't spark the opportunity to leave at all, no, only to burn brighter and brighter, up to utter collision and infallible explosion. Even the failed plans of misshapen creation stayed with her, carried wistfully in a pocket of her heart, reminding the feeling of what the entire process had felt like, like a tingling in her fingers, like a cool hand pressed to her forehead, unto the dance of lunacy commenced once again, the rage to engage was in commission and blithe childhood once stormed in again, filled of idea and the thirst to explore. But all these first attempts were silly, wrong, for her mission consisted to only create one and only one thing to obsolete creation, to utter perfection.

In order to realise her passionate dreams of...something better, something enjoyable, the thing that would belong to her and only to her, a little piece of the world tugged away, she quit her job and moved out of the family cabin, the sole home she had only known for many years, her father had screamed, her mother had cried, than her father had weeped and her mother had yelled curses at her staved back, as biting and belligerent, just as if he'd thrown daggers to cut her skin, the faltering girl would have immediately returned, quarreling with herself, if the pull, the draw hadn't overcome the control of her feet and stolen her away.

Now day as night was endured by working hard to achieve the implementation, speaking to many experts and sorcerers who potentially could become useful in her attempt to bring forth even a glimpse of the greatness she had tasted.

No one did, so she kept on acting, preparing. In her dreams, she reached tufts of clouds further than human minds, puffy and softly dyed, with ombre hues transitioning and tenderly fading to one mono, nuanced tint, collecting all the stars of the sky and slid on rainbows gaudily just as the garden plants she grew up with, inhaled the dust of fog and stole the moon its crescent.

The first prototype she made in those woods beginning it all, rendered incapable of cutting the quality she craved and the perfection she sought out, yet it offered comfort in visualising concrete plans of her spiralling inspiration. Making the corpus out of desert wood and inventing the column out of palm wood was a fine start, concluded with aloe vera - sprouting on any place a drop of moisture and a beam of light united - to serve as finishing polish, its shine meant to fulfill the purpose of tampering with the first impression which counted the most, so humans could see their own reflection in the yore lustreless drab, dark timbre. The long strings implicated in a hint of red the blood dripping in real, thin threads from the gaping rounded wounds of the arching bow, completing the ensemble and guaranteeing to impose. A new instrument born, the sounds unknown but the image truly captivating.

By laying enamoured eyes on her contrivance, virtually her child, realisation dawned on the other shore, horrifying and daunting, unfortunately little thrilling. Making, hardening and pulling the string would constitute an entirely different affair than to actually play the thing she had concocted.

Though failing to see how she had abandoned everyone in the first place, the magical slumber of artists being obviously blind and impervious to their direct environment, convinced her concurrence waited just around the corner to thieve her ideas and turn her back to that  daft thing that had never even lived with the ardour she carried now 'round, because presently, it would be her against the world.

Now in the afternoons, she'd sit at the large river, pulling strings and humming wonderful, silent melodies, gifting the world with something wonderful once again, even prior to the completion of the first pyramid to have its tip protrude and prod in the sky. Admittedly, it was hard and challenging and miraculously tempting to toss it into the Nile, albeit after growing used to her bleeding and ever ruined fingertips scarred with the position of width the strings had drilled into her very flesh, her heart was sound and music would fill all her day.

Proudly and confident with the knowledge to be capable of defeating any ill fraudsters meaning claim what ought not to be theirs, one sunny afternoon, she presented it to her estranged family and villagers, already obliging to have a chat with her, worried what she had been up to in all these weeks of total isolation, shrieking and hiding whenever someone neared. She named it a tschang, after her first dog, a three-month old puppy she had lost as a child to ill-meaning disease.

Never should she have known that a very believing priest would copy the idea in the name of his fancying a god and she'd truly may have held her reluctant composure toward exposure to the real world, making the afterworld until the present day believing he was the one to come up with the idea for the greatest instruments of all time, powerless it is indeed to claim otherwise.

The tones she made out were at first painfully excruciating to listen to, too sharp, too low, ill-fitting and nerve-splintering. She was brimming with nervousness finally.

Like she captured the feeling of stepping on raw pieces of glass, severing blood vessels on a cold and uncomfortable winter morning of a greying, rotting corpse, eyes unblinking staring into the white abyss of the void canopy shielding the world, the blood drops of unfolding darkness spreading in tiny, cursed veins across the ice, a glare combined with piercing eyes and snowflakes reflecting the light like daggers, retracted in a hostile situation she had never encountered, much like snow, not even befalling the highest and tallest mountains of the desert, a word almost as foreign "flood".

Wild and unhinged, never to be restricted or to be caught.

Her family deserted her completely, opaque to them how one might sacrifice themselves implicitly unconditionally to the mere art of the mind meeting only the immaterial needs, besides the blatant physical ones, abandoning her deferential job, cursing her from now on to be marked as an obnoxious, accursed fool, not comprehending how to honour the vacant, fleeting time she had been blessed with on this Earth and they may have killed her dead, if only the duty as their birth givers wouldn't have prohibited them in doing so, for you cannot take life of one whom you enabled to live, written down it said in their holy texts and belief focalised.

So they let her be, in that bubble of doom and self-destruction, impending despondency in reach, eager still to watch her fall, the second she'd recognise her erring and cry out in anguish.

She played and played and practised and cursed her secret desire, the lust to be the very best player, for raw power, unable to chime in the shell of layered wanting, incapable to end.

It was a spell she could not flee. She had to play.

She must get better still.

The girl needed to master this. A curse, someplace it would have been named, obsession to the point of utter negligence and crippling till she would live no more, suffocated by it.

To constantly have her fingers caked in blood that was still hers, but might as well could have resulted from a murder on a street she committed, possession, bedevilment the vital symptom of her rapidly declining sanity and once simply brilliant genius.

Blood, just like the colour of her hair, would soon flood the streets in abnormal masses.

She stopped eating, she stopped sleeping and sat on the river banks where the moonlight turned her head into a metallic bust of copper and silver light dipped her pallid fingers as she motioned them on the strings, irresistable, unstoppable and the rare, dreading nights of new moon or where the crest was no larger than a harvest sickle, where she couldn't play, were couldn't thrive on the feeling, of being indulged by the stark sounds of her tschang swiftly coaching beside her chiming never-tranquil in the gusts of wind, of somewhat achieving in her life, she'd lie down, alone, abandoned with itchy fingers, hurt and maimed by many days before, her body taking in more and more the form and shape, the very guise of a skeleton.

Her obsession was becoming her life, slowly and it ought to become the only thing capable of keeping her breathing and living.