ascahn’arca’shoreshik
Sermon Twenty-Five
he Scripture of the City:
‘All cities are born of solid light. Such is my city, his city.
²‘But then the light subsides, revealing the bright and terrible angel of Veloth. ³He is in his pre-chimerical form, demonic VEHK, gaunt and pale and beautiful, skin stretched painfully thin on bird’s bones, feathered serpents encircling his arms. ⁴His wings are spread out behind him, their red and yellow ends like razors in the sun. ⁵The wispy mass of his fire hair floats as if underwater, milky in the nimbus of light that crowns his head. ⁶His presence is undeniable, the awe too much to bear.
⁷‘This is God’s city, different from others. Cities from foreign countries put their denizens to sleep and walk to the star-wounded East to pay homage to me. ⁸The capital of the northern men, crusty with eon’s ice, bows before Vivec the city, me it together.
⁹‘Self-thought streets rush through tunnel blood. I have rebuilt myself. Hyper eyed signposts along my traffic arm, soon to be an inner sea. ¹⁰My body is crawling with all gathered to see me rising up like a monolithic instrument of pleasure. My spine is the main road to the city that I am. ¹¹Countless transactions are taking place in veins and catwalks and the roaming, roaming, roaming, as they roam over and through and add to me. ¹²There are temples erected along the hollow of my skull and I will ever wear them as a crown. Walk across the lips of God.
¹³‘They add new doors to me and I become effortlessly trans-immortal with the comings and goings and the stride-heat of the market where I am traded for, ¹⁴yell of the children hear them play, scoffed at, amused, desired, paid for in native coin, new minted with my face on one side and my city-body on the other. ¹⁵I stare with each new window. Soon I am a million-eyed insect dreaming.
¹⁶‘Red-sparking war trumpets sound like cattle in the ribcage of shuffling transit. The heretics are destroyed on the plaza knees. ¹⁷I flood over into the hills, houses rising like a rash, and I never scratch. Cities are the antidotes to hunting.
¹⁸‘I raise lanterns to light my hollows, lend wax to the thousands of candlesticks that bear my name again and again, ¹⁹the name innumerable, shutting in, mantra and priest, god-city, filling every corner with the naming name, ²⁰wheeled, circling, running river language giggling with footfalls mating, selling, stealing, searching, and worry not ye who walk with me. ²¹This is the flowering scheme of the Aurbis. This is the promise of the PSJJJJ: egg, image, man, god, city, state. ²²I serve and am served. I am made of wire and string and mortar and I accede my own precedent, world without am.’
²³The ending of the words is ASV.