you are not goliath.

//If you could be anyone, who would you be?// A question lies, unanswered in the back of your mind, as the waters rise over your head, dappled sunlight painting masterpieces without a name across your skin. The others before you were all gone - stolen away by spectres in the day. Danger these days lay not in the cracking of twigs at night, but instead came with the sun. Like the Yara-ma-yha-who that waits for its prey within the branches of the fig, children are drained dry and spat back out, left desolate in the houses of the worthy. Some days, you see the husks of the other children you once knew, empty-eyed and lost. Shouts travel from the distance of your home, like the frustrated baying of hunting dogs. The pounding of booted feet thump towards your hiding place, an erratic heart beating in tandem with those who had been taken. [[You take a breath, and sink deeper.]]

''Snow or ash''? The black light refuses to answer. Your begging fails to move it, and the solitary eye stares back, unblinking, and incessant with your pleading. With all the promise of a non-existent heartbeat, you clasp infinite limbs around the forgotten oath. ''What creates a monster''? A many-headed hydra of fate bares its fangs in the face of annihilation, snarls and blooms as fire cauterises its wounds. Flame blankets the building you were in, and [[you are too young to understand what it means.]]

Ash drips from the sky in a bleak ballet, and you gather sheaves of grey in your fists like it was the snow that had fallen once in your grandmother’s backyard. How terrible and fanciful you feel, lost in a world all on your own, where the distant cries of Chinook blades no longer haunt your father’s dreams. At long last, you stumble across the slumbering form of your grandmother, draped beside her husband. Shattered rebar makes for a poor bed, and you run to rouse them and show off your spoils. [[The snow in your palms does not melt, and they do not wake.]]

(set: $possessions to it + (a:"ashes")) You do not cry until your mother finds you, rolling the burnt tatters of books in your hands until they pill together like loose fibres on old clothing. She begins to weep, and so you tuck yourself close into her side, petting her hair the way she would to comfort you over a grazed knee or monsters in the night. When her tears do not stop, your own eyes spill over, and you know not the reason. [[A cannon fires, and you marvel at a candy-striped death that carves a little more from your soul with each story snuffed out, the lone candles of a history witnessed in ink and frightened snow.|The Room]]

The arms of the water reeds embrace you, and you are reminded of the way your sister tangled her fingers in your hair as you played, laughing under the bright smile of the sun. Some days, you see her crouched in the front of the house she was forced into, digging with single minded determination. Now, she would always stop before she finished, staring at the pit as if the wound in the earth could drain her sorrows away. Below the surface of the creek, you watch a cerulean crayfish burrow its way between the stones for safety. Together, the two of you wait with bated breath for the stomping to recede, the unsullied water allowing you to hold its beady gaze in a rare show of solidarity. Finally, the yabby cautiously inches out of its hideaway, just as your lungs begin to burn with the effort of staying in the underwater universe. It clicks its claws in annoyance, as if shooing you away from its domain. [[The sound of gunshots ring out, and you wonder if you could grow gills if you tried hard enough.]]

It is just late enough in the year for the remnants of the mournful sun to warm your soaked body as you turn your feet towards the direction of your home, but you shiver nonetheless, chilled with something you could not quite put a name towards. [[You know what awaits you each time the spectres leave, but it never gets any easier.]]

(set: $possessions to it + (a: "houndstooth")) The hound your father hunts with lies in the dust, its flank heaving as it tries to lick at the wound in its side. Like the last two, it was barely out of puppyhood, the once-soft down at the scruff of its neck matted with drying crimson. It whines, high and fearful, and you pet it with clumsy hands. The first few times they had killed the dogs in lieu of taking you, you had cried bitter, sharp tears, as hollow as the bullets they used. Now, your tears were spent, wasted away like the defiance in your father's haggard eyes. Eventually, your family would have to ask for help, without a means to hunt for food. Eventually, they will steal you away, too. You had not named the puppy, not this time, nor the last two times. [[But it still hurts just the same as it dies in your arms.|The Room]]

(if:visits is 1)[(set: $possessions to (a: "nothing"))] Humanity is a funny, fickle thing. Full of surprises, and innovation, and creativity - a single bite, in open defiance of god. And so very, very destructive, in ways that we cannot even begin to fathom. The room you create is liminal, built brick by bleeding brick with shaking hands that steady as you daub plasma and ammonia between them, begging for it to be enough. (if:visits is >1)[//See me//, you plead. //Can you see me now//?] (if:visits is >2)[(text-colour:red)[Why won't they see you? Why won't they hear you?]] The ghosts of a distant past coalesce in front of them, waiting to be judged. (if: $possessions is not "ashes" and is not "houndstooth")[[The book.]] | [[A dying hound.]] (if: $possessions contains "ashes" and "houndstooth")[[Make your effigy.]]

It manifests, not in a trickle, and yet not in a flow. Instead, it is like giving form to the transience of life, drawing out the loam that feeds the dreams of the slumbering world. Experience and drowned hopes, encased in a dread that refuses to answer. [[After all, how could it?]]

The effigy limps on battered legs, the sorrow of all those before you wearing an ill-fitting skin of stone. Its cries have no sound, hold no substance against the paper prison, the ink of damning words drawing a dark, precise line between //this// and //that//. Desperate, you rub ash and snow between your fingers, use it to smear your grandmother's pupils upon an eyeless face. Your digits leave prints of grey upon the bloody teeth you anchor into the silent maw, borrowed from the memory of stolen children. Countless other artifacts tremble in the wake of a non-physical annihilation, but the soul scars brought to a manufactured existence still cannot be heard. [[You cling to its feet, and weep.]]

The writers of history made your cultures to be an enemy, sawed the sinew of language from your bones and atomised the organ-deep knowledge of millennia in fire. Echoes of anguish ring in your ears like the hammering blows that stole the faces of statues, striking a declaration that you are to be ripped out and quelled, but ''you are not goliath''. The echoes come from you now, screams that never find an implanted home in the hearts of those who turn blind eyes and encase carefully guarded definitions in a brick hive. It does not stop, not even when ashy keratin parts your forgiving flesh, not until your vermillion hands feed cartilage and muscle into the waiting, silent cavity. Lovingly, you move the hinges of the effigy's jaw, stroke the marble column of its elegant throat to help it swallow. Finally, finally, it kneels. Clings to your feet. Begins to weep. But you cannot answer. [[After all, you are not goliath.]]