The Empire does not exist and its Emperor and Empress have never met. Its boundaries are clear, distinct and unrecognized; the edicts of its plenipotentiary powers are ignored. Nevertheless, it is felt. Its army is faceless, anonymous and singular, its soldiers shape-changers. Like the Old Man of the Sea, in fighting they are now a bull, now a fire, now a tree–whatever the situation demands.

Respect is a complicated thing. It is given, never taken; demanded, but not granted. The Empire exists, and does not exist; asserts itself and regards itself. In the streets between the bars and the jails, its citizens in exile are singing their national anthem to their brothers and sisters within. The Emperor’s ghost stands watch on its parapets, his cane held martially before his face. He has known what is to be arrested: in his Imperial humility, he pardoned his gaolers. What else could he have done?

The Empire overlays the real. It is a thought of a thought: a piece of political metafiction. Its Courts are everywhere, and ineradicable. Its passports carry no visas, only the Black Cat’s head and the empire’s motto: I am what I am.

by Stephen Cole

They know diseases spread through the air, and so they guard their breath with saffron and peppermint. Birds are ill-omened and born under a plague star, and so they ape their beaks, their shadowed wings against the sky. Evil cannot survive a red light, and so their eyes, red for health, red for protection.

They reek of their trade, of wax and lymph and decay.

How poorly armed they are, these doctors of words! In their ancient texts they riddle for answers, but Galen is silent, and Averroes. Half the sovereigns they list in their pharmacopoeia are names, no more: a rare herb indeed is moly! So, girt with rose petals and leather, armed with wooden canes and urine flasks, they sally forth into the house of Nergal; beneath that darkling roof they come upon Ereshkigal, wracked in birth, gravid with the waters of the earth.

No songs are sung of their deeds, nor tales told.

The rider is not always male, though usually (times being what they are) that is how people think of him. Mad Max wandering through the wasteland, looking for trouble, or Tank Girl, ibid. Or hollow-eyed drifters moving through the scrub towns of America in the 40s and 50s. Angular, long-limbed gunslingers moving across the plains. Nameless samurai flipping yarrow stalks at the crossroads. Knights errant: Bradamante, Gawain, Quixote. Or further back, and gods errant: Minerva begging hospitality, YHVH casually sitting down for a cup of tea in Abram’s fly-blown tent.

The rider comes to test a community. From the outside, she has no ties, no alliances, no family or history. She is anonymous in her singularity. She is always sharply political—power structures thrum in her bones like the threat of rain. She is always attractive in her freedom, dangerous and seductive in her power. Cynosure of party divisions and the slowly descending point of a tornado. The rider is quick to make friends. Hospitality is seldom seen, but repaid with a loyalty almost suicidal in its purity. She is beaten, stabbed, shot, robbed, strangled and constant. Money comes swirling in her wake, and success.

The rider is forever outcast. Society needs but cannot sustain his constant scrutiny. Shot of a silhouette against the sunset; song of farmers working in the fields. The Op leaves Poisonville for the coast; Jesus doffs his comforting humanity and ascends to heaven, his face a mask of radiant terror. Life resumes its slow decline.

Vienna, immediately following the second World War. In the great caverns of the sewers, Harry Lime met his death, shot down even as his fingers reached through the grate into free air. He was a thief and a conman, and hundreds of children died while he whistled and rode Ferris wheels and played at being a spy.

Annalise walked out of her home and saw her next-door neighbor Mrs. M. standing over a baby on the ground. ‘Is everything all right?’ Annalise asked. Mrs. M replied, ‘No, everything is not all right.’ Then Mrs. M. did the unthinkable. She put the gun to the baby and she shot it.

–17 December, 20–. Illinois.

Call it the keep, or the donjon. Call it durance vile, the tower, the monastery of St Mary-of-the-Woods. It is prison, torture cell, proving ground.

It is always in the distance: in the waste places of the earth, behind acres of barbed wire, concrete, dobermans and rottweilers. The rare traveler who braves this grim journey enters in and is seen no more. Strange shapes haunt these unwelcoming halls–ogres, sadists, military police. They are more than human, or less; they bristle with assault rifles, riot gear, black armor, serrated swords, leather wings and horns.

The tortures they inflict are many, but without pattern. They do not punish, nor teach; nor do they inflict pain for their own dark pleasure — these pincers, these pears, these smoldering cages are no more than the working out of their inescapable natures. As the anthill to the ant, so the rack. So the whip. So the flensing knife.

They wear our faces and mirror our suffering back to us, but do not partake of it, do not truly understand it or us. We who are prisoned here, lucky few, struggle to anticipate their ways, which are of god and inhuman. We scry for signs, portents and conjunctions; build astrologies in the constellations of agony they flare upon our bodies.

In the end we die, or are driven forth, or rescued. We gather in the evenings, in smoke-filled bars, in sticky theaters, in well-lit empty parking lots to display our scars, our crippled limbs, these cryptic, silent, puckered mouths.