Tenets of Eden – A Romance Urban Fantasy Cultivation Story

Somewhere, far away, there was a room that didn’t exist.

Someone, though perhaps calling them a “person” would be an exaggeration, sat on a chair in that room. It was a featureless chair, made as though drawn with one continuous line, solid white with black lines denoting its edges.

Without those lines, no one could have told where the edges laid, since the “room” - if it’s worth calling it that, even - was also entirely blank. The kind of blank where colour doesn’t really do it justice, at all, so while the room wasn’t really white, it was so empty it may as well have been.

In that white room sat something. A thing was more accurate than to call it a person, so it was a thing. A creature which had shoved its entire existence in a facsimile of a human shape, but was very clearly not human. It had a head, two arms and two legs, as well as a torso and neck, but that is about all that was human about it.

The thing’s skin was entirely colourless. See-through, more like smudged glass, as if a child had put its hands all over and then those stains had been dragged around with a dirty cloth. Inside the glass framing of the creature, there was a layer of dozens upon dozens of eyes. They laid over and under each other, to the sides and across. Each one seemed pressed up against the glass, straining to escape.

Each eye was a different colour, too. Some brown, some blue, some green or yellow or pink. They had round pupils, slit pupils, horizontal pupils, pupils like those of a goat with two round circles interconnected with a line between them. Pupils that were entirely different, shaped like vortices or towers or buildings.

It was a thing of evershifting complexity and undulating colour as the eyes blinked, and vanished, and were replaced by other eyes pressing up against the glass from inside.

Across that thing, for calling it a person would be too kind, sat another creature confined into a too tight human body. This one had managed a somewhat better mimicry, for it put in more effort. While the other creature was full of eyes that wanted to escape and see more, this creature had wrapped itself into infinite density.

Layer upon layer of something covered it. Like a matryoshka doll in the shape of a human. Its outermost layer was thin wrapping paper, the kind you’d get to cheaply wrap christmas packages, but without the colour. It was thin, translucent, and a dirty brown. Underneath that was a layer of glass.

Glass, of course, was intrinsic to these creatures, but while one proudly displayed it, the other was more private - though saying they understood the concept of privacy would have been giving them too much credit. Underneath the glass there was a layer of the creature made from mattress foam. Then one of fabric. One of thin wood. One of plastic. Aluminium foil.

A thousand thousand layers followed, each one smaller and more delicate yet just as intricate as the last, and all of them hidden behind that shitty paper wrapping. The layers, of course, had friction, and would rip and tear when the creature moved, revealing deeper and deeper gashes into its body until those layers sealed back up and it was a simple human shape wrapped in wrapping paper.

One creature looked at the other.

“It is time. She must perish, now,” Eyes said.

“She will not walk through until her soul is strong enough. You know this,” Matryoshka replied.

“Then we must make her,” Eyes spoke again. The vibrations appeared in the room, though there was no air, and Eyes had no mouth to speak.

“We must.” Matryoshka agreed, its hum shredding the wrapping paper and revealing a dozen layers deep into its body.

“How?”

“Violence.”

Eyes nodded, a bastardization of the human motion. It wasn’t smooth or gentle like a normal nod, instead looking frazzled and jerky, like a video watched from a scratched CD, jumping ahead and back, or a glitch in a game.

“Always Violence,” Eyes agreed, nodding some more.

“Who?”

“Always our enforcers.”

“Which of them?” Matryoshka asked, again. Their voice was even, but the paper tore, in the shape of a vein on their forehead. Angrily, it revealed dirty glass.

“The violent ones,” Eyes hummed, blinking a thousand times as though it was obvious.

“Always the violent ones,” Matryoshka agreed, leaning back.

“How violent?”

“Very.”

“Very,” Eyes agreed.

Then, each one of the eyes underneath their surface moved. A thousand directionless, curious gazes, taking in the nothingness around, suddenly flickered, turning towards one direction.

“Choose,” it said, and it revealed pictures of… people. Not all human. None of them looking kind.

“All?”

“No.” Eyes voice reverberated strongly, popping one of the eyes, sending a splatter of blood against the inside of the glass. It vanished, a moment later, replaced by more eyes. “Never all.”

“Never all?” Matryoshka hummed, curiously. Tauntingly.

“Never.”

Slowly, Matryoshka nodded. Its mimicry was better than that of Eyes, because it tried. Still, the paper was not bendable, and so it tore. The glass fractured, and for a moment, a thousand colours spilled into the room.

A failure of mimicry. An embarrassment. Matryoshka closed the hole, watching a million mocking gazes from Eyes. It was enraged, but despite that, nodded again.

“Not all, then.”

“Choose,” Eyes commanded.

At that, Matryoshka froze. The wrapping paper shredded away, all at once, as its body vibrated, layer after layer underneath the glass disintegrating and being replaced. “You dare?”

Silence.

“Choose,” Eyes requested.

Slowly, Matryoshka’s anger faded. The creature grew wrapped in beige, thin paper again. Silently, it picked out some of the people, indicating them with a pointed finger. “These.”

A human man. Middle aged, in his forties. Scraggly beard, unkempt hair, violent eyes. Many scars.

A woman of green scaled skin, with a tail for a lower body. One of the folk, some kind of snake. Her scalp full of sharp scales, done up with decorations. Piercings in the shape of golden rings, through ridges of scales that stood taller. She had a cruel smile on her face.

Finally, one person with three bodies. One of the tris-adu. The shellcrafters. This one had made its bodies different from one another.

A wooden thing, tall, lanky, like a tree come to life, a deer skull with green embers for eyes. Decorated with bones.

A thing of stone, granite blocks attached to one another. Their bonds tight yet malleable, easily able to change shape. A hunting dog, for now.

Third, it was a human. A face to wear. Young, beautiful. Wild raven hair, cheerful smile, kind face and mysterious eyes. A scar, across one eye. A facade to mimic a kind but reckless beastmaster - a facade the tris-adu must have stolen.

“This one,” Eyes said, indicating the tris-adu. “Far away.”

Matryoshka waved its compatriot off. “Time.”

“Time.”

“Agreed?” Matryoshka asked.

“Acceptable,” Eyes indicating, a thousand affirmative blinks just beyond its tainted glass skin.

“Good. Hunt well.”

With an explosion of colour, the room broke. Eyes and Matryoshka relieved themselves of their limiting, human fakes and returned to being what they truly were, in their own realms. There were a thousand other things to manage, and they had neglected those for too long in the few seconds their conversation took.

Hurriedly, Eyes turned its gaze around, and solved problems where they arose. Renewing stasis. Maintaining gateways; maintaining itself as was needed.

But back in there, somewhere, within what one could have called its mind, there was a hunger for growth and expansion. A morsel had appeared, and it was sending out its proverbial hunting dogs.

Soon, it would become more than it was. It drooled at the thought.