The Works of Vermin

Part III

III

The specter who comes as I go,

Who throws on the coat I shed

Know, as you puppet my rotting bones,

Decay is only growth unfettered.

—Olaf Aufhocker, Fleeting Lodestar, Act II

Ecdytoxin is God’s gift to hell. The fulminate of the Catoptric, the living thoughts of a living river—that liquid mind left by our forefathers, unrestrained by structure, a quadrillion particles making thousands of times more interconnections, without which we would be barbarians, rotting among the flies in the high deserts, barren like the rest of the damned world.

It is the Blood of God, the Water of Life, and ecdytoxin is wine distilled from it.

—Dr. Reames Gorslung, “Dream Treatise”