Wraeththu The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit/the Bewitchments of Love and Hate/the Fulfilments of Fate and Desire/3 Books in 1

CHAPTER ONE He faces northwest, the direction of the unknown My name is Pellaz. I have no age. I have died and lived again. This is my testament. At the age of fifteen, I lived in a dusty, scorched town at the edge of a desert. I was the son of a peasant, whose family for centuries had worked the cable crop for the Richards family. Our town was really just a farm, and to call it that lends it an undeserved glamor. Huts upon red dirt; there is little else to imagine. The cable crop, a hardy, stringy, tasteless vegetable, used for everything from bulk food to bed springs, straggled meanly over the parched ground. It did not grow high and its unattractive, pitted fruits burst with a sound like gunfire to release pale seeds in yellow jelly and fill the air with the odor of putrescence. The grand house of Sefton Richards, a stern, northern man, whose reclusiveness was supposed to shelter insanity, squatted against the horizon, far from our own humble dwellings. Every year, ten of us were summoned to the Great House and ordered to whitewash it. Through the windows, we could see that it had very little furniture inside. We lived in a cruel, bitter, petty country and it was inevitable that we shared many of these characteristics. Only when I escaped did I learn to dislike it. Then, I existed in a mindless, innocent way, ignorant of the world outside our narrow territories and content to stretch and pound the cable fiber with the rest of my kind. I don't suppose I ever did really think about things. The closest I came to this was a dim appreciation of the setting sun dyeing all the world purple and rose, lending the land an ephemeral beauty. Even the eye of a true artist would have had difficulty in finding beauty in that place, but the sunsets were pleasantly deceptive. We first heard of what were timidly termed "the upsets" by travelers passing hurriedly through our lands. Nobody liked to stay long in this part of the country, but my family were an affable, hospitable crowd; and their hospitality was difficult to evade. They loved visitors and entertained them lavishly, and it would have taken a hard brute indeed to resist their advances. The trouble had started in the north, some years ago. Nobody was exactly sure when it had begun. Different travelers opined different reasons for its cause. Some favored the specter of unemployment and its attendant poverty; others waved the flag of continuing moral decli≠ others claimed power plants were responsible by insinuating noxious fumes into the air that warped the mind. "The world we know is disappearing," they ranted. "Not the final, sudden death we all envisaged, but a slow sinking to nothing." Squatting in the dirt, I felt none of this would ever touch me. I listened to their tales with the same ghoulish pleasure as I listened to my grandmother's tales of werewolves in the desert. It was said it had started as small groups of youths.Somethinghad happened to them. Perhaps it was just one group. Perhaps, once, on a street corner of a damp, dimly-lit city suburb, an essence strange and huge had reached out from somewhere and touched them, that first group. A catalyst to touch their boredom and their bitterness transforming it to a breathing, half-visible sentience. Oh yes, they changed. They became something like the werewolves my grandmother remembered tales of. Spurning the society that had bred them, rebelling totally, haunting the towns with their gaunt and drug-poisoned bodies; all night-time streets became places of fear. They dressed in strange uniforms to signify their groups, spitting obscenities upon the sacred cows of men, living rough in all the shunned places. The final act of outrage became their fornication amongst themselves amid the debris they had created. The name that they took for themselves was Wraeththu. To distConstantine, Storm is the author of 'Wraeththu The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit/the Bewitchments of Love and Hate/the Fulfilments of Fate and Desire/3 Books in 1', published 1993 under ISBN 9780312890001 and ISBN 0312890001.