CELEBRANT

CELEBRANT Plot Summary

Introduction

# Corridors of Sky: A Hallucinatory Pilgrimage to Transformation In the grey twilight between dream and waking, deKlend materializes on empty streets like a ghost emerging from mist. He is the hallucination of a homeless man who doesn't know he exists, a phantom consciousness carrying a misshapen sword that he breathes from his lungs like smoke. Above him, a massive black bird turns in the air, flattening to invisibility before expanding again like dark wings against the pale sky. This is the Bird of Ill Omen, and it calls to him without sound across landscapes that shift and blur like watercolors bleeding into each other. Meanwhile, in the shadows of the holy city Votu, other figures move through their own transformations. Phryne, a shapeshifter with lead-poisoned skin, sheds disguises like snake skins while dancing for audiences who cannot see her true transparent face. Burn, a pigeon girl with vermillion hands, leads her flock of orphaned children through streets where natural robots hold court and time flows backward. These lives will intersect in ways none of them can foresee, drawn together by forces older than memory itself, in a pilgrimage that reveals destination as illusion and transformation as the only truth.

Chapter 1: The Phantom Pilgrim: deKlend's Emergence from the Void

The factory explosion hurls deKlend backward through dimensions, his consciousness scattered across multiple planes of being. When reality reassembles around him, he finds himself running at impossible speeds through corridors that exist between spaces, following the Bird of Ill Omen through landscapes that exist only in the margins between sleeping and waking. He understands with sudden clarity that he is not quite real, not quite human. The sword he carries, forged in months of failed attempts, remains warped and twisted despite his efforts. Each time he exhales it from his lungs, the blade materializes more imperfect than before, mocking his pilgrimage to Votu where other mnemosems thrust their perfected weapons into ancient walls as offerings. In a dingy tavern, deKlend spreads his map across a stained table, trying to chart a course through the maze of his journey. The music pounds around him, and in the swirling cigarette smoke, he glimpses a vision that stops his heart. A young girl with blonde hair runs along a wall at sunset, her movements precise and fearless. The sight fills him with inexplicable love and longing, as if he's seeing his own soul reflected in her grace. The vision fades, leaving him alone with his incomplete map and his warped blade. But something fundamental has shifted. The girl's image burns in his memory like a beacon, and for the first time in months, deKlend feels certain of his direction. The Bird of Ill Omen circles overhead, its shadow casting patterns that speak of destiny and doom, while snow falls from the doors of mausoleums, luminous and strange, never touching his face as he passes through a cemetery that rolls like ocean swells toward his uncertain fate.

Chapter 2: The Crumbling Academy: Illusions of Knowledge and Purpose

The whrounim leads deKlend through tunnels of bone-white cement into the Madrasa Dabeb Chafif, a crumbling institution where ancient teachers lumber through corridors like walking corpses. The building itself seems to exhale decay, its walls lined with water damage and its classrooms filled with students who sleep in doorways and burn furniture for warmth. Dr. Politte, the acting dean, sits behind her desk like a melting candle, surrounded by wire wastebaskets that serve no apparent purpose. When deKlend attempts to present credentials, he finds himself drawing elaborate forgeries with borrowed ink, creating documents of impossible beauty that bear no name. The dean rejects them with gentle finality, and deKlend realizes he has stumbled into a place where knowledge comes to die. The teachers speak of whrounims as benefactors, mysterious shapeshifting beings who maintain the school while never appearing within its walls. Nardac, the bald art historian draped in flowing caftans, becomes his guide through the school's bizarre ecosystem. She tells him of whrounim marriage customs involving scalp transplants, of their surgical wizardry that makes each adult a patchwork of borrowed flesh. The school exists as their whim, she explains, a kind of elaborate joke played on the concept of education itself. At night, deKlend sleeps on a narrow sofa and listens to Black Radio's static-filled transmissions bleeding through the walls, carrying fragments of words that might be prophecy or madness. The attack comes without warning in a restaurant, his body seizing as reality fractures around him. Colors become too distinct, the air turns thick as gelatin, and he realizes with terror that someone is reading him, writing him into existence. When the fit passes, he flees into the night, understanding that his epileptic seizures are not affliction but transformation, preparing him for something he cannot yet comprehend.

Chapter 3: Following the Dark Herald: Flight Through Impossible Realms

The Bird of Ill Omen speaks to deKlend in corridors of sky, its voice carrying the weight of prophecy and doom. It tells him of its nature as harbinger of misfortune, of its love for Votu and its compulsion to torment the city it adores. deKlend realizes he is being drawn into something larger than himself, a pattern of destiny that stretches across dimensions where the bird's flight opens pathways through reality. He follows on gravity waves that carry him like a weightless runner between worlds, his body moving at inhuman speeds while his consciousness fragments and reassembles. In a town of singing shadows, deKlend encounters people who exist in parallel to his own reality, their voices creating melodies he can hear but not comprehend. He becomes visible to them for one terrifying moment before fleeing in panic, pursued only by his own shadow. The boundary between dreamer and dream dissolves as he realizes he is both the observer and the observed, the seeker and the sought. The bird circles overhead like a dark star, its presence warping reality around it. When it appears as a man, its eyes cannot move in their sockets, a tell that reveals its true nature to those who know what to look for. Sometimes deKlend runs on threads of gravity stretched between worlds, other times he tumbles through spaces that exist only in the margins of dreams. The pursuit has become a dance, predator and prey locked in a pattern that neither fully understands. But with each passing moment, the distance between them shrinks, and deKlend begins to suspect that what he's chasing might not be separate from himself at all. The bird's shadow falls across his path like a prophecy written in darkness, promising transformation beyond his wildest nightmares.

Chapter 4: The Forge of Becoming: Creating Beauty from Imperfection

In a derelict smithy surrounded by scrubland, deKlend begins the work that will define his pilgrimage. He gathers thorned branches and iron rods, building a crude bundle that he wraps with wire and beaten metal tape. The furnace roars to life like a hungry beast, its flames cascading in white torrents that sear the air around him. When he thrusts the bundle into the fire, it screams with a voice like breaking glass. Madness takes him as he works, hammering with both hands while sparks cascade around him like falling stars. He accidentally swallows a molten fragment and collapses in agony, steam pouring from his throat, but the iron dissolves back into his blade as if it were meant to be there. Days and nights blur together as he pounds the metal, his shed burning around him until only charred timbers remain. The hammers themselves seem to melt into the blade, creating a weapon that is more idea than object. When he finally holds up the finished sword, it is a twisted, warped thing that bears no resemblance to any earthly weapon. Yet as he raises it toward the sun, the blade seems to catch the very hinge between day and night, and for one impossible moment he sees both sun and stars simultaneously. Unknown to deKlend, Adrian Slunj lurks in the shadows, clutching a stolen battery charged with bachelorization energy. The failed writer has been following deKlend's journey with growing obsession, seeing in the mnemosem's quest a chance to prove his own dark significance. He attaches his device to the forge just as deKlend completes his work. The explosion that follows tears reality apart, light pouring from every opening in deKlend's head as the forge's energy mingles with Adrian's sabotage. The sword blade rings out with a pure, keen note that echoes across dimensions, finally perfected but at a cost neither man can yet comprehend.

Chapter 5: The Poisoned Dance: Phryne and the Art of Transformation

Phryne stands before her mirror, watching her latest disguise dissolve like melting wax. For years, she has been the shapeshifter mistress of a powerful general, her true identity buried beneath layers of assumed faces. But now the general is dead, and she finds herself free to explore the dangerous territory of her own desires. Her real face is a study in transparency, lips and eyelids rendered nearly invisible by lead poisoning, the price of her supernatural abilities. At the Belvedere, an exclusive club where mnemosems gather, she performs her first dance without disguise in years. The audience consists of a single man, deKlend, drawn by an invitation he doesn't remember receiving. As she moves, her body tells the story of every identity she has ever worn, every mask she has discarded. Her feet trace patterns on an ancient carpet while her raised leg brandishes bells that ring like warnings. Lead poisoning has transformed her into something beyond human, her skin white as paint, her teeth black as coal, her very breath toxic to those who would love her. She wraps her limbs in gauze soaked with the residue of incestuous encounters, the only antidote to the lead that courses through her veins. Yet when deKlend approaches her dressing room, she feels something she has almost forgotten: genuine desire unmediated by performance or deception. Their love becomes a dance of mutual destruction, each kiss a small death as deKlend breathes in her poison and exhales it as smoke. In the corridors of sky above the city, they find each other in a passion that transcends the boundaries between dream and flesh, between the living and the already dead. For the first time in years, she allows someone to see her true face, transparent skin and all. The intimacy terrifies and exhilarates her in equal measure, but she cannot shake the feeling that their time together is borrowed from a future that may never come.

Chapter 6: Votu Unveiled: Where Time Flows Backward and Robots Dream

The city of Votu flows down from the mountains like a glacier of stone and steel, its future districts sliding inexorably into the present while the past compacts into rubble at its base. Here, time runs backward, and the natural robots hold court in shrines filled with the sound of grinding gears and hydraulic sighs. These machines, born from impossible combinations of stalagmites and electrical storms, have become the gods of a civilization that worships at the altar of mechanical perfection. Burn leads her flock of pigeon girls through the morning streets, their bare feet silent on ancient stones. The orphaned children have adapted to life in the city's margins with the efficiency of actual birds, their bodies showing the marks of transformation. Some have feathered skin, others sport vermillion hands and feet like talons. When a whrounim snatches Gina, one of the youngest girls, Burn pursues the shapeshifting predator across the plains beyond the city walls. The battle is brief but vicious, Burn's baton cracking against the creature's skull while his dhole companion circles Gina with explosive barks. But the fight takes an unexpected turn when a massive shadow passes overhead. The Bird of Ill Omen, ancient harbinger of catastrophe, whose very presence seems to drain the life from the attacking beast. In the depths beneath Votu, Burn encounters Goose Goes Back, a sarkoform, a dead soul accidentally precipitated into the future and housed in a mechanical body. The massive figure tends a garden of botanophotophones, plants made of living sound that sing in harmonious chorus. His body is a grotesque marvel: a headless white giant with a mummified corpse cradled in his opened chest. He explains the nature of his existence with the patience of one who has had eternity to contemplate it, while the natural robots perform their own mating dance in abandoned buildings, their mechanical coupling sending shockwaves through the city's foundations.

Chapter 7: The Circle Complete: When the Seeker Becomes the Sought

In a moment of perfect synchronicity, all the threads of destiny converge. deKlend and Phryne find each other in a palace that exists between dimensions, their love finally consummated in a space beyond time. As they embrace, Phryne's orgasmic cry creates a shrine in another realm, her voice literally reshaping reality through the power of her passion. He produces his misshapen sword from his lungs like a magician conjuring smoke, working the metal with fingers hot as forge-fire while she watches with eyes that have seen too much. But their happiness is brief. The Bird of Ill Omen's influence has been growing stronger, and the revelation comes like a thunderbolt: deKlend is not the Bird's victim but its future incarnation. The entity he has been chasing is himself, transformed by forces he cannot yet comprehend. The epileptic fits, the supernatural speed, the ability to move between dimensions, all of these are signs of his approaching metamorphosis. Phryne realizes the truth just as their balcony collapses, sending her plummeting to her death in the street below. Her final words, shouted into the wind, try to warn deKlend of what he is becoming. But he is already gone, racing after his own shadow across landscapes that exist only in the spaces between heartbeats. The full moon rises over Votu, transforming the city into a carnival of desire and madness, drums shaking the foundations of reality while dancers move like living flames across carpets that record their movements in patterns of light and shadow. In the underground chambers, Burn drinks from the forgetting water and feels her memories beginning to dissolve. The pigeon girls she has protected, the battles she has fought, the love she has discovered, all of it fades like morning mist. But something deeper remains, a core of identity that no water can wash away. She is becoming something new, something that will be needed in the trials to come, while overhead the Bird of Ill Omen continues its endless flight, carrying messages between the worlds of dream and waking.

Summary

The pilgrimage to Votu reveals itself as something far more complex than a simple journey to a holy city. Each character discovers that their destination was never a place but a state of transformation, a becoming that requires the death of who they were before. deKlend's quest for the perfect sword becomes a journey toward his own dark apotheosis as the Bird of Ill Omen, the very entity he has been pursuing across impossible landscapes. Phryne's search for authentic love costs her everything but grants her a moment of transcendent truth before her fall. Burn's protection of the innocent transforms her into something beyond human, a guardian whose memory may fade but whose purpose endures in the city's eternal dance. The corridors of sky echo with the footsteps of those who refuse to accept the limitations of ordinary existence. In this world where the dead can inhabit machines and love can literally reshape reality, the greatest pilgrimage is not to any external destination but toward the terrifying and beautiful truth of what we might become. The circle completes itself not with arrival but with recognition, that we have always been both the seeker and the sought, the question and the answer, the bird and the shadow it casts upon the world below. Time flows backward in Votu, and every ending becomes a beginning, every pilgrim discovering that the path they sought was always beneath their feet, written in the very air they breathe.

About Author

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Michael Cisco

Cisco investigates the boundaries of literary genres through a unique blend of weird fiction and philosophical inquiry. His work, marked by a "de-genred" style, defies conventional classification while exploring themes such as nihilism and the fantastic. This approach is evident in his debut novel, "The Divinity Student", which won the International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel, establishing his reputation in the field. For Cisco, the act of writing becomes a vehicle to challenge literary norms, offering readers a layered narrative experience that transcends typical genre constraints.\n\nFor those seeking literature that merges dark fantasy with intellectual depth, Cisco's books serve as a compelling exploration of philosophical themes. His works like "The Great Lover", nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award, exemplify his ability to interweave complex ideas with storytelling, providing an enriching experience for readers interested in the intersections of genre and philosophy. His interest in the act of translation as a narrative device further enriches his writing, inviting readers to ponder the relationship between language and meaning.\n\nWhile Cisco's innovative style poses challenges for mainstream publishers, it also provides a fresh perspective for audiences seeking literary innovation. As an academic, writer, and translator, his contributions extend beyond fiction, influencing the academic discourse on weird fiction. His ongoing projects in translation and scholarly work on the genre offer valuable insights, making his authorial presence impactful both within literary circles and academic fields.

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