How the tickling came to the world

[waterman]

A Grinnerverse tale​

Luciferyne had never known weight.
In the firmament where she had been born, at the dawn of time, her form was song, vision, living fire without matter. She moved through the spheres like thought before speech, like harmony before sound. She knew the motions of comets, the secrets of light filtering through clouds, the names of angels who do not speak and those who watch in silence over the newborn constellations.
When she dared to speak the question, Heaven fell silent.
It was not storm, nor lightning, nor shattering: it was a silence that nullified every other vibration of being.


“Why grant man freedom, only to condemn him for guilt?”
“Why give voice to desire, then command him to renounce it?”
“Why make him fragile, then judge him for his weakness?”

Her questioning was not received as thirst for justice, but as rebellion.
And the Word, the Almighty, He who shapes and unshapes without flaw, cast her down, into matter, into density, into the Earth.
The sky sealed behind her like a portal that would never again open.

**

The tower rose at the center of a wind-beaten plain, so tall it pierced the clouds. Its stone was older than any writing, and every slab bore the carved names of forgotten priests. It had been raised by hands guided by divine dreams, by men who had seen in vision a luminous form, a promise, a command.
Nimrod, the giant, had conceived it as a bridge between man and the Most High. But the gift received at its summit was neither word nor law. It was Luciferyne.
The fallen angel lay naked, stretched out in the center of the tower’s highest circular chamber, where the ceiling formed a dome of white gold and the corners radiated perpetual light.
Her body was immense and flawless, sexless but not without beauty. Her skin seemed carved from marble and animated by the breath of creation itself. Her wings, folded beneath her weight, spread out on either side like sacred mantles abandoned on the stone. Two horns, smooth as obsidian, jutted from her brow. Her mouth, a harmonious hollow groove within, seemed on the verge of uttering a mystery no one would ever understand.
She could not move.
Golden rings inlaid with incandescent runes bound her to the floor, fastening wrists, ankles, elbows, knees, neck, and the base of her wings. Each ring burned with the light of Law. They were divine words rendered as metal.
And in the silence, echoing like in a cathedral of the abyss, Luciferyne came to know the hunger of touch.
Not the hunger of carnal desire, which was not yet hers, but the absolute absence of sensation beyond thought, the longing to feel matter.

Then she heard footsteps.
A dozen men and women entered, led by a priest who pointed to the form she had taken in her fall to the world. They came from distant lands, as marked by their features, their fabrics, their hairstyles, but they moved as one body, stirred by a fervor instilled in them by their respective faiths, all guided by the word of the Creator known by many names in the far corners of the Earth. Their hands were bare. Their gazes, reverent. Each spoke in their own tongue, understood by none of the others. They knew only what they had to do, and that was enough.
Luciferyne did not understand at first.
They looked upon her body, and did not recoil.
They knelt.
And began to touch her.
The first brushed the hollow of her armpit with two fingers.
A woman traced a soft fingernail along the edge of her foot.
Another, slowly, placed his whole hand on her side, as if to test its consistency.
At first, it was only impulse.
A faint current, without a name.
But then, within her new flesh, a flame burst.
Luciferyne jolted, and laughter erupted from her throat like an unnatural sound, ancient as chaos itself.

“aaaaaaaahahahAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

Like a trickle that timidly begins to flow, only to gather courage and become a mighty torrent, so too did the faint crystalline sound from her immaculate vocal cords grow in strength, becoming a powerful, liberating outpouring of celestial joy.
She had never laughed.
And laughter was not joy.
It was compulsion.
It was spasm.
It was subtle, elegant, absolute torment.
The body would not obey.
It laughed.


She had studied human beings for a long time, God’s creation inspired by His mysterious purposes, had understood the happiness and suffering that passed through them, but she could not fathom how the two could intersect in a single phenomenon, the mirthful torment that shook her body.
Everything in her body laughed: belly, throat, legs, shoulders, belly again. When touched, control no longer belonged to her.
The tears came freely, warm, phosphorescent, falling in little cascades from her half-open eyes.
They were collected.
Vessels, amphorae, jars of pure glass were arranged at her sides. Her tears fell into them like sacred rain. No one paused.
And she laughed.
She laughed because she could do nothing else.
She laughed because that touch, light as prayer, had become a curse.
Inside, she screamed. But her voice was buried beneath the avalanche of laughter.
Every fiber of her being, which once bore light between galaxies, now strained to escape human touch.
But she could not.
Not anymore.
The seasons passed, but not for her.

**

Day and night chased each other across the high stained-glass windows of the sacred hall like beasts in an eternal dance, and each time the sun rose again, the hands returned with it.
The men and women were no longer the same, for time devoured mortals, but they were always ten, and always obedient.
Luciferyne could not know how much time had passed, whether months or centuries, for pain does not measure, and laughter, when imposed, devours all notion of time.
Every touch, every caress, every passage of fingers or feathers across her still-new skin was a storm without destruction, a hammer that does not shatter but sculpts endlessly.
These beings, small and fragile, who threw themselves upon her defenseless flesh, could not speak to each other or to her, but the exile from Paradise had learned to read the emotions in their eyes and the grimaces on their faces.
They were flattered by the outpouring of laughter that Luciferyne was forced to produce each time her feet, her sides, her armpits were assailed. They believed themselves instruments of God’s joy, and they continued, undeterred, in their merciless task.

“Stop... for the love of Him who is All... let this torment cease EHEHEHE!”

She tried to beg, but her vocal muscles ceased to obey as soon as the long, sharp nails of men and women assaulted her ribs, the soft soles of her feet, the defenseless smooth skin of her armpits.
Her mighty body thrashed even though bound by enchanted rings, her wings and breasts shaking like waves stirred by the wind — ten pairs of hands ceaselessly rubbing every stretch of that remarkable surface.

Something had changed in the world. Her laughter spread through the air and, reaching human hearts, infused them with newfound happiness. Her tears, carried to the homelands of her tormentors, were revealed to be miraculous elixirs steeped in vital force.

Now she understood God’s mockery. She had accused Him of not deigning to grant joy to His creations, and He had taken revenge by making her the very engine of their bliss.
She would laugh and weep for eternity, so that mankind might know happiness.

Lilith arrived on a winter evening, when the lights of sunset tinged the golden walls of the chamber with orange, and the runes on the rings shimmered with a faint languor, as if even they were growing weary of their duty.
She was young, or seemed so, with skin the color of ancient honey and eyes like wells of shadow. She said nothing, offered no name. But when her fingers touched the sole of the angel’s foot, they did not do so with the blind exactness of ritual.
They pulled back.
They hesitated.
Luciferyne, in the midst of another burst of laughter twisting her chest, sensed something.
A different intent.
A gaze that did not seek the miracle of tears, but understood the scourge that produced them.
Lilith did not avert her eyes.
She kept them on her, while the other officiants bowed and continued the ceremony.
Then, in the silence, something happened that no one had ever dared.
Lilith gathered a tear between two fingers.
She did not take it to the jar.
She knelt beside the angel’s arm, where the sacred ring, inscribed with the unpronounceable name of the God, pulsed with living light.
And with the tip of that tear, she drew a small mark upon the central rune.
The seal trembled.
It did not break, but it wavered.
Luciferyne felt it, like a claw loosening around her heart.
A breath crossed her ribs. Not a sigh, not a moan: a call of being, a distant echo of freedom.
Lilith looked at Luciferyne, and said nothing. But the angel understood.
Not through words, which between them were impossible, but through the gaze, the silence, the act.
Something had changed.

The next night, the ceremony resumed.
The new officiants arranged themselves in a circle. The hands rose. The fingers drew near.
Luciferyne laughed.
As always.
But that laughter was different.
Inside her, an arm reached out.
The metal yielded.
The runes crackled.
And then it broke.
Not with a clang, not with a burst of light: with a sound like rain upon glass, the ring shattered.
A purple storm erupted from nothingness, thunderous. Violet lightning flashed in all directions. The tears the angel had wept for so long now the sky returned without restraint.

Her arm sprang upward, and the right wing unfurled — colossal, glorious, like a storm unchained.
With it came the wind.
Human bodies flew backward like leaves.
The hands that had touched became flesh to be shattered.
Luciferyne rose to her feet, naked, majestic, her face streaked with tears and her mouth still curved in a laugh turning into a scream.
She struck.
Not with wrath. With justice.
The priests, the faithful, the guardians: they were felled one by one, like statues struck by an invisible earthquake.
The tower trembled.
Only one figure remained still.
Lilith.
Luciferyne stared at her.
Her eyes blazed, the feathers of her body bristled like thorns.
But she did not strike.
She lifted her.
Set her on her shoulder, like a companion, like a witness.
And she spread her wings wide.

From below, a mighty sound rose.
The noise of shattered bricks.
The roar of broken stone.
Nimrod.
The builder, the giant who had raised the tower to challenge the heavens, was climbing, through the rain and violet thunder.
He had seen the light change at the tower’s peak.
He had heard the laughter turn into a scream.
Now he came to claim what he believed was a gift from his god.
Luciferyne saw his massive form ascending with blind force, and she recognized him.
He had desired the tower.
He had longed for the angel’s presence.
He had built the throne of her prison.

And she chose her vengeance.

She descended in a circle above him, and with hands light as mist, she touched his body.
A finger beneath his armpit.
Another along his side.
A caress across his bare ribs.
Nimrod, the invincible, the dominator, came to know laughter.
Not the laughter of triumph.
The laughter of defeat.
The one born when the body no longer belongs to you.
The one that dissolves all dignity.

The laughter that Luciferyne had long breathed into mankind had passed her own weakness to them. Now their bodies of flesh had learned fear when their softest parts were subjected to precise, merciless assault. A mere touch to the neck, beneath the arms, at the sides, on the soles of the feet, could provoke disproportionate defensive reactions. Accompanied by laughter that meant to communicate anything but joy or satisfaction.

The giant was bewildered by the sensation he had not yet experienced himself.
Years of torment inflicted upon her flesh had taught Luciferyne how to replicate the same suffering. Her angelic fingers, with unnatural agility, seemed to shrink for the sole purpose of better reaching the softest spots of the climber.

“Ah ah... angel of the Lord, you are ours, ours oh oh oh!”

he found himself threatening and giggling at once.
Luciferyne’s fingers grew ever more slender to better reach the tender hollows beneath his arms. It was a tickling of unnatural speed, one that knew how to torment every nerve ending, how to exploit every weakness.

“Laugh, foolish human! Laugh, as I laugh at you now!”

His legs lost their grip.
His hold gave way.
His fingers opened.
And the body fell.


Luciferyne watched him plummet.
She did not scream.
She did not exult.
Then she turned.
Lilith was still upon her shoulder.
She touched her face with two fingers, with the same delicacy she had once known in torment.

“Lilith of the storms, you shall be my bride, and together we shall give birth to a new lineage.
Your heart and my power will mingle with the human race.
And we shall see whether God’s creation will freely choose Good or Evil.”

They flew off, toward the horizon, and behind them, the dawn.