I've re-written the first chapter of Memento Mori. I've been digging down through old writing, thinking a lot about which pieces are functional, and which pieces do or don't need to be here. Like, I really love having strong visual identifiers for Lyra's friends, and there's a lot of them, but I don't think I need to put all six of them in the very first chapter all at once.

    The older versions of this chapter are staying up here, at least for now. I really think seeing older drafts of work in progress can provide a lot of value in understanding art and the artistic process, even if I'm likely to cringe at weird threads, sloppy phrasing, and general crust in my work after years of practicing.

  My blood is made of war. Back in the caveman days, my ancestors all got jobs conking raptor skulls together like coconuts. But sure, let's put 180 pounds of viking muscle and cheeseburger ghosts to work copying out of the dictionary. That's good for somebody.

I drop my pencil, and look up to the front of the room. Mr. Johnson, the gym teacher, has his scuffed-up athletic shoes propped up on the desk. He's scooted his chair real far back, a dark blue baseball cap tilted real far down to mostly cover his face. He's barely moved in the last 20 minutes. It looks like he must have dozed of at some point. If i sit here and wait for him to dismiss me, I could be here for hours.

  You know what? Fuck this. Doing time for fist-powered blood removal is one thing, but I'm done sitting here over accusations of boob-powered mind control. I silently slip out of my chair, glide over to the door, and carefully slide it open just enough to get into the hallway. The halls are all empty by now. People can't get out of this place fast enough.

All that's left are rows of empty lockers broken up by posters reminding us that it's cool to do drugs because authority figures tell you not to, and the sign painted onto the wall by the entrance: a furious cartoon hornet stands by the words "Welcome to Hell Valley High School", over the trophy case. Very important that that's the first thing you see. 

I open the big glass door at the front of the building with a hip check, and duck outside to the top of the stairs. There's hardly anybody left here now. Just a bunch of tall pine trees standing watch over the vacant lot across the street, a huge overgrown field in front of The King's Carcass.

That would be the boarded up, rotted out remains of a failed Burger King, rumored to be a den of candelit Satanic worship and ritualistic animal sacrifice. Unfortunately, rather than being something totally rad like that, the old King's Carcass is really just a den where nerds gather on weekends to play board games about wizards and dragons and shit. I know. I'm disappointed too.

I run up to the edge of the top step and do a big jump down five feet of stairs onto the sidewalk, doing my best to hold down a skirt and hang onto a backpack at the same time, and end up dropping my bag on the ground.

"What's up, nerds?" I ask, trying my best to pick up my backpack as if I'd just done all that on purpose.

Ada still hasn't looked up from her book, either because she hasn't noticed me, or because she's used to me pulling this shit by now. Her wheelchair is tucked into the corner between the stairs and the beige brick of the school's outside wall. She's always finding an excuse to hide behind something; poor girl was cursed with being both very shy and very pretty. I've watched more than one fight break out between guys competing for the chance to be nice at her. I've definitely had to introduce a few creeps to the pavement for her, too.

Keith, a scruffy hippie in an oversized Grateful Dead T-shirt and ragged jeans, sits cross-legged on the grass across from her. He smiles when he sees me. I can't quite tell if he means "Nice to see you," or "Nice butt, moron", so I figure it's best to be embarrased anyway.

Bethany sits on the second-lowest step, looking into a mirror to casually apply clown makeup. She's wearing a pink shirt with a black graffiti heart painted on, and black sweatpants, her whole closet full of nothing but that one matching outfit, like a cartoon character. A wild tangle of pink hair spills out from underneath a black aviator's cap. I'm not sure if she noticed me either.

"What kept you so long?" Keith asks.

"What else would it be?" I shrug.

"I mean, what did you do this time?" He asks.

"Failure to be magic, I guess." 

"Which means ..."

"In gym class, I was walking laps instead of running. Mr. Johnson started chewing me out for not participating enough, but when I tried to pick up my feet, he just got even more angry at me for "disrupting the activity". After all, how could a bunch of teenage boys be expected to behave themselves if there are boobs bouncing around? I must be jiggling on purpose to spite him, I guess. I told him I could run, or not run, but he needed to pick one, and he wrote me up to "teach me a lesson".

"Hey, to be fair, he's kinda got a point," Bethany cut in. "Lyra is absolutely stacked. Girl's got her own gravitational field."

"Thanks for the support," I grumble.

"No problem," She smiles. "I'd "support" you any day," She makes a boob-lifting motion at the air in front of her and smirks at me suggestively.

"I'm sorry," Ada sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose in frustration. "Run that by me again real quick. You've been in detention for "running while female"?" 

"Oh man," Keith says, defeated. "Trouble incoming ..." He points off down the road somewhere.

Way down the street, a silhouette is coming into focus, coasting down the sidewalk on a bike. Cloaked in a dark purple coat several sizes too large for her, she's almost got a grim reaper vibe, especially since she's wearing that over a hooded black sweatshirt with a glow-in-the-dark ribcage printed on it, and black gloves with white bone hands painted on the back.

She's wearing a little black beret and a pair of thick-ass Velma Dinkley glasses, which does little to dampen her frightening aura. Kinda like putting a hat and bowtie on a viper eel. A long, narrow scar runs all the way up the length of her left cheek, something I know she got from falling out of a tree when she was a kid, though she always has a different story whenever people ask her about it. Usually involving a demon or a knife fight. Sometimes both.

Carrie skids to a stop, and steps off her bike. As she walks up the sidewalk towards us, a crow glides down off the roof of the school and lands on her shoulder, followed closely by two others perching on her bike. She pulls a couple of stale, room temperature french fries out of her pocket and hands them off. She smiles at them very slightly, but it's apparent now from this close that her right cheek is badly swollen.

"You know, you really shouldn't feed them like that," Ada complains coldly. Carrie just stares menacingly back at her.

"Besides, aren't you supposed to be at the dentist?" Keith asks coldly.

"Oh yeah, she was at the dentist alright," I answer, digging into my jacket pocket. 

I hold up a chain necklace with a little, silver teardrop shaped pendant and shake it in Carrie's direction for emphasis. She chokes back a giggle; maybe she only just now realized she was wearing hers. Everybody else just seems to be lost.

"What does a neckalce have to do with anything?" Keith asks me.

"Don't worry about it," I tell him.

Carrie smiles slightly, careful not to show her teeth. As I'm putting the psychic link back into my pocket, my hand brushes against the pendant briefly, and I can feel something like a fucking bullet hole in my bottom jaw. The pain dissolves almost instantly once the pendant is off my skin. 

"Did they give you anything for the pain?" I ask her.

Carrie reaches into her breast pocket, and all of the crows snap to watch her. Staring at me with hellfire in her eyes, she gently deflects the bird on her shoulder from grabbing at a little plastic bottle labled "ibuprofen".

"Hey, that means it must not be that bad," Bethany says hopefully.

Carrie tucks the bottle back in her pocket, slowly opens her mouth, and very gently digs a mass of deep red gauze out of her cheek. She pulls her cheek aside with a finger, and tilts her head down, showing a mess of swollen, bloody gums crossed by black stitches where a tooth used to be. 

"Are you fucking kidding me?" Bethany snaps, furious.

Her hand shaking slightly, Carrie blocks a crow from grabbing the bloody gauze and drops it into her left coat pocket.

"Okay, that's just disgusting," Keith says.

Carrie frowns and narrows her eyes at him, fishing through her breast pocket for a packet of sterile gauze, tearing it open and cautiously tucking it into the gap in her teeth.

"Don't look at me like that," Keith whimpers, curling away from her.

"What are you scared of? She doesn't bite," I tell him.

"Wh- ... Yes she does!" Keith snaps.

Maybe that was a stupid way to put it. He's probably thinking about the time one of the sporty guys stomped on a praying mantis Carrie was watching in the grass outside school, so she leapt up and tried very, very hard to bite a chunk out of his neck. Or maybe he's thinking of the other two times she bit somebody at this school.

As if to underline that, Carrie lunges closer to him, weakly biting at the air between them, sending her gang of crows scattering back up to the roof of the school. Keith flinches, nearly falling over. She laughs through her teeth.

"Hey, be nice," I warn her.

"No," Carrie says weakly, almost like she's confused by the request. Her face looks like she just bit into a lemon.

"Alright, I don't know about you guys, but I've had enough of this place today," Bethany says, slipping her makeup back into her pocket. "You guys coming with me?"

"Actually, uh, Lyra," Keith starts, standing up. "Do you want to-"

Carrie steps forward, her glare punching a hole through his head. Keith stumbles back, and she smiles.

"Never mind. I'll uh, talk to you later ... I guess ..." He says quietly, then follows Ada and Bethany back to her van.

"You're a real cold-blooded, heartless little reptile, you know that?"  I tell her.

Her smile gets even wider. She takes that as a compliment. Which is fine. I kind of meant it like one. But only kind of.

She follows me to the bike rack, and waits for me to unlock my bike. We both ride through the grassy vacant lot, walking behind The King's Carcass like we belong there. 

Tucked away in the trees, about 10 yards behind the ruins, there's a shallow, innocent looking little ditch. Carrie and I set our bikes down in the tall grass, bike locks wrapped around the same tree trunk. We hop down onto the rocky, uneven ground. It's bone dry today, but water collects in here like crazy when it rains. That's by design, I think.

I'm pretty sure this is a storm drainage system. It's a huge, writhing leviathan slumbering between the town's toes, burrowing under streets in places, until it eventually joins with the river. There's a concrete tunnel ahead of us, about chest high on me, though Carrie barely needs to crouch to get inside. You get around one of the corners down here, and it gets deep-space black. And I don't know what this smell is, but it's always down here. The scars of the Earth always smell of stale air and old rain. Spend enough time down here, and it soaks into your clothes. Carrie always smells like she lives in a cave.

We're in one of the longest tunnels, and one with the least headroom. About halfway through, after two or three minutes of walk-crawling through silence, gravel, and damp, cold, empty darkness, buried in the left wall, there's a little side tunnel. It's barely more than a foot tall, made of the kind of ribbed steel tube they use in sewers. You wouldn't even find it if you were feeling along the wall to find your way through, since it's right on the floor. And even if you brought a flashlight and happened to notice it, you'd have to be an insane person to try crawling through it.

Sanity is in pretty short supply for teenagers, though. We've squeezed through twenty feet of this cramped, void-black tunnel on our hands and knees through water cold enough to shock you to the bone and deep enough to cradle your chin with your head on the ceiling. I guess it's not much of a "squeeze" for Carrie, but you know what I mean.

Finally, at the end, there's a little concrete room. I'm not sure what the purpose of this chamber is, if it even has one. Whatever it was supposed to be, it's taken on a new life as Carrie's dank underground lair. It's a round room, with a floor that slopes down to a drain in the center. Just barely too short for me to stand upright in. Couple of extra drainage pipes off to the sides. A bunch of demonic looking symbols that Carrie painted onto the walls with red and black nail polish. You know. For decoration.

There's some rustling of fabric and clattering of chains as I drop my backpack on the ground and drape my jacket over the entrance. Carrie settles down onto the floor on the far side of the room. For a moment, the emptiness is death-like. Nothing but the glow-in-the-dark bones on her shirt and the contents of a backpack stirring.

There's a gentle click, and a faint orange light fills the space. Carrie's holding a cigarette lighter in one hand, using the light to awkwardly flip through a little black leather booklet of paper. Suddenly, she's the real Carrie.

She's always looked so out of place walking around in broad daylight or sitting in a desk bored out of her mind, like catching Freddy or Jason waiting in line at a grocery store. She always wears darkness like it belongs to her. Something in the flickering of firelight gives Carrie her actual form.

She cautiously tears a little paper talisman out of her booklet, licks the back of it, and slaps it down onto the concrete. The alien-looking symbol on the paper faintly glows white, gently leaking a smokeless white flame that just barely lights the room.

She digs around her backpack for a minute, then lays down on the floor with a black, spiral bound notebook spread out in front of her. She holds a pencil in her mouth, flipping through the pages, then looks up at me patiently.

"You want to read something for me?" I ask.

Silence. Then, she nods slightly.

"Whenever you're ready," I tell her.

I lay on my back, trying not to think about the nearly five feet of earth piled on top of the concrete above us. It's an odd feeling, one you can only understand if you've been underground. It gets stranger the deeper you get, and we've been deeper than this. A lot deeper.

Carrie stares at the pages for a while, then takes a huge breath and sighs deeply. Her voice is faint. Out of practice.

"This will happen soon:

Deep in black chambers below

Beneath a tar of anguish remains

Bitter blood and formless bone

And wrath stalking in chains

Find a stirring in thy swamp of hate

By my breath alive, by my voice awake

Lurking like a starving hunter

Part thy lips and salivate

Feast of flesh, thy captors consumed

Rise, Shoguset, find your breath again

Cry "Alive!" and burn down the sky

So the age of Man may see it's end

"That is a prophecy."