(and the Wyvern said--)
A beast as dangerous as myself has no fear of people or places, and thus is free to sleep anywhere. But I care for the wellbeing of my collection more than I care for myself, so I choose my lairs very carefully. Security, a lack of vermin (human and otherwise), inaccessability, distance from high-traffic areas, not too damp and not too dry... This is because the material must remain on paper, in all its frailty--living memory and digital memory both have failings too excessive to serve this purpose.

The codices are the heart of the collection--a dozen handwritten volumes, hardcover and made as tough as possible. Periodically, the writings are allowed to shed their paper skins like snakes and are recopied into young, fresh books. The old ones are always burned to powder, along with the smudges and stains that they have acquired throughout their lives.

I read through everything periodically in order to ensure that I have the keenest memory of them. As a bookmark, I use an antique rosary made of silver with Hail Maries of faceted garnets and Worlds Without End of oblong pearls. This I stole from a man who deserved to be one of us, but who chose to give his Art to God. For that crime, I cursed him and have forgotten his name, but for the sake of his brilliance I let him keep his life.

The pages of these books are an organized chaos, spines straining against the notes and scraps and photos that swell within them. To the casual eye, it must look like random clutter, but I have actually put great effort into proper filing. It's simply a fact that too many of my materials--smudged notes on looseleaf, yellowed newspaper clippings, old photos--are not neat and tidy themselves.

I am confident that a collection as extensive and exhaustive as mine exists nowhere else in the world. Perhaps there would be more like it if we Artists had not allowed ourselves to become complacent at a crucial time. I, too, was guilty of letting priceless gems slip through my fingers--so many now are lost and will never be found again.

In the beginning, those who would become [her] disciples bathed freely in the words that flowed from [her] hidden source, leaked out over a wide network of eager mouths whispering to eager ears. Though the greater part of humanity remained blissfully ignorant of [her], those who sought could still find [her] with little trouble. There were many dark places that cradled the endless repetition of [her] litanies and scriptures. The oral tradition began to appear in writing, transcribed into prison tattoos and spiral notebooks, flickering in lines on dim computer screens. It was in that time of plenty that those like myself became accustomed to the taste of [her], as a child knows its mother's milk and a gourmand remembers a fine wine. Diluted or degraded, heard fourth or fifth or sixth hand, half-forgotten--it matters little, for those who have learned the flavor can never mistake the words that are truly [hers]. Such innate knowing is a mark of our number, for it came to pass that only those who were able to separate truth from lies could remain faithful to [her]. All the others became lost and confused after the end of the fruitful days, and in their blindness they wandered away in pursuit of other glories.

This is why I am a king among the faithful, a warrior priest whose words demand obedience. I hold the highest concentration of [her] scriptures in the world, hoarded like dragons' gold. These treasures I wrested from hands clenched in death and tongues that were soon ripped from screaming mouths; every drop I have rescued and now keep for myself, protecting it against the foolish and profane. While I am alive, I will tolerate no heresies or schisms among us. My authority is unmistakable--if I let [her] golden words fall from my lips, then no Artist could fail to recognize the truth. We know the sound, like the hum of a plucked thread deep within the gut, where the beast lives in every man. I possess words that few have ever heard, and as the days pass, I bring more and more into the fold. Once, my dream was to hold [her] gospel in its entirety; I had no ambition beyond that of a faithful chronicler.

But everything changed when [she] died, and confusion descended as we sought the source and found only the repeated echo of old fragments rattling like a scream against bare walls. Suddenly, there was nothing more.

Because of this, I became the monster to rule all monsters, for the preservation of the truth began to require more and more violence and control. As the years passed and a hierarchy of master Artists arose from among those who had loved [her], a new reason to fight appeared...

It was necessary to decide who would continue the gospel that [she] had left behind.

So much had been left unfinished by [her] death; even I faced a maddening frustration as I read and reread tracts without endings, knowing that there had never been any more than what I had before me. We saw that there could be no progress, no further evolution, while we bent ourselves to merely scratching in the dust for lost shreds of [her] perfection. Our kind needed another to fill [her] place, one with strength equal to [hers].

This is not to say that fools have not tried before to end what [she] began, producing patchwork scrawls beneath mention. Artists of my standing know that such offenses must be punished by death, and we scramble to prove our devotion by taking the most heretic heads.

Ours is a way of violence, elegantly simple, and so all problems are solved by killing. In determining the successor of [Ching] (how that name runs over my tongue like sweet wine), it was decided in the hearts of all united to take a democratic approach. Each casts his votes with bullets or fists, or with the terrified silence of vermin trembling in the hawk's shadow. The last one left with the will to fight all comers will be the winner.

All hearts mourn [her], but we cannot languish in sorrow forever. The future rises at last to devour history. And in this battle, I will have few rivals--whose knowledge is as vast as mine, whose wealth of precious words is greater? I have fought the battle already in my long search for those fragments that had felt the touch of [her] mind and hands, and now there are none to stand against me.

(Except, says my secret heart, except perhaps for--)

(The Wyvern says--)
This city is dark, spreading like a stain on a barren landscape, cold even in the sunlight. No one comes here in search of light and warmth, and this is why the people walk with their faces turned downward, fearing the eyes of others. To have a name and a face is to be stripped of armor before the crowds; to be known by no one is a comfort.

I am a beast that walks like a man, carrying hooked talons and spreading wings. Like a Goat, my horns point upwards to assault Heaven. Everyone has heard my name, and no one who has seen my face will forget it. This is only one reason why I leave so many dead behind me. And yet, I am braver than the masses because I could hide myself away and yet I choose not to. People like me do not appear on the evening news, but word of us spreads like a ghost, infecting the minds of all who know fear.

How many of us are there? No one can know that. You come to learn the names of your fellows by the patterns left in their wake--the names and images that they scrawl in broken phonebooths, chipped into the plaster on the corners of old warehouses. It becomes like a familiar scent suspended in the air. If you find a track that is newer than the others, then you can be somewhat sure that the one you know is still alive. This is about as close to the others as many of us get.

It would be nice to say that we are thousands, like a teeming city hiding beneath the eyes of the law, but such thoughts are too optimistic. We are in the hundreds, if not the dozens. Far too often, other killers are listed among our ranks whose names and marks we have never seen on the walls that we know, and whose brutality lacks that flash of inspiration that is as familiar to us as breathing.
----------------
(Retsuka says--)
I prefer the rooftops to the sidewalks. The roofs are where our people keep their highways (literally). Anyone not in an A/C maintenance suit or with the sullen look of a construction worker is one of us. It's funny to watch for the kinds of people that travel up here--killers, heroes, gangsters, angels in disguise. Yesterday, I waved at some lone wolf who was jumping the tenement alleyways across the street; he was so shocked at being noticed that he almost missed his mark.

That's a terrible thing to contemplate, for some of our people. You can't go falling down amid the average rabble. It's a horrible end, even if you survive it. I take care of that fear by going down on my own and mingling with everyone else on the same street corners and subway cars that they use, and a lot of our people think me crazy for it. Better to practice your flying or your wire-fu jumping so you can go over their heads like a bird's shadow without catching a single eye.
----------------
(Yuusuke says--)
This city is dark, spreading over the wastelands like a drop of ink on a black page, dark blending into dark, shadow meeting a familiar shadow. Similarity is everyplace here. Flip through my sketchbook and see that I've already drawn this entire city in miniature, with a portrait for every living thing. The shade where buildings meet in the noontime is an ink wash. The alleys and high-rise windows are the straight lines, and the motion of cars and pigeons are the curved ones. And the pointillist grey that fills space and adds volume--that is all the people.

Gather the little dots together and the shapes form. It takes thousands to even begin the curve of a wave.

Certainly, I and the other Artists must be in my sketchbook as well, alongside all the others. In the great scheme of things, I hope that I'm a crosshatch and not a point. A bold line intersecting other bold lines until it fades and dies, still going as straight as it was in the beginning.

Weeks ago, my hands were black with charcoal that I used to muralize an inner-city wall. I drew people that I had seen, and people that I had killed, and a perfect mirror-image of the buildings across the street. In that part of town, things practically reflect each other anyway. In the end, I stopped drawing, not realizing that I had been sketching madly for hours inside the darkness (dark on dark walls in the dark city at night, like ink on black paper). In the blank space that still remained on the side of the building, I wrote, "What the fuck is the point of it all?" I threw the charcoal down a storm drain (black in the black guts of a dark city-stain) and walked away. The next day, I saw a photo of my work in the paper--a photo that omitted my question, proving that the point had indeed been cleanly missed--and noticed a strange concentration on each stone face. They all held an identical anxiety, their eyes searching in all directions for something that none of them could find.

What the fuck is the point of it all?

You said to me, What's most important, boy, is invisible to the eye.

Fuck you, [Ching]--you think you can tell me what I should value? I wish I could have pulled that last trigger myself, the last of fifty, the one that ended your miserable life. (The one that turned you into a ghost not bound by flesh--)

...But I can't mean mean that. Even when I draw your portrait on looseleaf and burn it inside a streetcorner oilcan, even when I draw what I know of your face on a sidewalk and pockmark it with cheap bullets--I can't mean it for real. If nothing else, it makes the scar on my head ache.

But not because I feel any guilt. It's because I can't remember what you looked like...
----------------
(Kyrie says--)
There is no fourth killer.
There is a skin stretched over empty space.
There is a mask where a face should be.
There are strings attached to the arms and legs.
There is no one standing here.
Who do you think you see?
----------------
(said the Wyvern--)
Of course I've met Yuusuke Murasaki. I know him too well, and I've been on the wrong side of his inkwork too many times. Usually I laugh at him because the weakling still uses paper instead of people.

All of these scars that you see now are self-inflicted, except for the first and most important one, which is definitely not from him. Still, if you ever meet a skinny Asian wearing a long coat and his hair in his eyes, smoking in the moonlight, you may want to run. His stare is colder and harder than the glass in his spectacles. Under that long coat is where--
----------------
(said Retsuka--)
--He wears the bandages wrapped around his stomach, beneath his shirt. I've never seen what was underneath. He snaps often, compared to me, but he'll snap twice as fast if you pry about that. No, not even booze will help you.

But you can forgive him his smokes and his shots and his sharp tongue, after a while. One night, the power went out and we lit twenty-five candles on a table in the middle of a warehouse. I found my violin in the dark and thought back to the old days; as I remembered the songs that we had sung out of tune as children, I played them in scraps like a running brook. He listened and listened, and gradually a look came into his eyes as if he had remembered something long forgotten. He picked up his pen and began to draw. The music flowed out of me, and the ink poured out of him, as if--
----------------
(said Kyrie--)
--He was rapidly gaining on the Wyvern, so far as the body count went. We know what he is like when he works.

The bullets come in all kinds, jacketed and hollowpoint, copkiller and black talon. Only they are different... They are made of a type of plastic that pierces like metal. They are hollow inside, and full of the best India ink in the world.

The Wyvern tells jokes, saying that Yuusuke Murasaki should massacre people in the Louvre because he makes the most beautiful ink washes when he kills. They belong in a museum, it told me.

The Wyvern would never want Yuusuke to know that it said that.

This is Chicago in the year 1929. No one has the technology to make the weapons that he wields.
----------------
(said Yuusuke--)
Which was exactly why I was not particularly looking forward to meeting the Wyvern again, even though there were times when I couldn't stop thinking about it.

The needle-launcher on its left hand is loaded with syringes full of superconcentrated strychnine. It kills people too quickly for an ambulance to be of any use. Same with the poison in its tail, which might even be the same stuff.

The Tattoo Magnum makes even less sense. Somehow, all that ink gelatin is forced through a large-bore needle at a speed approaching that of a rifle bullet. It rearranges itself in midair just in time to blast a picture into someone's skin from yards away.

Nothing about that shithead makes any sense. Not even the--
----------------
(said Retsuka--)
--Reason why it's been nicknamed "the Zealot"?

The Wyvern has a precious hoard, like any mythical beast, and some people have been very willing to try and slay the dragon to snare the goods. That one detective, for example.

For years and years, the Wyvern has been building a gospel out of all the broken pieces of [her] that we Artists know. But while the hunting and expression of these things occupies every true Artist, the Wyvern has taken it further than most. It tracks every scent of [her] like a predator, devouring every trace it finds, and these are all pieced together into its encyclopedias and catalogs of [her]. Some say that it possesses writings that are otherwise lost to the world, the last copies of forgotten last copies. Some say that these are inked in red--
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(said Kyrie--)
--Like memory. When it went mad from the pain of the bullet in its heart, it cut the patterns into its face and wings. I smelled the bleach searing meat as it ran deep into the wounds and washed all the blood away.

It is a tattooist of the highest quality (I know this because it told me). I saw it working once, making two dragons fight in a hurricane on the back of a girl who may not have been sleeping. Plasma oozed from punctured skin as the Wyvern dragged its forked tongue over scales over flesh; bright colors came up in streaks with the pink wash of blood.

I am no longer impressed by its art. I am too used to it--I am all tattooed already, inside my skin.
----------------
(said the Wyvern--)
There is nothing to say about Retsuka, for he is a fool who does not deserve the gun that he carries. He says he is an Artist, but he is far too clean--who could belong in our ranks without stinking of blood? He is a liar, and he mocks the things that are dearest to our kind.

When I think of him, there is a smell in my mind like the sun on the grass, a warm breeze in spring, a campfire in the snow. Retsuka belongs in a place where there are proud birds in the skies and living things growing--what is he doing here, intruding into our world? Here, everything in sight is rotting, everything living is dying, and darkness is kinder than light. How dare he assume that he--
----------------
(said Kyrie--)
--Seems like a person who carries a home with him wherever he goes. He makes people feel as if they belong, no matter where they are. When it rains, I always stay dry when the Wyvern tucks me under its wings...but I would rather get a little cold and wet while sharing an umbrella with Retsuka. That's the kind of person that he is.

But I shouldn't talk about him. The Wyvern says that--
----------------
(said Yuusuke--)
--He's persistent as all hell, whatever else he is. I tell him to pack his shit up, go home, doesn't he have his own damn family? (I heard that they're rich, old mob money soaked in midnight--how did he fall so far off the tree?) He smiles and goes for a stroll down the street. And always he shows up again just as I begin to miss him, whether it's hours or days or months later. He turns up at the door with his coat across his shoulders and a six-pack in his hand: "Hey, want to go up on the roof?"

Tradition dictates that I pretend that I don't want him back. I tell him that he's the biggest asscramp of my life, and he sees right through me.

Retsuka plays the violin, and unlike other Artists who at least add a complete disregard for human life to their art, his violin is just a violin. He never plays for money even when we're dead broke. I've never heard another sound quite like it...

Somehow, it makes me remember something that I forgot how to feel and believe in years ago. I was a very little child, and the cathedral seemed to go on forever; all around me echoed the sound of singing: Kyrie--
----------------
(says Retsuka--)
Who is Kyrie?
----------------
(and Yuusuke--)
Who is Kyrie?
----------------
(and the Wyvern--)
Who is Kyrie? Anything I want her to be. Do you want her to be something for you?