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| Seeking Some Guidance; Phaedrus! | |
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| Topic Started: Dec 29 2014, 02:27 PM (852 Views) | |
| Phaedrus | Jun 12 2016, 09:52 PM Post #26 |
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Thus conscience does make cowards of us all/ And thus the native hue of resolution/ Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.
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The bellow filled the room. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide. Nowhere to escape. His shoulders pressed against the cold, hard stone, immutable as a glacier--Phaedrus’ fingers twitched, spasmed at nothing, mouth still blubbering that insane mantra. “Do you hear me, Glede? P-petunias, remember the petunias, remember Fulvia--” Mad fool. Mad, mad fool, to think this could work, to think-- It worked. At least for a breath. The construct seemed to hit a wall, his faceless head swinging ponderously, joints locked like wrench thrown into a mechanism. Desperation filled the necromancer’s eyes, spilled into his shaking hands. For a moment he stood rooted to the spot, unable to move, unable to breathe for fear he might charge like a bull and spear him to the wall with those very horns. The air changed. He felt it, the twisting of a leviathan beneath the waters, a shift that crawled through his skin; iron filled his mouth, a wrongness jarred his bones. Fear struck his guts, bolted through his mind. Here was the magic of the Bayt, alive, alive -- in his own house; he’d wakened it in his own house. An unfamiliar beast hunched just yards away. Lost, lost. Something was wrong -- he could not feel anything, had lost the sense of another presence. As though Glede’s soul had sunk under black waters, and he hunted for a crest of bubbles, a ripple, desperate for any tether to the man below. “Glede?” Phaedrus croaked, his voice a strangled man’s. Glede’s helm gaped back at him, a black, raw wound. Alien. Let it not be. Let it not be... A blind buzz filled Phaedrus’ head, white noise, and all of his mind banked on a terrifying plunge. Had he awakened something irreparable? Had he... He could scarcely breathe, hoping against hope, battling a rising panic. Desperate, desperate, a line thrown into the void -- “...Glede?” The construct’s fist curled. Another bellow split the air, a thunderclap -- and the necromancer screamed involuntarily. The study whirled away-- replaced by a different darkness and blood-slick stone, a thousand keening voices. Shadows, lurching. The far-off clinks and bellows, chains jostling. Never seen, only heard. Back against the wall, cradled in the stones, eyes closed, waiting for them to pass, gods -- CRASH. The titan fell in an avalanche of metal -- gods, gods -- the sound went on and on and on, an army clattering in a tomb -- and the necromancer folded in on himself, arms thrown up by his face, sure the world had ended just yards in front of him. *** There was a Thing with no mouth, and yet it screamed. There was a Thing with no hands, but it crawled. There was a Thing in a Prison in a Palace thousands of moons ago, in a place where there were sometimes no moons and sometimes too many, in a place where the stars came and went like fireflies, where the sunlight pierced through stone and carved itself into the tile, yet never warmed the air. And in that place of a thousand contradictions that Thing screamed, and screamed, and screamed, and there were others that screamed with it. And that nothing-creature had learned where the others were. It knew to avoid the places where the air grew chill and the sun did not shine. It reacted to the shifts of light and dark like a recoiling slug; in its primal mind it only knew to eat, to hide. Fear propelled it, but it did not yet know what fear was. It knew pain, however, and it knew that those lumbering shapes would only cause more; it knew when it worsened, and it learned quickly. It took many, many years for that Thing to become something approximating a man -- perhaps a lifetime. Perhaps a hundred lifetimes, but that Thing turned Man would never know, because it did not know Time; how could it, in a palace with too many moons and yet none at all, where one room held the stars and another shone like a burnished diamond, a painful white in the desert sun? There was one room in particular It visited often to rest and eat in safety, for nothing else ever came there. A room where the ground was blackened -- warped, the stone uneven, as if the hand of God had crumpled it like paper. It knew this place because of its coldness -- despite the blazing azure of the sky, the crumbled walls, it never grew hot. Only cruelly, cruelly cold -- It never crept to the center of the room, for that’s where it grew the worst, the darkest and heaviest; things it threw to the center would appear in another part of the room, else never return. Once a great gout of fire consumed the center, and It fled in terror, not visiting that room for a long time -- but when It returned all remained the same from the time It had fled, and the center waited patiently. It took many years for It to understand that its hands were no longer for crawling; that It did not have to lope along like a hunched beast, that it was not like those howling shapes in the under. And there was one day, when It ate and stared at the blackened ceiling of that room, or at the crabbed surfaces of strange, long flat stones, that they were no longer animal shapes to It -- patterns of light and dark, pain and not-pain, safety and not-safety -- but something Else. When It no longer ignored them because they could not be eaten and did not cause pain but stopped and stared -- felt something pushing through that beetle’s existence, a painful seed of consciousness, a germinating memory. Book, something inside of It had known, deeply, irrevocably, as primally as it knew hunger and pain. The blood of Its kill had dribbled down its gaping mouth, spilled and joined the large, crusted stain at its neck. Its long, filthy fingers sought it out -- roved blindly over the wedged stone, clicking, smearing. Book. “Ba,” It had said, and Its voice was terrible, terrible -- a sudden intrusion, and It scared itself, looking wildly over Its hunched back. It took a long time before the return of silence assured It -- and finally It looked back again, staring at the way the blood trickled through the cuneiform, bit through the wear and sand and left it starkly clear, something primally a part of Itself even as it felt alien, a message from another world Its fragile mind could not possibly understand. *** And gods, one day It understood. One day It was no longer It, but a formless They, a They who understood fear, the deep tendrils that snuck into their chest and shot through them like clenching fists. They knew of an outside world; They knew of the price of staying. The pain had taken on a different kind. No longer avoid, avoid, it hurts, but help me, help me, Nailah, someone, help me. *** Help me, Nailah. Help me. Help me out of this place. But the stone doors never grew any closer -- no matter what route they took, no matter how many times they threw himself at the great antechamber, an animal launching itself against its cage. They wandered until their feet bled and still the gates did not change. For miles, miles, they walked that corridor, never to any progress. Something powerful sealed it, something beyond themselves, beyond anything in their mortal power, like a thousand arms locked together to repel them. Help me, Mother of All Things, if you are Mother of mine too. Help me. Help me, if you are there. So they walked a hundred hallways instead, pushed through doors into spilling sunlight -- and in those moments their chest leapt, and they cried out at the expanse of fields, of wild grass, of unkempt hills -- and they ran like a free Thing, and ran, but always their legs grew heavy, leaden; always their cries turned to iron in their chest, and suddenly they stared upon a stone door again, their insides filling with horror. Always and again. Always and again. Soon they did not trust the sight of strange places, and their run slowed to a limp, and a crawl, and they knew the entrance would be waiting. Back into that place. Back into that place. And their hands would tremble on the books they collected, scratching, clawing -- and they’d feel the weight of them against their chest, and an unearthly wail would fill strange skies. And they wept -- and they wept, and they wept, and they pleaded with Nailah, if such things answered to godless, formless creatures, for in their heart of hearts they knew the truth: the only routes left went through the Dark Places. *** Phaedrus’ chest surged up and down like a rodent’s -- the breathing choppy, heavy, uneven. Glede’s heavy, fallen form swelled in his consciousness as he dared to lower his arms -- became a jagged mountain between him and the door, no longer a person or even a monster but only an obstacle to escape. ...Returned, it said -- and he screamed. It could have said anything, anything at all, and it would make no difference - the cry that came from him was not shrill, but abrupt and horrible; the yell of a man burned, a knife twisted in the gut, a scream that cuts itself off in anticipation of a beheading. Something inside him wanted to flee like an animal--push himself off the wall and twist past the dormant monster, run, run, had to run -- Phaedrus? The necromancer twisted his head, his neck, teeth bared -- for a moment he was outside of himself, did not know to whom the construct referred to -- he might as well have been calling a stranger across the street; a series of garbled syllables with no meaning to him, so abstract it could not even be a name. All he could focus on was the creature rising, a thousand grinding screeches, a leviathan whirring to life-- Phaedrus. Awareness filtered through to him. His jaw was clenched so hard it felt his teeth would break -- all of him was a numb knot, a hundred coiled springs. The necromancer’s fist had curled itself around his dagger of its own accord -- a white brick of flesh clenched permanently around the inlaid handle, as though he was an automaton himself. Phaedrus. The construct was groveling on the stones -- clawing at the ground, a human pang of regret in his voice; and slowly, slowly, the image before him disengaged itself from the monsters in his memory, separated from the panic. Air whistled through one nostril. Phaedrus’ legs felt like jelly -- shaking uncontrollably under his robes, his knees all but knocking together, and he sank against the wall, the rest of him too impossibly heavy to hold up in that instant. Somehow the necromancer unclenched his fingers, one by one -- they felt limp and bloodless, still hovering in a claw over his knife. His jaw twinged, teeth aching, all of him still twitching like a feral animal. “No,” Phaedrus nearly snarled at him. Don’t touch me. Don’t come anywhere near me. Devils, stay away. He felt breathless--as if someone had dropped a sack of bricks in his belly, his shoulders wound up like straining pulleys. He steeled himself--inhaled with difficulty, one nostril entirely blocked. Then, calmer, calmer--just barely, touching down on a shaky self-awareness. “No... no. I’m... fine.” The pain of his face was far away -- a distant, alien throb. He had forgotten it entirely, only noticed it at its mention, and even then as though it’d happened to another person. Idly the necromancer pressed his fingers to his upper lip, trembling -- they came back black and slick, dripping cold fluid. He felt too numb to care, wiping it on his front. “I’m fine,” Phaedrus repeated, sniffing loudly -- as though saying it enough times would make it true. “I’m fine. I’m fine...” Trembling, the necromancer snatched his cloak, dabbing ineffectually at his lip. He kept it there -- inhaled as deeply as he could to steel himself, only bringing the scent of must and iron into his lungs. Little stars popped in his vision, danced. The sick aftershock pumped through him, still. The fear. He found himself angry -- angry at Glede, angry at himself, angry at nothing and everything at once -- for anger, at least, did not leave him powerless like fear; it did not give time for those horrors to breed. “This was a mistake,” the necromancer rasped, his eyes like yellow discs. Oh devils let him not know how close it came oh devils let him not know how close he was to-- The heat in his voice rose -- was directed to himself, himself, but somehow it had become awful and viperous, striking at everything in the room. “We should not have tampered. We should not have done this.” Left on a hiss. He pushed away from the wall in a sudden whorl -- his cloak billowing after him, a black cloud that followed the momentum of the storm; suddenly the metal bowl was in his hands and he threw it with an awful vehemence. It hit the wall with a catastrophe of sound, knocking into other instruments of queer design and shattering others, but he did not care, did not care -- the mantra was in him, living, throbbing. Gods what could have happened gods what could have happened gods-- He clawed at himself like an animal, clawed and clawed at the mounds of black fabric until he freed himself of it, then clawed and clawed till it wadded into a single ball; he threw that too, a hurtling mass that fell to the ground like a second skin and left him bare, suddenly, starkly naked -- the Phaedrus he had been in the kitchen, a domestic little creature still in his flowing cotton tunic, a sleeve half-rolled on one arm. Oh, what could have been, what could have happened, what could have been -- “Stop.” And he held himself a distance away -- from fear? Guilt? Both? -- fingers splayed as if to grasp something mid-air. He could not look at that scrabbling, clanking wreck upon his floor; part of him wanted to kick it, to send Glede spiraling away like a rolling can, to stop, stop, stop shaking, stop that noise-- Phaedrus scrabbled at a trunk, ran his hand over its surface as though to make sure of its solidity, then sank upon it like an old man, suddenly out of breath. “...Stop. You have seen much, I am sure. Rest and... rest and do not push yourself.” Was he talking to Glede, or himself? He blinked erratically -- a tinny sound started in his ears, left everything feeling far away and unreal. “Only... only speak when you are ready.” Never speak. Shut up, you horrible thing; shut up, shut up... Edited by Phaedrus, Jun 12 2016, 09:56 PM.
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