Rapture

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Alash
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Jul 17, 2018 1:15 am

Rapture

Post by Alash » Tue Jul 17, 2018 6:40 am

and with a subdued flare of pale green light I had set my final dwimmer into place, finally letting ravenous claws of fatigue sink into my flesh.

My eyes shut, and on my cheek I felt hot breath. I opened my mouth, for to cast a spell of a thousand stabbing lines of colour, but it found purchase only in an outpour of sand and grime. An unleashed scream of silence became my furious rebellion, limbs and body thrashing now in the filth and soil.

Finally I broke free, dazed and corybantic. But there was nothing; around me was only endless ocean of alien ground, flat and uninviting in its desolation. Everything seemed bathed in a hateful, carmine glare. To look above me was to see nothing, the unfathomable sky of the Night Above.

No tempting moon or melting hellish orb seared my sight. Only a deep glare of infinite red, stretching endless over equally infinite empty. Behind me I heard a noise, and turned fast on heel to see the beginnings of monstrosities of incalcuable size, of asymmetry layered into maddening irregularity. My eyes shut, unconsciously hoping to spare myself from the gargantuan horror ahead. I opened my mouth, for this time I was to scream with resigned terror.

Instead I found myself trapped within cold glass, silenced again, and drowning in viscuous fluid that tortured my skin with stinging aches. Outside of my newfound prison danced hideous shapes; they were long, bulbous, revolting in ways abstract. One of my captors dared to press its face against the translucent wall in front of me.

It was an ebon-skinned thing of vague femininity, without eyes and had a long tube of off-white flesh dangling from its hungry maw. With its singular hand it reached through for my throat-

The glass shattered then with a strange popping sound, and it swept me helplessly away by current in an ocean's torrent of stink and sewage. After eternity I wash ashore at the foot of my bed, the same bed that seems almost a frightening foyer now, a gateway to further terrors and the misbegotten.

The fingers of my shaking hands seem preternaturally long...

My protective thaumaturgies have long faded. I am alone in the cold stone of my room. The only sound is my laboured breath.

Alash
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Jul 17, 2018 1:15 am

Re: Rapture

Post by Alash » Tue Aug 28, 2018 3:57 pm

My name is Lesrak. I am fifty four years old. This cycle I have arrived at the College for my tutoring under the Masters and to learn the Nine Instructions, for my mother deemed that I should be of more use to my family (qu'ellar) than my introverted study of tales, and stories, and various little histories that she says don't mean anything; my mother tells me I should look ahead and not to the past. "In the past," she reminded me, constantly, "lies failure." Obviously she referred to my father with that, since afterwards she would hurt me.

This cycle I have arrived at the College and they told me that in three more cycles it'll be time for the First Instruction, but in the interim I should familiarise myself with the concepts of convex geometrical mathematic, since they would be important for the work to come. I tried, but it seemed very confusing. I was never any good at numbers. They're too cold.

Instead, I spend most of my time reading tales and drawing pictures and sketches of things I can remember from home. I like to look at myself in the little mirror they'd thoughtfully included in the austere aesthetic of my chambers. I like to think I am pretty. It makes me happy.

This cycle is the fourth since I have arrived at the College. This is the cycle where I am to receive the First Instruction. I hope I don't fail. I didn't learn the mathematic like they told me, it was too hard. There is a knocking at the zurkhwood of the door to my room...

I am lead into a small room by a purple-clad acolyte. She is impossibly beautiful. We stop before an iron door, and she whispers wizardly words that I do not, can not, understand over it. There is a pause, and I can count five heartbeats, then ten in the same interim. The door opens. We enter.

In this dimly lit room there are two things: a rectangular edifice of granite, and a tall jaluk. He has a strange, painted mask on his face, fashioned into the insectoid visage of a drelber ulm. Knives line the apron at his waist. They are impeccably clean. The beautiful jalil that was with me before bows halfway, and takes her leave. I am alone with the other male. There is a long silence between us, and I lose count of my heartbeats.

"Lesrak. Strip yourself bare and lay atop the table, so to face the ceiling." His voice is strange, like it folds in on itself and repeats somehow. Even so, I do as I am told, because I am afraid of what he will do if I decline.

I realised, just then, as I lay down that the subdued light did not come from any particular part of the room; it came from the strange one who spoke, as if his very presence was somehow capable of illuminating his surroundings.

"I am the Fourth Master," he spoke, again. "This is the First Instruction." His hands became alight, just then, with this oily green light that reminded me of sickly pale moss, or some kind of strangely vivid vomit.

At that point I realised his face was not a mask, that the monstrosity before me was flesh, and blood, and bone and I could see the glint of cruel intelligence in his (its) eyes. Before I could scream there was an unimaginable pain in my chest, not a burning fire so much as it was that my body was rejecting itself, forcing some part of itself Out and Away and there was so much pain it hurt it hurt so much why was this happening

From the very bottom of my peripheral (for some reason, I seemed so unable to move, paralysed by a force I could not have understood) I noticed jutting insectoid limbs, coming from what was probably my chest. This was not the worst of it, though. That did come when the chill of the air hit the limbs, and I realised they were not limbs at all, but instead my ribcage. Or, one could argue, whatever my ribcage had been repurposed to.

The pain came to a shocking cessation, which only made it feel just that much worse for a moment. I wish I could have screamed, but I couldn't. There was that horrible, awful feeling in me where all I understood was pain and the ending of pain. Even the most base, animal instincts -- save just that one -- had just been obliterated, cast away like insignificant dust.

Then it began again, his warping, despoiling hands over my face. I felt my jaw crack, shatter, hang in a way where it wouldn't ever close back shut right. Each moment, half moment, quarter moment, every measure of time so small as to be immeasurable was the most lengthy, agonising torture I had thought the ilythiiri capable of designing.

And then he set his hands to my temples, and drew out the bones into horrid, great horns of skull and I realised that, before this moment, I really had no idea what the word "pain" even meant. Now, though, I understood it. Obviously not to the same degree as my torturer (my tutor) but I certainly had an idea of the concept that I lacked prior.

"The First Instruction," the Fourth Master buzzed, "is Pain."

***

My name is Lesrak. I am seventy eight years old. This cycle I have just concluded my essay on how best to apply geothermal heating to transmutative devices made from inert matter. I was trying to learn how to fix the protrusions from my skull, but was required by the Eighth Master to write this dull treatise instead.

Bhin'oyn, who lived across the hall from my quarters in ones of his own, told me that it "isn't so hard," but at this time I am not as good as he is.

I broke my own mirror nine years prior. It just made me want to cry, anyway. Bhin'oyn let me use his when I needed it, on the condition I don't break it like I did mine.

When we're together, I cover it with a drape of black cloth.

***

My name is Lesrak. I am two hundred and eighty nine years old. This cycle I pore over my accounts, and my workings, and I do my experiments and my research in the soft purple glow of my magical lights. Everything in this room I have built or made or acquired through my own self, and I feel satisfied with that.

This cycle I look in my mirror and try again to make myself beautiful like how I remember. It doesn't work, so I reshape myself to how I usually like to look and go back to my papers. I like to think I am pretty enough.

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