~To Drown in Pale Waters~

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Preserver
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~To Drown in Pale Waters~

Post by Preserver » Wed Jan 02, 2019 9:48 am

A voice talking in utter solitude echoes in empty halls. Though the sound reverberates exquisitely, it soon meets a soft substance on some corners and walls that hardly allows the soft voice to bounce and echo further. Patches of moss have grown onto the moist corners of the edifice and, when it pours, droplets of water trickle down ancient cracks, bringing forth a sickly life that spreads from moss onto growths of mold.

Not far from there, a solitary spider once died of hunger and its corpse fell from the rickety web onto a puddle of shallow stagnant water. Slowly engorged with liquids, the dead thing bloated and cracked thill soft entrails spread in a deluge of sickly ocher hues, a rainbow of mud spreading from the curled in and split skin of the creature. A singular spread of mildew has found its home where the entrails once were, new abhorrent life being born from equally abhorrent death.

These, and many other scenarios of the inevitable rot that awaits everything, are the macabre decor of the halls, a pale green fog enwreathing all and hiding these slices of tiny life. There's but one observer, one voice that whispers by a grime-covered altar in a distant corner. The thing is shaped like a triangle, yet the inevitable liquid erosion has turned the corners dull and the chiseled symbols almost impossible to decipher... except for three patches the shape of tears that have been filled with stagnant water so thick that whatever hides beneath remains unseen.



Clarity is the greatest gift You brought me. For whenever the way was clouded with fog, You pierced through like a sting and showed me the way. Yet... I have been confused for long... some things have addled my mind: not with the rapturous spasms of fever, but with a conscious doubt.


The worshipping one is lithe and barely clad, her quasi-nudity giving so many chances to the many hungry fogs all around to deliver their viscous gifts. Yet the tendrils of ephemeral substance don't touch her, nor the long raven hair embracing her shoulders. The sound of a single droplet falling onto still water echoes to provide a new rythm to her worship, the source being a vat of cracked marble. Within the deep basin is something akin more to a pale semi-liquid mud than water, the colour mercury white. Cracked and dried leaves linger on the oily surface: anemone, nightshade and more, toxines spreading in the water.


Since I came onto this isle, no place has been closer to my senses than these halls... for this is the only place where my eyes can close and my senses spread to be embraced by Your gifts. I spoke these concerns of mine to the Pale Cadaver, and she embraced my view. Such a remarkable soul hidden within a corpse still in rot; were I younger and less moral, I'd probably be tempted~ ...

I remember my time years ago, as I walked through a beautiful countryside.
There, when the weather was warm because of the deep Summer and the rains weighed heavy on the clouds above, I closed my eyes and could feel everything. The slow digging of maggots through the muscles of a stillborn calf, the embrace of rot onto wheat left too long in the barn, the rapturously delicious throbbing sound of pus onto a wound from a farmhand writhing in pain.

I close my eyes on this cursed isle and I feel nothing.
I have seen its inhabitants: death is but a nuisance soon to be cleared by abuse of divine powers, even an ox warrants a godly call for resurrection. The fields grant bountiful fruit again and again, with no respect for the rythms of darker nature. The clean order of predictable neatness has cursed everything since these people have made the unnatural pact with their gods. 'Tis only fitting that I bring my own.



The worshipping one slowly stands from her kneeling position and walks around the altar, approaching the basin and its nauseating contents. Barefooted, she scratches her soles onto the rough surface of the shrine's floor, an open wound onto the sickening air and moisture of the place. Hungry things of minute and unimaginable nature already start to walk inside her, feeling the red warmth of her blood. She stops and lingers as she observes the basin, her emerald eyes taking a darker and almost amber-like colour as they already drown in that vision.


Lies are almost unnecessary now.
I have lost myself in them too many times, an actorial gift for sure, but there is little to be done. So much has already been achieved: this has been by far my best work. Perhaps less discreet, but with expediate efficiency. To think the depths of my deceit, even that to myself, could be unraveled in new revelations to my mind... it is exhilarating, comical and tragic at the same time.

I now know my role.
I hope those who have found me worthy of trust will embrace me and accept me as what I am, not what they hope to turn me into. My earthly Goddess, her heart is in the right place, but I hope her mind will also find the way to understand... I am tired of losing things I fall for. Too many centuries... I have embraced the truth of inevitable decay, but decay has no worth if it doesn't follow beauty. To see something ugly and unbecoming rot is as if I was trying to paint white over a clean canvas: beauty is the most delicious thing to turn into decayed sludge. And such truth makes decay and beauty both live in renewed glory. Each moment is more beautiful because it needs to compete with what will come after.

Please, my earthly Goddess, understand this.
To love life and what comes with it... it doesn't entail hating the dark entombment of a festering end. Redemption is a dream because it is inherently wrong, no matter what the Silver One states. He too will come to understand in the end, I would hate to see his intelligence wasted with stubborn ignorance.



The figure removes whatever remaining garments she was wearing, right hand moving onto a dull and rusted blade onto the altar. The edge has wasted away, except for a single part of its tip, still sharp from the sheer thinning of the blade due to the devouring act of rust. The blade hold tightly, the figure wraps her left palm onto the petite edge and cuts her skin, digging deeply, with splinter of rusting iron clinging to muscles, legaments and bone as she emits a soft groan. The sacrifice in blood gets poured inside the foul liquids of the basin as the dagger falls onto the mildew-coated floor.


This... shall clear my mind and cleanse my body.
Please, Lady, grant this mere larva to be reborn as the moth You need~ ...



Thus she steps upwards, the bare body touching the foul pale white liquid as the oily surface is pierced by her fles, wrapping around her. She descends in the vat, the opened wounds on her palm and foot slowly being filled by the infected and rotting liquid: there where skin was, and muscle, now the void is filled by the cursed substance. She closes her eyes, feeling her skin burn and starting to die as the sensations of a cruel concoction of aciding liquid, poisons, concocted diseases, toxins and pus envelops her body. She trembles, biting her lower lip to smother a scream of pain and, failing to do so, taking a long breath and drowning herself in the liquid.

Bubbles splinter the surface as her breath explodes from below in a scream that emerges just as a muffled distant moan.
And through the hours, days and tendays that accompany that ritual of rebirth and the torture she imposes herself, together with abstinence and fasting, pain slowly becomes a dear friend. The amber hue rooting onto her iris as she allows head and eyes to emerge and silently contemplates the forever-moving rythm of the rotting world around her.



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~ Lladria Sethassiel ~ (Dead!) - ~ Siobhan Gray (Departed!)
~ Elspeth Lynndain (Dead!) - Noasheel Xephrates (Dead!)
~ Yachta - ~ Providence (Dead!)


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Gideon DeVay
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Re: ~To Drown in Pale Waters~

Post by Gideon DeVay » Wed Jan 02, 2019 4:34 pm

Haunting, harrowing, beautiful :) Well done.
"Yog don't think Beat Up Guy know how dogman work."

________________________
Weston Cain-deceased
Cameron Morning-deceased
Halifax Bisby-returned to the earth
Evelynn Longbrooke-rolled uncermoniously
Drakas Austraxas, The Quiet Fury

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