IRL, New Zealand, a farm.
Henry, moving on without a fuss, had delivered the rest of his workshop's penultimate session. Nothing more happened after his random loss, no abrupt apocalypses, no invasion of termites dressed in little clown suits. Just regular, fun, unremarkable duelling.
When he was finished, he logged out to another sunny November morning. For breakfast, he invited a couple of random guildmates to join him. The group, helping with the renovation project, were staying at a campsite on the property.
After the meal, they worked, making a paradise for ponies.
Later that day, Henry met with his shrink while chipping out a quick sculpture. He’d commissioned stone pieces from local artists for a ride-through gallery forest section. His own, just made of wood, he’d thought he’d hide to rot amongst the less impermanent works.
At the end of their talk, his therapist wrote him a prescription to help him sleep.
Henry’d refused to take anything for his insomnia in the past. He couldn’t risk being stuck in a drug-induced haze at the wrong moment. It’d mortified him a little, the idea of accidentally snoozing while his empire burned. Saana’s time-dilation made it especially horrifying. Stay in bed too long, and you’d miss multiple days.
But that wasn’t his job anymore, nor his responsibility. He’d already joined the permanently retired, who slept oblivious through bliss and tragedy alike.
After lunch, he retreated to the farmhouse, turned off his e-assistant, turned on the security, and—while the rejuvenating sounds of saws and hammers hummed unheard outside—he slipped off into a pharmaceutical lullaby...
Opening Invocation to The Mountain and Its Endless Climber
Hail to the brave ones who in the meadows sleep! Hail to their general mantled in his laurels! Hail to those poppy-wreathed remembered for their might! Hail to their portraits fading at his altar! Hail to the valiant troops shallow in the ground! Hail to the spring flower that sprouts fresh from their gravesites!
Hail to him, and hail to his mountain!
How He's Continued His Eternal Ascension
See how the paragon still drifts, the summit-seeking blossom, who’d refused the tries to clip his stalk, from leviathans and armies.
His passage had conveyed him past the ranks of adversaries, beyond the troops of nations pruned, of subjugated countries. As once he, Lord Perennial, had swept their small resistance, like summer wind through grassy steppes, their watch he’d infiltrated.
Like the clambering sun reborn in spring that melts Demeter’s snowflakes, he—Dionysus drunk on death, revived by the god’s bordeaux, young Zagreus of rendered flesh, by the titans’ blood rewoke—he’d risen to the strata next, to the Mountain’s elevated showdowns.
Above, above, came honoured fields, which dwarfed Elysium’s grandeur. Above, he trudged familiar steel, from battalions who’d once served him. He travelled leagues of fine-bred men, instructed by his genius, through rank and eulogistic file once moved as swift as his own fingers.
Here were the leaves of tyranny, the branches of his forces. Here were the soldiers resolute, whose arms had drawn his vision. Here were the sailors golden-tanned, whose ships’d encapsulated oceans. Here were the stalwart engineers, who’d dug advancing trenches. Here were the vanguard scouts, assigned to sneak precarious missions. Here were the shouting officers, who’d mapped the labyrinths of valleys.
Here were the strong, who’d called him lord, who’d formed his constitution, whose indomitable swords and minds, he’d moved as swift as his own fingers.
Together, linked by blood in life, they’d strived Olympian ranges. With common prayers for paradise, together, they’d climbed the Mountain.
But they hailed him not like the citizens at his parades of triumph. No cups they raised of ale that’d spilt through streets in celebration. Their king, they tossed no cheered bouquets, no accolades or garlands, nor held aloft their cherub young bestowed his appellations.
With no utopian end for them, his troops returned their final visions. The more Plutonian gift, they gave, in which his campaign froze them.
War, they showered, war and blood, his war’s fine education
With valour drilled through discipline, they tried to kill their tender sovereign. With fear expunged, with practised thrusts, with ant coordination, with hardened grudge, they fought their king, who’d heaped their ranks upon his Mountain.
He Indulges in The Sour Tincture of Oblivion
While hacking down his champions, he now misjudged a handhold. He miscalculated half an inch, and when he leapt, he missed, was caught, was held, bound, punched, tied, kicked, and squeezed by the swift coordinating troops who dragged him into the mountain slope.
Into their thick, they pulled their lord, into his conscripted spoils. Their emperor, their arms embraced. His crown, his limbs, their arms embraced.
Inside, he plunged. Inside, he sank, into a lake of blood inside the mountainside. Inside, he plunged and sank his knife inside each troop he’d killed and killed inside the lake of blood inside. Yet their dying digits clasped his limbs to drag him further and further and further down inside the lake of blood, their corpses to his body tied like tombstones worked from marble.
Towards the lightless depths, he sank...towards the claustrophobic darkness...he plunged...just like the radiant ranks...his black crusades extinguished....
As he felt his oxygen...deplete...he sighed...and closed his eyelids...and he waited out...the spectacle...beyond his conquest’s...ending…
Inside the lake of blood...he sank…inside...he drank…its vein-spilled waters…inside the lake of blood...he sank…inside...he drank…its vain-spilled waters…inside the lake of blood...he sank…inside...he drank……its vein-spilled waters…...inside the lake of blood......he sank…...inside......he drank………its............vain........................spilled…………............wa………….............ter……………………..s.
He is Preserved from His Crimson Baptism by a Troop Girt in Floral Raiment
But what greeted next his gasping gaze was not the base of his Olympus, not his war’s dismembered piled in state, not the Mountain rising high to heaven.
Instead, six troops with angler’s gear were staring down befuddled. They scrutinised this young man whom they’d fished up from the bloodlake.
The climber’s heart was twicely struck, by two astoundments hammered.
First, he wondered whence had come their amiable handling. Where others sought to cut his throat, to terminate his summit, these troops had seemed to save his life, to offer him a charity, a kind of care unfound in strife and never on this Mountain.
Second was the climber stunned by their physique’s condition. They shone before him fine and strong, in a form beyond perfection. No harm from death did he survey, none of dominion’s visceral memories. Two arms, two legs, a heart unbled, each man held in possession. Their muscles, clean of every scar, had discarded off their armour, and in vulnerable garbs, they dressed, in floral crowns and tunics.
These soldiers draped in spring-bloomed health, the climber inquisitioned: “How do, in place of wounds, you wear these inflorescent linens? Millions have I passed upon my mountain explorations, but none whose flesh escaped their scars, their battle’s foul embroidery.”
His questions caused the men to nod with a kind, fraternal compact.
“A distinguished air, you own,” said one, “a smile that’s versed in secrets. So we’ll show to you the miracles we’ve wrought through sweet persistence; and perhaps you’ll grow our little home with the expertise you’ve hidden.”
At the anglers’ courteous behest, the curious climber followed.
The reservoir of blood, they left, and they trekked an obscured tunnel. Some guards they passed along the way gave amicable greetings, and they, too, wore not war’s residue but suits of blue baptisias.
He Beholds A Hidden Realm of Opulence and The Seed of Its Divine Origination
The passage soon unveiled a scene of elegance and splendour. Within the Mountain’s core was cleaved a paradisal haven.
An amber luminescence shone from a mile-high, light-draped ceiling. For many times that length ahead stretched fields of rhapsodising greenery. Streams of crystal water carved a panoramic Eden, of figs, dates, plums in orchard rows, of apricots and almonds. Service mares and destriers roamed swards of lovely pasture, through gardens where doves carouselled ‘mongst perfumed buds of saffron.
The teen’s arriving group was passed by two teams of fine-sculpt athletes. They saluted him with muscled arms festooned in tiger lilies. They chased, between their sandaled feet, a ball from leather shields refashioned, and as its flight conveyed them on, they left a scent of spring gardenias.
“How can this be?” the climber said, astounded by this scenic heaven. “How can you soldiers, strong and deft, have found this peaceful refuge? How rescued you, from warfare’s theft, your health and lost contentment? How find serenity so rare within this hellish sentence?”
From a roadside shrub, one angler scythed a tremendous-looking blossom, a flower of hibiscus type, with petals soft and crimson.
“This, our wondering stranger friend, has been our sweet salvation. Its buds contain a potent strength of harm remediation. Its helpful seed was harvested from the pockets of an empress, and its healing magic was unlocked by our detachment’s medic. ‘A young man’s life revived,’ we’ve named this panacea, and with its all-restoring gift, we’ve built our sacred bastion.”
In answer thus, they showed him well, the flower’s blessed endowment.
They ventured now through opulence, through troops from hell rebounded. In sunny fields, assassins toiled, their fingers stalking berries, while beneath the cooling shade of oaks, lieutenants talked and slumbered.
By a carp-filled spring were officers, who chattered philosophic. “That Schopenhauer,” conversed a sage, “mishandled India’s wisdom. The Buddhist path, absconding strife, is but a dialectic trifle; it complements the Vedic life, which venerates samsara.”
Their journey took them to a town of paradisal milieu. There, artists occupied their hands on painting myth-sourced murals. And manly singers crooned away at serenades of conquest, while café diners drowned their lunch in wine-reduction sauces.
And all they met were picturesque, were free of conquest’s leavings. To the gawking teen, they gave salute, with roars in peace exulting. They flaunted him their states renewed, their war-dealt marks surmounted. They showed his eyes the shining bliss, beyond his crusade’s dark ambitions.
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He is Extended Accommodation and Reveals The True Aspect of His Personage
Having toured their guest this sanctuary, this rest beyond the struggle, they gifted him a peony and a generous proposition. They volunteered the sproutling stay and join their Mountain commune. A cheerful cottage, he could lay, and enjoy a calm vacation.
But this offer broke the young teen’s heart, their kindness underserved, and he spoke a soft apology to these troops his war-lust murdered.
“Your rest and peace, I must depart, O honourable soldiers, for I am The General Cast in Shade who sacrificed your spirits.
"Tis I, with eyes invisible, but voice ever apparent. Tis I, with Nightmare-Speaking Lips, whose talk portends oblivion. Tis I, The Hydra Beast Obscene, your primary malefactor, who climbs this grotesque fantasy, who piled you on this tragic Mountain.
"I am that man, that Black-Clasped Hand, who buried you in meadows, and wherever do I plant my foot will bloom The Endless Death, The Darkness.”
To this, the teen’s confession shared, the soldiers rolled with snickers.
To He who’d thought His names unknown, they chided with sarcasm: “May the thunder strike Your spirit down for commanding us with splendour! May the ice winds strip Your flesh from bone for annihilating our aggressors.
“Our Lord, our noble sacrifice is damaged by Your hopeless fretting. Unlike Your laureled-lathered self, such castigation’s here unwelcome.
“From the vessel’s berth, those faint fawns cry of war’s supposed culprits. But we men, who navigate the storm, know the choice is row or perish. You, Captain of our galleys grand, who conducted us past maelstroms, be not disturbed by vanquished swells, but bask these days pacific.
“You, who to our triumph led, are most invited to this refuge. You, whose shield our sisters spared, are most invited to this refuge. You, whose fields our children fed, are most invited to this refuge. You, who incarn' Victory’s head, are most invited to this refuge.
“Just...just as long You clean up that dress…it…it intimidates our manly prowess...” they’d obliquely checked the climber’s clothes, his wardrobe inundated red, it soaked before the lake he’d swum, from the Mountain’s vein-donated oceans. “Be..beside…those stains, we DARE not stand…beside the Gods’ exsanguined ichor…but…but once their mark You’ve sanitised…you’ll cease to fright us mortals…
"Come, Keen King of Kings of Kings! Remove the heaven-plundered nectar! And If You’ll sheathe Your royal sword, You, too, can join our humble hamlet!
"Your skin, we’ll wash, with fragrant baths to sterilise Your triumphs! And Your Honour will return to white, to its ivory alabaster! Your crown…of king’s…anatomy…that…that we’ll spruce with hawthorns! And we’ll next a gown for sovereigns weave, a suit of purple orchids! And we’ll give Your throat a necklace last, of our healing bud hibiscus, to wear in rich remembrance of Your eternal victories!
"So, till boredom draws Your Sire away, enjoy our small alliance, until your tongue disdains the taste of vintage-poured libations! Stay, Lord, till Your heart is choked of close association!”
Saying thus, they filled a tub, and they wove the pledged regalia.
The climber, by this discourse swayed, by this speech of kind refulgence, was moved to stow his knife away, and recognise their friendship.
He washed his clothing stained and soaked with valour’s bled chromatics. His honour-scented skin, he bathed, in waters aromatic. His crown of vanquished emperor guts, they camouflaged with snow-white hawthorns, and they sanctified his sovereign flesh in robes of purple orchids. They gave his throat a necklace last, of their healing bud hibiscus, to wear in rich remembrance of his eternal victories.
He Relishes A Quietude Well-Deserved
And as soon as He relaxed His guilt, as His ascendant striving ended, He slipped into the hibernal peace of lilac-sheltered meadows.
And His neighbour troops would sing in praise, in the days of bliss that followed: “behold Our Liege, who so far reached, whose ceaseless climb the Mountains flattened! How He’s slipped into the hibernal peace of lilac-sheltered meadows!”
To their placid home, the peace-girt braves encouraged Him to add a cottage. From a village grove, they brought Him planks of sweet-aromaed cedar.
While the whole town joined to build His house, they communioned over interests. They swapped the dreams troops fantasise in the silent nights of trenches. Hopes of Sanctuary, hopes of life, of words replacing sabres; hopes of Ares pacified, of a sighing, lonesome Hades - these dawn-held hopes, beyond the night, now shone upon their glad construction.
As they drove His home’s last tough nail in, they celebrated in His garden.
And these friends gave Him a parchment roll, with which to start His post-war service. A stern command, they laid His hands, to rebirth in ink their grandeur. He should revive their chivalries forgot, should scribe their deeds immortal.
Each day, He joined their industry in spreading soil and seedlings. And they feasted through enchanted eves on the harvests of their produce. On marinated meats, they glut, on basted duck, on sautéed pheasant. And they quenched their thirst with beverages from grapes of pleasant season.
A club for belletrists, He made, where they climbed the peaks hereafter. There, they roamed the realms of reverie, through the pinnacles of pages. At banquet nights, His colleagues sang orations matching Homer, transcendent hymns to battles won, to paladins reproachless. And each who heard these melodies was driven to emotion, to the incorporeal that sounds in every troop who struggles.
Only once was there a pause of note, when a minister approached Him, with a bouquet of black dahlias and a warning to discernment.
“No cure could be so easily found,” the priest dispensed his counsel. “No hell-revoking peace could sprout from the innocence of flowers.”
But the other troops assured their Liege this charlatan was no true preacher. He was a snake, a sewer creep, a peddler of deceptions. Enraged, they took the priest away, for excommunication. And never ‘gain was then reheard the venom of his slitherings.
He is Contested a Minor Treatment
After months in this companionship, in luxuriating splendour, His Grace thought to indulge Himself a visit to the village healer.
His own complaint was nothing grand, His lips ripped by the wire He’d once extracted. But the way they wept when speaking frank seemed to give His hosts discomfort.
Such mess misfit the times, He guessed, didn’t match the mood nirvanic; and so he chose to splurge a kingly treat, to patch His mild disfiguration.
Outside the town’s herbologists, He joined a queue of patients. In rank, they lined, His limping troops, for the youth-refreshing flower. He chatted with a short-legged mate, whose knees had been dismembered, who’d all the seas explored and sailed in his pre-warfare profession.
But the injured Lord was turned away, when He sought to gain admittance, when a conscript with a halberd blocked the institution’s entrance.
“Your stately words,” this guardsman said, “Your mouth announcing victory, this aperture that exhales grace, should not by us be tampered! Such lips were hammered by the gods, by Hephaestus at his apex! No healer’s hand, no flower’s kiss, could hope to patch their grace resplendent!”
But this praise, dispensed like myrtle wreathes, contained a strange deception. A wayward scent, The General sniffed, an unearned adulation.
What’s more, this claim did not align with his observations previous, for He’d witnessed men repaired from worse, from conditions much more grievous.
“Should my lips’ repair prove onerous,” He said, “I will not grudge the failure. But I’ve seen your healer’s craft redress those injured with more flavour."
“That, we cannot risk, my Lord,” the guard again protested. “Should he fail Your lofty curves to fix, our herbologist would fester! How could his tender mind give soothe, when by this wrong-done sin tormented?! How could his fingers our wounds touch, when grimed by guilt’s pollutions?! Risk not, my honoured King of Kings, his ego’s devastation! Protect the brute’s imaginings of Paean Apollo’s favour!”
With suspicions held, The Liege decamped and left the healing station.
With suspicions held, He soon returned, disguised as a wounded soldier.
In a lily-woven mask, He came, with crotch-discoloured trousers; and, His inspection, skipped the guard, when He mumbled, “stolen valour…”
He Discovers The Nature of The Hibiscus Panacea
Inside, the herbsman met the teen, with a titanium-firm-like handshake. His ox-thick body filled a gown of Azaleas stitched with Pastel Yarrows. His arms, which once a great axe heaved, were draped in Chamomiles; and his fingers, switched to therapy, wore rings of Ginseng fibre.
The healer, of His grief forewarned, spoke a promise sympathetic. “Many such indignities, I’ve crossed within my practice. Some on battlefields were lost, from nether-aimed finales; and some were sheared on wicked isles, to generate their servants. All types, my friend, you need not fret, my surgery has mended; a replacement for your honour thieved, I’ll hastily have grafted.”
The masked king heard intriguing notes, in this doctor’s offbeat phrasing. Why call these labours ‘surgery’? Why’d ‘graft’ supplant for healing?
But before these doubts He could confront, or fix His false objective, the muscled doctor summoned aid by calling two assistants.
Two soldiers came in similar dress, with similar brutish constitutions. And they lugged the instruments prepared for the herbsman’s operation.
But no flowers had they fetched, no petal-imbued embrocation. Their medicine was sharpened steel, a set of knives from battles salvaged.
They’d brought, too, that priest who’d disappeared for giving the lofty sire correction, whose eyes now drooped in a vacant haze, in a poppy somnolescence.
At this man, the climber gasped, with repugnance, dread, and panic, at his severed arm and legs, replaced by the stumps of amputation.
This priest—who’d served Him as his Gods, who’d expired for His mission—like roast pig served at banquet feasts, had been harvested in sections. This priest—who’d served Him as a god, who’d expired for His mission—lacked three teeth from his sermon gob and a benedictory eyeball. From the sacramental arm they’d left was cleft a thumb and finger; and his hallowed abdomen was hollowed out and quartered.
The teen lord watched in pale disgust as the quack administered the treatment, as the orderlies, their patient, clutched, to receive his cursed castration.
Like a gardener who tends the stalk of an undesired thistle, the doctor grabbed the soldier’s groin and scrupulously pruned it. At the knife’s eviscerating kiss, the priest’s half-conscious face contorted. As his member’s stretched flesh split and peeled, he groaned as if in orgy.
As its meat began to separate, it haemorrhaged profusely. His severing manhood deluged red, like a royal rug down palace steps, like a chalice overpoured with wine to celebrate the conquered times dismembered on this Mountain.
His shrieks, the climber recognised, for He’d heard them once in battle, when they’d drift amongst the symphony of grunts, of howls, of rattles.
The sounds, the sights, they touched His calm, the peaceful-dreamed illusion; and in the lurid dance of flesh, His tranquil fantasy was shanked and murdered.
Along the healer’s arm, He glimpsed, behind the chamomile dressing, a thread that interlaced the limb, a suture trickling from the sawing. And the skin, each side this bleeding line, showed different pigmentation, for the appendage had been recomposed, restitched from scraps of several victims.
‘No cure could be so easily found,’ the climber recollected. ‘No hell-revoking peace could sprout from the innocence of flowers.’
He Departs The Medicinery and Observes The Horrors in Whose Company He'd Leisured
His stomach sick with nauseous guilt, he exited His treatment; He fled with fear the surgery and the impeding desolation.
But the scene outside the hospital was the same as when He’d entered, yet His eyes picked from the paradise what lies behind this heaven.
Beneath each stout-souled soldier’s glee, clandestined by His stupor, beneath their floral costumery, was kept the spoils of conquest.
The farmers, cultivating fields, laughed with stolen dentures; and their instruments that worked their yields were craft from shins and sternums.
On plagiarised legs, a painter drew a scene of slain behemoths, with a brush of scalp-dissected hair, on a canvas stretched from human dermis.
In a field of alstroemerias, a pair of soldiers played at discus. They’d sewn upon their skulls the grins of two dead twins’ dissected faces. And the discuses they vaulted forth, across the efflorescent pasture, were built from the brother’s broken jaws, from the mandibles they’d hacksawed.
At His village residence, the same grim sights awaited.
The furniture, on which He’d rest, was of strife’s morbid salvage. From bones, His bed was engineered, from human fat His candles. From filaments of nape-shaved hair was thread His shaggy carpet. The parchment gift—on which He’d wrote a lofty war remembrance, between its effervescent lines—was splotched with moles and freckles.
A neighbour, sensing His discalm, brought Him a woe-sedating tonic, yet the mug, within His palms, so soft, was thread from interwoven fingers. The drink was dust with cinnamon, in which floated plucked eyelashes, for the liquid was from tearducts milked, from a lachrymosing victim.
Thus, the veil of paradise, was from His vision sundered, and His jasmine-drinking eyes rewoke to surrender up a teardrop. Down His marble cheeks, it coursed, a trail of poppy-red diluted. Then to His heart, festooned in war, He cast a self-recrimination.
“For whom, Most Lofty Potentate, has Your ardour honoured?! To whom have Your crusading lust brought forth Your promised glory?! Not for these boys, You sacrificed! Not for their souls, You conquered! But for Your psychopathic goals, for Your Majestic Everest!
Here’s Your empire’s velvet truth, Your dominion’s honest anthem! Here’s the lily-petalled peace acquired by Your conquest! This pillow for Your cheek, it’s stuffed with the subjugated’s shornings! Your hospitals and homes, they reek, of their foundations’ buried corpses! This wine that helps You sleep at night, it’s from no virgin soil decantered! Its grapes of blind civility have sprout from earth manured by manhood!
Now Your mad example spreads to those by Your transgressions gloried! Your dream contaminates their roots and cleans their dirt-stained conscience! It’s only this, Your blessings gave, Your instrumental violence! As once You manicured Your pain, so will Your children mend their strife, will prune with honour war’s disdain and propagate the cycle!”
He Determines To Return
In the wake of this discovery, he tried to rest his judgement, to rejoin the kind troops’ company, to wear his triumph-festooned garments. Their brutality, he’d not condemn, having done himself no different, and one had to guard these reservoirs of calm upon the Mountain.
But his youthful joy, destroyed again, defied rejuvenation.
So, after one drunk bacchanal, he readorned his climbing trappings. His troops, he left in grape-blessed dreams, without a word of valediction.
Alone, he snuck to the lake of blood, at this sanctuary’s entrance.
By the shore, he stripped his royal clothes, those robes awarded for his honour. He relinquished to the lake of blood his crown’s disguise of hawthorns. He relinquished to the lake of blood his royal gown of orchids. He relinquished to the lake of blood his counterfeited chain of buds, of red hibiscuses that cured absolutely nothing.
As this last discarded necklace splashed, its flowers showed a strange reaction.
Despite their stalks’ incisioned death, the touch of blood revived their vigour. Along the vermillion-surfaced lake spread—like lotus pads—their petals. Their stamens elongated forth, and—like lotus blossoms—opened.
To this metamorphosis, the climber glanced with mute suspicion. His mangled lips fell taciturn as death, as night, as duty.
Then to the lake, he launched himself, to the blood of his accustom. Its unforgotten warmth, he swam, till he reached the breach he’d entered.
Through a corpse-lined gap, he crawled, returning drenched red to the outside surface, returning drenched red to the war-hacked slopes, returning drenched red to the howling cliffs, returning drenched red to the troop-stacked bluffs, returning drenched red to the endless-rising mountain climb.