ALVIA

Part Two

Barrus held the curtain, sinewy in the foreboding gloom. Haleon, he cried, come my brother, why do you hang back? Why do you wait, you whose strength is in decision? You were once to me a lofty height to look upon. Now you sift through the putrified murk, loathsome among the feeders of the grave for your self-serving patience. Haleon sits in the shadows now, dearest brethren. Let him lurk.

You call me a lowly worm, cried Haleon indignant. Hulking in the dark he held up Polysomnus who loved Barrus, and wounded her for her harlotry, and Barrus he wounded as he passed, driving a nail into his brow. Between the horns of the great bull he drove a nail and Barrus is afflicted with lasting sorrow.

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You were my brother, but now you are a name I curse in lonely rants, when lonesome I peruse my vaults of mourning and froth over my regrets. Such shame that I have called a faithless fool a friend. Haleon’s voice rings loud with scorn, shaking the brooding halls of Othominian’s cold and desolate plane.

Arriana, pouring soft tears lingers weeping over the shadows passing through the arch. In grief she spins words of song for their escape, now tainted by her wailing and enduring pain. Arriana sings the song of their departure, and over her pale shoulder grins the memory eternal of her baneful errand.

In Ulro stretched the vast expanses of a universe turned in upon itself with walls of lightning, cosmic bolts, woven like fine silk and a knife’s cruel edge to divide the void from the void. In Ulro do the Tangent Lords begin their feast upon their beleagured new shore where ash and anxious fears are served as wine.

They dined upon their nothing, mad still from the ravings of the tortured abyss and the cravings of the hidden king. Topar spreads her starry silk, now tainted by the thoughts severed from the sleeper. She weaves her silk like nerves to raise a starry pavilion over the lords of despair, and her silk is stained with blood.