Chapter Eight: Passage
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Waded muck, images of the mind galleries of falsehood an illusion to demented thoughts. Flames danced off behind, edging the sight onward in all its splendor mocking me, I was no longer sealed. Real as the soles of my boots, upon a foreign sky, stars unlike studied before. The construction runic carvings of my life's work, it was mine, unmistakable. Juts of wrenching shapes, coiled and strangled my design warped by hands, perverted. A sheen of waving metal, dark as the deepest shadow and receding sea. Infected, gorging as a spire-- Growth atop my tower. Misshapen corkscrew like spikes sucking the essence.. A malformation, disgusting irritation.
Silhouettes lurked about waiting to pounce all in absence the creator, lecherous eyes feverish, frothing at power none their own. Was it not a poet's inevitability to be transcribed twisted by interpretation; a stone mason dissolved by metal weavers, the farmers crops plucked for benefit of all? I pitied them, like a waterfall casting lives to shallows below by tune of the flow of the dredging mass. Awaiting the next providence of drying fields, overhead looming strings a power just coddling enough to ignore.
Nothing gave the right, no one had it to beseech the sweat of my work. A child's cry, pulled surrounding to the forefront as I met a stare from across the street. The bleak not obscuring green eyes and ashen face stricken, malnourished and pointing rising fire behind, or at me? Collapsing as I stood due no favor to this body or my legacies forsaken, I pulled at the edges of the stacked alleyway's sacks and packed crates and past the staring heads of children. Out of gaze a lying strawhat found new company only slightly misused, a light chuckle slipping out. At the situation, my rising boil or the face they'd make as I stuck it deep? Answers eluded even myself.
Rain bellowed, pattering tin roofs and zipping in lanes down to gutters neath footfalls. Capturing me in a current, lured between the shambles and towering designs I scantly recognized. A dividing wall obscured all on the horizon but the tower, adorned with hundreds of meters wide spotlights, a hive of flying forms interacting with it, interfering with the my will. A crowd of scantily dressed women carrying sticks and nickle ware peddling scraps drudged past me, as the storm dictated night, seeking shelter from the drab. The back of my mind raced with each step, not stopping till not knowing exactly where I was. Opening a crystal lit door to an underground hovel of a place, caring not of the empty room before me and toward the stairs above.
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A small room upstairs cleared the tension, like a sack of potato's I fell.
...
Marks of day throbbed, swaths of streaks still glistening in candlelight; it stuck calling witness, splashing my vision in a crimson blur no matter how I denied. A metallic embrace invaded my nostrils the confines, my inability. Clenching the bars my hands turned red my only retort, my weakness all in service. Within these decrepit walls I.. Could only watch. A itch filled my eyes, forcing me to witness the endless brutality, I couldn't, looking away- A coward's plight not my vice. Maria, the sinking feeling of hatred, fissures straight to the bone as if splintered wood. I tried, and more but the scene never escaped me.
Yet it wasn't nearly the cusp of horrors I'd soon become far too familiar with.
Mortan, a healer in name alone by definition of profession. The sort to come house call to the higher class, the poor but it was farther from the truth than the sun and moon. No wondrous gaze, endearing elixir and flavorful lollipop and bed rest- Twisted, a sense from within the hollow hole that was his heart of coal. Black as the tar on his tongue and rotting teeth, whom only seemed to eat the rawest of meat chucks. An arched back the man stood crooked as in a constant contest for the most defiled branch. He had come, fortnight soon as we came trapped within these walls, by declaration of Master Vinlan. The halls There was no quarter, not a sliver of joy or child-like delight. Everything that I know, and have known in this place... Perhaps behind, these walls somewhere off in a far land where my pain could leave and cause my heart adore. But biting at my shins, neck and anywhere else life could, I wasn't some fabled hero. Some destined one, was I?..If only it was that simple.
I could only watch. The blood ran that through my veins, Maria were not the same. Hackling Mortan wore his all present sneer, the same kind a cobbler does a rat admits their batter, not even- Lower as a specimen, something to use at ease. The floorboard creaked from beyond door-edge, knocking thrice a servant bell and an exchange of words that escaped my attention before Mortan hobbled out the room, a new shipment of devices sent by Vinlan or something of triviality I- My eyes just left barely, resumed excavating the already formed pit in my stomach. Knotting at the lines of tubes from her arms, the syringe of deep orange blood. I bit my lip, the gag we both wore did little to stop the conversation, her gaze was all I needed.
Soon. Maria.