Speaking manor. Sitting on the floor of her cell in her lightning robes, Serib was in a trance or some other distance. Her master, Gada’il, was calling out from their hut so many worlds and stars away, sitting by her feverish bedside. She had fallen ill after being sent by Gada’il in different pages to these; dreamlike she panted to the top of a dry mountain where spirits gather, to find there her first totem: that of Earth. Along Timeless seams as these.
∞
The totem was a long stone or metal handle that lightning seemed drawn to and the ground cracked beneath. She took it up as a staff, her arms and back in every strain, as the parched mountain fell drenched upon by raining blood and an evil spirit surrounded her when an Earthen ancestor was meant to congratulate her journey. Or so shamans tell of their customs.
∞
Eight and Infinity was everything about Them, this force primordial - their limbs burrowed within the mountain and older than the mountain, and all the mountain then was a crimson manor-peak, and all beneath the manor was a keep and palace, towering atop unfinished castles. And all from there were lands of every lavender under rose or poppy skies, and half her head was shaved, her eight thick locks of hair becoming four and no more.
∞
“That is how I first started on my journey.” She told The Ersecutor as he sat there with her upon the floor, brooding over plans.
“In one version. Where is your staff?” he asked.
“I haven’t mastered bringing it on my journeys, out of body and mind.”
“When I foresaw your boiling of the oceans and angels struck by lightning to drown in the fathoms, it was a great hammer you wielded the lighting with; the staff you describe could be the hilt.”
Though weird were things passing as she sat there in this prison ever-moving, and she had no linear since-sense of sequences. Silent thunder. Looking up from her trance Argus was gone, and her soul or spirit travelling through ashen nebulae was thrown off by thuds and shouts outside her cell door.
∞
Argus had been shoved up against the other side of the door, and two monks were with every might trying to punch through his helmet, digging their knees into his gut and ribs. Jumping and crashing with all their might upon him (the same technique Gargarensyr had destroyed The Great Freedom’s statue with, though executed with less expertise). Not a dent could they make. Serib rushed to the door and better saw how The Ersecutor leapt free, entangling both the monks with his weighted net cape, and on the ground wrapped them as though cocooned. He stabbed and beat them through their screams.
∞
Quiet. Blood across the stone floor of Serib’s cell the instant Argus opened the door.
“What are you doing?” She gasped, avoiding the blood with her rough feet, watching the monks grasping at their beads as they bled.
“Come with me, Little Eyes - Gargarensyr has ordered your execution, though there are other ways to see this conflict end, and fill the divide between Truth and Falsehood with Love - not Hatred.”
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Blood was filling the cracks between the flooring, spelling out my messages; alas Serib left the room too quickly to notice. A storm flashed in the cold darkness, beyond our barred windows. We prisoners.
∞
The Corridoor was smoky from extinguished torches and the glass of shattered bulbs crunched under her steps. The Ersecutor used his helmet against his next foe, bludgeoning them crushed and finishing them with his shard of a sword. They hid together from werewolves prowling tall who left runes clawed on the walls to track where they had been, Serib guessed. The manors a maze. Further on, flashes of lightning sparked through from the other cell doors all at once; for a space-storm was keeping close to Serib as she and Argus navigated the halls. The storm saw her only sporadically in the Corridoor, peeping from cell to cell through ancient windows. Through scenes slipping away. Her master, across distances impossible.
∞
As a creature she could not discern in the smoky dark leapt at her, she thrust out her hands against it, and the entire Corridoor rolled as though Gravity had turned in restless sleep. The storm outside crashed into the palace to her defense, alas unable to pierce the walls. The thing clawing and kicking at Serib fell away scrambling across walls of paintings, tearing as it went into the old oils and crooked frames.
“Open this door!” She pleaded to Argus, as he managed to grab the slobbering beast and throw them crashing into an old clock-o’-armour.
Trained in the habit of entertaining spectators, his kills theatrical, as The Ersecutor leapt and rolled in weird technique helping him avoid harm, slashing at more bestial enemies swarming here-there, and with his presence or command the cell door nearest Serib swung open. The window had shattered through and wild lightning was raging therein, waiting to meet the will of her hands. Argus yelled:
“Be glad, fiends, that you are not wet from rain as well as her power befalls you!” he knew only too well.
∞
The Ersecutor was soon being overwhelmed by these new, barely visible creatures, whom as humans perhaps did once crawl and move here behaving no laws we understand. Horribly sagging faces or so told their shadows cast from the flashes of lightning through the smoke. And when those sagging mouths opened with width enough to chew, suck and swallow you whole, these as Spine Eaters are known.
“What are you, horrors!” They slobbered on Argus’ helmet and at his arms, as with one hand Serib sent forth a wave of fresh and frothing water, boiling clean, flooding the way ahead. “I am tired, damn you!” he raged against the beasts, avoiding the scalding wave though not its steam. “Will ever you let me sleep!”
∞
He himself had been a victim of this next combination. He jumped over Serib to hide briefly behind her, as now both her hands and eyes were storming, her mouth flaring with teeth and tusks. Her hands were already burnt raw and previously boiling waves began to freeze in the cold darkness of the stars. Fuelled by the storm reaching at her from the beyond, lightning began filling the narrow hallway. Argus coughed against the stench of burning oil, oak and skin in his throat. His sleepless eyes saw too much. The wet horrors ahead of Serib floundered and fumbled electrocuted, dragging each other to safety when they could, the rest writhing or shivering against her tempest as Serib too was stricken, unable to control her lightning power. Her power turning against her as by some curse unnamed.
∞
She fell when she could no longer exert against her pain. She then felt lighter - carried away by the monstrous Ersecutor down a yet darker Corridoor. Whatever dim lights there dwelled in the chamber they left behind, the creatures were feeling around in it, finding my grooved letters or words in wood and stone exposed, and they began with their atrocious-open mouths to eat the manor floor and walls. Taunted. Encouraged. Distracted. Argus ran carrying Serib away from the deconstruction, the disintegration.