My eyes are drawn by my other's gesture to the sea of light that churns above.
The unreal color that has lingered on the periphery of my vision overwhelms my sight as it flows not from around me, but from within me. My eyes are made as floodgates for the manifest color as it rushes forth in a blinding torrent.
The color washes away and flows into the skies. My vision returned, I see it no longer as an impossible maelstrom of unearthly hues, and it begins to quiet in intensity. Calcify.
I see shapes form, paths falling into place and adhering to reaction, but they do not lay themselves as simple stone or mundane surface.
The color settles into horrific shape.
The sky itself assumes the aspect of a sea of twisted faces. Young and old, masculine and feminine. Some scream with anger and pain, others grin with joy and malice. Others still, stoic and solemn.
The statue sky is silent and imposing. Dark with portent. My other stands still, hand still pointed upward.
But then there is a sound.
It is low at first, the whisper of rushing water deep below ground. But it grows in volume, emerging deep from within the graven cloud of chaos. I hear screams, matching the chaotic emotion of the faces above. There is no discerning purpose, the sound is simply pure emotion in all of its forms.
Light rises in the stone throats and I see figures fall forth as raindrops from their mouths. The sky breathes fire and death.
My other's robes are whipped by the howling wind that besets us. I pull into a fetal position, covering my ears to block out the madness, but the sound permeates through my skin as if it were not an auditory sensation but a simple truth to the existence of this place. To be here is to be awash in the emotion of it, and I feel my body resonate with all the temperatures of the storm at once.
I try to close my eyes but find my vision, much like the sound, cannot be avoided. No longer subject to the conditions of flesh, I am forced to partake as witness for whatever is to come.
Existence shudders. Not the ground upon which I am moored, but the air itself. The fragile order I create here as a being from a world of logic, shaken by the harmonics of the screaming sky.
There is a snap, and everything is shifted by a minute degree upon an unseen cleave. The sky is broken by the warp, and cracks begin to form.
There is a brief moment where the sound falls away, overwhelmed by an encroaching silence that exceeds the volume of the chaos.
From within the silence, something speaks in a tongue I cannot commit to word nor thought.
And then the sky collapses.
From above, they fall. Towering semblances of agonized and jubilant faces, impacting with hateful force. I tumble in their furious wake, carried by forces both physical and not.
As the dust flees from the impact new horrors follow, crawling forth like insects from a corpse. The humanoid figures that fell as rain now scramble forth freely from their monstrous sarcophagi, jeering and howling in mania as they tear free of their progenitors.
Each figure a shambling mass of hewn stone in the shape of limbs with no singular source, suspended by luminous vascular mesh that serves as their bonds. They bob and dance without muscle or bone, an unnatural mockery that resembles no living being. Faces shattered and broken, torsos marred by gaping holes, limbs split and twisted and affixed in rough position upon the nets. Broken statues raised by puppeteer's string and made to dance in a mockery of life.
The very fabric of the fallen stone is unraveled as their throats are choked by hordes of staggering bodies. Stone skin falls away in strips as new figures emerge from the surface of the faces themselves. Definition is lost until the once imposing forms are reduced to lumps of misshapen clay, open birthing wounds bleeding the same blue light that shines from deep within.
When their sundered flesh can no longer sustain itself, the faces collapse with deafening crash, remaining stone quickly rushing to form into half-realized figures that writhe and crawl with barely functioning limbs.
As the horde grows, they fall upon each other. Paralyzed, I can do nothing but watch the carnage unfold.
Each figure seizes another, and with a desperate fury, claw and bite and strike against their opponent until they are broken and the glowing skeletal core is unspun like thread. Broken limbs, greedily torn free and cast aside in a frenzy where they fall amidst a growing sea of their discarded siblings.
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But they do not lie still.
The loose limbs are drawn by some inscrutable force to a new host, moving towards a finality. Each figure was born incomplete, and when their brothers and sisters are devoured, the shattered pieces rise to meet them. Holes are patched, broken limbs mended by shards of bone and stone flesh until the dangling puppets become patchwork mannequins that move in closer approximation of life.
The more complete forms meet not with the desperate fury of the half-wrought fallen, but with grace and martial prowess. They break their opponent's limbs with devastating purpose and affix the severed pieces onto themselves.
The carnage subsides, and in the wake, a complete form. Composed of its lessers, it has become grander than the sum. It stands, towering above me, symbolizing no evolutionary apex but a culmination of desire. It exceeds naturality to become the realization of excess.
Writhing limbs snake from a broad chunk of fused torsos, stretched and elongated into gnarled flesh to clumsily reach correct proportion. Massive trunks matted with legs dangling like vines, terminating into feet that face both forward and back. Its arms point in four directions, woven with knots of smaller limbs like the beast above the city of stone.
Veins bulge on its misshapen neck to support a massive tower of mixed emotion. Where eyes would sit, there instead are only mouths flowing into further faces, forming interlocking rings of hunger that align into an imposing crown split cleanly down the middle with an empty slit. Severed hands hover in a swarm around the head, and as they form arcane gestures I feel reality vibrate once more. Not in the grand and violent rapping upon its surface that shook my soul, but in a slow and deliberate exertion upon the borders of the law that binds this place with understanding.
With my senses exceeding my form, I am unable to turn away. I watch the creature as it stands, and then shifts. It splits its legs, not apart in line with its shoulders, but vertically along the very limbs themselves. It falls back, quadrupedal. I see it now in the shape of some ancient deity, facing all directions at once as it becomes anchored in some unholy marriage between man and beast robed in anthropomorphic mock. Though it wears a gleeful mask, it casts anguished cries skyward, arms spread wide in supplication to the approaching horror.
I shift my senses to my other, but it still points skyward. It smiles without speaking and wags its finger. This beast is not what it had been indicating.
Rising from the monstrous figure I notice faint glimmers of light. Spider's silk gently falling upon some central force, invisible above the apex of its form. The threads become thicker, weaving into ropes. Then chains. Then mighty cables thick enough to bind ships. They spin together and interlock, growing, growing, reaching skyward.
Skyward to the splits in the surface of the sky that shine black into the impossible nothing beyond. The rope spins and stretches to meet the darkness.
And then something reaches back.
It takes the outstretched lifeline and holds fast.
It begins to pull itself from the depths of the sky.
My other at last drops its hand and speaks. "Be seeing you, little man." And without sound or force, simply winks out of existence.
The apex form screams with a million voices and blood flows from my ruptured ears. I am still not granted the blessing of silence.
The towering body explodes into a geyser of stone-form gore. Shards fall to ash before they land and rise as a whirlwind, spiraling upwards along the rope of light.
The remains of the labyrinth too, dissolve into dust and rise to meet the horror in the depths.
I lie helpless upon a withered raft, floating in the impossible sea on the ocean floor beneath deeper waters above.
I cannot see what reaches out from the depths. My untethered sense fails to render it, and sees only the seam of reality bleeding around the edge where my mind refuses to fathom.
The form begins to pull. The waters draw together.
Something speaks within the depths, commanding me.
My body rises of its own accord and my arms are thrown wide.
I sing praise, desperate and pleading, and my voice is stripped from within my raw and stinging throat. I continue to entreat the madness above not with sound but with mind.
I know it can hear me.
The parting of the waters above widens. From within the depths I see something staring back.
Crimson tears, warm and burning flow down my face. My sockets are empty, yet they pull wider and wider, desperate to see without sight that which approaches.
My body forces against itself, desperate to prevent what is coming. It seeks to spare me with death.
The sky retreats entirely. I am faced only with the void beneath.
I see death.
Not physical. Not these dream deaths rendered as nothing with each rebirth.
I see finality. Existence unmade. Unwritten.
Taken.
My body tears itself apart, but my mind persists.
Madness cannot spare me. The horror from beyond holds my entirety within its fist.
It will not let any escape.
I seek for something to save me. The Seven. The heretical cult icons. Some deity without name nor flock that might suddenly become manifest solely to spare me from this fate that supersedes death.
None respond.
Any divinity is occluded by that which approaches.
The waters meet.
I am unwritten.
The thing within the deep opens its infinite mouth.
It speaks.
OULL [https://i.imgur.com/CMP8ybn.jpg]