Worship.

Worship.

Postby catch » Sun Sep 15, 2019 10:00 am

i shall sing when night’s decay
ushers in a drearier day




They sat in his sitting-room
Guiericke's? Or Bertram's?

and the preparations of Autumn were thick in the small, one-house hutment; prepared meats, dried fruits, cans upon cans of pickled vegetables and gelatinous preserves. In the rafters hung dried and drying roots, herbs, mushrooms. It left the mingled smell of something musty, both decaying and living, passing into rot.
To his credit, the horned Bertram hesitated only a moment in the doorway. It was apparent that he had not expected to see the figure sitting at his table. He recovered quickly from the shock of it. Bertram carefully laid aside the hare that he had in his hand.

"I expected to see you, sooner or later," he says. His voice has not changed, has never changed. Strong, confident, taunting snide. So full of Knowing, and wanting Him to know it. He spoke as an adult to a child. "Was it the boy who's shown you? Is this an introduction between friends?"

Is it possible that he does not know? That he does not suspect?

The man sitting at the table says nothing. It is what Bertram, the Red Horn, expects. He brings his own smells, his own dried flowers, his own desperation. He is not stoic. Bertram is right in his confidence. The tall man is hunched, his sweat a greasy sheen on his skin, and there is a copper tang of blood in his mouth from his fear. Even the flowers in his curled hair wilt from the stress tearing at his flesh.

His mismatched eyes cannot meet Bertram's. They wander, they dart, they constantly move with the twisting of his fingers.

He doesn't know.

"What are you doing here, boy?" Impatience, now. Anger. Catch
not his name, but it's safer. Guiericke rat'vak Oddy a Grand Catch


understands. But he is afraid. He had not though that he would be this afraid.

I didn't hear about you from Eater. But I've seen the Rats, you fucker. I've seen the Crows. I know what you've done to him -

"Ainrid an Tiomphan," Catch says, instead. His voice is so low, and it shakes so much, that he must needs repeat himself. "Do you know who that is?"

This time, it is Bertram's turn to say nothing. The Red Horn has advanced, his one antler setting the dried mushrooms and herbs above to disturbance. In the cramped center room, the two large men are giants. There is little room between them, and when Bertram takes his chair, there is nothing at all. Knee to knee, very nearly nose to nose, and Catch cannot, cannot look. His scarred hands are knotted under his chin. His eyes are squeezed closed.

"No," Bertram says, slow and insolent. "No, I don't. Should I?"

He may know Elliot Brown. He would know -

"Why did you let me have her?" Not Ainrid. Bertram has already answered that, and - in so answering - has already answered so many other things. Catch is still afraid. But he gropes out, a blind supplicant, unable to look his Uncle in the eyes as he entreats him. It is a broken sort of question. Ruined fingers curl into the cloth of the Red Horn's shoulders. One hand, and then the other, once he is made bold.

Because he is not looking, he doesn't see how Bertram smirks.

"Your mind is all over the place, son. Who do you mean?"

You know who I mean.

"Soodsy."

"As if I have anything to do with your spawn. But have you ever really had her? Ever seen her? -"

He is talking. I knew he would want to do this. He ruined Eater to get to me. But I didn't see it. It wasn't him. I'm sorry, Eater.

"Uncle."

He was so confidant, Bertram. So certain. So sure of himself.

Until he wasn't anymore.

His head held between Catch's hands, he was silenced, stilled, with a word. Because though Catch was afraid,

though his voice trembled and his fingers shook like a hummingbird's wings against Bertram's ruddy skin,

his mismatched eyes finally found the honey-brown of Bertram's own.

And they held.

"Her name is Fionn," he begins.

She is not a human. She is Tuatha, and she Loves me.
Do you hear me, Uncle? She Loves me.
Like those in the Cities, but unafraid.
Like those in Lothaine, but Purfied.
Like those in Jernoa, but free of Hate.
Like those in Myrken, but unsullied by Pity.
To me she Sings.
Her Flowers adorn my hair.
Her Fruits are sweet upon my tongue.
Elliot has shown me.
Ainrid has shown me.
I have given her my flesh.
And in her love
With her Worship
She has given me my
H҈̭̳̱̞̘̭̫͉̠̙͚̬̗̦̥̞̗̠͚̱̥͙̙̀̾̓̒̑͆͆̑̀̈́̅̎͋o̵͕̙̖̜͎͓̦̩̰̜͉̗̟͕̰̱̓̆̓̽̿͒͌͌̃͌̒͑̂̿͛̃̍͂̌́̋̌͗r҈͙̟͍͉̭̦̮͕̳͔̙͇̗̳̠̥͍̞͓̮̙̮͔̥̅͌͒̄̏̀̿͐̉͊̑͒͗͐̿́̈̓͂͛̅̓n̷̝̜̫̞̯̬̲̰̥̥̗̙͖̗̯̘͓̬̘̱̾͑́̓̈́̉͌̅́̅̄͊͗̒͛̀͗̒̏̊̑̚.
User avatar
catch
Member
 
Posts: 699
Joined: Mon Aug 31, 2009 4:00 am

Re: Worship.

Postby catch » Sun Sep 15, 2019 10:25 am

How does one Kill a God?

Bertram must have asked that. An age ago. He hadn't the answer, then, because the answer and the question was Myself. Containment. Ruination. Minimize my effects, save for brief spasmings outside of my control.

He didn't understand that it was always out of my control.

But I find that I can kill a God quite easily.

He screams as my thumbs enter the sockets of his eyes. There is no ichor, no smoke, no billowing of air or howls of the damned. He is surprisingly mortal. His blood is as red as the rest of him. The shock of his skull cracking, giving way, between my hands brings my mind that much closer to clarity.

I really will have to properly thank Fionn somehow.

I don't know if she knew how every flower stoppered a scream, how every bit of praise drove the bloodied fog further away. I hid more and more of myself in the outskirts, terrified of what I would find.

When she asked for Soodsy, I was very afraid, though I can't remember why.

Then it was as if the passing of a fever, the awakening from a long, terrible illness. I woke, and the world coalesced into a terrible sort of sense. I remembered the Horn, safe in Solena's keeping, but I remembered also that it had done nothing for me. And I asked myself something that I had never thought to ask before -

Why?

As I lay my head in Fionn's lap, letting her sing to me, letting her feed me candied apples, I thought I great many why'd's that I never thought before. Like an old wound I brushed mental fingers along the dusty jars in my head; but they were whole, quiet, firm upon their shelves.

It was enough. Fionn was enough.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Red Horn was a man-shape, awkwardly sprawled across his table, a red smear of nothing from the ears up. Catch dragged his hands across his chest, smearing hot, red blood and brains and aqueous humor across his rough clothes. He felt - good. Clean. But his eyes twitched, and roved, and his teeth threatened to shatter the way they clenched in his jaw, lips writhed back to bare against an enemy that no longer existed.

You ruined Eater. You ruined me, Fucker. Until something like Us came and Worshiped Me. You lost your chance.

He touches his hand to his lips, not entirely ignorant of the gore. It is salted, copper, metallic, awful.

You sent your Visions to torment me, to torment them, to force them to drive Me away.

How could he be Whole again?

For a long hour, Catch can do nothing but sit and watch the body of his Uncle, watch and wait, unable to move or speak or think save in expletives, a bloodied Prince and a bloodied table. His eyes fixated on the single antler, snapped in the ruin of the Horn's skull.
User avatar
catch
Member
 
Posts: 699
Joined: Mon Aug 31, 2009 4:00 am

Re: Worship.

Postby Cherny » Mon Sep 16, 2019 9:22 am

How many times has the squire trod this path, picking his way between trunks and boulders to the woodsman's home? Enough to see its changes from season to season, from the green-gold of spring to the bleak sleep of winter. A pilgrimage made no less than once in each turning of the moon, often more, over a span which has seen a boy grow into a youth, still on the way to becoming a young man.

Even after so long he never fails to carry a gift with him, small offerings from places the Red King cannot tread, which they both know to be mere pretext for the visit, an excuse for talk over a steaming mug and this treat or that from the woodsman's larder. This time it is a bolt of cloth, a few yards of sturdy wool fit for mending and patching another winter's wear out of whatever garments might need it. He's happy at having thought of it, having noticed a useful thing he might offer unasked, and his pace quickens as he imagines how Bertram might smile to receive it. There would be laughter and comfortable conversation, a sharing of news and company, the scent of drying herbs and woodsmoke and honeyed tea, safely coccooned in a warm and convivial nest from the troubles of the world.

The quiet is the first wrongness.

He rounds the last winding of the path, past the stump of a tree toppled many storms ago, and a hush lies heavy on the clearing usually astir with small and busy lives.

The woodsman's house rests across the glade, a humble heap of stacked stones and wood and moss and turf, sheltered by trees and mounded earth.

The door is the second wrongness.

A rustic thing of unstripped logs, in summer it is propped open with a scrap of unsplit firewood to admit the breeze; from autumn to spring, though, it should be closed tight, jealously hoarding the little hearth's warmth within.

Carelessly ajar it swings silently on its crude hinges, autumnal sunshine dappled upon its surface serving only to deepen the hungry shadow that champs slowly upon the breeze. No welcoming glow of stovelight or tapers within, no curl of blue smoke from the chimney.

Unbidden, the youth's steps slow to a hesitant halt some score of yards from the hut, and the first fingers of cold dread worm their way into his guts.

The blood is the third.

At first almost mistaken for the first scatter of autumn leaves, dark stains that shimmer and gleam like oil, and his thoughts shy away from what it might mean, what might lie at either end of that splashed trail. A dull roar rises in his ears, the clearing about him growing dim, peripheral. His feet move without conscious volition, dragging him towards the doorway as inexorably as any nightmare.

For a moment his hand presses upon the rough bark of the door, sun-warm and solid beneath trembling fingers, before the darkness swallows him.
User avatar
Cherny
Founder
 
Posts: 383
Joined: Sat Nov 17, 2012 8:34 am

Re: Worship.

Postby Cherny » Mon Sep 16, 2019 10:55 pm

Warmth presses upon his face, dazzles him, but it is a distant thing, barely touching the chill in his flesh, doing nothing to ease the chattering of teeth or shuddering of limbs. Each blink against the autumn sunlight is a flash of red through his lids so he stares at the cloud-wisped sky even as his eyes sting and water. The stacked-stone wall of the hut is uneven at his back, angles and corners pressing into his narrow shoulders as he sits against it. He grimaces, and feels stickiness crusting his face and lips.

He crosses the threshold and the room is cool, all but the barest scraps of warmth it once held now soaked away into earth and stones. The familiar scents are still there as his eyes adjust to the gloom - dried herbs and stove smoke, cured hides and pickled vegetables, the deeper notes of sweat and breath infused into the walls and woodwork over many winter months. Brighter, though, is the raw meat tang of the butcher's shop.

Eventually he lowers his gaze, a persistent motion gradually pulling on his attention; a pale thing which he slowly recognises as his hand, thin fingers curled, attached to a wrist which rests upon his knee. It twitches and trembles, moving without his command, and he finds welcome distraction in watching it for a time before dully wondering if it still obeys his will at all. He thinks about lifting it, and it does so with jerky, palsied movement; he turns it over, and the palm and fingers are dark and sticky red.

Eyes wide in the dimness he stares, breaths shallow and rapid in his throat, sweat chilling the shirt between his shoulderblades. He begins to discern shapes - bundles of leaves hanging from the low rafters, the back of a chair, the neat shelves of stoneware jars.

The table, though, is not right. A mass there, hunched or sprawled or something of both, a chaotic muddle of line and shape impossible to discern.

He takes a further hesitant, inevitable step into the wet copper stink, swallowing the sounds that seethe in the pit of his throat, and the rustling of trees outside adds to the rising roar in his ears.


Leaves of russet and gold spin and dance across the glade, leaves of amber and red.

A breeze tugs the door closed behind him, plunging the small room into abject darkness, and a helpless animal noise escapes his lips.

Something slips beneath the sole of his boot, smears wetly as he stumbles; he throws his hand blindly forward to catch his fall and it presses into something soft and cold and yielding.

His shout rattles the shelves, spills dust from the rafter, a clamour of bells cut short by the thin hands that clamp over his mouth, squeezing until his cheeks bruise and cut against his teeth.

The door swings open again, daylight brilliant after the dark, and for the first time he can see the red ruin that slumps at the table, dark clots of gore and splayed bone and torn meat in a deerhide coat.

He staggers, falls, flees into the light.
User avatar
Cherny
Founder
 
Posts: 383
Joined: Sat Nov 17, 2012 8:34 am

Re: Worship.

Postby Cherny » Sun Sep 22, 2019 10:07 am

He does not steel himself with platitudes against fear. He does not argue himself out of his shocked torpor with reason or logic. He does not tell himself lies about dignity or duty or respect.

It is the insult of it which eventually goads him into moving, standing, acting.

Since his first visit - as a scrawny child in an outsized coat, led stubbornly through the winter woods by a great and faithful hound - he'd known this place as a sanctuary, a redoubt against the threats and horrors of Myrken Wood. A place of kindness and patience and wisdom, untouched and unstained by the wider world. A place where he might feel entirely safe.

The grisly scene within is intolerable to that memory. Profane.

Still chilled and shivering with the shock of it, but at the same time mercifully numbed, his thoughts rendered dull and foggy. The ruined remains at the hut's heart are a thing out of place, something that does not belong, a wrongness, a wound to be washed and bound and set right.

Even so, his steps are hesitant as he creeps back into the single-room abode, cautious, and his breath catches as he looks once more upon the table.

Too much to consider, too much to let himself understand, so he clings to the simpler and more immediate matters which he might readily address. Practical. Pragmatic.

The room is dark and chill, but he knows where to find tapers and sulphur-matches.

* * *

"It's just meat."

What had slumped at the table was barely recognisable as once-human, a meaningless jumble that not long before had walked and breathed and spoke gentle words. That it no longer possessed a discernable face was perhaps a mercy - no head to speak of, though perhaps one might have recognised teeth here and there if one were to look closely, which the boy does not. Impossible that those fragments might once have belonged to a smile or a laugh, that they might once have been ordered into anything like features.

"It's just m-meat."

This lie lets him move scraps and pieces onto a blanket spread across the floorboards, to shift the main mass of it as if hauling a sack of grain, to heap it together and arduously with as much care as he could manage, to stubbornly drag the whole affair out into the light of day.

That error dispelled the lie in an instant, laying bare details the hut's dim interior had mercifully veiled.

There were Bertram's boots, undeniable, though their fur trim is caked with gore; heavy woollen trousers soaked through and stiffening; a calloused hand with skin tanned like copper; a deerskin coat with white wolf's mane at the collar and shoulders, now splashed and crusted as the rest.

"It, it's just meat."

Bead-black eyes watch from the treetops as he retreats back into the shack, there to lose himself in desperate distraction.

* * *

Hours later. He's not sure how many, save that the autumn sun drifts towards the horizon, the clearing already sinking into the shadow of the encircling trees, and he's weary to the bone.

He has done his best. With unthinking effort and buckets of streamwater, with brush and rags and sand and tears he has scrubbed and mopped and scrubbed again, his world constricted to a few square feet of rough woodwork. He'd wept as he worked, paused here and there to cough hoarse sobs into his hands before setting to work again. Thin hands chapped raw, back and shoulders protesting bitterly, but the work is done.

Well, most of it.

He sits beside the blanket heaped with just meat, and he is hollow. Too tired, too wrung-out to think, to feel, staring dully at the red ruin that remains of -

Winter evenings sat across from the woodsman, learning to draw creatures from a stout stick with patience and a sharp blade, each little figure less rough than the last; playing games of jumping stones on a stitched-cloth board, each of them striving to look more shrewd and cunning; tying bundles of wild herbs with twine to hang from the rafters, filling the room with their savoury aroma.

- his friend. And more than friend, for he'd been a source of guidance with it, wisdom accumulated over years (how many years?) and offered gently when sought. A fixed point for a boy otherwise adrift.

His crows had already arrived when he finally emerged from the shack, a dozen or more black blots upon the grass and leaf litter, a silent circle around the blanket and its burden. Larger than their forebears and cousins, children and grandchildren of those fledglings the miller's boy had befriended years before. More hang back in the trees, similarly still.

At length one of the birds - this one starkly different from the rest, plumage of ivory-white, eyes gleaming like golden beads - steps nearer, advances upon the wreck, and a moment later the rest follow suit, the circle shrinking, tightening.

Cherny watches quietly, no word or gesture to stop them.

It's just meat.

What follows is a strange, almost respectful affair, more akin to a sombre ritual than the raucous bickering of carrion-birds. Sharp and clever beaks tug scraps from flesh already rent and torn, each crimson morsel offered solemnly to a neighbour.

After a time the gold-eyed crow breaks from the circle, approaching the boy with a careful strut. It takes a span of heartbeats for his eyes to drop from the more distant scene, to fix on the ghost-pale bird and the gift she offers in red-streaked beak.

It's just meat.
User avatar
Cherny
Founder
 
Posts: 383
Joined: Sat Nov 17, 2012 8:34 am

Re: Worship.

Postby Cherny » Sat Oct 05, 2019 11:38 am

The last stone is in place, and it is complete.

For a time he had not known what to do with what remained; to surrender it to the ground or, as Myrkeners did, to fire had seemed somehow not right, as if neither had any right or claim upon those sorry scraps and pieces. So the youth had done what felt most proper - if anything could ever again be such in the aftermath of so deep a wrongness - and returned what was left of Bertram to where he most belonged, where he had lived and-- where Cherny had met him first, in his humble woodsman's shack. He wrapped the remnants as best he could in sturdy wool and well-worn blankets, tied tight with twine and strips of hide, a bundle light enough even for the squire to lift, laid to rest in the simple cot with care and reverence.

To leave those shelves of winter stores had seemed in some way wasteful, but the thought of taking them was worse. Despite it all there was the stubborn idea that the red man was simply elsewhere, absent for a time to return later, and he'd have need of provisions when he did. Meanwhile the dried herbs lent their faded fragrance to the room, covering the lingering stink of other things he would not name, and that too had seemed right. He'd made sure that the stove was swept out and set with sticks and kindling, and fetched a ewer full of water for drinking and washing.

That done, when all was in order, he'd gathered stones from the woods around; angular shards flaked from bare outcrops by frost, others round as cobbles and softened further by forest moss. He'd stacked them in the doorway, sealed it as best he could against any who might dare intrude, covered it further with sticks and brushwood until it was all but obscured.

He's done his best, has done what he could, can do no more. He hunches his shoulders at the chill wind of evening, huddles into the fur trim of a deerskin coat stiffened and stained, and turns away to begin the long walk home.
User avatar
Cherny
Founder
 
Posts: 383
Joined: Sat Nov 17, 2012 8:34 am


Return to The Forest & Lake



Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 10 guests

cron