A'arob'lth

A'arob'lth

Postby Rance » Mon Mar 31, 2014 1:02 am

The words fell on Cherny somewhere in that blank and undefined abyss between sleeping and waking. It was the domain where only the inner ear knew the depths of depravity, enough to shift one's balance ever-so slightly and create that vague, effortless sensation of falling, falling. A place deemed only fit for traversal right after the eyes closed, or moments before they chose, at the call of sunlight or cock-call, to open--

Not in the dreams, but in the anteroom of the dreaming mind, the foyer of it, the parlor; that place that sometimes strangled around the throats of the nearly-sleeping and caused them to say or sense the most sublime, fantastic, realistic things as though they were still conscious.

They fell like little droplets.

A'arob'lth. Ket? Et v'agro'oz et dar g' ghe-doz mor mo'ngerok.

Nar'jo; nar'jom et par'yl.

The phrases, distant and foreign, were the color of silver; they gleamed like mirrors and disembodied fingers. They were sensations with a reflective sheen. They whispered in that silent, uncharted darkness right inside his eardrum, beating subtly just beneath the membrane.

An ache throbbed in his left hand throughout the course of the following day. The knuckles creaked when he tightened them around the handle of his sword during fighting-practice. The wrist, when he twisted it to tend the buckles of saddles or the filthiness of hooves, sometimes gave off a faint stutter of pain.
User avatar
Rance
Co-Founder
 
Posts: 2520
Joined: Tue Dec 10, 2002 8:00 am
Location: Maryland

Re: A'arob'lth

Postby Cherny » Tue Apr 01, 2014 1:25 am

A day that feels off, haunted by the half-recalled murmur of foreign words, words that he did not so much hear as remember having heard; harsh syllables that he recognises as Jerno, but delivered in the wrong voice.

A day of vague unease, of stretching and curling fingers during idle moments to work out an imagined stiffness; flexing and turning his wrist to explore the boundaries past which the joint might protest. He assumes it an injury, some small sprain or soreness from overwork, enduring the discomfort with little more than a hiss of breath through his teeth or a tightening of features when he finds another gesture to avoid.

As with so many things the squire endures this small unpleasantness, well-used to the aches of jarred bones and overworked limbs. If it doesn't improve, he tells himself, he'll get a penny jar of ointment; the sort that stings the eyes with its fumes and seeps hot-and-cold into sore muscles. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the next day. Maybe it'll clear up on its own.

He's had worse. He's had far worse.
User avatar
Cherny
Founder
 
Posts: 383
Joined: Sat Nov 17, 2012 8:34 am

Re: A'arob'lth

Postby Rance » Thu Apr 03, 2014 3:11 pm

Speckles of rain trickled down the rose-colored chapel-glass in the walls of his--

A'arob'lth. Ket? Et v'agro'oz et dar g' regret mor mo'ngerok.

Unnecessary; nar'jom the others.

Could he feel it? Could he, as he lay near-asleep and prostrate underneath his itching blankets, feel the trembling, sulfurous fingers crawling like curious serpents across his rough bedsheets. They tugged at the fabric and wrapped their warm, greasy lengths around the thinness of his wrist. Above him, two smoky figures--

(Shadows that had stretched out and reached for him from the oblique upper supports of the stable-loft's ceiling?)

--tilted their chins and looked down upon him as though he were an ailing dog. They wore cone-shaped caps that stood erect several feet above the termination of their dark foreheads. Occasionally, when their blurry, inquiring faces leaned just so, the cap-points collided, struck one another like flimsy swords.

Again, the Jernoan words looped, bleeding into clearness within the drums of his inner ears.

A'arob'lth. Ket? Et v'agro'oz et dar g' regret this mistake.

Unnecessary; nar'jom the others.
User avatar
Rance
Co-Founder
 
Posts: 2520
Joined: Tue Dec 10, 2002 8:00 am
Location: Maryland

Re: A'arob'lth

Postby Cherny » Tue Apr 15, 2014 5:23 am

Though quiet, the hayloft is rarely silent; if not the slow breaths and muffled footfalls of the horses shifting in their stalls below, then the soft scratching and scurrying of the rats in the thatch, going about their nocturnal business. Foreign words slipping into his memory, recalled rather than heard, weaving themselves into whatever liminal dream plays out behind his eyelids.

Even a touch upon his bedding is not unfamiliar, though he hunches a shoulder beneath his blankets, murmuring some sleepy complaint; only when that grasp settles about his wrist does something seem awry; only then does he begin to rouse from half-sleep, brow creasing into a frown of unease. Too early to be awake, the woods outside silent, no dawn chorus to stir him from his bed, and it's this which at last has him cracking an eye open to squint blearily--

Dark figures loom over him, seeming strangely stretch, attenuated, indistinct wraiths of smoke and shadow.

--his breath catches in his throat, unable even to feign that he still sleeps, that these intruders have gone unnoticed; he does not move, cannot move, save to hunch deeper into his bedclothes and stare wide-eyed at these intruding apparitions, tensing beneath that grip upon his wrist.
User avatar
Cherny
Founder
 
Posts: 383
Joined: Sat Nov 17, 2012 8:34 am

Re: A'arob'lth

Postby Rance » Tue Apr 15, 2014 7:34 am

Two worlds.

Cherny inhabited one, this half-waking frame of a world where his bed existed and the walls reached over him like the distorted stanchions of a barn-loft chapel. Likewise, feigning sleep, he was indigenous in this other world, this place where he was sprawled like a sacrificial lamb upon a cool slab. The cap-headed sentinels swayed over him, examining him without ever seeming to actually observe him.

He was half-in their world; they were half-in, half-out of his.

(Underneath his pillow were the bones he'd dug up with Glenn Burnie over a year ago, still laying dormant and almost forgotten. They rattled in their rucksack like hollow bells, awakened, awakened, awakened--)

No, in the other world...

...he actually never lay upon a slab, for now when they touched him, they reached through him with their dark, wrinkled, parchment-rough fingers and sorted a number of artifacts organized on the table in the place where his intestines would be. Here, Cherny was intangible, invisible; he was an interloper in this distant place, a consciousness tossed instantaneously over a thousand, thousand leagues--

It was a bleak chamber with a single shaft of Sunlight spilling in through a pinprick hole in the ceiling. The beam was filtered through a thin disc of rough, red-tinted glass suspended by thongs of leather. Air was thin, scarce. The two cone-capped figures were hunchbacked wastrels. Their brown-skinned faces sagged as though they'd hooks in their flesh constantly tugging their cheeks down near to their knees. The whole room, in its compactness, was redolent with the reeking, sulfurous odor of tarsweat. One of the shadows had gray, lifeless eyes, and the other wore a pair of mismatched spectacles.

One of the figures paused. Stone-Eyes. It peered right through Cherny as though he were a sliver of smoke in the air.

"
A'arob'lth. Yes? I fear we're going to regret this mistake," it said.

"Unnecessary; don't inform the others." The second of the pair lifted something from the table, and its robe shifted away in a dormant wind. A sunken chest peppered with criss-crossed ribworks lay atop a distended, hunger-bulging belly. Two sagging breasts dangled like sacks of coin toward its waistline. The female, peering through scratched lenses at a relic on the slab, raised her hoarse voice again. "Is this thirty-seven?"

"It is," said Stone-Eyes.

Only then might the object in question have been visible: cradled in the woman's fragile palms, there was what looked like a dried piece of twisted meat lifted up from the table. It had several mangled offshoots, motionless fleshy appendages, each capped by a chewed-short nail; it bore
fingers, a thumb, though it resembled more a lump of dessicated venison than--

A severed hand. Human. "Thirty-seven," the woman said, and raised the artifact high to examine it.

Stone-Eyes, peering off to the side, said, "There's someone here, Nereius. Eyes and ears. A dreamer. I sense him. I
touched him where he slept."

Nereius, still curiously examining the hand, did not look away. "Can you fetch him? Can you bring him to us?"

"I can try."

Stone-Eyes reached forward...


...and that chilled, sandy hand took hold of Cherny's wrist once more and tried to yank him out of bed, not to the floor, but into this other world, this other place.

(The Dreamwaker's bones clattered, shook, and chuckled. Awakened, awakened, awakened--)
User avatar
Rance
Co-Founder
 
Posts: 2520
Joined: Tue Dec 10, 2002 8:00 am
Location: Maryland

Re: A'arob'lth

Postby Cherny » Thu Apr 17, 2014 9:37 am

Words understood, for all that he knows they are not his mother tongue; somewhere else overlaid upon the hayloft like the reflection of a bright room in a dark window, the air simultaneously night-cool and desert-hot upon his skin, mingled scents of horses and tarsweat, sweet hay and bitter dust. He listens, watches as much as can be taken in by the turning of his eyes alone, not daring to move for fear that--

A leathery grip upon his wrist, tangible, and it's at last enough to have him crying out, trying to tug free; a moment of dislocation, of falling, and then the bite of sandy stone against his knees and palms as he tumbles across the floor, a tangle of pale limbs in a creased nightshirt. A stunned moment in which he stares wildly about the chamber, dark eyes stretched wide in alarm, and then he scrambles hurriedly to his feet, backing away from the withered figures before him, bare feet scuffing slightly as he edges to set his back against a wall. He pushes aside the sting of abraded skin, the ache of bruised bones as he lifts bony fists before his face in guard and challenge, no obvious weapon found close to hand; heart hammering against his ribs, it is a handful of gasping breaths before he can speak, his voice strained and raw.

"Wh-who are you?"
User avatar
Cherny
Founder
 
Posts: 383
Joined: Sat Nov 17, 2012 8:34 am

Re: A'arob'lth

Postby Rance » Fri Apr 25, 2014 5:33 am

Somewhere else trickled into his reality, became less than a doorway to a dream and more a here-and-now, and...

The air in this place was thin and burning, tearing at lungs with every inhalation. The heat was not so much a bother as was the air itself. It was impossible to bring in a full mouthful of air without the chest expanding, wheezing, begging for more. Only altitude waged such a war against a human's breath. As the boy scrambled to put his back against the nearest wall, he might have had a moment to engage his surroundings, subsume them, make them familiar.

The conical chamber was taller than wider. At its heart was a single granite-like slab carved out of the same stone- and sand-speckled earth that comprised the rest of the narrow-ceiling room. Set in the walls at uneven intervals were depressions and divots wherein little glass sculptures stood like natural growths from the earth. The statues of imeprfect glass were perverted by any number of fractals, smears, and blots, but not enough to too greatly distort vision of what each one of them contained: a severed hand in each, some fat and plump, others dessicated, shrewd, and thin, immortalized inside the glass and kept away from the rot and putrefaction that would have surely turned them to dust.

But what was more prominent than the hands were the figures of Stone-Eyes and Nereius. The flickering torchlight in the chamber cast their shadows like crawling ghosts, flicking and twitching, against the walls. Their cone-tipped hats occasionally struck one another, making them appear off-balance, disproportionate.

On the slab were a thousand chunks of broken glass. The remnants of one of the hand-containers. Nereius cradled thirty-seven against her chest, a limb with callused fingertips and too-short fingernails. Looking over her misshapen spectacles, the reedy woman said, "A better question is, who are you, imp? I'm unsure by what magic you dream, but this is not a place for wiry little boys and fanciful imaginations."

It was not Standard she spoke, or Common. Her jaw clacked together and her tongue lashed like a leather whip. She spoke Jernoan. Cherny could understand every word of it.

"He has the hand," Stone-Eyes rattled from the room-side, daring to creep forward toward Cherny, his nostrils flaring. Sniffing. The kind of breath that tugged up his upper lip and gave a glimpse of broken teeth. "He's a whitesweat boy. Not Jernoan, not even vaguely."

"Then how can he be here," Nereius asked her assistant.

"Spellcraft. Bones," Stone-eyes said. "I can feel his bones. I can hear his bones, clacking and rattling, performing a dance, giving him dreaming-eyes."

Nereius considered her associate's observation. She slid forward, circling around the slab to more carefully approach Cherny. She brought with her the odor of burnt wood and bad eggs, as Forzo once posited. The older woman's dugs were dashed out of view by a sweep of her robe, a modesty offered the trembling boy in the corner. She cupped the withering hand between her palms and squatted several meters away from Cherny. A daub of tarsweat dangled like an oily spider off her nose-tip. "If you think I'm going to cause you pain," she said, "I don't intend to. Were you one of my people, I'd hollow your insides as quick as look at you and leave you out on the rockface for the voorbears to shred. But not you, young man. There's no secrets to lock away by killing a foreigner."

A pause. One second. Two.

"I don't have a name, but had I one, it might be Nereius. Tell me yours," Nereius said. "And then tell me why you have my silvered hand."
User avatar
Rance
Co-Founder
 
Posts: 2520
Joined: Tue Dec 10, 2002 8:00 am
Location: Maryland

Re: A'arob'lth

Postby Cherny » Mon Apr 28, 2014 11:06 am

It's not fear alone that has his chest heaving for breath, but the thin air only compounds the boy's sense of shock, of alarm at finding himself dragged from his bed by dream-ghosts, snatched across countless miles faster than he'd been able to comprehend what was happening. At first glance he takes the glass-sculptures as holding gnarled branches or roots, and clings to this assumption for all that he soon realises it to be false. Likewise his - what, his captors, his conjurors? - are creatures of creased leather and withered sticks, puppets both ridiculous and unsettling, and for all his knuckle-brandishing bravado he presses back against the wall as if wishing he might squeeze through it.

The apparitions speak and Cherny grimaces, shakes his head sharply; vexed by the dissonance of words that crack and grate in his ears, foreign, alien, and yet understood. The old man edges closer and the boy dares a desperate swing of his fist in warning, trying to make himself fierce; an ineffectual threat, so instead he grabs for the nearest alcove, the distorted glass a more substantial weight in his grasp. Heavy enough to threaten, to do an injury if wielded or thrown.

"S-stop it - no c-closer!" His voice rasps in the attenuated air, anything but intimidating, and some part of him listens to find if he speaks Common or harsh Jernoan. "I, it's n-not me - you d-did this, you, you brought me h-here!" A raw accusation, as if it might force them to undo whatever magic they've worked, to put him back, safe in his hayloft bed.

Their words still filter through the haze of breath-starved fear that muddles his thoughts - hand - bones - dreaming - magic - silvered - enough to give him pause, to have him drawing deeper, steadier breaths in an effort to order his wits. Not calm, not by a long chalk, but something closer to controlled. Dark eyes drop briefly to that severed hand; still mistrustful, still ready to lash out should either of them stray too close, but at least willing to listen. To consider.

"It's n-not yours - not any m-more." A tone that might be surly, were he not forced to gasp for breath every second or third word. Connections made, gaps filled in with hurried extrapolation, an unsteady edifice of half-knowledge and speculation. Eventually, after a stretch of time in which his gaze flicks from one of his questioners to the other:

"Cherny."

A nod to the grisly token clutched in Nereius' hands.

"That's h-hers, isn't it." He has eyes enough to note similarities, to recognise sturdy knuckles and needle-thickened skin. He knows next to nothing of magic, no understanding of how this might have happened, but can hazard a guess as to why.

"Th-that, that's her r-real hand. The one you c-cut off."
User avatar
Cherny
Founder
 
Posts: 383
Joined: Sat Nov 17, 2012 8:34 am

Re: A'arob'lth

Postby Rance » Mon Apr 28, 2014 12:50 pm

Though Cherny's fist lashed out in warning, a seemingly useless maneuver, the frantic swing caught Stone-Eyes against the side of his ear. The withered man flinched back, his shoes scuffing marks through the loose dust on the floor. He turned a shoulder to protect himself, then balled one of his hands, his index and muddle knuckle protruding slightly from the bunch. He bent his knees and wrenched back his arm, quite prepared to maul the boy in return.

S-stop it - no c-closer!

Words thought in Common, spoken in Common, shaped like Common. But when they met the humming air, their sound was altered, less gallant, foreign.

The glass sculpture in Cherny's readied hands caught a gleam of Sunlight in its angles and creases. "No," Nereius said. Her head was turned to the side, the point of her chin a perfect complement to her sharpened nose. "No," she told her assistant, whose heels flattened back to the floor. They kept their meager distance. Stone-Eyes turned away. He ambled toward the stone slab and put his palms against it, letting his head hang low between his shoulders. His fingernails scraped against the uneven rock. An attempt at composure, at calm.

"Cherny," Nereius said, returning her gaze to the boy. When she said the name, a gust of breath slithered its way between the first and second syllables, a strong huff of air blown out of her lungs. "Stone-Eyes performs tireless work to shape the glass and liquify the silver. And he spends even more time attuning it. Throw that container in your hands, and you threaten damaging something very precious to him. To me. To someone who once owned it. That sort of mindlessness is a spark for starting wars. Seven," Nereius said over her shoulder. "Stone-Eyes, who was seven?"

"Hed'er," he said. "Hed'er Coretch."

"And six?"

"Glour'eya Asbon," he said.

"And eight," Nereius asked, as though identifying the bracketing victims was important in the least.

"Mitz'on Far-Reach."

Th-that, that's her r-real hand. The one you c-cut off.

With a dry-lipped smile, Nereius said, "He remembers all their names. He recalls distinctly what children bear the silver. Stone-Eyes, who was thirty-seven?"

"Glour'eya Wynsee."

Nereius turned her attention down to the decrepit limb clasped between her forearm and her stomach. "It's no longer hers, Cherny. It was surrendered and dutifully replaced."

Stone-Eyes muttered again, "I can feel his bones. I can hear his bones, clacking and rattling, performing a dance, giving him dreaming-eyes. I called him not; I want no boy, I want no boy, not unless he's one of us."

Still crouched several arm-lengths away from Cherny, Nereius fell silent for several long moments. This place was a quiet one, this spire-shaped room like a miniature chapel. Every time they spoke the glass receptacles set into the walls vibrated like teeth with old, unanswered aches. The huddled woman plucked her spectacles off her nose and furiously wiped their lenses against the threads of her sleeve. Upon it was stitched a swirling arabesque, a thousand miniature hands with interlocked fingers. At even intervals around the hem, the dots of the sun and the moon waxed and waned through their swelling and diminishing phases.

"Surely the silvered hand is in your employ," Nereius said. "Else, whatever mechanism of interference you possess wouldn't have landed you here, of all the better places in this world you might decide to chance in your sleep. And yet this hand--" she lifted the seamstress' preserved limb between them, "--is no adolescent boy's. Thus, we're faced with an inconsistency, a tangle, a problem to be solved. An anomaly -- a'arob'lth."

Several seconds passed, fat and tedious. The wrinkles etching Nereius' hard-leather face softened.

"Have you ever committed a sin, Cherny? A blasphemy, an irrevocable deed? An act you so disdain that it threatens to mutate that intangible essence in your chest that whispers to you, This is who I am, this is what I've been born to do?" A hiss of metal at her hip. From a small leather sheath, Nereius dislodged a rough trowel with an angled edge. She scraped it across the floor between her feet, gathering up flecks of rusty sand. "Tell me," she said.

Behind her, Stone-Eyes repeated, "Tell her, boy. You must."
User avatar
Rance
Co-Founder
 
Posts: 2520
Joined: Tue Dec 10, 2002 8:00 am
Location: Maryland

Re: A'arob'lth

Postby Cherny » Tue Apr 29, 2014 3:57 am

The glass casket gives him leverage, something to bargain with - a way to threaten, and thus to ensure that he is given space, given time. Up to a point. So he holds tight to his prize for now as if it is a talisman that secures his safety, that protects him from the gaunt figures that shuffle and crouch in the ruddy half-gloom.

"I, I'll b-break it." Striving to sound bold, to sound determined, adjusting his grip on the cool mass as if to cast it to the ground. "You, you s-stay there. Don't g-get any closer, either of y-you."

Hed'er Coretch. He shapes the unfamiliar syllables silently with his lips, but very deliberately does not turn his gaze to the trophy he holds, to the dark shape imprisoned at its heart. Each of those alcoves, a lump of glass; each of those lumps a hand, each of those hands a name, and the hag says thirty-seven even as he glances to the walls, making a quick guess of how many names. The old man speaks his sister's name and his breath catches, lips pressing together as he swallows back a rush of nausea.

Surrendered and dutifully replaced.

"It w-was taken - s-stolen. She, she d-didn't give it." An angry correction, slapping aside the justification for that knot of flesh and bone ending up here, rather than where it belonged. Not freely given - not the first time and not the second, not in any way that counted as a choice on her part. He settles back, crouching with his shoulderblades against the wall, dark gaze moving from one of them to the other with undisguised mistrust. His frame tenses at that metallic whisper, glass container half-lifted in warning even as he eyes the trowel that scratches at the rough floor. Recalling the scraps and fragments he's been told, glimpses of forsaken Jernoah gleaned from the seamstress' words.

"I'm n-not eating that." Making that clear before they enter any discussion of sin, even as he considers her question, as he hunts for its meaning and at the same time secretly weighs up how much of his answer he is willing to share. He thinks on matters of guilt, of wrongdoing and regret, his gasping breaths marking out the time; thin features gradually harden into something like defiance as he comes to a conclusion with a small shake of his head.

"N-no. Not l-like you mean." There are sins that he might silently confess at the chapel, small stumbles and failings, unkind thoughts or words, moments in which pragmatism briefly won over principle. The rest, though?

"I, I look after m-my friends. And, and if anything t-tries to, to hurt them, I s-stop it however I c-can. Same as, as if anything t-tries to hurt me." Clear enough in his warning there, looking sharply towards Stone-Eyes.

"That's n-not a sin."
User avatar
Cherny
Founder
 
Posts: 383
Joined: Sat Nov 17, 2012 8:34 am

Re: A'arob'lth

Postby Rance » Fri May 02, 2014 9:47 am

I'm n-not eating that.

"But you are," Nereius said. "You intrude upon a place of holy devotion. Without permission, you drift into our sanctuary and permeate it with your pride. No creature lives sinless, Cherny; this sand absolves you here, and of whatever trespasses you may commit in the future. You're young," the woman continued, passing back to Stone-Eyes the withered leather of the seamstress' disembodied hand, "and that leaves a great number of years ahead of you pregnant with the guarantee of your wrongdoings.

"Shatter that glass and I discard you, Cherny. This is my home, and these are my artifacts. You threaten to perform blasphemy at the behest of your discourtesy alone."

Behind her, huddling like a gargoyle over the inanimate hand, Stone-Eyes whispered, "It's been severed. Silver leaps from the flesh and I can see her no more, I can hear her no more; it's been severed, it's been defiled. It's the bones, it's the fault of the bones, he's here because of the bones."

Nereius, despite the warnings Cherny had given, unfurled to her full height, the girth of her dry-rotted robes and her towering cone cap casting a crawling shadow across the wall beside him. "Do you want to know a secret," she said, the spectacles magnifying the yellow-whites of her eyes like inflated pustules. "You're a clever boy, and clever boys always adore secrets."

The trowel thrust itself closer, too close, the grains of sand gleaming and sparkling in the faint, ambient light.

"He's seen us," Stone-Eyes muttered, clenching his palms against his temples, squeezing -- denying some kind of pain blossoming within. He doubled forward, striking his skull once, twice, with a hollow and violent report against the edge of the stone slab. Stone-Eyes' voice had started to shift and gnarl in its tones and features, ejected from his diaphragm like an acid he could no longer contain. "He's seen us and I smell all the foulness he brings; I feel all his kind's reeking offal filling my mouth, like all the Jernoan filth we've cleansed. Nereius, Nameless, Nameless--"

Nereius reached out, tried to take Cherny's hair in her spidery, rock-knuckled fingers.

"Eat it. I give you this one opportunity to do as I ask, or I throw you to the voorbears and see how much of a dreamer you really are."
User avatar
Rance
Co-Founder
 
Posts: 2520
Joined: Tue Dec 10, 2002 8:00 am
Location: Maryland

Re: A'arob'lth

Postby Cherny » Thu May 15, 2014 12:28 am

"I'm n-not." Obstinate refusal, denial, however much she talks about sin; he turns his face aside from the laden trowel, lips pressed tight closed, leaning away as if those few inches of distance might buy him respite. No move to throw the lump of glass to the ground as he'd threatened, however, recognising that to do so would cost him any ability to bargain at all.

"I, I d-don't want to be here. You b-brought me here, I, I was asleep!" Asleep and safe in the hayloft, the air scented with hay dust and horse sweat, and his voice carries in it the confusion and alarm at somehow finding himself here, with these withered elders - priests or wizards, whichever they might be.

The man, Stone-Eyes, mumbles something about the bones and a moment later dashes his head against the stone table, and the boy stares in wide-eyed horror, ever more certain that the pair of them must be mad. It's distraction enough for Nereius to seize a fistful of the boy's hair, and be rewarded with a hoarse shout of pain and anger; he struggles briefly, but her stony grip is strong, cruel.

"It w-was wolves!" Admitted at last, hurried, looking for something which might win him time in which to think, in which to escape. "There was a w-wolf and, and it b-bit off her hand and I k-kept it! I don't kn-know why I'm h-here, I don't w-want to, to be here!" It's too real, the pain as she wrenches at his hair, as he twists in an effort to keep the sand away from his face; he hugs the glass lump to his chest with one arm, the other raised to push the trowel aside, to fend it off.

"I j-just want to g-go back."
User avatar
Cherny
Founder
 
Posts: 383
Joined: Sat Nov 17, 2012 8:34 am

Re: A'arob'lth

Postby Rance » Thu May 22, 2014 1:40 pm

"And still he sleeps. Still he sleeps, because of the bones!"

Stone-Eyes had a voice that cut like steel through the thin air. It was sharp and otherworldly, ringing with a collection of notes that should have never been married, but together they were disharmonious, grating, and ugly tones. He reeled back from the altar. His palm jabbed up to cup the swollen gash opened above his left eye. Blood ran down his face, and when he breathed, ribbons of runny red blew away from his lips.

"I bleed because of the bones. They helped him dream us. They helped us dream him! An anomaly, a'arob'lth, a'arob'lth!"

Nereius swallowed a breath. The bags of her lungs wheezed and rattled just beneath the parchment of her mud-colored skin. Her talon-like hand released his scalp. Nereius drew back, threw the tool to the altar, and disengaged the boy. She scuttled back, offering him space. Her great, erect cone-cap threw a peak of shadow across the nearest wall. "Wolves," she said, still watching him -- trying, with her cataract-blurred gaze, to see into him, through him, but his white, white skin threw off too many reflections, too much brightness.

The old woman steepled her fingers and pressed them across her nose and her forehead. Then: "Stone-Eyes."

The decrepit fellow snapped his chin around, the summons of his name garnering greater attention than his wet skull.

He chattered from across the chamber, "What are wolves? And whose bones have you got? I hear them knocking against the inside of my brain. Dreaming-bones. Dreaming-bones brought you here in an ivory chariot. Give to me my Hed'er Coretch and tell me of your dreaming-bones. They are to blame. They are to blame. This, we shall fix. I can send you back, child. But give to me that silver in your arms. This is no place for boys. Only for gods made out of lies.

"Tell me of your dreaming-bones." Stone-Eyes grinned through a sheet of red, his teeth creaking. "I will beg them to send you away from us."
User avatar
Rance
Co-Founder
 
Posts: 2520
Joined: Tue Dec 10, 2002 8:00 am
Location: Maryland

Re: A'arob'lth

Postby Cherny » Wed Jun 04, 2014 3:02 am

Stone-Eyes' voice is a harsh shriek that echoes from the niche-riddled walls; he speaks a jumble of half-sense, chattering and jabbering as he bleeds and splutters. Cherny finds himself abruptly released, the threatened trowelful of sand drawn away, and as the crone retreats he slumps back against the wall, sinking to sit on the earthen floor, curled around the entombed hand of Hed'er Coretch.

Still he sleeps, because of the bones!

It's enough to give him something like hope; if he's still sleeping, still dreaming, then there's a chance he might awake - back under his own rough blankets, on a mattress of prickly straw and sackcloth. Enough to have him doing as he's told at last, setting the lump of glass carefully aside and hugging his knees to his chest instead. He watches them warily, not without mistrust, but the air is too thin for such struggles, and to fight is to risk exhaustion.

When he speaks at last his voice is sullen, defeated, and though he answers the old man's questions his reply is directed to Nereius.

"Th-they're wolves." He's far from home, so far they've probably never seen a wolf. Different animals, stone-bears and juzzoons. "H-hunting beasts. They l-live in the, the w-wilds. They eat sheep - livestock - or, or p-people, if they're h-hungry enough." He glances down, then lifts a thin wrist for the pair of them to see, drawing back the loose sleeve of his nightshirt to display the scars etched into his flesh.

Dreaming-bones.

A frown as he has time to think, to consider what the old wretch means, and a moment after he blinks as he realises, understands. Or at least suspects.

"There w-was a, a wicked m-man - years ago, I d-don't know how long - and he g-got killed, and... and h-his ghost was so angry it s-sent dreams to p-people." Trying to remember, to get the story straight in his mind, to recount the facts as he knows them. "Dreams that f-felt real. And, and p-people met each other in the s-same dream, and he, he g-got them to kill each other. In the d-dream."

A pause for breath, to gather his thoughts.

"I went with the G-governor to d-dig up the dreaming-m-man's bones so we c-could stop him. I, I was m-meant to take the bones into the next d-dream he sent, and... and that'd end him." A shrug of bony shoulders admits his own ignorance as to how that might work, why he might be set such a task. "I k-keep them by me when I s-sleep, to b-be ready. But there's b-been no more dreams yet. So I d-don't know if I should k-keep them close still or, or w-what."

The boy's dark eyes watch the two of them - wizards, or priests, or whatever they might be - to see if it makes any more sense to them than it does to him.

"They, they've n-never done anything. They're just b-bones."
User avatar
Cherny
Founder
 
Posts: 383
Joined: Sat Nov 17, 2012 8:34 am

Re: A'arob'lth

Postby Rance » Wed Jun 04, 2014 10:47 am

Stone-Eyes, his face still smeared with blood, the bulging contusion on his forehead split like two red-stained lips, blew out a breath of relief. Cherny unhanded the capsule of glass. He listened with his whole being as Cherny explained, his darting gaze seeming to follow the sounds from the child's mouth as if they scrawled words in the warm, dusty air. His arched back creaked and moaned as he shuffled forward.

...he g-got them to kill each other, Cherny said. In the d-dream.

"You dream," Stone-Eyes whispered. "You dream this place, child. You dream me. You dream us. You dream the Nameless. You dream, that you might kill?"

Behind Stone-Eyes, Nereius offered a conspiratorial whisper, "Would they send a boy?"

"To kill us? Perhaps," Stone-Eyes said.

The withered matriarch's lips peeled back. "Whether or not these are his dreams, this is our reality."

Perhaps Cherny expected to find some modicum of ease or understanding from his fragile captors, but their faces turned to cracked stone. They shared a silent realization, a discovery that swirled like marbling beneath the surface of their flesh. Behind the peculiar, battered man, Nereius slithered forward and placed her palms upon his shoulders. Her fingertips gouged into the dusty folds of his robe, then thrust into his skin and muscle And for a moment, like two beasts in union, Nereius's body mashed itself up against Stone-Eyes's back; she breathed, her tongue lapping with something like euphoria before--

(nearly two years before, he lay with an egregious wound sucking in his chest, covered by bandages. He burned like wildfire when he breathed, and Gloria gave him milk, a saucer of milk, and the trees outside the Rememdium Edificium scrabbled and clattered noisily against the window, seemed to whisper, speak to him, murmur in tongues and voices)

Nereius vanished. She dissolved. No, no--

She crumbled into Stone-Eyes, the great point of her cap merging with his. His visage swelled, bulged, and jerked. The two disparate figures became one. A pair of gnarled, feminine arms wetly emerged from his shoulders. A pair of leaking, bleeding slits opened in his forehead, blinking into life.

Nereius's eyes.

When his mouth yawned open, there were two tongues lashing for purchase, struggling against one another in some tiny, perpetual battle. Another couple of nostrils opened on either side of the cleft above Stone-Eyes's upper lip. In a twisted, resonant voice -- that which had once crept for him through the walls of his mind, seeping into him at the insistence of milk, a saucer of milk -- Stone-Eyes and Nereius spoke as one. Inside that wide mouth, its jaw stretched and distended like a snake's, swam rows of sand-shattered teeth.

"Leave us. And if dreaming-bones have brought you here, little boy, then beg that you awake. Beg and pray you stir, and when you do, shatter those bones. Strike them into splinters if you must. For if by whatever means you awaken here again, an intruder, an a'rob'lth sullying a house of secrets, we will reduce you to just b-bones."

A great stone shifted. A banner of burning desert light spilled in through a newly-formed crease in the wall of the minute chapel. And Stone-Eyes, having been reshaped like hot clay, continued to grow, until the pointed cap crushed into the ceiling and the four eyes widened and beat like bloodshot hearts.

Nameless, Nameless.

"Leave us. Bury that sinful Silver deep in the earth, that it will forget its purpose. Dismantle your precious little dreaming-bones. Never return."
User avatar
Rance
Co-Founder
 
Posts: 2520
Joined: Tue Dec 10, 2002 8:00 am
Location: Maryland

Next

Return to The Stables



Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests

cron