Re: QUIETUS [S!5] [Round 1: Godsworn Valley]
07-13-2012, 05:24 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Agent1022.
<font color="#486858">The Temple of Obscura was, true to its patron deity, mostly built underground. It consisted of a labyrinth of corridors and rooms, and thanks to an oversight or perhaps deliberate intent on Obscura’s part, there were no maps to the maze available anywhere. Most directions ended up hastily scribbled on the backs of envelopes and hands in easily washable ball-point pen, and pity the private with sweaty palms: it was said that the ones that got truly lost were met by Obscura Herself and taken into Her presence as sacrifice, to reemerge as the mythological creatures She spawned to aid her army.
“Sorry, Lieutenant. Hames gave me fuckin’ last week’s map.”
The voice came from under some inconspicuous ruins, which were connected by a crumbling sprawl to the collapsing hall a ways away that housed the Temple aboveground. A small trapdoor opened underneath a half-rotted roof, and the ragtag hunting squad pulled through from the labyrinth below, kitted out with gear and packs and other military paraphernalia. Mills milled about the top of the stairs, giving a hand to those having difficulty climbing the ladder. Briefly, he wondered - Recruits these days. What happened to everyone who could carry a rucksack without help? What happened?
Coming up the ladder was the strange girl. The one who was light and not a myth, Obscura had said. He reached out a hand, carefully keeping his face composed as cold metal sucked at his body heat, and lifted her to the cracked, mud-caked cobblestones. It had rained recently; the smell of turf and surviving flora blotting out the chemical stink of war for a short, eternal moment. In the space of a breath Mills breathed the air of his youth, beyond the valley, beyond the neverending deific war. For a second, the world was perfect.
Rachel stared into space.
A starfield spanned her imagination, dots upon streaks upon great heaping showers of glowing light splattered across a panorama of receding cosmos. It was a daydream of stellar quality, a vision of the universe packed into one infinitely clear sphere, to be perused in leisurely detail.
It was a prelude, Rachel knew, an opening score for something half-remembered or forgotten in haste or fear. Deep within her, a synapse misfired, and in a flash of unexplainable déjà vu she imagined the sound of chimes.
Then a chilly breeze blew in from underneath the overcasting clouds, and nature’s reclamation proclamation faded like watercolors in the sea. Around Mills came a chorus of heartfelt sighs, followed by equally heartfelt coughing and gagging as the various malodors of wartime atrocities resumed their nasal grip.
And then they marched, though marching was an activity usually reserved for organized armies, like that of Raxis or Frigidus. Obscura’s forces usually opted for moving in some direction in a generally sort of purposeful way, and that was just about good enough for them.
As Rachel hiked with them, she became aware of a sick feeling in the pit of her nonexistent stomach. A gnawing, pulsing feeling, like the kind she had felt for the first few weeks after she hadn’t had a stomach anymore. It struck her again - that feeling of déjà vu, accompanied with a fleeting memory, a sense of urgency, heat, fear -
Just as suddenly as it had come, it wisped into the everyday noise of consciousness, leaving only a foreboding taste on the fringes of her senses.
A nasal voice punctuated, for the umpteenth time, the sounds of boots on drying leaves and mulch. “There’s a God of Hunting, you know. Kedemonas.” Mills closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to ignore the voice and its owner. “It’s said he gives animalistic qualities to his higher followers.” The fact that everyone already knew this never seemed to cross the voice’s mind.
“An’ wouldn’t you like to have the mouth of a mynah, Sparks?” This speaker, solidly built, gave Sparks a friendly punch in the skinny arm. “Oh wait!” Raucous laughter all round.
“Shut up, Jenkins!”
“No, you shut up, Sparks, that’s the whole point!” More raucous laughter.
Interrupted with an insistent beeping from the device in Mills’ hand, raised in the signal for all stop. “Hold. We’ve got something.”
Everyone felt it - a rippling wash of natterings across the psychic spectrum, sleeting through the woods like a neutrino shower of the mind, impinging and ricocheting on the insides of minds: PEOPLE? PEOPLE? IS ANYONE OUT THERE? IS ANYONE THERE? BROTHERS! HELP HELP HELP HELP ITS SO EMPTY
Rachel screamed without lungs, an impossible note in harmony with the panic in the air as the stellar mass inside her writhed, spasmed, the crossed wires of her broken, repurposed nerves brought her the sight of green, no blue, no, yellow-snake-writhing writing triangles with sixteen corners and the smell of apple pie and potato fritters drizzled with Flight of the Bumblebees and velvet chocolate hazel sandpaper
The squad, as one, flailed, clutched at various solid implements and structures - of which there weren’t many; the tree trunks themselves groaned and bent under the barrage of sound and mental dislocation -
Mills, in one of those moments of clarity brought by having one’s senses too overloaded to maintain the comfortable barrier between thought and perception, mused on the epiphany that plants must have minds.
The mental onslaught stopped as suddenly as it had started - but the screaming was beyond impossible now; it swept into the registers of the inaudible, becoming a mere conduit to something
something, something liquid and sick and bright and painful, welling at the bottom of her sun’s miniaturized gravitational well, a cup runneth full, a cup runneth over
Mills turned and saw the girl, sparks arcing from her metal and grounding themselves, beyond belief, in the very air, and once again had the feeling he’d had since he’d left home outside the valley that he had stepped into a world he did not understand in the absolute least-
Cognition came to Rachel in an instant, along with its lesser cousin recognition: Déjà vu didn’t happen for no reason. The signs, the symptoms, the synaesthesia, all of it had happened before and its consequences were terrible - so terrible - that she couldn’t bear to know she’d done it. And now the sun was giving an opening act for another phase on its stellar cycle.
Solar flare.
The lieutenant watched the glowing girl
metal-palmed hands whining
shining
when
sucking at the light, a wave of darkness sluiced through the trees like a quantum knife ignoring classical matter, a buzzing swarm of spherical shadows flowing liquidly in its wake. In unison, a thousand dark eyes opened and stared into the nuclear light-
Instinctively Mills’ hand reached for his weapon, despite the uselessness of bullets against the gestalt anti-light organism that was a Nightgazer. The frozen energies of mere matter for them held no interest - yet if those same atoms could be convinced to fuse, to release the bounty on the other side of mc2...
The Nightgazer gazed, basking, caressing the electromagnetic spectrum like a black widow’s lover, preparing to love, preparing to feast.
She saw the myth surround her, feeding off the radiation that flowed from metal and flesh, but she was beyond caring about that. Everything was beyond caring about.
She saw the scene as if from a way away.
Rachel raised a metallic hand and let loose an arc of plasma at the closest orb of blackness, which exploded; bursts and licks of flame scorched the air and ground as the little sun flared and twisted its excess energy into her, spewing from her metal and into the dark eyes that grew few-
As per narrative convention, the remaining shadow accreted, eyes disappearing and melding into a larger whole-
-but it was no use; she watched as Rachel summoned the most of the coronal mass ejection and pushed, exhiliaration filling her nostrils like the fumes of some illegal hallucinatory drug. It was carnage. Carnage that be seen and heard for miles around, as she eviscerated and evaporated and exploded some of the very best Obscura had to offer the war.
Mills shook his head, and it rattled to his damaged ears like a couple of dried peas in a styrofoam cup. Amidst the heat and light and chaos-
-he hardly noticed Jenkins’ burning bulk falling against the trunk of a charring tree, striking the ground together-
-crushing Sparks, whose glasses had melted to the remains of his face, flinging out a charred arm-
-tripping Hames, of temporarily temporally-displaced map fame, clutching at his burning kit and trying to stop, drop and roll-
-their own screams mingling with the inaudible vibration of that girl - that girl -
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
“Kedemonas take me, for I have strayed from the pack.” Kantha, fifth scout, third pack, Third Regiment, Hyleoroi, lowered his head in prayer. His leg lay extended before him, caught, with the cruelest of ironies, in a steel trap. Blood trickled from where the cruel teeth had incised flesh, matting the fur that grew in patches.
“Kedemonas have me, for my hunt is unworthy.”
He grew somewhat trite.
“Kedemonas consume me, for now I find that I am trapped behind rather large and converging walls of burning trees, and I’d really like my soul to go someplace, thanks.”
Silence. Actual silence, in the midst of the forest, beyond the sound of the oncoming blazes. If Kedemonas was listening, he wasn’t-
Kantha pricked his ears, the slight points rising inhumanly: faintly; the sound of howling hounds. Yet it was wrong; they weren’t on the scent, they were hounds in fear, and behind them he began to hear the shots and shouts of panic wavering through the trees, thin and unreal yet perfect in its execution.
He barely struggled as it held him down in the midst of freezing fog and mist, deliriously he thanked it as the pain drained from his leg - coldness claiming him, devouring him...
And the sound of rain, retreating from the flames.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Mills looked up, into brown eyes flecked with glowing gold. Her gaze was cold, unlike the heat that blazed within her and around them. It cut through the flames and the burning and settled into your soul like ice, carrying with it the slow, terrifying realization: she didn’t care whether you lived or died, she didn’t care whether you were immolated or crushed or asphyxiated, she did not give two shits, or even one, that you had family, or friends, or precious belongings. You were there. That was reason enough to die.
“I. I never caught your name.”
She stared at him for just a moment, of life extended.
“Rachel,” she said, and watched him burn.</font>
<font color="#486858">The Temple of Obscura was, true to its patron deity, mostly built underground. It consisted of a labyrinth of corridors and rooms, and thanks to an oversight or perhaps deliberate intent on Obscura’s part, there were no maps to the maze available anywhere. Most directions ended up hastily scribbled on the backs of envelopes and hands in easily washable ball-point pen, and pity the private with sweaty palms: it was said that the ones that got truly lost were met by Obscura Herself and taken into Her presence as sacrifice, to reemerge as the mythological creatures She spawned to aid her army.
“Sorry, Lieutenant. Hames gave me fuckin’ last week’s map.”
The voice came from under some inconspicuous ruins, which were connected by a crumbling sprawl to the collapsing hall a ways away that housed the Temple aboveground. A small trapdoor opened underneath a half-rotted roof, and the ragtag hunting squad pulled through from the labyrinth below, kitted out with gear and packs and other military paraphernalia. Mills milled about the top of the stairs, giving a hand to those having difficulty climbing the ladder. Briefly, he wondered - Recruits these days. What happened to everyone who could carry a rucksack without help? What happened?
Coming up the ladder was the strange girl. The one who was light and not a myth, Obscura had said. He reached out a hand, carefully keeping his face composed as cold metal sucked at his body heat, and lifted her to the cracked, mud-caked cobblestones. It had rained recently; the smell of turf and surviving flora blotting out the chemical stink of war for a short, eternal moment. In the space of a breath Mills breathed the air of his youth, beyond the valley, beyond the neverending deific war. For a second, the world was perfect.
Rachel stared into space.
A starfield spanned her imagination, dots upon streaks upon great heaping showers of glowing light splattered across a panorama of receding cosmos. It was a daydream of stellar quality, a vision of the universe packed into one infinitely clear sphere, to be perused in leisurely detail.
It was a prelude, Rachel knew, an opening score for something half-remembered or forgotten in haste or fear. Deep within her, a synapse misfired, and in a flash of unexplainable déjà vu she imagined the sound of chimes.
Then a chilly breeze blew in from underneath the overcasting clouds, and nature’s reclamation proclamation faded like watercolors in the sea. Around Mills came a chorus of heartfelt sighs, followed by equally heartfelt coughing and gagging as the various malodors of wartime atrocities resumed their nasal grip.
And then they marched, though marching was an activity usually reserved for organized armies, like that of Raxis or Frigidus. Obscura’s forces usually opted for moving in some direction in a generally sort of purposeful way, and that was just about good enough for them.
As Rachel hiked with them, she became aware of a sick feeling in the pit of her nonexistent stomach. A gnawing, pulsing feeling, like the kind she had felt for the first few weeks after she hadn’t had a stomach anymore. It struck her again - that feeling of déjà vu, accompanied with a fleeting memory, a sense of urgency, heat, fear -
Just as suddenly as it had come, it wisped into the everyday noise of consciousness, leaving only a foreboding taste on the fringes of her senses.
A nasal voice punctuated, for the umpteenth time, the sounds of boots on drying leaves and mulch. “There’s a God of Hunting, you know. Kedemonas.” Mills closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to ignore the voice and its owner. “It’s said he gives animalistic qualities to his higher followers.” The fact that everyone already knew this never seemed to cross the voice’s mind.
“An’ wouldn’t you like to have the mouth of a mynah, Sparks?” This speaker, solidly built, gave Sparks a friendly punch in the skinny arm. “Oh wait!” Raucous laughter all round.
“Shut up, Jenkins!”
“No, you shut up, Sparks, that’s the whole point!” More raucous laughter.
Interrupted with an insistent beeping from the device in Mills’ hand, raised in the signal for all stop. “Hold. We’ve got something.”
Everyone felt it - a rippling wash of natterings across the psychic spectrum, sleeting through the woods like a neutrino shower of the mind, impinging and ricocheting on the insides of minds: PEOPLE? PEOPLE? IS ANYONE OUT THERE? IS ANYONE THERE? BROTHERS! HELP HELP HELP HELP ITS SO EMPTY
Rachel screamed without lungs, an impossible note in harmony with the panic in the air as the stellar mass inside her writhed, spasmed, the crossed wires of her broken, repurposed nerves brought her the sight of green, no blue, no, yellow-snake-writhing writing triangles with sixteen corners and the smell of apple pie and potato fritters drizzled with Flight of the Bumblebees and velvet chocolate hazel sandpaper
The squad, as one, flailed, clutched at various solid implements and structures - of which there weren’t many; the tree trunks themselves groaned and bent under the barrage of sound and mental dislocation -
Mills, in one of those moments of clarity brought by having one’s senses too overloaded to maintain the comfortable barrier between thought and perception, mused on the epiphany that plants must have minds.
The mental onslaught stopped as suddenly as it had started - but the screaming was beyond impossible now; it swept into the registers of the inaudible, becoming a mere conduit to something
something, something liquid and sick and bright and painful, welling at the bottom of her sun’s miniaturized gravitational well, a cup runneth full, a cup runneth over
Mills turned and saw the girl, sparks arcing from her metal and grounding themselves, beyond belief, in the very air, and once again had the feeling he’d had since he’d left home outside the valley that he had stepped into a world he did not understand in the absolute least-
Cognition came to Rachel in an instant, along with its lesser cousin recognition: Déjà vu didn’t happen for no reason. The signs, the symptoms, the synaesthesia, all of it had happened before and its consequences were terrible - so terrible - that she couldn’t bear to know she’d done it. And now the sun was giving an opening act for another phase on its stellar cycle.
Solar flare.
The lieutenant watched the glowing girl
metal-palmed hands whining
shining
when
sucking at the light, a wave of darkness sluiced through the trees like a quantum knife ignoring classical matter, a buzzing swarm of spherical shadows flowing liquidly in its wake. In unison, a thousand dark eyes opened and stared into the nuclear light-
Instinctively Mills’ hand reached for his weapon, despite the uselessness of bullets against the gestalt anti-light organism that was a Nightgazer. The frozen energies of mere matter for them held no interest - yet if those same atoms could be convinced to fuse, to release the bounty on the other side of mc2...
The Nightgazer gazed, basking, caressing the electromagnetic spectrum like a black widow’s lover, preparing to love, preparing to feast.
She saw the myth surround her, feeding off the radiation that flowed from metal and flesh, but she was beyond caring about that. Everything was beyond caring about.
She saw the scene as if from a way away.
Rachel raised a metallic hand and let loose an arc of plasma at the closest orb of blackness, which exploded; bursts and licks of flame scorched the air and ground as the little sun flared and twisted its excess energy into her, spewing from her metal and into the dark eyes that grew few-
As per narrative convention, the remaining shadow accreted, eyes disappearing and melding into a larger whole-
-but it was no use; she watched as Rachel summoned the most of the coronal mass ejection and pushed, exhiliaration filling her nostrils like the fumes of some illegal hallucinatory drug. It was carnage. Carnage that be seen and heard for miles around, as she eviscerated and evaporated and exploded some of the very best Obscura had to offer the war.
Mills shook his head, and it rattled to his damaged ears like a couple of dried peas in a styrofoam cup. Amidst the heat and light and chaos-
-he hardly noticed Jenkins’ burning bulk falling against the trunk of a charring tree, striking the ground together-
-crushing Sparks, whose glasses had melted to the remains of his face, flinging out a charred arm-
-tripping Hames, of temporarily temporally-displaced map fame, clutching at his burning kit and trying to stop, drop and roll-
-their own screams mingling with the inaudible vibration of that girl - that girl -
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
“Kedemonas take me, for I have strayed from the pack.” Kantha, fifth scout, third pack, Third Regiment, Hyleoroi, lowered his head in prayer. His leg lay extended before him, caught, with the cruelest of ironies, in a steel trap. Blood trickled from where the cruel teeth had incised flesh, matting the fur that grew in patches.
“Kedemonas have me, for my hunt is unworthy.”
He grew somewhat trite.
“Kedemonas consume me, for now I find that I am trapped behind rather large and converging walls of burning trees, and I’d really like my soul to go someplace, thanks.”
Silence. Actual silence, in the midst of the forest, beyond the sound of the oncoming blazes. If Kedemonas was listening, he wasn’t-
Kantha pricked his ears, the slight points rising inhumanly: faintly; the sound of howling hounds. Yet it was wrong; they weren’t on the scent, they were hounds in fear, and behind them he began to hear the shots and shouts of panic wavering through the trees, thin and unreal yet perfect in its execution.
He barely struggled as it held him down in the midst of freezing fog and mist, deliriously he thanked it as the pain drained from his leg - coldness claiming him, devouring him...
And the sound of rain, retreating from the flames.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Mills looked up, into brown eyes flecked with glowing gold. Her gaze was cold, unlike the heat that blazed within her and around them. It cut through the flames and the burning and settled into your soul like ice, carrying with it the slow, terrifying realization: she didn’t care whether you lived or died, she didn’t care whether you were immolated or crushed or asphyxiated, she did not give two shits, or even one, that you had family, or friends, or precious belongings. You were there. That was reason enough to die.
“I. I never caught your name.”
She stared at him for just a moment, of life extended.
“Rachel,” she said, and watched him burn.</font>
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So very British / But then again | People are machines Machines are people | Oh hai there | There's no time
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Superhero 1920s noir | Multigenre Half-Life | Changing the future | Command line interface
Tu ventire felix? | Clockwork for eternity | Explosions in spacetime