Re: The Relentless Slaughter [Round 2: S'kkoi]
09-03-2011, 01:14 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by engineclock.
Gannet sank like a dead man in the darkness.
His host, his brother of the night, had given up trying to speak to him when all the drowned one could manage was a string of incoherencies. It hadn’t liked the way he talked; it grew angry when he tried to tell it part of the Hymn. Now the invader was curled up at the corners of his mind where he’d left it, neither willing to come closer nor to leave. It said things to him that he didn’t understand from that corner. Little things in its little voice, like a part of himself he’d forgotten about. It asked him where he’d come from, what he’d been before, why he was here and what his real name was. Gannet didn’t understand the questions at all and he asked the blackness to stop; he wanted his brother to leave but that was fratricide. Blood in the veins, blood in the water, wash and wash but you’ll never come clean, I’m in your blood now, O thou my brother. You’ll never be rid of me.
Gannet drifted for a little while longer, aware that the tentacles that weren’t his were moving in strange ways that propelled him through the sea. This wasn’t swimming to him. He remembered holding his breath until fire crept into his lungs and he had to leave the arms of the ocean for air, gasping as the gulls cried far above his head; he remembered spearing fish on his claws and watching them die. He remembered lots of things. He remembered a giant and a chemical man, a spider and a death that walked. Fire and water, a burning ocean, a ship that left him stranded, a light and a shadow wrapped around each other in a spiral, never meeting but winding closer and closer until the boundaries between them disappeared…
He remembered her.
“Is she dead?” he asked softly.
Who?
The question caught Gannet off-guard. How could anyone not know who she was? She… she was… He… She was his, wasn’t she? Or was he hers? She was the shadow and the light, and the Oracle, and the voices in the dark, and she was pain and fury and ecstasy pulling him down to drown.
He felt his brother’s impatience with him at this. The shadows in the corner of his head rolled like a storm waiting to break and Gannet cringed away from them. It was hard to hide from your own thoughts. Carefully he sent his brother the image of her as she’d been when they were drowning in each other; he couldn’t remember her face, but he didn’t need to. He had her scent, the taste of her blood, the shadows hidden in light and the voices she’d spoken to him with, and the Oracle-
Dorin? This girl?
The name didn’t mean anything to Gannet any more than his own did. Words were only sounds, nothing more than the crying of gulls. The darkness of his brother’s mind was heavy on his thoughts as the newcomer searched his thoughts for memories of her and the others who hadn’t been important. It was as if a hand of ice was picking through his head and flashes of faces and bodies burst from his mind unbidden. All the others… he remembered them now. They could have all died and it wouldn’t have mattered. The Oracle hadn’t needed them, had only needed her and him and nothing else.
Ah, the voice chuckled, your lady-love.
Gannet responded with a wave of ambiguity and helplessness. What did his brother know of the Oracle? Beyond the turmoil of his thoughts he saw a mountain of shadows looming in the water and wondered if it was going to swallow him alive.
Is this one the cause of your sickness? Is she your ‘Oracle’? Your damned thoughts are too tangled, all I can read is your maddened chattering. Why did you not see fit to tell me?
I am not sick, Gannet thought uneasily. He hadn’t heard most of what his brother had said. That word had brought a flash of terror along with an image of men dressed in white and long thin knives and sharp things and the needle that had been in his arm. He saw walls stained with blood and viscera and faces hidden by cruel masks; smelled the reek of death and a cruel sterility. Someone else’s memories. He wrapped his arms around his ribs and heard his claws rattle with shivering.
Scares you, does that? Poor fool pariah. You are lucky to have me. We’ll talk of this later when your diseased mind is not so clouded by fear. Look up now, child; look at where I’ve brought you.
The shadow mountain had come far closer than Gannet would have expected even with his poor grasp of time. Cruel faces glared out at him from carved niches and jagged stone claws reached out towards them with a frozen urgency. He felt their hatred, deeper and older than the statue he’d woken on, calling him in so they could tear him apart and wash his filthy blood clean in the water. They hated him, hated him with the revulsion of a mother whose children he’d slaughtered, a ghost who’d died by his hand, a thousand tortured souls who had him and him alone to blame for their screaming deaths. He and he alone was the source of their loathing and it beat against his mind like a hammer, hating and hating and hating him and only him, his name on the tips of their frozen tongues like a blasphemer’s curse. Even the mountain itself was cursing him as it drew him in, promising him an eternity of unspeakable torment in its jagged teeth and an endless slaughter in its stony heart.
The calling was so powerful that it formed a song like the Oracle’s, a din of hate and fear and a burning hunger that yearned to swallow the world in its gaping jaws. He could feel it pulling him in and his brother moving not away, but towards it, bringing them ever closer to the hateful shadows with a terrifying deliberateness. Did he not know? Couldn’t he feel it? Sick with fear, Gannet called out to the darkness in his mind and showed it images of corpses bloated from drowning and skeletal from predators, the bones of their stiffened fingers pleading for it to turn away and leave this place before it devoured them both and they were dragged down into the seething hatred for the rest of time.
But the darkness only laughed, and his brother carried on.
Walls rose around them as they drifted towards the mountain’s base, rotten with tunnels just enough like the ones in the Oracle’s den to give him cause to hope before he saw the things carved on them. The foreboding he had felt was palpable now, a thick wave of tangled thorns that fell on him like a net and smothered his thoughts under a deafening drone of fear. Even his brother, alien as he was, weakened slightly under the terror that wracked Gannet’s mind. Nevertheless he forced them onward, drowned man and leviathan both, into the heart of the shadows that swallowed them and left nothing behind but bones.
_____________________
In the core of the Drowned Temple, a facet of the god called Soggoth woke.
It was a small waking, and a quiet one. It was no more than the opening of an eye in the midst of millions more, the emergence of a thought in a mind so vast it could not be said to be a mind at all. It was a world in on itself, a dark and drowned world that consumed the lives of lesser beings like a whale devouring krill, and like that whale it neither knew nor cared what its fodder had to say, if they said anything at all.
But the voice of one of its children calling from outside the dark was enough to remind it of a time when it had not been so large, when it had not been able to boil the seas with a thought and summon down eternal darkness with a whispered word. This facet was one among millions, and it had time for the words of a child.
“I have brought you an offering, Destroyer. Attend to me.”
Gannet sank like a dead man in the darkness.
His host, his brother of the night, had given up trying to speak to him when all the drowned one could manage was a string of incoherencies. It hadn’t liked the way he talked; it grew angry when he tried to tell it part of the Hymn. Now the invader was curled up at the corners of his mind where he’d left it, neither willing to come closer nor to leave. It said things to him that he didn’t understand from that corner. Little things in its little voice, like a part of himself he’d forgotten about. It asked him where he’d come from, what he’d been before, why he was here and what his real name was. Gannet didn’t understand the questions at all and he asked the blackness to stop; he wanted his brother to leave but that was fratricide. Blood in the veins, blood in the water, wash and wash but you’ll never come clean, I’m in your blood now, O thou my brother. You’ll never be rid of me.
Gannet drifted for a little while longer, aware that the tentacles that weren’t his were moving in strange ways that propelled him through the sea. This wasn’t swimming to him. He remembered holding his breath until fire crept into his lungs and he had to leave the arms of the ocean for air, gasping as the gulls cried far above his head; he remembered spearing fish on his claws and watching them die. He remembered lots of things. He remembered a giant and a chemical man, a spider and a death that walked. Fire and water, a burning ocean, a ship that left him stranded, a light and a shadow wrapped around each other in a spiral, never meeting but winding closer and closer until the boundaries between them disappeared…
He remembered her.
“Is she dead?” he asked softly.
Who?
The question caught Gannet off-guard. How could anyone not know who she was? She… she was… He… She was his, wasn’t she? Or was he hers? She was the shadow and the light, and the Oracle, and the voices in the dark, and she was pain and fury and ecstasy pulling him down to drown.
He felt his brother’s impatience with him at this. The shadows in the corner of his head rolled like a storm waiting to break and Gannet cringed away from them. It was hard to hide from your own thoughts. Carefully he sent his brother the image of her as she’d been when they were drowning in each other; he couldn’t remember her face, but he didn’t need to. He had her scent, the taste of her blood, the shadows hidden in light and the voices she’d spoken to him with, and the Oracle-
Dorin? This girl?
The name didn’t mean anything to Gannet any more than his own did. Words were only sounds, nothing more than the crying of gulls. The darkness of his brother’s mind was heavy on his thoughts as the newcomer searched his thoughts for memories of her and the others who hadn’t been important. It was as if a hand of ice was picking through his head and flashes of faces and bodies burst from his mind unbidden. All the others… he remembered them now. They could have all died and it wouldn’t have mattered. The Oracle hadn’t needed them, had only needed her and him and nothing else.
Ah, the voice chuckled, your lady-love.
Gannet responded with a wave of ambiguity and helplessness. What did his brother know of the Oracle? Beyond the turmoil of his thoughts he saw a mountain of shadows looming in the water and wondered if it was going to swallow him alive.
Is this one the cause of your sickness? Is she your ‘Oracle’? Your damned thoughts are too tangled, all I can read is your maddened chattering. Why did you not see fit to tell me?
I am not sick, Gannet thought uneasily. He hadn’t heard most of what his brother had said. That word had brought a flash of terror along with an image of men dressed in white and long thin knives and sharp things and the needle that had been in his arm. He saw walls stained with blood and viscera and faces hidden by cruel masks; smelled the reek of death and a cruel sterility. Someone else’s memories. He wrapped his arms around his ribs and heard his claws rattle with shivering.
Scares you, does that? Poor fool pariah. You are lucky to have me. We’ll talk of this later when your diseased mind is not so clouded by fear. Look up now, child; look at where I’ve brought you.
The shadow mountain had come far closer than Gannet would have expected even with his poor grasp of time. Cruel faces glared out at him from carved niches and jagged stone claws reached out towards them with a frozen urgency. He felt their hatred, deeper and older than the statue he’d woken on, calling him in so they could tear him apart and wash his filthy blood clean in the water. They hated him, hated him with the revulsion of a mother whose children he’d slaughtered, a ghost who’d died by his hand, a thousand tortured souls who had him and him alone to blame for their screaming deaths. He and he alone was the source of their loathing and it beat against his mind like a hammer, hating and hating and hating him and only him, his name on the tips of their frozen tongues like a blasphemer’s curse. Even the mountain itself was cursing him as it drew him in, promising him an eternity of unspeakable torment in its jagged teeth and an endless slaughter in its stony heart.
The calling was so powerful that it formed a song like the Oracle’s, a din of hate and fear and a burning hunger that yearned to swallow the world in its gaping jaws. He could feel it pulling him in and his brother moving not away, but towards it, bringing them ever closer to the hateful shadows with a terrifying deliberateness. Did he not know? Couldn’t he feel it? Sick with fear, Gannet called out to the darkness in his mind and showed it images of corpses bloated from drowning and skeletal from predators, the bones of their stiffened fingers pleading for it to turn away and leave this place before it devoured them both and they were dragged down into the seething hatred for the rest of time.
But the darkness only laughed, and his brother carried on.
Walls rose around them as they drifted towards the mountain’s base, rotten with tunnels just enough like the ones in the Oracle’s den to give him cause to hope before he saw the things carved on them. The foreboding he had felt was palpable now, a thick wave of tangled thorns that fell on him like a net and smothered his thoughts under a deafening drone of fear. Even his brother, alien as he was, weakened slightly under the terror that wracked Gannet’s mind. Nevertheless he forced them onward, drowned man and leviathan both, into the heart of the shadows that swallowed them and left nothing behind but bones.
_____________________
In the core of the Drowned Temple, a facet of the god called Soggoth woke.
It was a small waking, and a quiet one. It was no more than the opening of an eye in the midst of millions more, the emergence of a thought in a mind so vast it could not be said to be a mind at all. It was a world in on itself, a dark and drowned world that consumed the lives of lesser beings like a whale devouring krill, and like that whale it neither knew nor cared what its fodder had to say, if they said anything at all.
But the voice of one of its children calling from outside the dark was enough to remind it of a time when it had not been so large, when it had not been able to boil the seas with a thought and summon down eternal darkness with a whispered word. This facet was one among millions, and it had time for the words of a child.
“I have brought you an offering, Destroyer. Attend to me.”