Despereaux

The Family Biz [Open To Apply]

I put in a small clarifying edit in the event anyone already read that latest scene.

The Family Biz [Open To Apply]

The Pleiades Casino & Resort: the Lounge

<< Theme: Interloper >>

Vast yawns a tumultuous clash. Flecks of glass, leaden scraps engross my locus where focus-framed dust bold and foul billows, a perfidious cloud opaque before a phantom form, envoy of Bastest. Tightening my grip on my saucer’s brim, I seek to anchor myself in this reality. From red eyes inquisitive to red imp ribald, who, amid sanguine strobes and tremors distant, I observe creep into the mantle’s gloom. A sense of wrongness permeates the space. This all feels amiss. I feel my depths revolt, my perspicacity in doubt. The intermittent glow of those violent flares expose the imp’s, I dread, true nature as ephemeral, phantasmal and incoherent—a device of my mania. Implausible, upsetting, my mind insists on occult preconceptions, my mind compels me to forget.

The imp is whole. The window is whole. Watching me is, perhaps, just a cat.

I know, as usual, nothing.

Reset, I collapse upon a walnut and velour boudoir and absently inquire, “Is this chaos not eerily familiar?”

“An intrusion that sits beyond the cycle,” I receive in cryptic riposte.

I grasp neither the question I posed nor the response it elicited; thus, I ponder, forgetful, my awareness drifting someplace far removed. I cannot be here, this mere imagination, this dream, this figment.

Abandoning my faculties and surrendering myself to the alluring fragrance of calumny, pretense and vituperation arising from my decanter, I unhurriedly rotate the stop and compel its effluence into an artfully-wrought demitasse trembling on my saucer. Peering down, I inhale deep the lies that darken the vessel’s interior, an ichorous rust muddling throughout the veil of tenebrous smog. I fancy that by consuming such, I might discern that which is false, itself a pursuit I find worthy to plight my troth.

A single sip, and calm I ask, “What awaits within the cycle?” Thereat, the imp responds without words, red wire fingertip’s talon accusing an iron drum table in a corner, adjacent to my reclining form. Melted by the Amduat’s 11th hour, the iron drips along its stanchion. A book atop, flesh-bound, sanguine, worn, glossy, lustrous. All around me bleeds the same hue, a testament to the avant-garde, the exaggerated, the overwrought. This hotel, this lobby and this sham existence. Flicking the cover aside, I sense a portent of its power over me. Increasingly authentic, the imp implores, “None but you dare touch it, neither Nightwhisper, nor Ealdorman, nor Iblis. From it, you recite. You... you pray, my Lady Ruohtta.”

Scorn and defiance igniting within me, I retort, “Pray? Fool! How so, like this?” and I cast myself from the chair upon an exquisite lapis lazui rug. Knees delve the soft, rich texture, my fists clench before me, aloft, my breasts heave and breath quickening as I face the unknown, my face lifting in rapture and defiance toward whoever or whatever lurks beyond.

I breathe deep, yet, there is only emptiness.

Increasingly furious, beyond reason and explanation, I cast down my gaze, my cheek flattening against the stinging gray fabric wrapping my thighs. Spine bowing, I fling wide my arms in a parody of supplication, embracing mockery, splaying my fingers through the intricate pile weave and sardonically wailing, “Or is it thus?”

In that moment, an answer, a repudiation. A coldness seizes me, gripping my shoulder-blade, the whole of my form convulsing. I lurch back, unnatural, scapula perversely prominent. Something, a sinister inertia, forces my face into the rough-hewn yarn. Thrown by forces unseen, I gaze at the ceiling’s vault, a view of heaven, of stars, of the deceiver’s works. Rigid, my toes and fingertips pierce through to wooden planks, my back arches, my body levitating in its tight gown. I grit my teeth, and hiss through them with a venomous tongue not nearly my own, or what I imagine must be my own. Words at last spoken rather than a conversation imagined, throat speech that reverberates malevolently from the hole in my cheek:

Dajashk, Preshtat:
Leth-craven, womb-devourer!
I summon thee!

Damballa Dajashk:
Omen of the spiral-mined eye;
Mirrored, infinite, omniscient, abyssal;
I command thee!

Damballa Preshtat:
Fiend with nine wings;
Both whirlwind and void;
Boast, conflagration, my message beyond the lacuna!
I unleash thee!

A pallor devours color in the chamber, leaving behind a monochromatic void. Beneath my twitching, floating figure, bathed in the spectral glow of the white diamond stars encrusted in the canopy, they whisper their secrets, their luminous facets mirroring my own inner turmoil, and in them I behold reflections. I, an epicenter, concealing a hate-birth black, insidious, creeping. I know not whether this is formed of roots, fingers, veins or perhaps an ersatz amalgamation of all three, but nevertheless it surges from beneath me; a tree of unlife. What it touches decays. The once-luxurious rug crumples, dust swirling against the wind’s natural course. The imp, no more, retreating behind a secret door, vanishing into shadows. The chair, a pile of mildew and termites feasting on its rotting wood. Up the wall it races. Around the window it reaches. One hue, one saturation, one inexorable aim. A place where time ends, the Land of No More.

Overcome with strange joy, I close my eyes, surrendering to the enigma.

Out of sync with time, I slumber.

That is when I remember. When I sleep. When I stare at the scars on my fingertips, just below my fingernails, in confusion. It isn’t vivid. An imprint, that’s what it is. So easy to forget. I wait. Nothing happens, but ever something feels as though it is about to happen. Expectation, I suspect. I stride slowly the night trail and hide my face from the elongated silhouettes of looming pines. They remind me, but of what I know not. Are their secrets memories or warnings? The pines whisper, but their language eludes me. I shun their scenery, drawn by forces beyond comprehension toward a destiny entwined with forgotten echoes.

The Family Biz [Open To Apply]

Oh, hm, I s'pose that wasn't who I thought it might be. Not him. I shall endeavor to compose something worth replying to.

The Family Biz [Open To Apply]

The Pleiades Casino & Resort: Lodging

<< Theme: Solitude >>

A silent scream scathing my throat, a moan escaping my clenching teeth. I wake. The dream vanishing, the day before fading, the samsara renewing.

I know, as usual, nothing.

Sleep paralysis subsiding, I emerge from the chrysalis of slumber. My senses awaken to a peculiar reality. Telltale coral or perhaps sponge wedges cling to the ceiling, floor and walls of this otherworldly chamber. My bedroll hovers, suspended by silk ropes that form a celestial grid. Clothing dangles from these same ropes, swaying like forgotten memories. Small, oddly angular furniture hangs on the rope walls, too, as if utility and function have forsaken their duties. And there, a wending path leads to a small irregular door. An exotic monochrome cage, perhaps just due to the silver candle light, but I know somehow that the door to this cage is easy to open. Everything is loud and silent. Blood roars through my veins, a freight train hurtling toward eternity, yet my joints pop and ache in eerie quietude.

I can move, so I stand and don garments that inform me of my elusive identity.

I approach tarnished glass and bear witness to a horror I already know, and the fact of that knowledge is a shock. Before me looms an ugly person, an abomination, an assemblage of decay. Bald. Skin like smallpox. Body lean long and desiccated. A husk, with pits for eyes. Deep, dark pits, like igneous spiral mines, where from fleeting strikes of light onyx glints sharp amid the basalt. Lips held forever silent with iron twine. Beyond my ugliness, another sensibility looms, a sensual somber dignity of poise, frame and breeding flaunting itself in the shadow of my bodily debris. I wear the simplicity of a sleeveless scoop neck gown, heather grey with diamond dust; something between royalty and flapper. Shimmering fabric that contrasts against my tawny corpse flesh. Without the shoulder straps, I’d be naked. My breasts, infertile and scant, make modest my risqué attire.

I turn from the scene. Woven into the rope wall, I remove a pair of elbow-length lace gloves and hide my hands; mostly plain, but the palms combine to disclose a secret: a glyph of an arc girding an inverse pyramid within which looms an eye. Someone precious once told me of its origin, but I struggle to recall the story. I trace backwards in time, to the Freemasons and Knight’s Templar. No, older. To Moonshaft and Amarna. No, older. Finally to Leth, the first world-seeders, creators of woman, womb and sex.

Remembering where I am, I exit my meditation chamber. My hotel room. Down the hall, down the stairs, into the lounge. It is all very overstated. Garish art deco. Clashing geometric patterns and false gold enamel burden the senses. Along my journey, I see many strange creatures. Demons, damned, fallen angels. All I want is lotus blossom tea, preferably steeped in tears. False tears are better. I can drink it through a metal straw. Through the small necrotic gash in my left cheek.

“Your usual, Lady Ruohtta,” approaches a spade-tail red imp in a tuxedo, a charming Rick Blaine corruption. It offers a decanter from which meanders an intoxicating aroma of duplicity.

The Family Biz [Open To Apply]

Perhaps. What brings you to these parts?

@Liaison

Been lurking around a while, saw maybe familiar names and thought maybe put in some work after forever. I suck at profiles, was thinking a demon with amnesia could be fun.

The Family Biz [Open To Apply]

Resort have rooms for rent for an applicant?