Despereaux

The Family Biz [Open To Apply]

I will no longer interact with you Alucroas, please respect that and do not pursue my character.

The Family Biz [Open To Apply]

The Pleiades Casino & Resort

<< Theme: Fiend >>

A nightmare floating before my vision, a scream budding nascent in my breast but rising no further... my throat is stoppered and, failing to refuse the dread invitation, it drags me in.

Always it is starting with a conceit, with cascading tangling thoughts in which my intuition informs me I am in the wrong, I am wronged; a portent of memory I sense myself violently discarding, yet is ever clanging at my threshold, my gate. Mockery piercing through the barbs of desire, through the want, a bitter, guttural and scandalous intonation, the voice I hear is my own and without brace against this cliff of madness.

First and foremost is the cacophony, the din of wild, insane and rib shattering cackling.

By fractious needle and comb of callosum weaving manic neural threads, the haunting tapestry of my El Naddaha emerges and I behold myself writhing on a sanguinary bed of blood, of pallid flesh, of unspeakable deeds and words. Hapless and birthing foul a lie that’s true. As Mother I know it, grooming it and nurturing it by my rapt repetitions, rapturous echoes and delirious recitals. My folly. A shadow, a lightless stain of resentment clinging to my back, following, following.

Within the limning womb time stagnates and furcates, splintering into an agony of contradictions. Strange, indeed, are the extent of my phrenic interlacing among phantom mirrors laden with fruit from distant, impossible spheres and unattainable realms, but an hour is nothing to me. Time stalls inside my truth-lie, an empty gist near the epicenter of all those uncanny, circuitous paths I trek all the while unable to distinguish mirage from myth, half-truth from fully ripe, luscious lie. Known to me is only the lie I tell myself, and for it I hold aloft the mirror of my terror.

Oh how it is seducing me, vengeful lover, swine to whom I am in my lust but a craven slave sating on all manner of affectionate abuses gripping me, dulling my senses.

My dream transports me far from the paroxysms of my corporeal form.

I fear the pines.

With grandeur unnatural and frightful, they rise. Their bark black chitin, or carved of coarse unworked jet. Long, still—rustling in the stillness, yet moving not with wind. Rustling all the same. Dense, the air carries with it their cruel and perfidious tidings. My soul straining against assault, I can hear it—no, them. That which births cruel, stillborn words, whispering half-sung words outside of and beyond knowledge, from a place where knowledge is not known. That terrible, non-existential Land of No More. Trembling, I sense the looming the full extent of their threat. To this dread thing I am but husk, but ossuary, but empty relic. It is seeking to ruin me, to fill me with malevolence and doom and a malice intent on all dour ends.

Ice lacing a delicate spell, its filigree binding bark and needles, yet all is shrouded in shadow. It is not reflecting the moon glow, neither glistening nor gleaming wet and fair. Light falling into depths remote, unreachable, and drowning in them dies. Perishing utterly. The shadow of the pines leaning towards me, I shrink, I wither. I flee. But the shadow lengthens, pursuing my imprints across the snow. From it, I recoil, small and vulnerable. Sinking into myself. I flee the pines. Snow blanking a frozen fen, a calamitous place where an incautious step may rupture to a mortal snare. There is a crescent moon. A slender silver sliver beyond which no stars remain. Only a more distant, larger, fainter silver sliver crescent, and another, and another, and so forth. Imagining the slow drifting flakes as stars, denying the incomprehensible void—I struggle to remain hidden, to be silent. The soft snow betrays me, the veneer of ice coating it announcing the lore of my every cautious footfall in a crackling awakening the night’s eerie, false, whisper-raking silence.

“Galagolgathar!” I plea, tumbling forward onto my knees. My palms burn with the onset of frostbite, hiding beneath the snow. Forgetting myself, I strive to recall who I am. For I am no beast, but woman, priestess, serpent, sacrifice. Inward I recite the Psalm of Torpor,

Omen of the spiral-mined eye:
devour the fruit of my body;
the flesh of my sons;
the womb of my daughters.

Fiend with nine wings:
smear on me your fiery dung,
even the clotted dung of your solemn feasts,
and cast me into the wastelands
that I may rot at rest, forgotten.

Fool am I, contriving a wish that such rote recitations and prayers might avail me succor against sublime forces holding even death in disdain! Dissuading the ultimate end from its peaceful, empty solitude, a lure to ultimate calamitous corruption. Saying the words again, my lips silent yet shaping the spell, the focus point. Distraction steadies me, yet still terror is besetting me at every turn. Boreas’ strident roar harries my mind, making awkward my gait with impetuous ethereal blasts.

Half-running, half-crawling, seeking ever nearer a place of warmth, charity, piety, I flee. Fair moons heavy-lidded I pray serve me as loyal guides, shepherds for which my vessel deserves no guidance. Clawing at the ice, frantic, shifting along its surface like a mad thing, I flee. Beneath my nails, the sting of entropy; at my back, the touch of annihilation. Foul shadows encircling me, enemies I fail to comprehend at every turn. By whatever fateful contrivance, hope clings to my will like a parasite. Hope has no place in such misery, but I welcome it with the whole of my being.

Through bramble fangs and over solid pools, I hasten. My reflection is there, but I seek it not. Enough horrors lurk this night. It is all the same, this wilderness of cold. Death seeping into my stiff limbs. I no longer see the warm smoke of my exhale. My fingertips are dark blue. Rocks rise like fangs up through the snow covered earth. The whole of the hill is ringed by a crown of those wicked, stabbing rocks. Down a slope, a root reaching out, grasping me about my heel. Tripping, I fall. My cloak tightening around me, wet and strangling in my painful descent into madness. Clumps of wire-grass and mouse weed carve into my garments, and unbidden I know myself to be pulling close the tatters , staving off the cold, the recreant barbs slitting my numb flesh like so many razors.

Why am I so afraid?

It does not matter, it cannot matter. I must run, I drink full another lie.

Hardly does it matter, except that I know terror. I know it at the root of my being. We all do. Standing, I run. Weak, plodding, one foot in front of the next. An act of contrition. Hands grasping about me, numb worthless surrogates to my white-blind agape and sightless gaze.

Headlong, I crash into a wall. Blocks of ice barring my passage onward, yet I somehow recognize this place. It is but with a semblance of recognition, the warping and twisting ink smear of memories of a long-buried nightmare, forgotten. Within I understand protection from the shadows of the pines I might find, and that is all I am capable of recalling in my harried moment. In full frenzy, feeling along the barrier, every frigid crack and bulge. Numb though my fingers are, with time and effort I fall forward, collapsing on all fours into the open, waiting gate. There the wind is softer, the storm is merely in my mind.

But so too is this all, this my everything.

Feeling the oppressive heat of a furnace beyond, smelling the acrid stench smelting of metal... I surrender hope. Here, a fresh terror displaces that conjured by the pines, for it is present and urgent rather than remote and terrible. Grasping my ankle, a hand dragging me inward, into the ghastly Winter Forge. My mouth opening to protest, to bargain and offer up a plea for sanctuary. Drowning before a word departs, drowning in a bitter compound of tallow and reed. My jaw aches from its rude, abrupt opening. Warm stone slopes up hard against my leg, and the hammer strikes with scorching heat. Gagged, I emit a muffled, helpless scream. I see stars burning and vibrant but muted beyond the nocturne veil. I have arrived at the seat of destiny, come where I must come. This is everything I sought, the culmination of my hopes and desires. They die like vapors, like cinders erupting from the pail where the hammer’s heat is quenched. Now I am lame, a cripple. Dependent. My skin collapsing around shattered bone, the bruise livid, dark and so strange in that at last my flesh discloses color. Tears blinding my eyes, pain confusing my senses. This was the refuge I sought, to which I fled. This is what I desired. Yet I feel my cheek rupture, splitting to embrace a spile. Acid flows through, melting my tongue, cleaving its tattered remnants to my torrid throat. Pliers clasp my lips, and a needle pierces the soft thick flesh. My mouth is sewn shut with iron wire, cold, forged in ice and fire ever stinging.

Hulking before me is a vision of power, an executioner’s cloak and grim iron flat mask with two narrow slits through which to see. Rivets and bands, wild wolf fur and flocking. We lock eyes. No words are spoken, for those terrible eyes, bloodshot and deep ruddy red, dark as a spear wound bubbling out of the heart, are revealing to me the truth-lie I already know.

Silence you slut. I own you. I will break you and use you. When you are used up I will pass you along to my hounds for their pleasure. Pray they are not hungry. Or pray that they are. Your worth is the brief moment of my arousal.

Off to the side, swinging and empty the gibbet, my destiny secure yet not nearly from the teeth, the fangs.

Striking again the hammer, quenched and cold and shattering femur. Back in the fire, hot, glowing, red. Striking again, my kneecap exploding, my flesh ignites until a bucket empties out frigid agony and drowns the ravenous flames. My screams are muffled, meek.

Many hounds are baying here at the Winter Forge.

I awaken from my nightmare, the sound of the striking hammer ringing still in my ears.

The baying of the hounds chilling my bones.

My oath inundates the room, swelling in violent ascent up the chimney and careening through the window’s broken panes. It is a single word, both prayer and command: “No!” — but to whom do I speak? The imp is gone, and a dumbfounded beast looks on. Yet at last there is the hope of silence.

Ancient lifeless fibers, works of ruin support my decaying spine. Around me my form is falling disintegrating. Motes of darkness scatter where once were fingers, my arm collapsing into an ashen heap. Time is brief, with decay accelerating. My body the muse, epicenter, the shadow denying life passage, existence, consumption and repair. Through me words were uttered, and I remember them and the way and why of the how of the cycle that repeats. What it touches decays. There is nothing of it to devour. To fling hope upon such nonsense! It is entropy, it is the end. The Land of No More. The complete absence of verve, of energy or of quantum pulse.

Instead of silence there is chaos. Freakish, stupid bedlam.

How appropriate that in this false, benign, insouciant hell is set unsolicited and unwanted on the sill, flagrant and nigh, a being so glutted on its own lies that it believes them utterly, these fancies manifesting as hollow artifice. Strident, intent on imposing its deceit on others. It gluts, it smashing, malding. In a sense I grasp our common plight, I and that poor imitation of Bestat. Yet I seek freedom from my lies, if only my cowardice were not preventing me from grasping truth. It is stupid to fear the pines, to flee them to a place of certain ordained doom. This creature revels in its delusions. To wit, a dumb beast eagerly eating its own shit and vomit. Laugher chokes me, and from the hole in my cheek surge flecks of black. Such a metaphor for existence, for the condition of thinking, feeling things. To eat shit and die! Would that we were kindred spirits, but I am seeking escape my cycle, finding my place, my power in distinction and distinguishing truth from lie. This creature is merely wallowing in a false, unflattering type of ignorance, deeming it strength.

On my tongue, merely an afterthought of ashes, dry and empty. Tasting nothing, savoring nothing. I thirst, but it is folly to seek water at a drought-stricken well. It is a fool’s errand to seek light from a shadow, to grasp for substance in a void.

Ribcage sinking, my chest collapsing around my stilled, rhythmless heart. My breasts two perfect mounds of dust.

Perhaps it will die, or perhaps the unlife will not touch upon it.

Always waking in the instant of repose, my eyelids rapid in idiotic spasm, my carrion wrap strangling joints like an agonizing skein wringing out cold, pungent sweat. The cycle repeating, I remember. I force myself to remember, and I deign yet fail to open my mouth in a silent scream where pneuma paints my lungs in wasp stings of joy.

The dream vanishing, the day before fading, the samsara renewing.

I know, as usual, nothing.

Somehow that rings untrue, for stirring within me ferment contemporaneous images whilst I dress before a wavy mirror in my hotel room, beholding without shock my ghastly image. Brazen, I intrude upon a gaudy art deco hall. A far away window informs me it is night, and toward it my deliberate pace advances. An imp appears from an inscription in my mind, reminding me it is always night here in the Pleiades. Either he or I suggest we go to the stairs, to the lounge. There I sense a presence, a maelstrom of decay yet waking, yet feasting. A nameless entity brought forth from nowhere, by no one. The room is in rot, cast upon it writhing, roving shadows from a realm without life, beyond reality. They penetrate the penumbra. I will not go to the lounge, so from my throat I issue a scoffing sound, planting my figure firmly in front of an elevator door.

“Today I shall play slots.”

Doors and panels splitting before me, and the elevator beeps. Catching a whiff of air inside, noxious herald billowing cigar smoke, citrus cocktails and tears shed on the casino floor, I sneeze, which is queer. Kindling a realization, it was no cat at all back there at all, that thing that fell through the hole in the floor.

“Back where?” curiosity rousing to inquiry I dare and brazenly ask.

Where it from walls of wreckage is raising its raven beaks, its leper's claws.

The Family Biz [Open To Apply]

<Snipped quote by Despereaux>

Is the rotspread/tree of unlife part of that hallucination or is it real? I assumed it was real because of the imp fleeing to get away from it.

@Alucroas

That is real. The imp is not real.

The Family Biz [Open To Apply]

<Snipped quote by Despereaux>

I could also do with a layman's summary of what your character did, please.

EDIT: For further clarity I'm trying to gain a sense of positioning. I thought I saw something about your character walking into the pines, but wasn't sure if it was something going on in her head, or literal.

@Alucroas

She does not trust her senses and assumes your cat like the imp are mere hallucinations. She is compelled to observe her cycle of torment. Epileptic seizures were thought to be interactions with divine or infernal forces and her body is used to recite foul scripture. She begins dreaming. Her body is still in a lounge on top of a rug near a broken window and fireplace.

The Family Biz [Open To Apply]

Given pace and length it might be time for a summary. 0th post on the OOC?

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.