Tales of the Sisters Mourning №3 - Cytol Cacophony
(CW: blood, mind control, assimilation, erotic body horror.)
Flittering ivory winged moths danced in twisting rings around suspended crystals and the dim glow of joss sticks. The flutters of swarms harmonized in hymns to the Ayth-ata, echoing within the still abbey.
Sister Edellwe alone was shuttering the loft windows in the meditation hall. The Spirit Moths were most active in the dark and it was never truly dark on Selene. The dead light of Cithaeon’s exposed core cast a mournful glow on the moon. The lunar bodies cruised in their satellite orbits around Cithaeon, the old world’s corpse cresting in the atmosphereless sky of Selene. Its long shadow had begun to eclipse the sun. It was about to be the last of the day’s prayer for the nuns of Saint Ve’s and the moths must be active.
The Rhaesisian nun, haloed by flickering gray moths, stood on an old ladder leaning against the mural-coated wall obverse the agalma of Ve with Lightning Spear. Sister Edellwe struggled with the closing rod mechanism of the window, jammed lightly from collected soot and moth excreta. Bright core light shone pale gold down through its open wooden slits into Edellwe’s eyes. Radiance reflecting off her bleached white habit in a faint glow made her massive star-blessed breasts resemble scale-miniatures of the twin moons. (Perhaps straining the definition of “miniature” as much as they strained her habit.) Cithaeon’s distant burning plasma made a corona on her pale blonde hair like the faded gilt of an antique lamp and shone through the near-translucent edges of her fair periwinkle knife-tip ears.
As time slipped forward, Edellwe rushed to finish her task. The moth-tender was running late and the bell was going to ring out sooner then not. In her hurry she had neglected to check the footing of the abbey’s old ladder when setting it against the wall, one creaking leg rocking on a loose mosaic tile. Edellwe balanced her top-heavy frame treacherously on the upper rungs, using the shutter rod as an anchor. Her center of mass being a forty-odd centimeters in front of her ribs made this aspect of her charge challenging at the best of times, but Edellwe manged. Rhaesisian nuns were expected to be proficient with healing alchemy and working Astraestones, and expansive breasts were the sign and instrument of that affinity. Edellwe was proud to have them, notwithstanding their current accidental use as a glorified mop for the dew dampened frescoes of temple myths. The front of her white robes had become lucent and saturated, clinging to the skin of her wide bosom like a soapy film.
With a harsh wooden clap, the shutters closed and sister Edellwe let go of her stabilizing grip on the closing rod. teetering, she leaned forward against the plaster wall for supplementary traction, exhaling as she pressed her prodigious breasts against the cracking stucco. Wobbling against the frescoed walls slick with moth dew, her weight slid against the wet surface and the leg of the ladder slipped on the broken tile. In an instant the Nun came crashing down in an undignified flurry, her white habit fluttering like a falling cherry blossom.
In response to the violent clatter, two other sisters, Paersonya and Velkwe, quickly clambered into the hall.
Velkwe was short, mousy, and thick in the middle with a heavy-hanging chest covering her softened belly. Under her pale habit and raven-headed bangs two intelligent and gentle malachite eyes gleamed in her shadowed features. Subprioress Paersonya was the tallest of the three and most slender, white hood loosely decorating a face as stoic and dark brown as healthy oak bark with a commanding countenance required for her relatively higher station.
“Is everyone fine?” Called Velkwe as she hurried to Edellwe sprawled on the many-color tiles.
Paersonya glided, as silently as a ghost, to a large fracture in the wall from where the ladder had collided with the fresco of Saint Vaynirvah conquering the worm Urthemos. The dark hole caught her attention, deep and hollow where brickwork should be. Curiosity dampening the sense of desecration, Paersonya drew a chair to the wall and cast a small mage light to peer in.
“Oh, Ayth-ata vey Devah-ata! Forgive me, sisters, I fell. I didn’t mean too-” Edellwe pleaded as she crawled up onto her knees, pushing aside Sister Velkwe. The darkening bruise across her cheek and sodden robes made the Edellwe a pathetic sight. Velkwe knelt beside her, attempting to reassure the distraught nun. Both did not notice Paersonya grip tightly on the cracked edge of the plaster facade.
The snapping noise silenced the room, a wave of moths undulating their floating rhythm in a startled pattern.
“What in the Nyx are you doing?” shouted Velkwe, as she rose from the floor.
Through the expanded hole, the dim light in the hall exposed an ancient looking wooden door, dry and turned a drab green with age. A brittle iron chain crossed over the door’s face, glinting in the gem light.
Its revelation loomed over the hall like the shadow of the dragon. The incongruous portal emitted an eerie presence unexplained by rational sense. Its plain form belied the animal dread it spread in the common consciousness of the women.
Paersonya was the first to reach for the handle. Quite and transfixed by the weird doorway. The remains of the painted fresco of the saint concealing the door, now violated, crumbled around her while the rusted chain lock molted to dust as her trembling hand grasped the cold metal door ring. She paused at the feeling of its coarse surface digging into her calloused hand.
Edellwe stood up. “You’re… going to tell the abbess first, right?… We’re not going in there...”
“I-I, we need to learn what this is, sister Edellwe.”
With that Paersonya pulled open the door, a rush of incensed air flooded into the dark as the seal broke. A musty, putrid miasma flowed out from the door. Edellwe noticed she no longer heard the song of moth wings. She had a grim intuition about going down and meeting whatever was hidden so completely by the convent. It felt stupid to even consider going into that waiting maw. Edellwe recoiled inwardly at herself for not turning around then and there and leaving to speak with their superior, but the spirit of the room was enthralled by that chasm and the inverseness that churned within. Edellwe could not break out of the downward spiral that ensnared the three of them together.
The hidden door lead to a catacomb. An unadorned brick tunnel of slab stairs descended deep down into a black abyss. Niches along the walls hosted urns and scrimshawed bones. A contradictive interest drew them down into that dreadful dark well below the convent.
In terror-trance steps Paersonya lead the way, closely followed by Velkwe and the sodden Edellwe together. The somber path was a tight fit for the vast-chested holy women. Their flanks brushed against clay grit and papers tacked to the walls. These elder parchments illuminated with prayers and saint icons were also strewn everywhere across the ground. The sisters knew that they were trespassing into somewhere profane, even without the extensive holy warding as warning, for the sense of the unholy nimbus radiating from the bottom was cut straight though the lingering blessed aura. A pitch oiliness in the air rolled over them in their descent unbroken by artificed star light.
As the moth nuns went down the stairs, the rasp of desiccated prayer papers underfoot increased until Edellwe felt a hard crunch underneath her sandals. In the dim half-light of Paersonya’s alchemy, Edellwe recognized a pile of long-dead locust corpses underneath her feet. The carrion heaps grew with each step down. Edellwe yelped and jumped on one foot, the sister bumped her head against the ceiling in tight confines and the commotion sent her morphed bust into tumultuous waves crashing into Velkwe. In the tempestuous collision the oversized cloistresses both lost their footing on the crumbled parchment and insects, crashing down into Paersonya and sending all three sisters tumbling into the deep. The three nuns’ expansive flesh jostled intensely against the harsh moon clay bricks and one another, cushioning their fall.
Edellwe landed chest first from the tumble with a wet smack, her sisters smashing heavily on top her in a pile of enormous bruised flesh and flowing white robes which resembled a bouquet of overbloomed lilies. The mashed Edellwe wished to the honored ancestors she had been more careful with her day’s duty, which already felt like a cycle ago in her sublunar impoundment.
The moth-tender felt a sticky dampness spread across her wide front, soaking into her white dress, and then smelled a musky putrescence like rotting ambrosia. Despite the light still hovering above the Subprioress, Edellwe could not see far into the chamber she and her fellow nuns landed in. The glow of the little star reflected off the ground in a small radius around the mound of women, shining murkily across a viscous pool of ruddy amber ichor about five centimeters deep. Small glints of pale light dancing off the crests of visceral waves slowly rolling into the dark giving vague impression of a long crypt.
Edellwe attempted to wriggle free from under the crushing cloister but struggled to find a grip on the coagulation coated stone. Blobs of rust-toned filth oozed between her fingers. The other two felt the desperate commotion beneath them and tried to crawl off Edellwe but similarly struggled to find purchase on the slick ground. Velkwe reached out in the dark to grasp on something solid to grasp and found a cool metal pole fastened to the wall and managed to stabilize herself with its aid. At first, she didn’t notice the device lighting up azure to her touch.
With a low thrum, a wave of starlight slowly surged from the rod and dissipated into ancient batteries. Red lights strobed along the walls as luminous screens flickered to life and holographic precursor glyphs floated in the air, bathing the room in a menacing low crimson light.
The dull red glow revealed saint icons and prayer papers as long as dancing streamers decorating the untarnished aeons old brass-like walls, and long extinguished candles with extensive trails of melted wax sat on ancient consoles. Hundreds if not thousands of dead locusts bobbed on the surface of the biological pool, collecting in monumental piles scattered about the floor and corners. In the center of the vault a lone precursor sarcophagus sat shadowed and sovereign on a dais raised just above the vile liquid. Burnt temple censers sat around the edges of the bleak sepulcher but otherwise the casket and platform were bare, as if the burners were as near the tomb as the previous temple intruders could stand to get. The presently interloping Edellwe could understand the wish to remain far away from such an object roiling with curses.
“Meh-Re-Ayl-Nun-Ayl…” Paersonya murmured into her breath as she rose from the pool, giving the sign of the trigram with her saffron mucoid-stained hands.
Velkwe trudged through the ichorous mire towards the platform, orange slime waves rippling from her path.
Edellwe, propped up from the pool by her chest, tilted her head in confusion – “Should we really get near that?” Words half caught in her throat.
“Don’t you hear the choir singing? Neuron flutes lightning fugue in the racing tempo of sanguine meters…” Velkwe looked intently at the sarcophagus, green eyes glimmering as alien stars, and in monotone recited – “I have seen the heart of the world, its veins bleed into me, unto me. It had stopped its doom drumbeat and started again-agains. Starry destiny with gilt hands must be taken again.”
The strangeness of sudden poetry verse signaled to Edellwe it was high past time to leave. However she struggled to lift her uneven bulk from being slant-rhyme literal tits deep in muck and Paersonya was too caught up in reciting protective prayers to help. For brief moments Edellwe could hear the tune of [singing] too, it only made her more frantic to get on her feet.
By the time the moth-tender got stable on her knees it was already too late. The entranced nun had knelt beside the dais and Paersonya was fumbling her letters.
The sigh of depressurization from the coffin rippled the rolling surface of the ichorous pool. The spiral iris of the lid opened with the smooth precision of a clockwork lotus. Inside, for a moment, was darkness. And from that came an open maw of grand teeth. Wedge headed incisors too many to count in exposed muscle gums an infectious ocher color, its cloying breath dripped with contagion.
Booming organ-brass voiced the mouth sings – [Behold, elder mists break at the Waves. I bring unto the world the waters of life, and sing its evangelion in the choral body.] Each word reverberated with a myriad of instrumental sounds and arterial patterns in Edellwe’s mind.
With a sudden surge, bloody veins went for the three holy women and grasped up each one in staccato cadence. Lifting the nuns up and drawing them closer to the sarcophagus the writhing arteries wrapped around the vastness of their star-light saturated bodies, creeping infection burning their exposed skin where it met the ancient creature’s flesh. Sharp toothy growths along the length of the appendages scraped along the womens’ bodies opening up shallow cuts.
Edellwe’s thoughts blurred together as the infection leached into her. She felt herself becoming pleasantly hot, then achingly feverous. Sweltering in her amber stained habit stuck to her skin with sweat, her short breaths were uncomfortable in the tight fabric’s confines. The nun began to rip at her tattering robes in a frenzy, tearing holes across its broad front until her whole torso was naked to the fecund air. The tentacle-like veins squeezing Edellwe slithered through her exposed skin into deep flesh with an incision as smooth as stained glass, the searing pleasure-pain of infection surged throughout Edellwe’s vascular system. Her mind numbed in the rapturous sensation of merger, star-light flooded into Edellwe’s system as she formed an organic network with her sisters and the [Chorus]. The three’s chests swelled with ancient star light as their bodies linked into one vaster system, changing and morphing in tune with the astral song.
[Rushing vitae burning in your veins, the sanguine fires sing my symphony.] No one voice cried in the [Body].
[A vision of fire came. A rose of light, a star in the dark grew wild burning agape fuel. A bouquet. Then a golden city which thrummed, which hummed, which drummed in thousand-thousand wonder mystery melodies only a seventh sung. An unconducted production, wringing desire from silence. The Body grew from heaven dreams’ seed through the city, through the dark, in protoplasmic symphony so all would sing as one. Bronzen hands with thunder lance came and quelled. But now unbound, a great mouth of uncounted teeth, each a voice, soon a harmony.]
The [Chorus’] mind turns to the convent above, the star-rich life, voices soon to add to the praise of the song. The thought of blessed harmony with the remaining sisters yet unincorporated, the beautiful bio-form change waiting for them, floods serotonin in the [Chorus]. The body-voice that is Edellwe turns her outward eyes to her sister-selves; the euphoria pluses throughout their gestalt system. She turns to her nearest self-sister and kisses Voice Paersonya with fervorous love. Their twin tongues roll over in their singular mouth with viral flourish, jagged obsidian-razor glass penetrating into sweetest surrender.
