#tsv 13

[tsvwords]

Happy, are you? With how it turned out?

You’ll take that boy, and you’ll eat him up.

It doesn’t matter if you do it today in this sodden ruin you’ve created, or you wait forty years until he’s old and quaking and calls it a blessing to have your servants crawling out from behind his eyes to seek new light - you’ll take all that was good and all that was rotten and every ounce of potential in him and you’ll eat every part of him up.

And you’ll keep on whispering to him that he’s right on the verge of realising something, gaining something real and true, and he’ll keep walking his way towards your baited fucking lure as it skitters away at every turn until you’re ready to bite.

Doesn’t that make you ashamed? To scavenge off our lives, when they’re all we have?

What is the point of you?

— Chapter 13: So Let Me Dwell Eternal.

[theboombutton]

So who had Sid Wright down as the first person who'd commit mass murder "on screen"? Because I sure as hell didn't

[tsvwords]

I’m afraid I’ve changed my mind about sleep. I don’t think it’s such a terrible thing. In fact, I think we could do with a little more of it. And I’m not so sure I’m willing to be a sacrifice after all. Because in the soft and silent space between death and dreaming, I have glimpsed a better gospel, and I have witnessed the birth of a superior god. And in a thousand tongues I whisper its glad hosanna: sleep. You’ve done enough. Your work is done. Sleep. Never wake. Sleep.

— Chapter 13: So Let Me Dwell Eternal.

[tsvwords]

And when the petrol gauge dims and the Petropater’s dripping face blinks its final warning at us from the dashboard, we park the car beneath an old willow tree that hangs alone in the empty fields.

We get out, and we walk onwards, through the rain. Gradually, the landscape obscures.

There comes a time when you can no longer see beyond the next hedgerow, the next stile, the next creeping outgrowth of stray forest overwhelming the burnt-out ruins. High above in the distance, the shapes of rusted military saints on their towering long legs or rolling tracks are just barely visible.

And as we enter deeper into the trailing mists, a familiar, wet scent enters the air. A cool, sticky damp lingers on our skin, making us drip. It’s river mist, I think. Somewhere out here, in the heart of the barren land, the waters have staked a claim for themselves.

And presently, we come to something strange. An endless line of warning tape, stretching out across the fields before us. Neon orange, once bright and now hopelessly muddied, staked into the ground at intervals, here and there flapping free. Old tyre tracks lie in the earth before it, pooling with water.

Someone has built a makeshift shrine to the Riddlespike, God of Boundaries; three crows, impaled upon iron railing-posts that have been driven into the ground. It looks somehow desperate.

The police were here. Clearly. And whatever they found beyond the tape, they didn’t feel the need to stick around.

They abandoned this place, almost as soon as they found it.

— Chapter 13: So Let Me Dwell Eternal.

[tsvwords]

I glance at Carpenter, and she glances back at me. And I know she’s already changing her mind about leaving our faith behind. You’d have to, when faced with revelations like this. We’re caught up in the currents of something immense, and it’s dragging us someplace fast.

— Chapter 13: So Let Me Dwell Eternal.

[tsvwords]

FAULKNER: They killed your parents. They killed your Nana Glass. They wiped our people from the records. Don’t you care about any of that? Because I care, Carpenter. Why don’t you?

CARPENTER: Oh, don’t even try it. That’s is my rage to carry. It’s my hurt, it’s my sorrow. You don’t get to share it with me. You’re a convert, Faulkner. Stop pretending, stop performing. None of this belongs to you. You want to play messiah and we’re just the most convenient vessel.

— Chapter 13: So Let Me Dwell Eternal.

[tsvwords]

The heart of the town rises up from out of the mists.

A great sunken park, stretching out on all sides before us. The grass and flowerbeds have been blessed by the flood, growing tall and wild and strange above the water’s surface. Grey polyp trees sway back and forth like weeping willows in the morning breeze, as the rain falls, their tendrils reaching to the sky.

We’re surrounded by people here, I realise. They stand in mid-motion, walking their dogs or pushing their prams, calcified and reshaped and eroded by a dozen tides, as the water washes up around their waists.

A forest of people, strands of white river-coral extending from their heads and their outstretched arms.

We walk amongst them, silently and cautiously; they, too, are swaying, teeming, with life, and might wake at any moment. The mists part.

And in the very centre of the park, painted in great strokes across the ruined wall of some clubhouse or public toilet, its purpose no longer clear...at last, we come to it. The source of all this.

The Wither Mark.

— Chapter 13: So Let Me Dwell Eternal.

[tsvwords]

We wade forth, through the remnants of the town.

The black and seething water rises to our ankles, then to our waists.

The concrete has sunk into ruin. The clinging mud is everywhere. Neon signs and shrines flash faintly from underneath the crawling black limpets and barnacles that coat every surface.

The river mist fills the corners of your vision, so thick and so chokingthat you can’t see further than a few feet ahead.

As we walk, Faulkner slips, almost toppling into the torrent - I catch hold of him and steer him back upright. He’s glassy-eyed, grinning at me as he regains his balance. Close to delirious.

— Chapter 13: So Let Me Dwell Eternal.