(x) brushing along the lonely souls left wandering aimlessly in the guts of the palace, the wind howls, guided in on the breath of the moon’s light and harshened by the frost beyond the window. the shutters rattle, and the dead threaten to stir. we are nothing if not intruders on the land. the quiet and elegant curve of my longsword is featherlight and calls wordlessly to me in the dark, begging again for use.
a silvern voice rings ancient, reigning from the deep of forgotten history, soil- buried and bloodless: “ are you so blind, or is it that you do not wish to see ? ” in the blue, i catch sight of a fang– he appears before me an apparition, infinite in his breadth and blurring the edges which we hem along in this realm, gelid and white and biting. he repels me. @umbrarch
i curl the shadow round my being– borrowed from the night– for not protection, but distance. sharing ancestry with the intangible like this, i feel it still and even, settled beneath my skin, ages undisturbed. the dull tug of the cannibal’s impulse lies sleeping still beneath my tongue, trailing behind it an aftertaste most repulsive.
“ it is nothing i have not seen before, meier. you, too, were present as the eldest of –our kind .. first fell ill to time and age. only does memory serve a purpose. ” the words are acrid on my lips, but we are dying. come morning of one suffocating and dehydrated summer’s day, meier will rot, and so too will i, and there will be none to mourn the wasted space which we now occupy. he blinks from my vision like dust for a moment and i wonder, at the far ends of my considerations, if the centuries of cruel and pointless existence have already taken hold on the broadness of his frame, as talons do helpless prey. the grotesqueness of our unlife is an ugly cinereal scar on the skin of the earth. my hand finds its way to the pommel at my side. and so it ruptures from behind my too fanged maw, quick as a slit throat, “ i pray on the death of the race. ”