(softly but with feeling) soulscape
Soulscape!
AND SO, SHE WAS NAMED GADREEEL: she it is thatshowed the children of men all the blows of death, and she led astray Eve…
It’s the kind of place which has been he subject of legend for millennia now—or so you hear, you never could wrap your head around the stories, so you never paid them any mind, let the ink melt together and flood free of the pages. And so you take her word for it, believe her when she says that the fruits borne on these trees are granted to you and those around you as they were to Persephone from Hades…
( They’re mere names to you, after all... )
And then— without warning, it all turns rancid in your mouth. Whereonce sweet nectar flowed, there’s now something thick, ferrous, cascading downan unwilling and unconstricting throat. The soles of your feet are raw, blistered from God knows how long you’ve spent, stood atop a mound of brittle bones and vulture feathers…
You’re going to choke, you think, and now you wish you were in a different version of this story; where the trees were ripe with apples, and the bitter cyanide therein lay siege to an already fragile, thinning myocardium, put your weary lungs to rest and lull your nervous system to a permanent, anesthetized sleep. At least that would have been a death both definite and swift…
Oh, but for thesickness that settles in the pit of your stomach; the dreadful reminder, that death has poured downyour throat, and rather than snatching the very air from your lungs, has become as much a part of you as it is this accursed place, scorched itself into the marrow of your bones. You cannot leave this place, for though your heart still beats as theirs does, you no longer have any place among the living.
And as rapid as its onset was, Tartarus fades back to Shangri-La. She’s a garden, a place as enigmatic and changing as the forces of nature themselves, and you exist in limbo within the confines of her whim...