Vibes | Pt. 1 | Content Warning: Dark Themes and Graphic Implications.
<’Ang Canton Belmont anaa kanimo...’>
< ‘ug ang Canton Belmont anaa kanunay.’>
As his spoke, his palms began to glow with a noxious yellow light, a sulfurous stench invading the air as if a pocket within the earth had been opened up within the room with the hints of shed snakeskin lurking underneath. Alongside his words, damned voices whispered in a ghastly chorus that invaded the mind, and as he worked the lights of the room dimmed and flickered with his incantation.
<’Nahibal-an nimo ang kasakit, ug gibati kini kung gusto ko ikaw’ >
<‘ug nahibal-an nimo ang kagawasan sa dihang kami giputol’.>
From his desk he stood, bringing the newly named body to its final resting place: a chalk circle lit with sanguine candles that dripped wax like blood upon the stone floor. He set the doll in the center of it all, lighting a bundle of incense and waving it over the small figurine’s motionless form. As smoke filled the air and the candles burned, the shadows danced along the walls, celebrating his words.
Twice more he repeated the incantation, and with every repetition the lights dimmed further, dying and fading, while the smoke began to grow thick and acrid. A heavy blanket that spread outwards from his movements and from the burning herbs in his palm. By the third repetition, the smoke had grown to an excessive cloud leaving not even a fulm’s worth of visibility to the naked eye while the smell of rotting eggs grew so abhorrent that one risked expelling their lunch should they so much as open their mouth in this environment. .
< '...ug nahibal-an nimo ang kagawasan sa dihang kami giputol.’ >
He traded the smoldering herbs for a pin of polished bone lined up next to the figurine, slowing raising his palm above the small creature’s body. As he finished the final line, the smokey grey tones of the smoke turned a deep red as if they were in a room full of evaporating blood and it began to funnel, rising into the air and following the motion of his hand. Or more specifically, the apex of the bone needle he now held.
In one, quick plunge, the bone needle was forced down and into the gut of the wide-eyed replica figurine. As he did so, the smokey, crimson serpent dove with it, disappearing into the new wound as if it were a black hole singularity, consuming what smog remained. The ritual was done almost as soon as it had begun, all remnants and traces of the smoldering vapor were gone, not even the lingering stench of mephitis.
The polished bone pin was removed though there’d be no sign of its entry and the doll itself was carried to another end of his chambers. Here, his final offerings were placed before a shrine of exotic flowers before they would be sent on their way. Impossibly beautiful golden cogs that gleamed when they caught the light, lavish finery decorated with intricately painted flora, hand-crafted jewelry finer than any mortal palms could be capable of, delicate paint brushes...all his own works of art. He needed to rest soon and bless these gifts with dreams for his children, but he had one final preparation.
Sinister was the curl at his lips when he turned to an adjacent steel door. Slowly, he walked to it, pushing upon its heavy frame with his palm. The biometric scanners of the entry way lit up the door around his grizzly hand before sliding open with a compressed hiss...revealing within it a room dimly lit by magitek machines and filled with several metal gurneys still laden with the weight of living cargo. Some of these poor souls still slept, others stirred, wide-eyed with fear.
“Tonight you will finally be a part of something to your liking..Does it excite you all to know this? I will be sending some of you /home/.” Despite his reassurances of a promising future, nothing but screams met his words as he carted his first victim away.
For both canton and nam: @enambris
The GN: @givethemtothegallows
