Seeleruhe's Writings

[thewrittensailor]

Jakeev

Fog rolled thickly down the forested hills, gathering over placid waters and spilling onto the bridge. Jakeev could hardly see the next set of mage light lamps ten paces ahead. He pulled his scarf tight to his nose against a breeze of bad air and plowed on ahead, away from the stench of camp. The only sounds were wind and his own wet footfalls, but in a country full of mages one never trusted his own senses to get him by.

Glyph stones in his pockets throbbed with warmth. Approximately two mage lights away there was a presence. If not for the stones, he would never have noticed. Still, the warning did come at some delay. Likely this was a mage from the capitol, schooled in thieving and espionage. Not that the institution halls advertised themselves with such garish, unholy titles. Both could be valuable for a nation with a mind for warfare and lying to its civilians. Namera’s tactics had made Jakeev what he was. Odds were that she had done the same for this mage. And how then could he blame the fellow?

All hail the mother nation.

If the glyph stones had not been delayed, the mage would have meant nothing to him. Jakeev was trained to respond to intent. When someone hinders your defenses, he means to break them entirely. Mages are slow moving creatures as a rule. In battle, they do best in positions similar to the posts of archers, away from heavily armed enemies. They needed time to recover after every attack and being behind a wall of compatriots afforded them this. Had this one understood his tactical place and how to read physique, he might have known that he was ill matched. Jakeev did not mind ridding his nation of idiots.

He launched into a sprint, barreling into the mage and upending his balance so that they crashed down together. With one knee braced in a shallow puddle and the other pinning the man’s thigh down, Jakeev rested a muscle thickened arm on his windpipe. They froze there for a moment and he strained to listen past the wheezing breaths of his target. Neither sound nor the throb of a glyph stone gave away any waiting collaborators. It was a mage unskilled with attack spells who bothered to hide his presence. Either they were alone or whoever was there didn’t matter.

The Madame was his target’s saving grace. She would not be made to wait and this was already a delay that would have him riding his waiting horse much harder. If he was to have a fresh prize for his later games, this man was not it. A serrated dagger hung from his belt, gleaming in the faint mage light with never-dull charms. Jakeev removed his arm from the man’s throat and in one sweep, pulled the dagger and slit the carotid.

There was a strong temptation to leave his mess, but for the sake of later traffic he grabbed the corpse up as he stood and lowered it quietly into the water. Jakeev waved goodbye as if to a friend and smiled. The mother nation had made him this way. It was she who brought him another step closer to the clergy. Jakeev feared the restriction, but he would deserve his clerics mark and robe when the time came and mother would see what she had made him.

All hail the mother nation.

[correctdichotomy]

(image credit to Dan Hoare on twitter)

I ONLY JUST LEARNED ABOUT THE EXISTENCE OF THIS MUSHROOM????? WHICH ERUPTS FROM AN EGG BEFORE UNCURLING HELLISH ARMS, EXPOSING ITS STICKY MASS OF SPORES TO BE SPREAD BY FLIES ATTRACTED BY THE SCENT OF ROTTING FLESH???

Admittedly, I am easily won over by all organisms that attract flies with the scent of rotting flesh. But the octopus stinkhorn (Clathrus archeri) also has tentacles, a freaky egg stage, and blackish goop, so it’s my favorite now.

[thewrittensailor]

Dull Edges

When it comes on, you may not know. I pray. It is not loud. Not outside my body, where a heart races, stutters, rages, pushing against flower filled lungs. Keep your ears away from my breast. It screams. No, settle love. This is just my mind, I'm used to it. Shattering. Roaring. Shaking. I'm smoothing the edges that result in hopes that you won't cut yourself on me, because dull ridges hurt too. It just takes more time. You will catch me sneaking away with no God be with ye. Please dont be mad, just follow the menthol smoke. Tar kills and no one questions it, not like scars. I will need you. Let me pull close when I return. Your ceiling might become my movie screen at night, just so I don't have to look at our skin when the unspoken 'it' begs me to cut out my viens and spread them in the dirt. Narcis shouldn't have to see Nero’s forest alone and that's what I'm growing, isn't it? The Mother needs life to give it, after all. Namera wants her trees and- I'll probably need to spill ink instead to appease my mind. So if you catch me with a notebook in your bed, please just give me warmth until all of the nastiness is out.

[tag-your-oc]

Tag your oc who is always seen reading a book.

You know the one.

[readingwithadam]

When you are old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

- W.B. Yeats

[just-six]

There’s nothing poetic about being empty.

six word story // 3misguidedghosts (via just-six)

[thewrittensailor]

Most Recent Kiss

This is not singular, it is a series. Every time I catch her smiling, I want to write the next one chaste. With every skimming, maddening touch when the lights are out, the next will be deep. They are a warm invitation. Lean into me. Oh, you’re safe, I swear. So even though my heart beats too fast and I struggle to breathe, I do.

[knightofleo]

some days, aren’t yours at all they come and go, as if they’re someone else’s days they come and leave you behind someone else’s face and it’s harsher than yours and colder than yours

Somedays, Regina Spektor (via knightofleo)

[thewrittensailor]

"All men are moral. Only their neighbors are not." John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

[thewrittensailor]

I’m given great pleasure by the reading of Mr. Steinbeck’s characters. Especially their inner thoughts, which must surely have been an extension of the man himself. Always, I feel as though I have been dealt a short hand by the unfortuitous timing of my birth. Would that I had been born before even my father, that I may have caught a glimpse, a signature, or a glory of a word of his, even if given well past his prime.

Had I been born so early, what would become of my temperamental inner clock? All of its constant cranking back and back, grinding gears until they cannot fathom additional tension and spring forward at hyper speed, sending the long day hurtling towards an early night by a play of chance or will.

A quarter of my life has already been spent thinking on ways to stop the clock. What would occur if suddenly there were twenty more years tacked on and I found that over half of my life had been spent hovering near the lawn path to the grim of grims, kicking different stones down towards his door? Oh, but just to see how he might greet them.

[thewrittensailor]

Real

She was one of the two doll women that Narcis knew. Sable Graeblod was the other, but she was not a natural phenomenon as Aurore of Soul was. Both women were wooden as marionettes, carved to stolid perfection, with all of the ball and socket joints arranged just so. How they moved like the real thing! Hips revolving and lashes falling with perfect poise. The only parts of either that he saw to be real flesh were the busom and the heart hidden beneath that. And there he saw the difference. Sable achieved her nature with magic, weaving and lacing her humanity into submission, keeping it confined where others might not see. But Aurore, she had iron self control. Or else the heart simply wandered happily in whichever perverse direction that the head decided to go. He had not been able to decide until he saw the way the heart struggled for every beat, just as her sluggish Real heart did. She was killing it. Trying to, at least. Llyn disrupted the process at times. Especially when Aurore hurt her. Oh, how the Metaphor beat then! Like the starling caged by his own ribs. It was fear shooting, guilt shuddering, and love pulsing deeper than she did intend. She could not be whole the doll anymore. The joints were bone and ligaments, the body shot through with raised blue veins. She still moved stiffly, to be sure. But it was real. It was all real. Remie was dead somewhere without her pyre. The Mother was possessed of a monstrous rage that could go nowhere. Then Llyn was gone, replaced in some unknown place by a drunken whore that begged to die without having the presence or the selfishness to make it happen.

[thewrittensailor]

I’m waiting for you to see me without passion. Will you cut yourself on my blunt edges, expecting softness and warmth, open and interested in life and your inner world?

The other one (I’m sorry, I don’t know when I’ll stop comparing my loves to her) always hurt herself trying to pull me out on those days. She never understood that the numbness couldn’t be swayed and that it was all internal. But I don’t blame her. I just learned to fake it too late.

[thewrittensailor]

You called it poison and indeed it was, for noxious thoughts and a cell or two as well. A breath of would be cancer to choke me dead in a decade or two, but those thoughts would have had me quicker still. You say I’ve cut my life, I say I’ve only been borrowing a couple years here and there.

[seeleruhe]

I saw the veins stand from your face Push and burst through paper skin It was a sanguine array A pseudo halo for a new age angel And all I wanted was to know Why didn’t you bleed?

[seeleruhe]

I only really wanted him because his head was rotting. The colors were nice, but the way he kept it all together with gold was better. His family, they were smarter. They only wore the rot around their necks.

[thewrittensailor]

The human was lost, this much was obvious to Nero the moment that he saw the one who dared insult his forest. So what if it was in a sad state? No need to call him out on his failures. He meant to make the trespasser pay for what he’d said, but how to harm someone that pretty? Let alone so obviously intoxicated. Playthings ought to be more aware for the games.

He thought that his trespasser might be a mage. Little else could explain the rancor of humanity mixing with the ooze of dark magic. Ooze pleased him as a word. A very strong descriptive for what crawled across his senses now. A keeper who had more purity left to them might have driven him out immediately, but Nero felt only curiosity until the man knelt and actually stuck a finger into the root of a stronger tree. Not in, he did not dig into or crack the root, but stick a finger through as though it had the constitution of mud.

“Do you know that your forest is grown of corpses?”

Nero saw it. The defiled bodies of men whose veins and innards dug into the earth where roots ought to be. Lying tongues hosted the weakest of saplings and only abdomens provided trees of any height. Every inch of earth was tinted red and even the moss was rusted by it. The trespasser had his sickly little finger stuck right into an intestinal root, releasing a smell so foul that Nero retched until he removed it and the image faded.

“What did you do?” Nero screeched. “Why would you show me that?”

“Show… You saw it, too?”

“Saw it, smelled it. Filthy cretin, how did you do it?”

The beastly human hardly seemed to hear him at all. He tapped at his blonde stubbled chin and tilted his head. “No one else ever saw it before.”

Evergreen glazed Nero’s eyes, spilling out the dim green light of his spirit. He should not have needed motion to command the vine, yet his fingers twitched at his sides to bring the dangling, inert thing about. The flora cocked back in an arch and snapped forward to slam the beast into the nearest tree. Brittle, malnourished bark cracked under the strain. Nero trained the vine around the tree, holding his captive tightly in place. It squeezed boney elbows tight into his rib cage. Fingers dug into the cracked bark in pain and once again the visions were on Nero.

He trained his eyes on the human to keep away from the gore of his forest floor. The beast’s hair was golden cloud dissipating into the miasmic fog that gauzed Nero’s forest and squirming knots of headless snakes. His frail chest was a twisted bird cage. Inside was a frantic starling, beating its wings wildly and squawking silent warning calls. There was a tiny vine creeping up its ankle. Cords of twisted twine laced up from the cage, anchoring his translucent head in place.

It giggled. “Don’t you hate metaphors? I do. Makes the looking glass a scary place.” Twin skies yawned, splitting the face a third of the way down. He relaxed his grip on the bark and the beast melted back into a sickly young man. “I’m sorry, hope this is better. I haven’t seen Narcis in some time.”

[thewrittensailor]

Stillness was what Narcis noticed first. Forests have that about them, the quiet of life going about its business so unobtrusively. It was a little grey, a little too quiet perhaps. His mind was so busy most times that he hardly thought anything of it. The underlying babble of dishonest noise confused and hid sounds of the real world.

The scream didn’t shatter reality, so much as liquidate it. It was a crash that rippled out like the strike of a war hammer at a cathedral bell and everything below the sky fell. Now came the world Narcis expected these days.

She was still screaming, a cracking, burbling sound. There never seemed to be any time for a breath. How he could even think around such a consuming sound, Narcis didn’t know.

The pattern was in the trees and plants. Weak and strong, little patches with each in varying degrees and in similar shapes. Where the roots should have begun, the cut of the pattern became clear and human. The plants, especially the trees, anchored themselves in the corpses of human men. They made roots of the inner workings of the bodies. Veins tangled and matted over moss beds and dove into the earth in straggles. Strong trees growing out the torsos of the men made thick roots of the entrails, slick and glistening still until dirt was kicked over them. The weakest trees, wilted whip-stemmed sprouts, grew from the skulls out of gaping mouths and eye sockets.

A haze hung in the air like miasmic fog punctuated by small, struggling orbs of golden light. Narcis fancied them to be smothered or shattered forest spirits and the poetry in that thought made him laugh out loud.

"Dryad," he mused, "do you know that your forest is grown of corpses?"