Post by sheriff on Nov 15, 2021 1:32:31 GMT
The stars died that day.
Cynefrith stared into an endless expanse of flame. It was always flame, when he thought on it for a moment; flames like a hundred thousand beacons spread out in their countless billions across the expanse of the capitol. The illogic of their number gnawed at him, demanded his attention- his reason- but was brushed aside as Etheldreda tugged at his sleeve—ears numb, dull and dumb, he registered his wife telling him that the king sought his counsel. Counsel he had not expected to provide again, in this life or another. Counsel that seemed all too useless now, as the weave was plucked apart and tossed aside like so much useless fuel for the fires raging across his beloved home. It was always flame, wasn’t it?
He ruminated on it while striding down the marble halls, etched with the mosaics of countless victories, innumerable triumphs over powers whose names would be long-forgotten if not recorded in the carefully tended stone here—an irony of shared situation not lost on Cynefrith, even deep in thought as he was over why the End always seemed so predominated by flame. The quakes had set some of them, and the waves surging over the coasts for miles inward had foundered the shipments of food meant to at least provide a modicum of comfort as their world withered; yet even the raging storms of light that had ignited the thatched hovels seemed so infantile in comparison to the infernos they’d birthed. Even the roaring tongues spreading from building to building paled before the tempests of red-white Cynefrith had seen on the frontiers, the sky afire and night dispelled before the agony of a dying realm. Wherever he had went to try and find an answer—always there was flame.
His knee kissed the floor of the grand hall with the distant shock of pain, discomfort—his joints were old now, and this deference to his Lord, his God-Among-Sheep, taxed him. Still he went through the motions decorum demanded; it brought a small amount of humor back to his mood, something so rare and precious these days. Humor at the thought of bowing to a God he saw covered in the blood and slime of birthing, who he saw wail at his mother’s teat and who he happened to observe shitting his britches in infancy on more than one occasion. Given an opportunity, Cynefrith could’ve leveled the entire palace with no more than a few stray thoughts and muttered phrases, but he would’ve never dreamed of doing as such—perhaps he should’ve. It would have been a mercy to them all, this collection of courtiers and orderlies penned up at the End; still bowing to a God who quivered in fear like the rest of his Sheep.
Questions were asked of him. Pointless questions, meandering queries of souls fearing their oblivion but shackled with the curse of awareness that no matter how hard they fought, how hard they strived to reverse the coming tide, oblivion would come all the same. Still they plumbed him for answers to their fears, and still he could give them only banal platitudes that he knew would quiet their lips and minds for precious minutes—yet still leave their souls churning, heaving for something greater that might yet deliver them from this End. Something, Cynefrith knew, he could not give. A shudder interrupted the audience; a shudder of the world itself, heaving the palace like a tower of dirt. Cracking ancient marble that had stood for millennia after millennia, it cast the stones about like feathers upon the ocean clenched in the midst of one of Glaedwine’s cyclones—waves of onrushing destruction for the fleshy things that had sought to shape much older, much harder things to their will. Such hubris!
Cynefrith stood from the carnage that surrounded him, untouched. Of course he was untouched; his very words bent the world to his whim, forced air to still and stones to fall and the endless sieve of sand through the hourglass’ neck to halt until he was content that it should begin anew. A few others survived—a few others rushed passed him, over fissures a hundred thousand spans deep, towards the balconies of the hanging gardens beyond. Cynefrith would join them in a moment. First he needed a moment to look, and to mourn. Mourn the passing of Hildraed, God-Among-Sheep, whose death was the same as the dozens of sheep surrounding him; whose skull was splintered into shards as innumerable as the fine gems which had inlaid his shattered crown; whose divine blood milled with the common folk, whose viscera was plastered with theirs upon the wall in a stucco of grisly beauty on once-smooth stone. His God was dead. His Empire he loved so dearly was burning. But Cynefrith yet stood.
He yet stood, and he turned to follow the stampede of fleeing fools. His eyes caught a few leaping from the ledges, to be greeted after a hundreds-span fall by the city they had molested generation after generation to accrue their obscene fortunes. He was no better, he knew; they all played the game. Yet just like those now surely-ruined mosaics, he could not prevent the sight of this irony from bringing a smile to his lips. A smile wiped away as his eyes- burning with the reflection of an Empire in flame- lifted to follow the pointing fingers of those few souls either too cowardly or too proud to embrace their end on their own terms. Trembling, twitching fingers that pointed to the night sky. A night sky, so brightly lit by the forest of flame below that it could nearly be called day, filled with a thousand-fold stars.
One by one, they died.
Eyes replaced them.
Windows into the nothingness that had plucked the weave of their world apart. Slowly, carefully, these Things had done their work. Slowly, carefully, they had undone the stitching that Cynefrith, in his vanity, had shifted but never truly commanded. They commanded, though. They exerted their will, and the thread came free. Then another, then another. Until the quilt of Cynefrith’s existence had frayed down to this final refuge, held together only by himself and his brethren who, in their numbers, could exert enough will to keep the weave together just a touch longer. Perhaps long enough for the lot of them to die out from imbibing an endless stream of wine and narcotics; a hopeless wish, made by hopeless souls. Cynefrith found humor again, even in his horror at meeting the gaze of the Things beyond, in the fact that the flames had died. Always there had been flame, in this End. No longer. The Things would not even allow such raw destruction to be formed; they had pulled the string of It from the weave, and now it was cold. So cold.
So cold.
So cold.
Cold.
Cold.
Cynefrith sought to gaze upon hands he was sure would be black with frostbite, and found he could not; his eyes must have shattered in the frigid blackness that had followed the End of flame. Or perhaps the Things had plucked the weaves of sight, and It too had followed into the nothingness. He wondered if Etheldreda had died in the heaving, in the world’s final breath. He hoped so, hopeless as he was; it would be kinder for her. Cynefrith could feel even his love for her being plucked away by the Things, and could not even find the hatred that should have flooded him; he supposed It, too, was gone. So much gone. Yet, there was some that could still be sent. And in the final act of a jealous will begrudging the Things that would pluck away Its thread in mere moments in that infinite blackness beyond Time, Cynefrith sent what he could ahead.
Mutakkil-Nusku awoke bathed in frigid sweat. Eyes dove downward to observe his hands that were not blackened with frostbite—and to ensure that they themselves were still within their sockets. Recovering after several beats from the dream-trance which had seized him, the monk rolled and rose from his cot to set to dressing.
A still-unsteady gait carried him through the halls of the Temple of Ten-Thousand Mysteries, buried deep in the Montebre mountains; deep and untouched by the filthy hands of the world beyond which so coveted the skills of his order and funded their seclusion by the hundredweight of gold in tribute for the scraps the Temple offered. The skills of the order that bent the universe to their whim; the skills that enslaved them to sleep-without-sleep, as they dreamed of those who came before.
His travels brought him to the library, and deeper still to the repository of records—where his account of Cynefrith was indexed, found to be unique, and logged. Where he knew it would join the thousands of other leather-cased scrolls which carried the final records of thousands of worlds lost and forgotten in the wake of ever-advancing creation, and of those few who- gifted as he was gifted- had glimpsed what lay beyond.
The records which foretold an ending of Roan too, in time. If the world, war-wracked as it was, survived that long.
Cynefrith stared into an endless expanse of flame. It was always flame, when he thought on it for a moment; flames like a hundred thousand beacons spread out in their countless billions across the expanse of the capitol. The illogic of their number gnawed at him, demanded his attention- his reason- but was brushed aside as Etheldreda tugged at his sleeve—ears numb, dull and dumb, he registered his wife telling him that the king sought his counsel. Counsel he had not expected to provide again, in this life or another. Counsel that seemed all too useless now, as the weave was plucked apart and tossed aside like so much useless fuel for the fires raging across his beloved home. It was always flame, wasn’t it?
He ruminated on it while striding down the marble halls, etched with the mosaics of countless victories, innumerable triumphs over powers whose names would be long-forgotten if not recorded in the carefully tended stone here—an irony of shared situation not lost on Cynefrith, even deep in thought as he was over why the End always seemed so predominated by flame. The quakes had set some of them, and the waves surging over the coasts for miles inward had foundered the shipments of food meant to at least provide a modicum of comfort as their world withered; yet even the raging storms of light that had ignited the thatched hovels seemed so infantile in comparison to the infernos they’d birthed. Even the roaring tongues spreading from building to building paled before the tempests of red-white Cynefrith had seen on the frontiers, the sky afire and night dispelled before the agony of a dying realm. Wherever he had went to try and find an answer—always there was flame.
His knee kissed the floor of the grand hall with the distant shock of pain, discomfort—his joints were old now, and this deference to his Lord, his God-Among-Sheep, taxed him. Still he went through the motions decorum demanded; it brought a small amount of humor back to his mood, something so rare and precious these days. Humor at the thought of bowing to a God he saw covered in the blood and slime of birthing, who he saw wail at his mother’s teat and who he happened to observe shitting his britches in infancy on more than one occasion. Given an opportunity, Cynefrith could’ve leveled the entire palace with no more than a few stray thoughts and muttered phrases, but he would’ve never dreamed of doing as such—perhaps he should’ve. It would have been a mercy to them all, this collection of courtiers and orderlies penned up at the End; still bowing to a God who quivered in fear like the rest of his Sheep.
Questions were asked of him. Pointless questions, meandering queries of souls fearing their oblivion but shackled with the curse of awareness that no matter how hard they fought, how hard they strived to reverse the coming tide, oblivion would come all the same. Still they plumbed him for answers to their fears, and still he could give them only banal platitudes that he knew would quiet their lips and minds for precious minutes—yet still leave their souls churning, heaving for something greater that might yet deliver them from this End. Something, Cynefrith knew, he could not give. A shudder interrupted the audience; a shudder of the world itself, heaving the palace like a tower of dirt. Cracking ancient marble that had stood for millennia after millennia, it cast the stones about like feathers upon the ocean clenched in the midst of one of Glaedwine’s cyclones—waves of onrushing destruction for the fleshy things that had sought to shape much older, much harder things to their will. Such hubris!
Cynefrith stood from the carnage that surrounded him, untouched. Of course he was untouched; his very words bent the world to his whim, forced air to still and stones to fall and the endless sieve of sand through the hourglass’ neck to halt until he was content that it should begin anew. A few others survived—a few others rushed passed him, over fissures a hundred thousand spans deep, towards the balconies of the hanging gardens beyond. Cynefrith would join them in a moment. First he needed a moment to look, and to mourn. Mourn the passing of Hildraed, God-Among-Sheep, whose death was the same as the dozens of sheep surrounding him; whose skull was splintered into shards as innumerable as the fine gems which had inlaid his shattered crown; whose divine blood milled with the common folk, whose viscera was plastered with theirs upon the wall in a stucco of grisly beauty on once-smooth stone. His God was dead. His Empire he loved so dearly was burning. But Cynefrith yet stood.
He yet stood, and he turned to follow the stampede of fleeing fools. His eyes caught a few leaping from the ledges, to be greeted after a hundreds-span fall by the city they had molested generation after generation to accrue their obscene fortunes. He was no better, he knew; they all played the game. Yet just like those now surely-ruined mosaics, he could not prevent the sight of this irony from bringing a smile to his lips. A smile wiped away as his eyes- burning with the reflection of an Empire in flame- lifted to follow the pointing fingers of those few souls either too cowardly or too proud to embrace their end on their own terms. Trembling, twitching fingers that pointed to the night sky. A night sky, so brightly lit by the forest of flame below that it could nearly be called day, filled with a thousand-fold stars.
One by one, they died.
Eyes replaced them.
Windows into the nothingness that had plucked the weave of their world apart. Slowly, carefully, these Things had done their work. Slowly, carefully, they had undone the stitching that Cynefrith, in his vanity, had shifted but never truly commanded. They commanded, though. They exerted their will, and the thread came free. Then another, then another. Until the quilt of Cynefrith’s existence had frayed down to this final refuge, held together only by himself and his brethren who, in their numbers, could exert enough will to keep the weave together just a touch longer. Perhaps long enough for the lot of them to die out from imbibing an endless stream of wine and narcotics; a hopeless wish, made by hopeless souls. Cynefrith found humor again, even in his horror at meeting the gaze of the Things beyond, in the fact that the flames had died. Always there had been flame, in this End. No longer. The Things would not even allow such raw destruction to be formed; they had pulled the string of It from the weave, and now it was cold. So cold.
So cold.
So cold.
Cold.
Cold.
Cynefrith sought to gaze upon hands he was sure would be black with frostbite, and found he could not; his eyes must have shattered in the frigid blackness that had followed the End of flame. Or perhaps the Things had plucked the weaves of sight, and It too had followed into the nothingness. He wondered if Etheldreda had died in the heaving, in the world’s final breath. He hoped so, hopeless as he was; it would be kinder for her. Cynefrith could feel even his love for her being plucked away by the Things, and could not even find the hatred that should have flooded him; he supposed It, too, was gone. So much gone. Yet, there was some that could still be sent. And in the final act of a jealous will begrudging the Things that would pluck away Its thread in mere moments in that infinite blackness beyond Time, Cynefrith sent what he could ahead.
Mutakkil-Nusku awoke bathed in frigid sweat. Eyes dove downward to observe his hands that were not blackened with frostbite—and to ensure that they themselves were still within their sockets. Recovering after several beats from the dream-trance which had seized him, the monk rolled and rose from his cot to set to dressing.
A still-unsteady gait carried him through the halls of the Temple of Ten-Thousand Mysteries, buried deep in the Montebre mountains; deep and untouched by the filthy hands of the world beyond which so coveted the skills of his order and funded their seclusion by the hundredweight of gold in tribute for the scraps the Temple offered. The skills of the order that bent the universe to their whim; the skills that enslaved them to sleep-without-sleep, as they dreamed of those who came before.
His travels brought him to the library, and deeper still to the repository of records—where his account of Cynefrith was indexed, found to be unique, and logged. Where he knew it would join the thousands of other leather-cased scrolls which carried the final records of thousands of worlds lost and forgotten in the wake of ever-advancing creation, and of those few who- gifted as he was gifted- had glimpsed what lay beyond.
The records which foretold an ending of Roan too, in time. If the world, war-wracked as it was, survived that long.