Random Excerpts From Some Recent Revisions
This is some stuff I've been messing around with. I'm not sure if I'll end up using any of this, but I'm posting it anyway, so damn the naysayers. Eris and Discord sit on my shoulders, and they're telling me to Immanentize the Eschaton, so don't fuck around or Jason will mow you down with his new ak-47.
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Occasionally his eyes roll backwards into his skull, causing him to walk with the tentative gait of a blind man who sees nothing but pure, white light. The Aperture yawns, defenses are dilated and paper-thin, eyes see too much, and, suddenly, something peers back, something from the other side, from across the line, drawn to this optic locus, and there will be no balancing, no fit fate or hallowed end, only a shifting in the weight of things, and the movement away from the median is quickened as the scale is weighed heavy and the angle of the slope increases, and in this place religious chant and cries for help are mutilated by Doppler shift and echo, this forever plunge, this place of harrowing Fairweather calls home—Which way to the egress?
--
He mutters to himself, the whispered prayers punctuated with furtive glances to all directions, including skywards. His teeth grind and clash like hammer against anvil, and pain needles through his skull. Using his tongue to probe the source, Fairweather winces in arousal; the broken tooth is angled sharply and feels wrongly soft, and his mouth fills with the taste of copper and phlegm. Though his mouth is a horrid thing, stinking like rotten meat and populated with all types of decay and pestilence, Fairweather’s followers view it without revulsion, ensnared as they are in his guileful rhetoric. For he is an orator of great passion, his words skillfully wrought and bejeweled, his tongue prone to cruel forging of afflatus and diatribe, and many have been bewitched by his voice, tempted by promises of Arcadia and Eden, unaware that such lands have never been found by men of any creed, and unaware that only a desert awaits them, a desert with no oases and no end to its wastes.
Mirages only appear to the damned, and skeletons line the shores of any imagined paradise.
----
Teeth snarl and velvet rustles as Fairweather rushes forward, his knuckles clenched into a hairy fist. He hits the man in the gut and pushes him to the ground. The man voices no exclamation of surprise save the wind leaving his lungs, and his mouth hangs open like a dying trout. His face signals no recognition, no pattern is found in his doughy features, pale and shapeless with seabloat, just a grand acceptance of surrender to the tide; his eyes flicker like damp fire in the mud. A life of rotting wood, of what’s found in the imprint of stones overturned, of grubs and maggots and all the things swarming, legion in the chthonic darkwet.
---
Fairweather looks skyward, mouthing silent words towards the shifting empyrean. If the sky gives any response it is a silent one, hidden and occult, the secret language of prophet-speak: glossolalia, sermons, witch-trials and martyr-fires. All the deliriums bubbling to the surface like the symptoms of some inverted dementia praecox.
---
No one moves; they sit huddled, just effigies in the mud, broken forms on the landscape. The sun dies towards the horizon and this last-light bathes the frozen figures, turning them to bronze shells, tarnished and hollow. All drowning, all being submerged, all destined for bleached bones and rictus grin.
All drowning. All drowned. All drown.
Fairweather turns, stepping lightly and whistling, his mood ebullient, his movements vertiginous, his melody jubilant . . . and he ascends the hill, skipping like a child.
-------
Occasionally his eyes roll backwards into his skull, causing him to walk with the tentative gait of a blind man who sees nothing but pure, white light. The Aperture yawns, defenses are dilated and paper-thin, eyes see too much, and, suddenly, something peers back, something from the other side, from across the line, drawn to this optic locus, and there will be no balancing, no fit fate or hallowed end, only a shifting in the weight of things, and the movement away from the median is quickened as the scale is weighed heavy and the angle of the slope increases, and in this place religious chant and cries for help are mutilated by Doppler shift and echo, this forever plunge, this place of harrowing Fairweather calls home—Which way to the egress?
--
He mutters to himself, the whispered prayers punctuated with furtive glances to all directions, including skywards. His teeth grind and clash like hammer against anvil, and pain needles through his skull. Using his tongue to probe the source, Fairweather winces in arousal; the broken tooth is angled sharply and feels wrongly soft, and his mouth fills with the taste of copper and phlegm. Though his mouth is a horrid thing, stinking like rotten meat and populated with all types of decay and pestilence, Fairweather’s followers view it without revulsion, ensnared as they are in his guileful rhetoric. For he is an orator of great passion, his words skillfully wrought and bejeweled, his tongue prone to cruel forging of afflatus and diatribe, and many have been bewitched by his voice, tempted by promises of Arcadia and Eden, unaware that such lands have never been found by men of any creed, and unaware that only a desert awaits them, a desert with no oases and no end to its wastes.
Mirages only appear to the damned, and skeletons line the shores of any imagined paradise.
----
Teeth snarl and velvet rustles as Fairweather rushes forward, his knuckles clenched into a hairy fist. He hits the man in the gut and pushes him to the ground. The man voices no exclamation of surprise save the wind leaving his lungs, and his mouth hangs open like a dying trout. His face signals no recognition, no pattern is found in his doughy features, pale and shapeless with seabloat, just a grand acceptance of surrender to the tide; his eyes flicker like damp fire in the mud. A life of rotting wood, of what’s found in the imprint of stones overturned, of grubs and maggots and all the things swarming, legion in the chthonic darkwet.
---
Fairweather looks skyward, mouthing silent words towards the shifting empyrean. If the sky gives any response it is a silent one, hidden and occult, the secret language of prophet-speak: glossolalia, sermons, witch-trials and martyr-fires. All the deliriums bubbling to the surface like the symptoms of some inverted dementia praecox.
---
No one moves; they sit huddled, just effigies in the mud, broken forms on the landscape. The sun dies towards the horizon and this last-light bathes the frozen figures, turning them to bronze shells, tarnished and hollow. All drowning, all being submerged, all destined for bleached bones and rictus grin.
All drowning. All drowned. All drown.
Fairweather turns, stepping lightly and whistling, his mood ebullient, his movements vertiginous, his melody jubilant . . . and he ascends the hill, skipping like a child.
posted by David at 1:59 AM
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