∗ ∗ ∗
What–
"HELP MEEEE!"
He felt the scream rip through his chest as intensely as it ripped through the empty corridor. The voice was impossibly juvenile and still so haunted by a millenia of agony. He was in a burial chamber.
Is that a ch–
"KILL ME!"
His stagnated blood slowed to a stop as a legendary freeze raced through his veins. The dry aching flame in his throat roared, his eyes burned from fatigue. Upended and contorted was his stomach as it coiled around itself tight, the ground had fallen out from underneath him even as he lay frozen and helpless on solid–
What is this material?
A cracknel, and slow grinding and crunching joined the howls pulling him away from his study of the dungeons composition and its–
"NOO PLEASE NO!"
She was being tortured and it was torturing him.
"PLEASE END IT!"
He mustered up his strength. He planned to crawl through the dungeon, toward the atrocities and save the day.
Pain.
No I should–
"NOW! NOW! NOW!"
He held fast, was she in trouble, and if so by what then? He was trembling from the inside out.
Is anyone even there …no, the poison.
I'm dying.
or is it the dungeon,
It was inevitable.
The focus needed for maintaining the enchantment of his bandage, proved more and more difficult, layering his brow in sweat. A muddied, piteous, rabid darkling, he envisaged himself.
I'm delirious, auditory hallucinations
Everything was still.
He could partition off a piece of himself dedicated to tending the fickle flame that is the spell that was nullifying his egregious wounds. The enchantment was layered with previously existing magic, but it was in essence his own creation, a marvel.
He was already versed in the partitioning of his personal resources. He dove within, to conduct the glorious silken starlight within, with almost excited fervor the satiny shimmer, his liquid astronomy, danced at his every whim. The cosmic glow now insisting its own autonomy, strengthening the amalgam of death-defying dungeon magic and his own Eiligilthilit. Forgetting himself and his situation, he smiled.
My efficiency is not normal
"IT HURTS, PLEASE KILL ME!"
The blood curdling scream racked through the dungeons' high ceilings, scorching him back into the crisis of his situation. He was trapped.
It's getting closer, coming closer.
Bones were cracking.
This is no hallucination
Each scream; a new voice, yet each voice more hoarse and heartbreaking as they howled for mercy.
Ume please help
"PLEASE NO MY DAUGHTER!!"
Aoi was sick. Unable to move, enraged at the second voice that tore through the hall.
UME HELP HER PLE–
"TAKE MY DAUGHTER" A third alchemized Aoi's burning flames from a blistering heat to a deep cold, that altogether became a looming, sapping frost. It was rough, and dark and masculine, whereas the second voice was comparatively more feminine. Though the words were horrific, the voice was just as haunted by pain as the others.
"..please" The first voice was meak.
Ume wh–
"TAKE HER" The third pleaded.
"What…" He whispered to himself as the horror shrunk him tenfold. He was clung on to the final remnants of his reality.
"TAKE HER INSTEAD!" The second voice pleaded.
The dungeon walls threatened to disappear in boiling flames of crimson which ate and tore away his insides, burning away the freeze making way to a vision oh so red. The hellfire inside urged him to action but his blood ran cold. His was paralyzed.
"PLEASE!"
A pale arm tapped through the corridor, reaching out as if searching in the dark. Waterlogged and almost tinted a bleached olive with a faint otherworldly glow upon its deeply human skin.
"PLEASE NO!"
Arms, legs, innumerable appeared, reaching and grabbing.
Crack
The great cracknel of bones getting louder.
One head became four which quickly became five as more bodies crawled into his view, each eye moving independent of the rest.
One eye spotted him.
SHRIIEEKKK!!!
The keep walls rattled as the cacophony of torment and pleads for mercy and sacrifice shook the air, the mana reacted in kind, vibrating along with the structure that was its prison. The teal lights dimmed and raced away from the newly emerged arachnid atrocity edging along the sepulchral oubliette floor.
An abhorrent amalgamation of the dregs of a plague pit; living corpses transmuted as one creature, reminiscent of his last pursuer, though absolutely nothing about them were the same.
The arms and legs of countless individuals acted without awareness of one another, it seemed, until the bulk of the beast commanded obedience. As they contorted and writhed in agony, the popping of bones breaking over and over, the scraping of corpses' teeth across the unidentifiable, unyielding material of the dungeon floor. Screaming in agony. Buckling under the weight of each other, the bodies, the sentient graveyard moved ever closer toward Aoi – his silly fear of spiders both resolutely diminished and ferociously, tormentingly, emboldened.
"UME PLEASE HELP ME!" Tears fell as he shrieked, though his scream would be unheard regardless, it was swallowed by the orchestra of death that echoed in this lost chamber.
∗ ∗ ∗
Every ravenous maw closed shut.
Every unblinking stare fixated on Aoi..
The constellation of gazes, he noticed, weren't varied much in color, neither were each of their complexions. Their hair stark white, familiar–
NO
The feeding chamber bedazzled in bright cerulean as his aegis spell manifested highly efficient perfectly formed blue hexagons, replicating themselves; building a brick wall from the center out, in between the abomination and himself.
The creature was lit up, a menacing cold blue washed across the violation's skin. He could see it in its entirety.
The sight horrific before him, a very graphic warning.
The victims were chosen of various ages and sizes, adults and children, with no regard to gender it seemed, nor age. The curation of the 'mass grave made monster' looked to be from one People. All their hair glowing as if in blacklight, the white catching the cerulean hues of the spell, their skin blemishless but pallid, familiar and deceased.
They look like me
"Where is Ume…Ume?" He called again to no avail.
They look like me
"Something here, maybe it's.."
"HELLP ME"
No they just have white hair
"The lack of organic…"
No their skin, its its pale
"SAVE US"
"Growing material.."
They look like me when im sick
"THE CHILDREN"
"Suitable for the species…"
or is it the magic of the dunge–
"PLEASE KILL ME"
They look like me
"NO THEY DON'T AOI!" If he hadn't willed it himself he wouldn't have believed the voice came from his own mouth.
The room was still. The popping and snapping of breaking bones, the scraping and grinding of teeth ceased. The monster gazed at Aoi, taking him in, but the eyes themselves, they looked almost–
"Illyana my darling daughter, how are you?"
..wha
"And she was right there, you shoulda seen this one she was a looker–"
"Hey! Are you alive in there?" He was shaking, crying as he meagerly offered a hand to the creature, trying to find some response in any of these poor souls' eyes.
"Tiral Khalir, keeping my oath on my land you will find me.." The voice sang beautifully and hauntingly. Chills ran up his spine, the tears that had been streaming were now gushing.
Muttering to himself now, defeated. "..hey…hey are you, are you oka–are you in there?"
"Don't forget to scrub under your fingernails!" A harsh shrill admonishment stole the oxygen from the room.
Chaos.
"How long are you going to stay in bed– its my birthday – I like the smell of the sandstone after the rain." A torrent of voices.
"Mommy mommy I can count to ten"
"This land is my blood! Our blood, we will forever be free!"
"My son puts dirt from the village in his pocket whenever he travels,"
"The fig trees out back are growing beautifully"
"He thinks I don't know"
"Just like his father, he wants to keep everyone he's ever lost…"
Forty five or fifty individual bodies, people transmuted together to form a large uncannily arachnid beast. The transmutations essentially surgically connected and healed the seams over with vile magicks, welding each body together at their necks, or some their backs, or sides.
The hundreds of eyes, a terrifying swarm, began undulating with no end in sight. Searching.
A tiny hand reached out..
∗ ∗ ∗
A meadow gilded in the brightest golden wheat stalks swaying in a fresh breeze just before the sun began its descent. The beautiful, shining Elven children laughing and playing, sharing toys, dressed in magically crafted clothing, surely their own mothers' fabrications. He looked down to see he was draped in what should've been a sack with holes for arms; it probably would've been better designed and more practical.. He reeked of stale vomit and piss. He had soiled himself and the Good children knew it. Why weren't they looking at him, couldn't they see him? He reached out to call for them, just for someone to look into his eyes. Stretching his small dirtied arm forward–
Warmth bled through his neck and he was gone.
∗ ∗ ∗
"AHHHH!!" Aoi came into himself screaming, grabbing his throat.
He was being held by the abomination, one of its vile arms had grabbed him.
Paralyzed, another arm came reaching for him, he tried to fight it knowing what came next but he already felt the world leave him…
∗ ∗ ∗
He was falling. Dropped from the heavens themselves. Pressure contorting his flesh as he fell face first toward the sprawling lands below. A bird's eye view. She could make out rivers and lakes and thickets of forest. How high was he? How did he even get here? He was with his daughter. He was a mother. Juna's Mother. They had taken her.
"NOOOOOO JUNA! GIVE ME BACK MY BA–" the voice of the woman's body screamed from Ao–
The ground was hard on impact.
∗ ∗ ∗
"Juna! JUNA!" Aoi came into himself screaming and wailing.
"Juna! Where's.." He slowed.
"..my daughter..?"
He was shaking in horror as more hands were inches from his skin, from her skin, she was going to die, he was going to die.
Horrific screams flooded and echoed through the ossuary.
Another hand, rougher, grabbed hold of Aoi's throat…
∗ ∗ ∗
He was looking through a barrier into a sprawling wasteland, a–a prison actually, an open air prison– littered with people of all ages dressed in what looked to be sacks, dirtied with dried earth, despondent and weary, their skin the deep earthen hues of the desert beneath them.
Why are there children here? I was told..
They told us they were extremists, murderers…
A small girl ran toward the edge of her prison, toward me. Speaking in a language I couldn't understand, she was crying and hungry. She had written something on her arm. Barely legible, and poorly drawn, characters in a language I can't decipher but recognize.
"Wait! She —"
Her head was separated from her shoulders, his voice broke as he watched it fall to the dirt that was stolen from her, her last words will forever linger.
"Has a name."
One quick, warm, stroke through his collum saved his mind the agony of the irrefutable truth.
∗ ∗ ∗
"NO!! PLEASE NO!"
His own voice roared into the horrordor causing the periscopic glazed eyes to lock onto him.
Too human for him to make eye contact, a face was breathing on his own. The gruesome stench he was expecting wasn't. He stole a glance, and they were looking up and down at him, their eyes scanning him, sizing him up.
It opened its mouth to sharp canines, drooling. Starved.
It bit down on Aoi's cheek, hard.
∗ ∗ ∗
The violet and orange sky in plain view. The last remnants of the Sun. I was starving.
Peace and blessings of God be upon you!
I raced to the table;
Dates and water were inhaled faster than I ever had before. Roasted chickpea, purple with sumac. Cool grape leaves stuffed with rice and mint, a splash of lemon. A crisped bread, flattened, I dipped into a creamy golden lentil stew.
∗ ∗ ∗
Aoi's stomach bloated from the ghosts of a meal he never ate. Her hands, so kind against his damp skin.
∗ ∗ ∗
I am a mother, dressed in the desert, and emboldened by faith and clinging onto hope as I wash the beautiful clothing my mother made for my children.Tiny socks. Hand-knitted, my first pair I ever completed on my own since my mother departed. She was an incredible teacher. And I sing.
Sing all ye people Sing in indignation. Be with the citizens of Beyt Lahm.
Sing out for justice,
Freedom from oppression.
O come let's not ignore it,
O come let's not ignore it,
O come let's not ignore it –Tell the world.
The trampling of soldiers heavy in the surroundings, but lost to itself, lost to the song I sing.
O come all ye faithful. Those who care for justice, O look ye, o look ye at Bayt Lahm.
A great shadow descends upon my face as harsh voices and cries, loud bangs, softly fill the ritual of my daily life. And still I sing.
Come and behold it,
Under occupation.
O come let's not ignore it,
O come let's not ignore it,
A small girl, beautiful, looking just like me, green eyes, asmarani skin contoured glamorously by the earth that is mine, that is hers. Wearing the dress I made her. My daughter.
Juna and I sing:
O come let's not ignore it – Tell the world.
∗ ∗ ∗
I was screaming as masked figures in white cloaks all stood around me, and Aoi felt a fresh hand clenching his hair. They were holding her down with some kind of magic. Having conversations in a language she couldn't understand. They looked hungry through their masks.
She's looking at her naked body, tied up, as a masked man held a sickle—
Aoi was bitten, the monster grabbed hold and he felt the flames inside him withdrawing. The creature was—
I'm going to be ripped open!
"Ahhh!!!"
The pain, she opened her eyes to her husband holding her beautiful baby, an angel.
Bloody, Crying and kissing my baby.
"Ghaidaa".
∗ ∗ ∗