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+---- Thread: [P] our hour come round at last (/showthread.php?tid=5766)
our hour come round at last - Vercingtorix - 11-06-2020
The darkness drops again; but now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, and what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
This world is one of serene darkness.
I am nearly fooled into believing it is the end; that this is the after of all life had been, cool and noiseless, a comforting pressure all around me. I believe, when I regain consciousness, that death is not unkind—and my eternity could remain in this secluded alcove of time, in this comforting bed of forever. There are no thoughts here; no feelings. There is only darkness and pressure.
This epilogue cannot remain so quiet, so still, so comfortable.
There is always an undercurrent to life; the threads beneath the turbulent surface of what could have been and what should have been, versos what is. The things that were said or done or acted upon that prevented one result; or cemented another.
These threads are woven into lies and secrets, promises and happenstance. Sometimes, they are woven into fate. More often, the knots are somehow self-made—they are what occur when one lives too long in their own intentions and recognizes at the end, their suffering had been at the fault of their own hubris.
I realize this when I open my eyes.
Above me, sunlight pierces the surface of the sea. The light descends in a prism; refracted; glancing. I could still believe this was death if it were not for the way that the light moves, undulating with the movements of the water it pierces.
The silence is the water. My lungs are full of it. But there is no burning, no breathlessness; I inhale and feel the stretch of flesh over my ribs, the expansion of water pulled into my lungs, and somehow, somehow, it feels natural if not for the sharp stinging at my throat.
I am afraid.
It is a different kind of fear than I have ever felt before. It strikes me to the core. My mind is clouded with it; and might have remained that way, if not for the hunger that spears me next.
It is like a hunger I have known before.
It is as if it encompasses all of me, all of what I am, as if the “I” is separated into need.
I might have groaned—I don’t know. But when I shake my head in anguish, ripping open a line of scabs down my throat, the smell of my own blood in the water makes me salivate.
I might have screamed—I don’t know. But when my ears pop and I hear the ocean singing, it doesn’t seem to matter if I made a sound or not.
I do not know how much time passes before she returns to me. I rest, still, at the bottom of the sea where I first sunk; my wounds are nursed by the salt-sea and my turning. Yet, I am nothing but pain and hunger. I am not rational enough to understand this, however; what I understand is the hunger within me and the disjointed concept of what I have become.
When she descends from that prism of light, angelic with her grace and beauty, it is not to find me dead.
It is to find me ravenous. I am still and crouched; a coiling and uncoiling of powerful new muscles; of a hunger that she knows intimately. My eyes are closed. My death is a feigned (and this, later, I might laugh bitterly at—I, too, am surprised).
But for now I am not me. No. I am need, kept in a primordial, instinctual body. No. I am hunger, and angst, and the opening of an abyss.
When she is near enough for me to hear the way her body moves the water—a shushing, a shushing—my eyes reopen (pupils blown wide, irises vividly bright) and I lash out with teeth grown as wicked and sharp as a shark’s.
It is time for me to meet my maker.
I am nearly fooled into believing it is the end; that this is the after of all life had been, cool and noiseless, a comforting pressure all around me. I believe, when I regain consciousness, that death is not unkind—and my eternity could remain in this secluded alcove of time, in this comforting bed of forever. There are no thoughts here; no feelings. There is only darkness and pressure.
This epilogue cannot remain so quiet, so still, so comfortable.
There is always an undercurrent to life; the threads beneath the turbulent surface of what could have been and what should have been, versos what is. The things that were said or done or acted upon that prevented one result; or cemented another.
These threads are woven into lies and secrets, promises and happenstance. Sometimes, they are woven into fate. More often, the knots are somehow self-made—they are what occur when one lives too long in their own intentions and recognizes at the end, their suffering had been at the fault of their own hubris.
I realize this when I open my eyes.
Above me, sunlight pierces the surface of the sea. The light descends in a prism; refracted; glancing. I could still believe this was death if it were not for the way that the light moves, undulating with the movements of the water it pierces.
The silence is the water. My lungs are full of it. But there is no burning, no breathlessness; I inhale and feel the stretch of flesh over my ribs, the expansion of water pulled into my lungs, and somehow, somehow, it feels natural if not for the sharp stinging at my throat.
I am afraid.
It is a different kind of fear than I have ever felt before. It strikes me to the core. My mind is clouded with it; and might have remained that way, if not for the hunger that spears me next.
It is like a hunger I have known before.
It is as if it encompasses all of me, all of what I am, as if the “I” is separated into need.
I might have groaned—I don’t know. But when I shake my head in anguish, ripping open a line of scabs down my throat, the smell of my own blood in the water makes me salivate.
I might have screamed—I don’t know. But when my ears pop and I hear the ocean singing, it doesn’t seem to matter if I made a sound or not.
I do not know how much time passes before she returns to me. I rest, still, at the bottom of the sea where I first sunk; my wounds are nursed by the salt-sea and my turning. Yet, I am nothing but pain and hunger. I am not rational enough to understand this, however; what I understand is the hunger within me and the disjointed concept of what I have become.
When she descends from that prism of light, angelic with her grace and beauty, it is not to find me dead.
It is to find me ravenous. I am still and crouched; a coiling and uncoiling of powerful new muscles; of a hunger that she knows intimately. My eyes are closed. My death is a feigned (and this, later, I might laugh bitterly at—I, too, am surprised).
But for now I am not me. No. I am need, kept in a primordial, instinctual body. No. I am hunger, and angst, and the opening of an abyss.
When she is near enough for me to hear the way her body moves the water—a shushing, a shushing—my eyes reopen (pupils blown wide, irises vividly bright) and I lash out with teeth grown as wicked and sharp as a shark’s.
It is time for me to meet my maker.
RE: our hour come round at last - Sereia - 11-12-2020
The guilt is a sickening feeling. She does not swim far until its debilitating effects stop her. Sereia retches into the sea, convulsing in the water. She may be washed clean of blood this far down into the deep sea, but she is bloated on meat and blood. It tasted good. It tasted sweet and warm and divine. She retches again and sobs a strangled groan.
It is not just blood the sea has swept from her body, but tears from her cheeks too. It is only the dark of her eyes, the downward turn of her lips and the deep grief carved into her face that reveals how deeply she hurts.
Sereia follows the same pattern as she has a hundred times before. She pledges herself off meat, she cries wretched tears for her lack of self-control, she considers her own death in penitence for the lives she has taken.
Gods. The golden stranger.
She remembers how he hung in the water when she was done. He was so still, his blood was a thick cloud about him. The fish had fled, escaping before their own lives were taken. But the irony is this: Sereia cannot eat even fish, any life is valuable.
Valuable. Yet she left the golden stranger as though he were worth nothing at all. She needed to pay him the respect he deserved, not flee, addled by guilt and terrified of her own monstrous nature. The first part of changing who she is is facing up to what she has done. This is her cycle. Sereia always begins hoping that this time would be different. It is, on this occasion. It is the first time she has killed a friend, some one she knows.
Already she has turned. Already her guilt has her swimming back the way she came. Sereia returns to him, swimming out of the murky water and up towards his golden figure, framed by the sunlight reaching down through the water. The light dances across his skin. He is so terribly still. She cries more tears that are stolen away too soon. Only the wide curve of her eyes show how filled with grief and regret she is. Slowly, slowly she approaches him, all of her meek and soft and sad.
Sereia’s heart plunges like an anchor when her eyes fall upon his wounds that still bleed into the water. Should he not have stopped bleeding by now? Elegant, slow, the kelpie moves toward him, to touch his skin and remember how he once was warm and alive-
His eyes snap open.
Oh.
Oh!
Sereia knows those eyes, that gleam, that rabid hunger.
No.
No!
But yes.
Her creation lunges for his Maker. Sereia recoils from him, fast, instinctive. She may yearn to shed her kelpie nature, she may prefer to die than kill another soul. She may wish to weep and beg his forgiveness and chastise herself for her inability to fight her hunger. But despite all of that she is a kelpie. She moves like one, darting when he lunges for her. Slipping away from his frenzied hunger. Instead she lunges for him in turn, to grasp him about his throat, to press upon his jugular, to remind him that she is the dominant one here. She is his maker and master. Every lethal move that was put into hunting her prey only hours before gets spilled out and directed into this exchange. “No!” Her kelpie laughs at him, at her. “You are mine.”
Sereia forgets, forgets beneath the inescapable drive of instinct that she is supposed to be soft, that a kelpie is not what she wishes to be. She forgets as she exerts her authority over him, pushing him until he yields, seeking to hold him between tooth and jaw until he falls still, compliant, hers. Until he learns in his new being that he has a maker and it is she. She forgets - until she doesn’t, until suddenly she pulls herself from him and swims back, back.
Regret is bitter on her tongue. It is poison in her veins. She convulses beneath its terrible effects. “I am sorry,” Sereia croaks. “I am so sorry.”
@
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
~ Ariana
RE: our hour come round at last - Vercingtorix - 11-18-2020
what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
There are some things you cannot be sorry for.
In life, there are some things you must simply own. You must acknowledge the misdeed by looking it in the eye, by saying, yes, I did that, and I am not sorry.
This, this is a world I no longer understand. What had been conceivable to this point has suddenly been cast inward; what is right is wrong; what is wrong is right; my life, my very survival, is an insult to my morality.
(And who I am—the man named Vercingtorix, the man who has fought and bled for a hundred battles upon dozens of beaches, who has turned the salt-sea pink as roses with the blood of the dead—lies dormant beneath my faux death).
What remains—
What remains is unforgivable.
What remains watches, languid, from beneath the waves. This “survivor” stares at her approach with primordial hunger; and lunges only when she is near enough to touch. She is swifter, of course; and before the frenzy can continue her mouth is pressed firmly against my jugular, teeth against that thready, weak pulse. The pressure is a reminder of how close I was to non-existance; how close I was to not to rebirth, but to death. Those terrible new lips peel back from the shark-like teeth and I hiss into the water as she deftly, instinctively, flips me into a position of surrender.
No. You are mine.
Those teeth remained bared. Those eyes remain spiteful; full of pitted, treacherous loathing. Perhaps she is my Maker. But I will never be hers.
My blood ribbons out from my wounds; the flow is nearly delicate. I cannot help the way it reminds me of the old fable; we are bound, irrevocably, by red strings of fate. And mine drift into her too-bright eyes. I withdraw from her, back to the bottom, coiling and uncoiling. Everything I am is new. Everything I am is unfamiliar. But beneath that unfamiliarity, beneath the self-disgust, lays something more instinctive, more primitive. Perhaps it is hunger. I do not think so. I think it is even more intrinsic.
It is the transformation—on the most inherent level—from prey to predator. I have never felt like prey before; but in this instance, my lips stretched taunt and rippling over serrated fangs, I realize I have been prey my entire life.
And will never be again.
(This, in many ways, is the most tremendous loss I have ever suffered).
“No,” I breathe out; my voice is weak. It does not sound like mine, aside from the seething hatred behind it. “No. You don’t get to be sorry.”
There is blood in the water.
I know it is mine. But she is a fool for showing the weakness of her regret. It might as well be an arterial bleed. “You do not get to take away who I am and say sorry.”
I think, if not for the pit of hatred opening within my breast, I would have died. I think if I were not so spiteful a creature, the sea would have already swallowed me.
But my fate has never been to die easy.
“Maker.” Never has a word been twisted so reptilian, spoken so cruelly, a caustic blade.
But my eyes convey what I cannot physically. Oh, the thread between us is thin in all but disdain.
In life, there are some things you must simply own. You must acknowledge the misdeed by looking it in the eye, by saying, yes, I did that, and I am not sorry.
This, this is a world I no longer understand. What had been conceivable to this point has suddenly been cast inward; what is right is wrong; what is wrong is right; my life, my very survival, is an insult to my morality.
(And who I am—the man named Vercingtorix, the man who has fought and bled for a hundred battles upon dozens of beaches, who has turned the salt-sea pink as roses with the blood of the dead—lies dormant beneath my faux death).
What remains—
What remains is unforgivable.
What remains watches, languid, from beneath the waves. This “survivor” stares at her approach with primordial hunger; and lunges only when she is near enough to touch. She is swifter, of course; and before the frenzy can continue her mouth is pressed firmly against my jugular, teeth against that thready, weak pulse. The pressure is a reminder of how close I was to non-existance; how close I was to not to rebirth, but to death. Those terrible new lips peel back from the shark-like teeth and I hiss into the water as she deftly, instinctively, flips me into a position of surrender.
No. You are mine.
Those teeth remained bared. Those eyes remain spiteful; full of pitted, treacherous loathing. Perhaps she is my Maker. But I will never be hers.
My blood ribbons out from my wounds; the flow is nearly delicate. I cannot help the way it reminds me of the old fable; we are bound, irrevocably, by red strings of fate. And mine drift into her too-bright eyes. I withdraw from her, back to the bottom, coiling and uncoiling. Everything I am is new. Everything I am is unfamiliar. But beneath that unfamiliarity, beneath the self-disgust, lays something more instinctive, more primitive. Perhaps it is hunger. I do not think so. I think it is even more intrinsic.
It is the transformation—on the most inherent level—from prey to predator. I have never felt like prey before; but in this instance, my lips stretched taunt and rippling over serrated fangs, I realize I have been prey my entire life.
And will never be again.
(This, in many ways, is the most tremendous loss I have ever suffered).
“No,” I breathe out; my voice is weak. It does not sound like mine, aside from the seething hatred behind it. “No. You don’t get to be sorry.”
There is blood in the water.
I know it is mine. But she is a fool for showing the weakness of her regret. It might as well be an arterial bleed. “You do not get to take away who I am and say sorry.”
I think, if not for the pit of hatred opening within my breast, I would have died. I think if I were not so spiteful a creature, the sea would have already swallowed me.
But my fate has never been to die easy.
“Maker.” Never has a word been twisted so reptilian, spoken so cruelly, a caustic blade.
But my eyes convey what I cannot physically. Oh, the thread between us is thin in all but disdain.
RE: our hour come round at last - Sereia - 12-10-2020
Maker.
That is what her kelpie thought of herself as.
That is what he calls her.
But he could not have said anything more wounding.
Now she is of rational mind. The mind that knows eating meat is wrong, killing is wrong. Now she is of rational mind. The mind that knows the worst thing she could have done to someone is turn them into what she is.
He looks upon her with such loathing. With such exposed and bleeding resentment. Sereia feels it. It is as if his teeth are digging into her flesh. But they go deeper still, down into her heart and her soul. Her creation takes its maker apart, piece by miserable, wretched piece.
Sereia squirms beneath his gaze, less a lion than a worm. Her sorrow and regret makes her small and pitiful. She nods as he rejects her apology. She agrees and she says so to him, “I know -”. And she longs to apologise again. It is there, upon her lips, nearly out in the depths of the blue for him to hear with his new sea-deep hearing.
But she doesn’t say it. Instead she hangs in the water, as if by the noose of her own grief. And she watches him as he floats in the midst of ribbons and smudges of red. He is a broken body, but he is becoming. Sereia knows he will be ever more beautiful, ever more savage for it. And she hates herself.
“Why did you not run?” The question is desperate. It is confused as she watches him with wide eyes and a disbelief over all that has happened.
His blood is sweet, she can take it no more. Slowly she swims to him. “Come. You need to heal. I can help you. It is the least I can do.” Her lips are downturned, her lashes heavy over her weeping eyes.
“There is a cave nearby. Come.”
@
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
~ Ariana