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With all of her pilgrimages, with all of her days of proper, ladylike piety, Llewelyn had assumed that she already knew all she needed to know about Veneror’s windswept reaches. Yet, as she climbed the snowy path, signature emerald cloak wrapped tight about herself, the maiden found that she had been sorely mistaken. Following the tug within her chest like some sort of pet strung along by a leash, the mare offered no resistance to the sensation, instead opting for a resigned curiosity about where the invisible pull would lead.
So up, up, up she climbed, watching the stars become closer with every step and the air grow thinner with every breath. I could reach up and pluck one from the heavens, She mused silently, gazing upward with no heed to where her hooves may lead her, having given herself up to the faultless direction of that incessant tugging long ago. Lashes dusted with frost, Llewelyn found that her eyelids felt heavy when she blinked; as a result, a small smile played along her lips as she wondered if the resulting heaviness would induce sleep.
Suddenly, the maiden’s view of the heavens is obstructed by a dark slab. Gasping, the mare lowered her gaze and found herself within a vast room of alabaster and towering pillars. Fires crackled in grates and shallow pits, hanging from braziers far above the femme’s head and filling the great chamber with warmth. In the heat, ivy and other crawling plants wrapped themselves about the bases of pillars and grew upward, Llewelyn’s line of sight ending as the great stone columns vanished into darkness.
She wished she could have stayed there, in that welcome warmth, and watched the sun rise from within the confines of something to majestic, but alas, the invisible leash was not done with her yet. Brow furrowing, Llewelyn huffed her dissent and followed along, hooves scuffing softly over the polished floors. Through a smaller doorway she was pulled, the coziness whipped away by a merciless and bone chilling breeze. With a gulp and a shiver, the fair youth picked her way forward through the dim passage, gilded eyes locked upon a basin glowing a sickly green.
As she approached, the mare found that the basin was smoothly wrought copper, cradling a flickering ball of flame that cast what could be called jade but.. wrong somehow. Tilting her head upon an elegant neck, the jewels that swung from twin horns tinkling, Llewelyn pursed her lips to blow out the eerie flame. Her satisfaction was stolen, however, by a rush of petrifyingly cold wind. Suddenly, she was plunged into frigid black, not even the light of the slowly breaking dawn permeating the otherworldly void.
Oh, how she did quake, then. How her very bones shook and trembled within her young skin, to bear witness to something not unlike the endlessness of the gods, but no more familiar to her than the outer reaches of the galaxy. A tiny, horrified sound escaped from the femme’s lips, fear loosening her self control and sending it skittering into long forgotten corners of her being. “Wh-“ The questions was bitten off into a shriek as that same wretched fire burst back into light, the tongues of arsenic green giving off a tepid, oily sensation that could not be excused as warmth.
At that same time, the jewels that hung so prettily from horns of alabaster began to whisper, all at once, their voices a hissing crescendo like a swarm of hungry flies. Wide eyed with panic, the maiden shook her head as if to dislodge the voices from the smattering of rubies. When that did not work, when the whispers became incessant, insistent, Llewelyn began to listen.
They told her secrets one after the other, secrets from past lives, secrets from present day, from years not yet come to pass. They were varied, each unique and personal as the day was long; a white lie here, a murder there... a plot, a betrayal, a prank, a rumor. Each of these were whispered to the girl in quick succession, sometimes layered one over the other, a chaos of information that Llewelyn had no idea what to do with. She could not hope to keep up, not with the rapid swarm that continued to build and build as the seconds passed.
At last, when she thought her skull would crack beneath the pressure and the pulse of subtleties revealed, they whispered a final secret to the youngling; their not-quite-voices hissing the words in a chilling unison saved for cultists and demons.
They told Llewelyn her own secrets; the ones that she had not yet discovered, the ones that she had already hidden away, the ones that would warp her sense of self and tarnish the reality that she had so desperately created to fit her idea of rightness.
And so she ran.
Oh my, took me only forever to responses. @‘Random Events’
