At first, it was too much. Too much pain. Too much thought. Too much physicality. Too much noise. It had been the pounding of a heart and the guzzling of a throat and the mind-numbing buzzing of all else that couldn't be bothered to stop. And at once it was full with a craving for silence and sustenance and sense that mania had yet to even define the manner of depravity that befalls a newborn – to be given unto this world, your skin too tight and your throat too dry, lungs aching for stardust, stomach pitted with loathing. It was too much to feel nothing and then all at once, each thing collapsing into another menace with shallow breaths grasping at each hollowed nightmare that glares greedily; such was the founding of mortal flesh and the grief of its' weight. Atlas bears it with beauty.
Erasmus, (or what now is) only now learned that beauty of labor, with each ticking breath of time.
It clambers now to recall what was, and struggles over comets and rifts and mirror sands with jagged rocks that sing to long charted heavens left empty; it confuses them with crows and dragons, oceans, diamonds, and the bell chime from a burning tower. The great crater that was once The Wilds, as so dull named (it thought), did not sing to the blue skies or even share their image in the rolling red sands scarred with meteorite chips and discarded bones. But at least, at least, it made more sense than this world. It was unchallenged, fixed, deadened and bare but beautiful in its own desolate manner. Yet this place hummed with life, with underground veins full of potency and muffled hymns; the trees were not shards of iridescent glass gleaming with looking glass eyes at the nether reaches of their universe. The stones did not rise with the first sun nor buckle at a third, neither had there been gaseous lakes of indiscernible whirring or the flutter of scaled things that leapt to die to soon. This and more, more or less – this world was too much of its own not to be hostile to a thing such as it, as he, so it constantly reminded itself.
His mind sat unpacked like a cracked open chest of forgotten treasures, and it pried through every gem. Every name, every face, every item, every landmark was eventually suited in its own place, though their own contexts were lost in translation. Even a step, at one point, had been difficult enough. But here he was now, quite the unraveled likeness of an Erasmus if he could say so himself, a wolfish boy, a selfish thing, a hungry thing, somewhere beneath the dust. He was unaware of how certain movements were too fast, and others too slow, and every gesture in between had now-and-then twitched with an uncertainty that came with a learning curve. Little did the know how unnerving those minute details were – the way his lips stretched a little too broadly at times in a smile, or the too rhythmic beats of his hooves against the wet pavement that hitched, but for a second, before alternating their tide, as if they could not synchronize their proper gait.
Perhaps that was why he found himself here.
Perhaps it was the need for something familiar while the world around him burned like a whirling vortex – perhaps it was the way the tree sparkled in the distance, the midday light swelling its boughs with prisms of kaleidoscope hues. The way it resembled, in that distance, those hallowed titans of phosphorous glass and quartz shards. The way the insects tested its constellation leaves like fluttering scaled cells, or the ebb and flow of golden grasses that reminded him of swirling gaseous oceans.
Indeed, this is why he stood at the base of the crystalline giant, catching the shattered colors of the sunset that revealed itself at once in waves of brilliance – like diamonds, he mused, or like the spark rushed from the bowels of a furied star. He pondered its celestial leaflets that dripped with glistening moonlight, and the way cardinal buds danced at its base, foreign and gleeful. And in the dune-grass he swayed solemnly with the breeze that hummed, and closed his eyes.
He dreamed of spiraling black night as far as the eye can see, speckled in each year by a burning, snarling red star. Dreams that sang with towers of graphite casting shadows from one end to another, of mercurial stretches of clouding vapors whose hunger far underestimated its depth. But when he opened his eyes, there was only the tree and its leaves and its flowers and its tall, gold grasses that had begun to turn shades of purple and pink as the horizon devoured the sun.
And he understood none of it.
Erasmus, (or what now is) only now learned that beauty of labor, with each ticking breath of time.
It clambers now to recall what was, and struggles over comets and rifts and mirror sands with jagged rocks that sing to long charted heavens left empty; it confuses them with crows and dragons, oceans, diamonds, and the bell chime from a burning tower. The great crater that was once The Wilds, as so dull named (it thought), did not sing to the blue skies or even share their image in the rolling red sands scarred with meteorite chips and discarded bones. But at least, at least, it made more sense than this world. It was unchallenged, fixed, deadened and bare but beautiful in its own desolate manner. Yet this place hummed with life, with underground veins full of potency and muffled hymns; the trees were not shards of iridescent glass gleaming with looking glass eyes at the nether reaches of their universe. The stones did not rise with the first sun nor buckle at a third, neither had there been gaseous lakes of indiscernible whirring or the flutter of scaled things that leapt to die to soon. This and more, more or less – this world was too much of its own not to be hostile to a thing such as it, as he, so it constantly reminded itself.
His mind sat unpacked like a cracked open chest of forgotten treasures, and it pried through every gem. Every name, every face, every item, every landmark was eventually suited in its own place, though their own contexts were lost in translation. Even a step, at one point, had been difficult enough. But here he was now, quite the unraveled likeness of an Erasmus if he could say so himself, a wolfish boy, a selfish thing, a hungry thing, somewhere beneath the dust. He was unaware of how certain movements were too fast, and others too slow, and every gesture in between had now-and-then twitched with an uncertainty that came with a learning curve. Little did the know how unnerving those minute details were – the way his lips stretched a little too broadly at times in a smile, or the too rhythmic beats of his hooves against the wet pavement that hitched, but for a second, before alternating their tide, as if they could not synchronize their proper gait.
Perhaps that was why he found himself here.
Perhaps it was the need for something familiar while the world around him burned like a whirling vortex – perhaps it was the way the tree sparkled in the distance, the midday light swelling its boughs with prisms of kaleidoscope hues. The way it resembled, in that distance, those hallowed titans of phosphorous glass and quartz shards. The way the insects tested its constellation leaves like fluttering scaled cells, or the ebb and flow of golden grasses that reminded him of swirling gaseous oceans.
Indeed, this is why he stood at the base of the crystalline giant, catching the shattered colors of the sunset that revealed itself at once in waves of brilliance – like diamonds, he mused, or like the spark rushed from the bowels of a furied star. He pondered its celestial leaflets that dripped with glistening moonlight, and the way cardinal buds danced at its base, foreign and gleeful. And in the dune-grass he swayed solemnly with the breeze that hummed, and closed his eyes.
He dreamed of spiraling black night as far as the eye can see, speckled in each year by a burning, snarling red star. Dreams that sang with towers of graphite casting shadows from one end to another, of mercurial stretches of clouding vapors whose hunger far underestimated its depth. But when he opened his eyes, there was only the tree and its leaves and its flowers and its tall, gold grasses that had begun to turn shades of purple and pink as the horizon devoured the sun.
And he understood none of it.
@Random Events
***STAFF EDIT
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@erasmus has been awarded +1EXP!
