so soft and so tragic as a slaughterhouse ─
when it enters the room, its eyes are not drawn by the fine solterran filigree at the corners, or the beauty that enchants a casanova from the depth of the crowd, or the statues in the hall (some of which, eerily, follow you with their eyes), but by a painting that stands on the far wall. It looks to him, calls to him, to it, a cadence to the untapped leagues that wander the starlight in his veins, the black holes of his eyes, each lit by a crescent moon that hunts and hunts. An ocean to an ocean – they reach for one another, these horrors. His ambiance is cosmic, one that begs tentativeness when in the gravity of his presence; an eclipse in the eye of their sun. They mirror one another, it and the painting, even through the bodies that stand between them like hedges.
It is swathed in blues and golds and shining sandy tans, (and blots of indigo, violet, faint, forgotten needlepoints of white) a galaxy that repeats itself over and over through painstrokes that gleam in the light drawn through curtained windows. At their center is a deep dark, one that tunnels on, on, into unprecedented depths – but it knows where it reaches. It knows what waits. And oh, how the boy that was Erasmus would shudder, having learned. It is unlike the other paintings that deck the halls of the noble house – this one is enchantingly atmospheric, haunting terror, a gasping torrent of fear amid the pleasantudes of smirking portraits and aristocratic abstracts. It speaks to him, and he speaks to it.
The aether hums to another galaxy, a dreaming drumbeat pulse that resonates in his ears, his jaws, his veins. It is a song, a dirge unto the bleakness of the unknown which you dare not touch in your worst imaginings – and the beauty in it that waits beneath jaws of a bewildering, lachrymose beyond.
It is silent despite these wonderings between the folds of flesh and spirit – where the aether nestles like a pit of black vipers, as it does in the hollows of his flesh. The noise does not escape his throat, where it grows like an impending thunderhead, black and unfurling. It dreams of great stones rising from the bruising blues of the vortex's lining, of red sore suns bleeding light from its most desolate corners, of things that flutter, not unlike birds, not unlike fish, over the violet-eyed haze of drifting islands. The sands are acidic sheens of vapor rolling, devouring, choking, and the blackness which waits – well, we know it, do you?
He has closed his eyes then, but a servant arrives at his side and clears his throat. Glass rattles and the echo dies, and Erasmus, eyes still entangled with chaining voids, looks to him like shifting shadows at the end of a windowless hallway. The servant's breath catches in his throat, but he remembers - “Could I interest you in a drink, sir?” and though his words threaten to stumble over one another as he is nearly swept into a celestial chasm, one that bites and gnashes but promises things beyond dreams, he ushers the question like it is his last confident breath in a dying world. Erasmus looks to the drinks that gleam in the golden light, watching their contents swirl like glimmering cosmos. For a moment he lingers between sapphire and emerald, something picking at the back of his skull like a needle prodding for a memory, before he selects the oceanic brew.
The servant does not wait to move on. Before he does, something unconsciously slips into his eyes like a second pilot, and for a fleeting second it is discomfort, denial, and demure, then it is gone again.
When the servant's back is turned to Erasmus, the thing looks back to the painting and drinks deep of the tincture.
here comes the moon again ─
@Aghavni ; @
