The Song of Suffering I: The Puppet Master

[Thechosenone]

(So here's the first installment in a new series about my next crew. As always, my crews and narratives will have little in common with the Wyrd narrative. Its my own material. As always enjoy and please drop a comment)

“I’m awake.”

Formless thoughts stir in the dark.

“But I cannot feel?”

The thoughts seek with fingers that do not exist anymore.

“I cannot see!” Eyes that have long turned to ash probe the shadows for something, anything .

But the consciousness adjusts like sight acquainting itself to the night. It sees using eyes of aether. There are tall columns of alabaster crossed by ancient stress lines. The floor, once polished and slick is covered in weaves of dust and stray debris born from the vaulted ceilings high above. The windows, works of art in their own way are darkened by the rock and earth that press against their outer pane. It’s been long since any light has shined through their colored glass.

At the far rear of the chamber are wide steps that lead to the throne. His throne. Row upon row of ordered kneeling husks lay before it. Their clothes desiccated and bodies withered to bone and petrified meat. They are bent, crooked and forever forced into prostrations and poses of worship. The consciousness follows their gaze to the throne.

There he sits, body broken by the march of time. His spine has cracked and form slumped as if in some kind of uncomfortable and eternal slouching slumber. The thoughts, they rage with anger and with fear. The body belongs to the thoughts; he’s dead yet still he remains.

“How can this be?”

But slowly memory returns. One in particularly. He remembers noise. His existence was filled with beautiful welcomed noise unlike this baleful dread stillness. The noise was the throng of the crowds, the droning constant prayers to him, their living god.

His aether eyes scan the corpses to see their limbs bound, forced into eternal prayer. He can see the blade scars that raketheir eye sockets. Bound and blind. Other memories set fire to his thoughts. There was more than just the bellow of worship. There were screams. The songs sung by razors reading from notes of flesh.

But his new eyes lock with his old. Dust. All is Dust.

Though he hasn’t lips to smile anymore the emotion is still there. His corpse’s clothing has withstood the test of time. His vestments, still the deepest most perfect yellow. His mask, weathered, cracked and worn, is still the most perfect face. The face of a god. The crumbled flesh beneath was just the shell of an egg which he waited to hatch from. He ruled from that shell for years so long that even he lost count.

The consciousness stares deep into the mask upon his corpse. The many spidery cracks and fissures form a hypnotic pattern. All paths lead to those depthless hungry hollows in the eye sockets.

Slowly, painfully even, the mind pulls away from the chill gaze. He wonders for a moment if this was the pull that his followers felt when they looked upon his radiance.

"Is this what it is to stare upon the face of divinity?" It wonders. The dread and awe are intoxicating.

"How fortunate they were." The mind considers for a few brief moments the terrible punishment it was for them to have to live without him. That’s why he made sure they wouldn’t have to endure long in his absence.

Another memory unfolds slowly like the petals of a rose to meet the morning light. The sound of a city gagging. The echo of countless mouths gasping, the slap of innumerable hands clutching at their throats, the baritone choir of lungs hacking out air and blood. He poisoned the waters of his city just before morning, just before he ascended to his throne for the final time. He slipped into oblivion while listening to the lullaby of genocide play softer and softer singing him to sleep.

But then he awoke to the jarring sound silence. The reason he was pulled from the void is beyond him. Just a sudden surge of vitality that threw him from nothingness into horrid motion once again.

“All is ash now." The mind speaks; its voice an unheard pang that vibrates through the stillness as an aura of despair. As he knew it would be. He remembers living so long that even his immortality perished beneath the weight of aeons. But seeing it all in ruin, no matter how inevitable, still brings sorrow upon him.

Such rich history all gone now. So long did his city endure that its name was lost to the unyielding drumbeat of time. Other cities rose and fell till entropy left none but his city.

The Nameless City.

And so long did he rule as oracle, savior, master and hierophant that he lost his own name somewhere along the way. But it was never of much consequence to him. For he picked up new names.

He was Lord. He was Emperor. He was General. He was Prophet. As cities died and more flocked to his expanding fastness his names became longer. He was All-Father. He was the Chosen One. He was the Mouth of the City. He was the Enlightened. He was the Scourge of Souls. But these were names that compared his greatness to others. These names conveyed to other rulers what they should know of him. But when cities died and when no other walls were left to stand… when all outside of the city was a single note of dread silence played for all eternity he took on his favorite name. One that was simple; to the point. All was said without wasted words.

The King.

The King can feel time around him, cloying at his immaterial being, hungry to take him back into the darkness.

“I’m done with death for now.” The King shakes off the advance of decay. His thoughts swim toward his corpse and try to reenter those time shattered bones. But they repel him. They hold no succor for the wayward mind. He searches the room for something, anything at all, to inhabit but there is only death here.

Frustrated by the emptiness The King’s mind blossoms larger and spans through the remains of his court and kingdom. From above he sees what is left; nothing but a nation of sand and rock mostly buried beneath the earth. Only the tallest spires reach out like the fingertips of a drowning man grasping for solid ground. The Nameless City once spanned for miles uncountable, it turned all enemies aside and consumed all before it… and now it lay defeated by sand and concurred by scorpions.

But still his mind stretches. Further and further, pulling thinner and thinner. So much silence fills the desert that it reminds him of the awful quiet of death. Finally, spread out to nearly the point of dissolution, does the King find music and color. A burst of patterns and hues beneath him; a circus tent at the edge of the desert where congregations of camels and men gather. Travelers come and go. Songs are sung.

The King wondered if there were souls left outside his kingdom. Nations hidden by distance so great that even he could not know of them? How else could life still be here if he had not killed off the last of it with his toxic mercy?

His mind gathers together again and drifts through the canopy of the tent and among the many lurid faces all gathered for the garish entertainment. The acts played out before him are bawdy and exotic in some cases and in others they are gruesome and dramatic. The faces of these men and women, their angles and bones, they are foreign to him. Their manners and their speech are equally alien. But some things are spoken in a universal tongue. The beguiling eye of the circus performers urging the males on for private entertainment. The salacious hunger on the lips of men with hidden daggers marking those with fat purses.

“Nothing has changed. The hearts of men are still lost without a Sheppard. They cry out for a life of truth. They beg for a higher order. They are in need of a true path. You are not alone little souls. Your god has not forgotten you. I am here. I will peel away the layers of ignorance and show you once again the world as it truly is.” The King preaches to all in attendance. They cannot hear him but they can feel his words. They are an oppressive force, domineering and seeped in fear.

But still the King searches. There is life here and there are many suitable hosts he could take. Some dark skinned and alluring. Others filled with menace and some so innocent in form that they could be mistaken for angels. But none would last. They are all found wanting. Their bodies too fragile and their minds too weak.

The King’s will would shatter these forms.

And the pull of death beckons him again.

He fights off its urges a second time but as he does something demands his fullest attention. A small side show where many have gathered. A doll show. He watches these constructs, animated by wire and rods, dance and mime. He watches the puppet master direct his scandalous little show with curvaceous and tempting circus performers playfully fighting off the advances of stitched hands and wooden fingers. The men love the simple little show and the brief flash of skin.

But one in particular catches his eye. A doll the size of a man with four long spindly arms. Its body vibrates with bound magic. Enough that it acts as a simple set of intelligent hands to aid the puppet master in his shows. It controls most of the puppet movements with a flurry of whipping wires. This empty mind with wooden body stands as a welcoming bastion for the King. His mind pools into the doll.

As the show goes on, the doll stops for a brief moment. Its eyes flash with a saffron flicker that few notice and none dwell on.

*************************************************************************************

Noise returns the Nameless City. The sound of footsteps and the dragging of a heavy weight. Into the darkness of the throne room a form enters. Two eyes of yellow light survey the chamber. The King speaks with his new voice, terrible and welcoming like a poet executioner.

“My reign is renewed.” The Doll God speaks. He walks across the floor, nude and covered in days old blood. “I made them sing. These new men and women. I made them sing the songs of the old days. And I taught them proper prayers.” His wooden lips, stiff and solid, would pull into a smile if they could.

With him he drags a large wooden trunk that he lets fall beside the stairs to his throne. He walks, wooden feet clapping on the floor, toward one of the walls. There are shelves of withered old tomes and reliquaries containing treasures of a time from before even the King’s birth. He picks one particular book, his hand with dangling puppet strings, grips the cover. With another hand, this one ending in scissoring bladed self modifications, opens the cover.

“Your sleep has come to an end my flock. It’s time to rise! Time to help these new men walk the true path! Time to teach this world to sing again!” He finds the incantation he’s been searching for. The room quivers with each spoken word. Arcs of malignant light twist over the walls and floor. The assemblage of corpses flake to ash as they are struck.

But the King reaches out with his free hands toward the bursts of illumination. The puppet strings whip and coil like extensions of his own body. They dip into the light rapidly and pull forth embers of screaming energy, some with ghastly panicked shapes that appear all too human. Over and over he rips them forth and flings them into the trunk till finally the frenzied howls die and the darkness returns.

Then the trunk rumbles.

Its lid opens and his servants step forth. They examine their new bodies, cloth and stitch, button and stuffing. One cocks its head, confused. It tries to read the words scrawled on the side of the trunk but “Collodi’s Traveling Show” means nothing to him.

Dozens and dozens of wicked little dolls and perverse marionettes all fall to their knees in prayer as their King strides past.

He ignores them and their whisper/chant. Instead he looms over his former body. With scissor fingers he rips the mask from the skull and slides it over his smooth sanded face. His old bones scatter across the room as he dons his yellow robes.

The King, resplendent in his yellow decay and pallid mask, sits before his followers once again. “We must find a new city and new souls to make sing.”

His followers groan a hymn for him.

Song returns to the Nameless City one last time before its King and his people begin their exodus.

Edited January 31, 2012 by Thechosenone

[Balefirestorm]

Wow! Now I want to start playing Collodi as well. Well done