It was turning out to be Halei-Helai's third night without sleep. At least, she assumed it was her third night without sleep. In this land words such as "day" or "night" held no meaning. As far as she was concerned, she had not slept in an eternity.
Halei-Helai sat atop an ancient hunk of metal jutting from the ice below her feet. It was an eve of pitch black save for the flame in the center of her camp, though it was perhaps for the best. Halei-Helai's surroundings were a charnel hell, almost lightless even during the day. The living sun seemed too pure to touch this place; its light was anathema to this realm and the denizens here reveled instead in the dead sun that dominated the sky over this blighted landscape for almost the entire year. Light would only make its way here for no more than a week or so each year and only for mere minutes each day at the very longest.
Wind-blasted wastes of ice stretched for countless miles in seemingly every direction. A horrible gale seemed to blow at all times; each gust threatened to extinguish the only source of light and warmth in this horrific land at the center of the camp Halei-Helai nervously sheltered in. The terrain in this bleak and lifeless waste was littered with blasted pieces of metal in all shapes and sizes, each piece of which was wracked by the cruel decay of time and covered in rust and corrosion. The ancient dead too were sprawled out in this region, their number too great to count. Rigid limbs of blackened flesh jutted out from the ice in a permanent and agonized pose; lifeless faces of rot and ruin grinned eternally from rigor mortis as if mocking the living who might observe them. "We forsake life," they seemed to say, their lips never moving yet conveying horrible things without a single spoken word. Time had stolen the identities of the dead that lied here. Whoever and whatever they once were was now lost to the cruel mists of antiquity.
Halei-Helai was tired, so very tired. Even with the greatest determination she could muster in her exhausted state Halei-Helai found it almost impossible to keep her eyes open. Despite her utter tiredness Halei-Helai refused to succumb to sleep. The hellscape that surrounded Halei-Helai at this moment was merely unpleasant compared to the tortuous experience that would follow if cruel slumber stole her away from consciousness.
Halei-Helai's only company in this dreary place was a single man. He sat opposite of her on the other side of the fire pit; the fire was fueled not by wood, but instead the kindling of ancient, desiccated flesh and sorcery of the man's own weaving. The man had said that they could not be particular when it came to using fuel to sustain the fire; there was no wood to be found here. The flesh of the corpses that the man had scavenged sizzled in the flames as the ice within melted and bubbled to the surface. Bones cracked and popped from the heat, the noise almost inaudible over the constant howling wind that threatened to drive Halei-Helai mad. The one comfort that Halei-Helai drew from this current moment was that she was not sitting downwind of the campfire's smoke which carried the nauseating scent of burning carrion.
"It is fortunate that the bodies here rest, even if the Masked One does not permit the dead themselves to lie undisturbed," said the man sitting opposite her within the light of the fire at their camp. Halei-Helai couldn't summon the strength to lift her head to look at him when he spoke. The very mention of the "Masked One" almost made her scream and claw at her face from terror. He had said the phrase almost as if it was meaningless. The man clearly knew who the Masked One was but could he conceive the indescribably horrific nature of that thing? Halei-Helai could conceive of such and yearned for the time a mere four days ago where she was wonderfully ignorant of the abomination that laid claim to this place, the abomination that she had seen.
The man gazed at Halei-Helai from across the fire, his brow furrowed as he observed the lahaian in her drained state. "You must sleep sometime, Halei-Helai. If you are to collapse from exhaustion I would prefer that it occur while we are at rest instead of while we are making our way to our destination. Besides, you need to practice your 'art.'" The man paused and took a femur upon which a large chunk of frozen carrion clung and tossed it into the fire which was slowly dying from lack of fuel. "I am beginning to think that this place's worst quality is the fact that the only fuel available to burn is filled with ice," he continued, his task now complete. "It virtually saps the fire of all strength given how it melts and moistens what we sustain it with."
Halei-Helai then broke the silence that she had maintained for almost the entire day. "Have you seen him?" she asked softly. Her words, virtually a whisper, were almost inaudible over the howl of the wind.
The man looked up from the flames to glance at Halei-Helai. For the first time in the past few days that he was aware of her eyes finally made direct contact with his own. "Seen who?" he asked in reply as he broke eye contact and casually reached for the satchel that he had been carrying as they had been journeying through the desolate expanse that they found themselves in.
"Him." Halei-Helai shot back, now seemingly filled with a vigor that she lacked mere moments before. "Have you seen where the Masked One rests? Have you walked the spiritual sepulcher where his thralls roam the halls? Have you heard their agonized screams, their cries of torment? Have you heard their lamentation, a cacophony so terrible that deafness would seem to be the greatest blessing you could receive? I have seen them. I have seen them." Halei-Helai became more and more animated as she relayed that which now kept her from sleeping, and importantly, kept her from dreaming. "Their incorporeal forms are twisted beyond all recognition compared to whatever appearance they had before. They are grotesquely mutilated and deformed beyond all comprehension, yet the bodily anguish that they experienced before their passing in this frozen hell ages ago was a mere discomfort compared to the eternal suffering they are inflicted with now with no hope of release nor relief. They despise their master. They despise him. They are but slaves to their father-captor. The true horror lies below."
Trembling, Halei-Helai continued, "under miles of ice and stone in the cold and dark, I have seen him. He walks amongst his subjects as a spirit. He wears the facade of an angel and appears perversely holy despite his abominable origins and nature. Among the living dead in the halls of ice and dreams he seems pure, celestial, empyrean. His face, his mask, is as ivory, and he is clad in a raiment that is heavenly and beautiful to behold. It is all falsehood, a glittering facade upon a rotten frame. His pretensions of holiness, of cleanness, of purity is steeped in perversion. Is it a dream for him? Does his body rest in that bleeding stone sarcophagus while his mind wanders amongst his petitioners?"
Halei-Helai continued, speaking at times haltingly and at others hurriedly. Her body quivered as she related what she had seen as she slept during that night that felt so long ago yet was so fresh in her mind. "I saw where he sleeps. I have been in that hall, that deep place far below the earth where even the dead fear to tread. I have seen the lid of his sanguine stone tomb broken open as I so ignorantly stood above it. He reached out to me, and I beheld true horror as nobody I know of could ever imagine in their blessed innocence. His boneless limbs were not of flesh and blood, but instead formed from a mass of gangrenous worms! I was ensnared in his vile embrace and he pulled me to his writhing bosom. The worms gnawed at my flesh and burrowed to my bones, and I screamed. I screamed. I screamed not because it was a dream, but because I saw that which exists but should not!"
Halei-Helai abruptly stopped talking, but quivered and shook. Her hands trembled as she remembered the horror of that place, the place that was north of here, the place from where the despot who dreams lorded over his spiritual subjects. She shuddered, knowing that the dead that surrounded the man and herself were the Masked One's subjects, and even though their bodies were lifeless their spirits surely looked upon them now, looked upon her at this very moment.
The man, instead, was calm, almost disconnected from the one-sided conversation Halei-Helai was carrying on. Having retrieved his satchel, the man lifted it upon his lap and made ready to open it. Before raising his hand to undo the locking mechanism upon it, he asked Halei-Helai, "your dream, did it seem real?"
Halei-Helai trembled from head to toe, not from the cold, but from sheer terror. Her gift was her curse. Though what she had seen was in a nightmare, she knew in no uncertain terms that she had walked those halls, seen those horrors, and looked upon Death that Dreams himself. A single tear fell from her left eye and streamed down her face, slowly turning to frost as it rolled down her cheek. As she attempted to suppress the memory of what she had witnessed three nights ago, she stared intensely back at her companion and guide and said, "it was real."
It was all so horribly real, the way the dead screamed as they experienced untold nightmares of their own, the way that the Masked One's stone tomb bled like an open wound, and worst of all, the way that the worms stripped her flesh down to the bone without granting the mercy of waking her, or even without granting the sweet release of death. Her dreams, after all, were why she was with this man, a man who had promised that he could help her tap her potential, a man who had led her into this abysmal hell.
The man didn't respond right away. With his satchel unlocked he opened the lid and peered inside. He beheld the object within only for a brief moment. He reached in to grasp this thing, to feel it within his hand, and to draw comfort from touching it and from the fact that it was there. As he withdrew his hand from the satchel where his beloved possession was held, a single squirming worm fell from inside of his sleeve.
Looking back at Halei-Helai, who was still glaring at him and seemingly desperate for some validation that what she had seen was real, the man met her steely gaze. Only the faintest glimmer of a smile formed on his lips before he responded to her assertion with but one word.
"Good."Statistics: Posted by Halei-Helai — Mon Jun 02, 2014 8:23 pm
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