The Dawn (Chapter Two)

Chapitre Deux: Les Yeux

To say that her strength was regained instantaneously would have been an understatement. A strong, herbal burn, echoes in languages and voices of unknown origin were like a prophet's touch. The words filled her as new blood, coagulating and gathering to form sinewy muscle. She flexed her lower extremities anew, riding the odd, ethereal high. Like a striking cobra she arose, violent, assured. Feet stretched across the cold floor which held her solidly now, and she strode with a born confidence about the room; in its emptiness she was a splash of ink thrown carelessly upon blank canvas: "Interpret me as you will! My meaning is not yours to define!"

Holding this swell of vigor and rage as a spear, she threw herself at the daunting emptiness of the far wall and began striking it, beating furiously with a spiritual brutality. Her piercing screams of desperation and angst punished her, as her words warped and twisted, throwing themselves back at her in a form all their own. As her torn knuckles cracked upon the wall, sending Rorschach splatters of crimson in all directions, the paint began to meld and shift, its structure taking on new life, pulled by some bizarre gravity. In her own blood she saw visions of a life she did not feel: she observed wars and struggles beginning and ending, herself an omnipresent pillar. Fires licked her skin, blades ripped and sliced her fragile frame to bloodied shreds, but she did not falter. She stood, a towering entity, with power and might, above all else. Her eyes widened, and she stumbled back, thrown once again by the weight of things which defied seeming reality.

Spectres in all hues and colours - the identifiable and otherwise - formed in the union of blood and plaster, shifting in and out of one another in a dance of the cosmos. One particularly humanoid spectre, with the head of an enormous raven and the feet of a fawn, drifted slowly toward her, cloaked head bowedin shadow, and shrieked in a thunderous voice which turned her stomach in knots: countless levels of sound, the masculine, the feminine, on all conceivable frequencies, pitches, and decibals entered her almost in utero; they flooded her as water, an aural river rose. Torrential, comforting. The chiseled figure of the spectre shimmered gloriously like diamonds - even the old wounds that riddled its toned body had a wonder all their own; the things it must have seen! She stood, stark naked and vulnerable, hypnotized by the flooding of her senses. She strembled, but she did not weep. The figure spoke: "Farsót ramaya entrités exys!"

Her mind slowly undulated and mingled with every syllable, slowly opening to their light, blooming as a majestic flower. Flowing robes of glittering energy stretched over her and hung in a wind that she did not feel. Pinwheels and ribbons of light cycled through her outstretched, broken fingers, and up to her eyes. The light did not part with her. It glowed as a piece of her essence, fueled from deep within. The glyphs in her palms caused her no pain, as they now held fast to...something. She observed through new eyes, beat with a new heart. Cyan vines illuminated beneath her skin and branded her painlessly. They now burned within her, and she within them. She stoked the flames gingerly, emblazening them, feeling their consumption. With these eyes she stared as the great arms of the spectre outstretched and gripped at the air with claws of shimmering quartz, sharp, jagged and wise; those hands had torn flesh from bone, touched coal to tongues. He lurched at her with a growl and sliced open her breast. She did not cry out in pain as she stroked the wounds tenderly. The being stamped its monumental hooves with punctuatory emphasis; bright sparks of amethyst erupted in a cloud of pungent black smoke.

In the silky, swirling wisps was the pain of thousands, crying through gnashed teeth for deliverance. She observed many twisted, agonized faces calling to her wordlessly as they came to form. She observed them, and she felt them. Her body quivered stigmatically as she reached out, hoping to quell both their pain, and the tremors of her soul. As the faces tumbled a vicious whirlwind around her, she was overcome. Her knees buckled, and as a criminal in the stocks, she surrendered to their assault. The drooping jowls of an elderly monk ran with tears of blood in his vehement outcry, "Hexys entrités lörnu póstè! Uté sanïtus!" As she felt herself welling up with sorrow, the vines within her turned to a sharp scarlet. The woman wept.

------------------------

The entry of the needle was the thing which almost always deterred him. It was too familiar, too close to so many sensitivities; the puncturing of the skin was eerily sensual to him, it made him implode. As he pulled and pushed on the plunger, he pushed aside his feelings. He did not want to feel. With the flood his world turned in directions conceivable and otherwise. Weight greeted him next, a welcome pair of comforting arms, the pull of which lulled him softly, but with intention. His head whirled toward an indescribable ecstacy and he gripped and clawed at all solidarity to avoid the seeming antigravity. The Hunter groped amidst the haze for the gold lighter sitting on a table of glass formed from the stump of a dead sycamore tree to his right. From his pocket, he drew a pack of Davidoff cigarettes, put one to his lips and ignited the flame.

With his heroin-clouded vision he watched the subtle dance of the fire, swaying slowly back an forth to an unheard baroque. Inhaling deeply, he surveyed the smoke unfurling and twisting in countless spirals. The Hunter stood and began pacing upon the wolfskin rug lain with care before his ornate fireplace. "Ah, Adrienne," he cooed, "this is the final hour; the cycles of this world are slowing. Your actions are gravity, orbits shift at your very will!" He stumbled slightly at the mouth of the wolfskin, and the old scars etched in his forearm burned with memory...

October 31st, 1870

An earthshattering snarl breaks the heavy, fog-hung silence in a way that gripped Adrienne in the depths of his mind. The distant snapping of twigs under heavy, beating paws muffled by soft beds of pine needles. Closer and closer it came, louder, louder. Animalistic panting and rumbling in syncopy with the steps filled the mystic woods as the Hunter's eyes adjusted to the deepening twilight.

"Damien!" the Hunter's voice cracked against the sky, "I hear you! And I smell you..." His eyes narrowed, piercing a distant grove of trees, he bared his teeth and released a cackle which would break the sturdiest of spirits. "Four centuries I have waited for you! Stop hiding in the shadows, dog, they can no longer save you. Those times have passed - this land belongs to me - I've paid for it in blood and the tears of thousands! Come for me, fils de pute!"

With the finality of these words, there was an outcry somewhere between a howl and a scream, and a lupine figure leapt from the haze seemingly propelled by naught but the force of its rage. Slack-jawed and brutal, he struck. Claws of ancient malice brought even one such as Adrienne, in all his foreboding glory, to his knees. He spat upon the pine and carelessly brushed the dirt from his front before springing full-force at the wolf; his arms wrapped around its charcoal scruff, searching for the connection of spine to skull.

Through its struggling breaths, the wolf spoke: "Adrienne...look how far you've fallen, brother...We are not so different, you and I. Deux fruits du même arbre..." His voice maintained a quasi-canine quality, but there were levels which spoke to the human parts in him.

"C'est faux! How dare you slander my good name by comparing me to your filth? Vermin!" He released the razor-sharp spindles of his fingers from the flesh-folds of his neck and kicked him hard in the ribs. With a yelp, Damien turned over and lunged straight for Adrienne's face.

--------------

In the heat of the fire, he stroked the gash down his cheekbone with a feeling of victory. He had overcome. None could bring him down from this height.

Outside the huge, arching windows of his abode, a solemn blackbird threw its prey, broken-spined and bleeding, upon the branches of the haunting sycamore tree which spanned almost the entire height of the castle spirals. The small, malnoursihed kitten seemed almost relieved when the beak of the blackbird pulled its skin back and began tearing at its stomach, showering the roots with its pain.

--------------

May 3rd, 2013
New Mizéria Prison for the Preternatural

"I write this a solitary man; the only voices I have heard for days have been those of the indefinite sludge dripping from the ceiling, and the despaired sobs and anguished screams of those beyond these four walls. Since the Guard took me, I have not eaten, I have not slept, I have only waited. The oddities which have run rampant through my life of late trouble me.

I am, of course, no stranger to oddity, but this is somehow different. I feel myself falling victim to emotion: fear is at my door, uncertainty is breaking it down. Six years in the Fool's service have weakened me, I fear. And now, He has taken from me the one thing I thought I had left: my freedom."

Sighing deeply, I set down pen and ink, squinting in the ebbing light of the lantern. I cautiously eyed the numerous tin trays in the corner of my cell, and their contents, rotting as my mind. Laced with EC-10, all of it--of this I was certain. My knees ached as I pulled myself grudgingly to my feet and rolled the stained parchment, slipping it beneath the lantern glass. I watched as the flames consumed it, condensing it to nothing, until fire and earth were one.

As I attempted to push myself up from the red velvet chair beneath me, all of my muscles contracted and locked, holding my weight to the seat and back. My neck snapped forward viciously and forced my face toward the far wall of my cell. "Fils d'une chienne! I spat, to no individual in particular. I knew the powers that held me now, I knew them well, and it would not do for me to curse names I quiver to speak. "Is there no hope for me at all, Mastère?" I shouted into the wind. At this I felt a slap across my face, cold, and tearing. I, groaning in agony, my back arched with electricity - striking out at the ends of my fingertips, rolling across the floor like a low fog - held my tongue. Never once did my eyes leave the Wall.

As the tremors slowed, and my body recuperated, acclimating to the lack of energy It had left me with, I saw His face form in the bricks before me. From beneath that face came two hands, reaching, stretching grasping at fires in the air. Stroking a single bit of space with a seemingly insignificant finger, He was one with the fire. In the other Hand, a single hand, He rolled many herbs into a sheet of thin paper, black as night. Into his mouth floated the herbs, and with the other hand He brought the Fire. When Fire and herb were one, He breathed deep, His beard quivering as He blew the smoke with emphasis. Pungent aromas: sage, opium, cannabis, brimstone itself burned before me and drifted with violent force to my senses. "Know this, Jineaux. You and I, we are not the same. Le blanc, et le blond, you might say. Do not think that you can overpower me." again the Fool held the paper to his lips and inhaled with a deep sigh. "If you think you are as I am, you are the Fool. Do not think me weak. From these hands, Mes propres mains, you were shaped. You were mud, before I made you to clay and turned you into what you have become." The Fool inhaled rapidly, holding up one finger. "Non, not what you have become. I would not take credit for that. What you have become, is insolent! Insubordinate! Comme l'enfant! Consider your surroundings, l'un nouveaux, you still have much to learn."

---------

Legs pounding the floor like pneumatic machinery until they ached, she stared down the stretching, winding hallway wide-eyed and more alone than she had ever felt. What is this world... she mused, and what am I to it? Her head whirled from an invigorating combination of surreal confusion and being pushed past the ultimate threshold of exhaustion. In the back of her mind, the last moments of the bizarre fairytale which was her life read like an archaic proverb:

When I finally came back to reality, crashing like a meteor striking earth, the raven-man was gone, as were the spectres which trailed him. My blood, sweat, and tears had dried from the walls and the floor, now only whiteness stood boldly to replace them. As I rose, the elegant robes which covered me unfurled like a magnificent waterfall, splashing out agains the rocks of my thin ankles. The sheer fabric was cut against the contours of my body like a glove, from the low-cut neck which treaded the line of indecency, to the broad, sloping curvation of my hips. My fingers pulled easily through my flowing, fiery locks which hung down nearly to my waist, and I felt the corners of my mouth pull up into a subtle smirk. So this is what beauty feels like... I thought.

My knees bent with ease as I knelt to pick up the vial and the Fool's letter from the middle of the room. These in hand, I began a slow, skipping trail around the perimeter, brushing my fingertips along the smooth, white walls. As I reached the far wall, my fingers found pause in a slight catch running up nearly the entirety; pulling my hand further, I felt two similar creases, each roughly three feet from the other. Doors? Placing my hands, palms to the wall, between the creases, I slowly increased the incline of my body, leaning my weight against it.

Almost to quickly for me to pinpoint, the glyphs in my palms began to warm and throb, holding me to the wall like an electric charge. In a panic, I ripped away, and my hands began to cool, the pounding of my nearly boiling blood slowing. My jaw dropped as I watched the smoking outline of the glyphs burn a bright blue where my hands had placed them. As the glowing deepened, a crack started to form in the center, the great doors sliding open into the wall without a sound.

She turned her head to glance behind, her hair cracking the air like a bullwhip, and she saw the magnificent doors coming to a creeping and silent close; where they met in the middle formed that familiar glyph: two triangles, one smaller, inside the greater of the two. Within the lesser of these, an image of the sun, rays outstretched like a mother's loving arms, at the very tip of which was a symbol; to her knowledge, these were no more than a random display of lines and shapes.

She ran, feeling almost weightless, blowing through the hallway like a vengeant wind. Seconds, minutes, hours, all manifestations of time and space melded together as one. As far as her vision permitted, to her left and right, each of them a bright snow white, seamless and nearly invisible against the vibrancy of the walls surrounding them, doors. None of these were as ornate as those which now lay far behind her; they paled in comparison to the towering intricacy of the double wooden doors - neither of them less than fifteen feet high, carved with the greatest care.

Her bare, small feet sent rapid pitter-pattering echoes up and down the passageway as door after door sped past her, quicker and quicker, blurring like muddy water. For what could have been days or weeks she ran like Sisyphus, pushing her infinite, inexplicable anguish before her, seeming to get no closer to exodus. Time and again her knees buckled, but she held strong. Her throat dry, her body drenched in sweat, she moved on, searching for the unknown, some sort of earth-shattering answer to set her mind at ease.

"Rousseau!" She cried, "Your niceties and riddles are lost on me! I am not a god - I cannot build mountains from nothing! Who do you take me for?"

In the distraction of her words, she nearly missed it: a blank wall coming up before her quickly - she had to take a step back to avoid colliding with it. She ran her hands along its smooth emptiness, hoping beyond all hope to find another hidden door; and find it she did: barely above her mid-shin, set deep into the wall. She dropped to her knees and set her hands against it, praying that whatever powers had fallen to her would return again; pressing with all of her might, she mouthed pleas to deities she invented on the spot. And then, like a dam burst, it happened. The floodwaters of recognition washed over her as her palms began to burn. When she could no longer handle the scorching, she relented, staring at the glowing glyphs. Inch by inch, the tiny door pushed back further into the wall - when she peaked her head in cautiously, she realized that it was opening to reveal a pit in the floor beneath it, overrun by spiderwebs and dust. When it was opened wide enough, she sat down on the floor and swung her legs over the side of the hole. She closed her radiant, almond-shaped eyes and took a reassuring breath before dropping into the dark.

------

January 19th, 1999

"What is emotion?"
"Emotion is weakness!"
"What is feeling?"
"Feeling is naiveté!"
"What is action?"
"Action is strength!"
"What is service?"
"Service is instinct!"
"And who do you serve?"
"His Holiness Cardinal Fouqué and the Divine Papacy of New Mizéria!"

At the monotonous drone of these final words, all of the young learners took their seats behind their small pine desks. With a tap on the wrist from their aged Professeur, walking from child to child, each hand turned over to receive a small red pill, shining reflectively like a beacon against the light of the candles hanging down from the ceiling: the first of three daily doses of EC-10 they were to take. As the ocean's waves crashing in time over weathered rocks, each young boy's hand came to his mouth and he swallowed the capsule forthwidth. I glanced to my left for but an instant, long enough to see the small, mousy boy sitting beside me flinch when his fingers brushed his lips. Professeur Moreau wasted no time at all before taking his crimson-gloved hand and striking the boy, open palm on the back of his neck, and prying his teeth apart. The child whined like a beaten pup and he pulled against the old man's grip. However, years in this place of power had made Moreau deceptive in his strength: he pulled harder, no sign of strain on his wrinkled face, and the boy closed his torn, white eyes, and relented. When he was finally satisfied that the pill was gone, Moreau moved on to me with a graceful sidestep. The very moment that instrument of death touched the surface of my desk, I snatched it up and put it to my mouth. My finely-tuned tongue cradled it like a ticking grenade, pushing it against the inner walls of my cheeks, searching for that familiar place.

Years before, what seemed like a lifetime to me then, I had cut a small pocket inside of my right cheek just for this purpose. Feeling it open and enclose around the pill, I felt nearly dizzy with memories of pain and struggle. . .

November 23rd, 1994

A turn of a hand, a turn of a card; all of these knew my fate. "The jester. . .in this quadrant . . .you are confronted by him. He is incessantly flippant in his twisting of your will." The old Seer's face, framed by graying dreadlocks and dimly lit by the shimmering light of two ebbing candles, contorted in thought, staring at the fool's jovial expression sitting before him. As he danced his cares away in silent stillness, he was speaking volumes to a part of the Seer which he had long sworn to keep to himself. His wise, enlightened eyes burned with intensity and he spoke again, "Jineaux, there are events on the horizon in your life which you must be prepared for; things for which I am afraid no man can."