I am the song that my enemy sings...
Jan. 27th, 2009 03:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonContinued from Eye spy with my little "I"
Five representatives of the recently united magickal cartels have gathered tonight in the heart of the historic Gallows Town district. Deep within the basement of the abandoned Brush Factory on Abigail Cain Road, under the wax yellow light of a lone flickering bulb, the Five wait for the arrival of the other delegates. These being the envoys of murderous and clandestine principalities, whose rule of 'the law is a free-for-all' has long enslaved the shadow markets of forbidden fruits to their will. From the ranks of the machiavellian crime dynasties to the inner city wolf tribes, a stoic platoon of diplomats have been dispatched to meet with the Five. When the last of these emmisaries arrive, the Five will collectively deliver their message to those gathered: No longer will the magickal community barter their gifts out to the criminal underworld for piecemeal rewards. No longer will they serve in silence from the sidelines. No longer will they stand back and watch the lifeblood of the cities night needlessly drained away in hollow sacrifice to the vampire tyrants. No. What they will do instead is stand as One under the aegis of a new order and as such will accept only complete obedience from their former masters.
Resistance, subterfuge, betrayl of the truce they heralded this meeting with, is of course, well expected... but that is why the Five chose this meeting to occur here in Hoodsville, the heart of the City's Dreaming. The former mill town remains the oldest part of this city to go unscathed by the forces of urban development, as such allowing her weathered shotgun homes and empty buildings to become saturated with the ghost-currents generated by the local history. These ghost-currents course out of Hoodsville to run directly through the old brick factory before spilling out into the neighboring streets with diluted visions of disembodied memories. Time is indeed the fire in which we all burn. Its heat not only scorches shadows of the past into the landscape... but also acts as a reservoir of vast power for those who know how to delve into their mysteries. Each of the Five have drawn a series of binding circles concentrically around the building they have gather in. Five circles drawn. One by foot dragged in dirt, one by chalk scraped against concrete, one poured with warm blood, one sprinkled with fresh grave soil and one bought forth with nothing but a thought. Each layer of the circles serves to sift through the passing currents, allowing each band to to charge their intention into a protective field around them. This field allows entrance only to those invited and grants power over them once insde. This is of course nothing more than a ritual of precaution drawn strictly from habit, for there is no one left within the magickal communities of Terminus to oppose the Five or the one they serve... the Hearts Beautiful Lie. The Five know that if any of these delegates should be proud enough to raise a hand against them, they will be stricken down before they can fire the first shot.
Eventually those smart enough to surrender or tenacious enough to survive will then come before them, as one, on bended knee all, each eager to serve their betters.
There was only one nagging little detail that stood in the way of their inevitable dominion: No one else had bothered to show up to receive the news.
The meeting was scheduled to occur well over an hour ago and so far not one of the delegates had arrived. Nor have the Five received word from any of the expected parties, their own contacts or, most importantly, the Hearts Beautiful Lie.
It has become painfully obvious that something terribly wrong is occuring outside their individual circles of protection.
Dent, representing the 13th Street Disciples, cycles through every number in his cell-phone trying to reach someone, anyone, to come up with an explanation. So far each number offers only an endless ring.
"I'm tellin' y'all someones fuckin' wid us. Every number I dial jus' keep ringin'. Now, my boys are expectin' a call from me. They know better than to not pick up and shit. What d'I get instead? No answer, no voice box, no disconnect, no nothing!" he huffs petulantly snapping his cell shut and shrugging at the others, "So I don't know what y'all wanna do about that, but I say..."
"We wait", Frater Da'ath - Perfected Knight of the Illuminated Dusk - cuts Dent off with an air of distracted authority. He stands at the other end of the basement with his back to Dent, not lifting his gaze from the weaves of graffiti tags sprayed along the cellars walls.
"'Wait'?", Dent snorts at the gray haired man querulously, "Naw man, fuck 'wait'! This shit's a trap..."
"Of course it's a trap, Dent" Frater Da'ath chuckles lightly, idlely tracing the weaves and curves of the tag with the tip of his forefinger in an attempt to decipher the word (words?) scrawled before him, "Which means someone want us to split up. That's why we'll let them come to us. Here where we stand at our strongest..."
"Don't worry, little boy" Mistress Drown purrs in Dent's ear - appearing suddenly behind his shoulder where no one stood less than a moment ago, "I'll protect you"
Dent spins and cranes his vision up the length of the towering Alchematrix - a sheen of red flames replacing his eyes with a blink, "Y'wanna think twice on who you go callin' 'boy',..."
"Oh, you know you love it", the Mistress blows Dent a kiss followed with a slither of a lick across the bottom of her lip.
"Isn't he a little young for you, Drown?", Annie Kreist, combat-champion of the Terminus Riot Covens, sneers with dry humor.
"Why, Annie..." Drown giggles playfully over her shoulder, "... don't tell me you're jealous".
Annie shrugs with indifference at the remark and stares back up at the ceiling, "You guys know we're being watched, right?"
"Probably just our elusive fifth Beatle..." Drown gestures a sweeping hand to the empty space before her,"... whassisname... the Murder Magickian from the Zero Temple? I can see him sulking around from the corner of my eye in fact..."
"Nahhh, Setheus has a unique signature, a..." Annie pauses for a moment searching for a word that will translate, "... certain vibration to him. This is something else completely".
"Another Player?" Dent doesn't so much guess as give voice to what they are all thinking, "How? I thought everybody in the Game was onboard with the big plan... everybody still livin' that is".
"Maybe not" Annie ponders still staring up at the ceiling - for a moment she thought she saw it, a rough painted eyeball peering back down at them only to have it vanish in the time it took the mind to register its presence, "There's still the Circle".
"The Circle's shattered, honey..." Drown lights up a cigarette and blows a puff of smoke through the still air, "... or damn near enough to be considered as such. Even if they weren't though, it wouldn't matter... we have the building protected, remember? No one gets in here without our say-so."
"Pfft", Annie breaks away from her ceiling vigil to meet Drown eye to eye, "Or so you hope..."
"See, that's your problem right there...", Drown flashes a curt-cute smile from ample cheeks at her fellow Fiver, "...you need to have confidence in your work for it to actually work. Otherwise it's all just bullshit and bluff dressed up as ritual".
"Well maybe when this is over I'll give you a lesson in what real confidence is, Drown..." Annie smiles with facetious diplomacy.
Drown counters, parrys and strikes with one word: "Promise?"
"You two done playin' top-dyke?" Dent interrupts the exchange with soured impatience. The two women turn as one to the diminutive mage both contemplating excruciating responses to his impertinence.
"Because if you are, we got other shit goin' on right now that be needin' our immediate attention", Dent plows through the cold stares drilling into him with an oblivious charm, "So, what's the plan? I mean we wait for now, okay... but then what?"
After a long moment where no answer presents itself to any of them - Dent, Annie and Drown all turn towards Frater Da'ath, who eventually draws in their attention by the sheer weight of his unwavering silence. In fact the Perfected Knight of the Illuminated Dusk hasn't heard a word his companions have been saying. Instead his attention remains absorbed on the graffiti scrawl before him. At first it caught nothing more than a passing interest, but then, the longer he stared at it the more the arrangements and patterns took root in his curiosity. There was something both familiar and alien that nagged at his consciousness demanding an immediate translation. It has taken some considerable effort on his part to decipher the words, but he is close, very close actually.
"...hey, you alright?" Dent's question barely registers across Da'ath who responds without looking.
"Don't you see it?" the Knight asks the others even as his mind finds another word weaved into the puzzle-sentence.
"What?" Drown asks, the dread knotting up in her guts as a realization begins to dawn much too slow upon her.
"This!" Da'ath taps the dotted "i" drawn in a fat bubble on the wall with frantic insistence - a light of recognition burning behind widened eyes, "The Pattern! I think I finally deciphered it..."
It all goes down at once:
Dent gives a bewildered laugh to his graying colleague, "You're trippin', man. There ain't nothin' there but a buncha bricks...".
Mistress Drown reaches a conclusion that comes too late to launch the shouts of warning building inside her.
Annie catches a whiff of instinct and slides forward ready to strike at whatever happens next.
The mysterious Donovan Sethius, in turn, laughs with a voice that cannot be heard by ear alone.
Frater Da'ath speaks the words outloud without his usual inflection, helplessly aware now at the curious fact that he actually didn't intend to say anything at all really...
... "I am the song that my enemy sings"
The words, though muttered more than spoken, send the earth beneath the Five to rumble and the walls around them to tremble in the wake of their utterance. The sentence before Da'ath glows with the inate light of luminescent fish swimming under iced water. The letters of which begin to melt, flow, curl, bend and meld into a restless symbol constantly rearranging itself from one form to the next. From deep within its fluctuating curves - the sleeper within stirs and awakens out of the folds of non-existence he has buried himself in. A single seed of awareness sprouts open up from the symbols heart. An equation of seemingly endless reductions finally end against the sum of his being. He hears the words spoken across the void, the words he wrote with subliminal graffiti across the street hours before.
It was the plan all along. He knew if he left the words out there in the open long enough, one of the Five would 'see' it on their way to the meeting without actually seeing anything at all. Once read the subliminal graffiti took root in the consciousness of the reader, slowly its tendrils burrowed deeper into the thoughts, strangling all resolve with obsession as it coiled tighter around the will of its host. In enough time, not too soon to give itself away, the message would embed itself into the occipital lobe of the brain to appear before the viewer: "I am the song that my enemy sings".
The words itch with a fever. A thousand tiny legs run across the brain. All effort at ignoring the message consumes the attention that much more with its presence. There's only way to scratch at it. You have to say it outloud, you have to give it expression before the scream you hold back burns a hole through the throat.
"I am the song that my enemy sings"
It is too late now. Caught in the grip of a complex possession sigil, one created to act as an emergency psychic ripcord for its designer. Once pulled it yanks their consciousness across the void and allows them to reboot himself into the body of whoever activated the sigil by speaking it outloud.
Frater Da'ath screams with naked agony. He drops to his knees tearing both vest and shirt from his body, exposing the pale tattoo of a magickal seal inked across the heart under the gray mane of his chest. The seal begins to emit a blue smoke that wafts with the stink of burnt bacon. The green-blue ink of the circle binding the seal begins to revolve, an ouroboros trying to cough out its own tail. Frater Da'ath doubles over and clutches his face with the palms of his hands.
"What's going on?" Dent asks Drown, seeing the mute recognition wash over her face.
"He's here" she mutters, uncoiling the whip she wears on the side of her hip.
"Who?" Annie asks scanning around the room for any sign of a breach of the five circles.
Frater Da'ath looks back up at them. His eyes now puddles of shadows in which raw white stars float glistening with a faint celestial light.
"Me!" Da'ath snarls with a strangers voice coming from too far deep within him to be his own.
"Adam!" Drown gasps before catching herself...
A cold smile foreign to the face that wears it, lifting himself back off the ground the Knight winks at the Alchematrix, "Who else?"
*****
Five representatives of the recently united magickal cartels have gathered tonight in the heart of the historic Gallows Town district. Deep within the basement of the abandoned Brush Factory on Abigail Cain Road, under the wax yellow light of a lone flickering bulb, the Five wait for the arrival of the other delegates. These being the envoys of murderous and clandestine principalities, whose rule of 'the law is a free-for-all' has long enslaved the shadow markets of forbidden fruits to their will. From the ranks of the machiavellian crime dynasties to the inner city wolf tribes, a stoic platoon of diplomats have been dispatched to meet with the Five. When the last of these emmisaries arrive, the Five will collectively deliver their message to those gathered: No longer will the magickal community barter their gifts out to the criminal underworld for piecemeal rewards. No longer will they serve in silence from the sidelines. No longer will they stand back and watch the lifeblood of the cities night needlessly drained away in hollow sacrifice to the vampire tyrants. No. What they will do instead is stand as One under the aegis of a new order and as such will accept only complete obedience from their former masters.
Resistance, subterfuge, betrayl of the truce they heralded this meeting with, is of course, well expected... but that is why the Five chose this meeting to occur here in Hoodsville, the heart of the City's Dreaming. The former mill town remains the oldest part of this city to go unscathed by the forces of urban development, as such allowing her weathered shotgun homes and empty buildings to become saturated with the ghost-currents generated by the local history. These ghost-currents course out of Hoodsville to run directly through the old brick factory before spilling out into the neighboring streets with diluted visions of disembodied memories. Time is indeed the fire in which we all burn. Its heat not only scorches shadows of the past into the landscape... but also acts as a reservoir of vast power for those who know how to delve into their mysteries. Each of the Five have drawn a series of binding circles concentrically around the building they have gather in. Five circles drawn. One by foot dragged in dirt, one by chalk scraped against concrete, one poured with warm blood, one sprinkled with fresh grave soil and one bought forth with nothing but a thought. Each layer of the circles serves to sift through the passing currents, allowing each band to to charge their intention into a protective field around them. This field allows entrance only to those invited and grants power over them once insde. This is of course nothing more than a ritual of precaution drawn strictly from habit, for there is no one left within the magickal communities of Terminus to oppose the Five or the one they serve... the Hearts Beautiful Lie. The Five know that if any of these delegates should be proud enough to raise a hand against them, they will be stricken down before they can fire the first shot.
Eventually those smart enough to surrender or tenacious enough to survive will then come before them, as one, on bended knee all, each eager to serve their betters.
There was only one nagging little detail that stood in the way of their inevitable dominion: No one else had bothered to show up to receive the news.
The meeting was scheduled to occur well over an hour ago and so far not one of the delegates had arrived. Nor have the Five received word from any of the expected parties, their own contacts or, most importantly, the Hearts Beautiful Lie.
It has become painfully obvious that something terribly wrong is occuring outside their individual circles of protection.
Dent, representing the 13th Street Disciples, cycles through every number in his cell-phone trying to reach someone, anyone, to come up with an explanation. So far each number offers only an endless ring.
"I'm tellin' y'all someones fuckin' wid us. Every number I dial jus' keep ringin'. Now, my boys are expectin' a call from me. They know better than to not pick up and shit. What d'I get instead? No answer, no voice box, no disconnect, no nothing!" he huffs petulantly snapping his cell shut and shrugging at the others, "So I don't know what y'all wanna do about that, but I say..."
"We wait", Frater Da'ath - Perfected Knight of the Illuminated Dusk - cuts Dent off with an air of distracted authority. He stands at the other end of the basement with his back to Dent, not lifting his gaze from the weaves of graffiti tags sprayed along the cellars walls.
"'Wait'?", Dent snorts at the gray haired man querulously, "Naw man, fuck 'wait'! This shit's a trap..."
"Of course it's a trap, Dent" Frater Da'ath chuckles lightly, idlely tracing the weaves and curves of the tag with the tip of his forefinger in an attempt to decipher the word (words?) scrawled before him, "Which means someone want us to split up. That's why we'll let them come to us. Here where we stand at our strongest..."
"Don't worry, little boy" Mistress Drown purrs in Dent's ear - appearing suddenly behind his shoulder where no one stood less than a moment ago, "I'll protect you"
Dent spins and cranes his vision up the length of the towering Alchematrix - a sheen of red flames replacing his eyes with a blink, "Y'wanna think twice on who you go callin' 'boy',..."
"Oh, you know you love it", the Mistress blows Dent a kiss followed with a slither of a lick across the bottom of her lip.
"Isn't he a little young for you, Drown?", Annie Kreist, combat-champion of the Terminus Riot Covens, sneers with dry humor.
"Why, Annie..." Drown giggles playfully over her shoulder, "... don't tell me you're jealous".
Annie shrugs with indifference at the remark and stares back up at the ceiling, "You guys know we're being watched, right?"
"Probably just our elusive fifth Beatle..." Drown gestures a sweeping hand to the empty space before her,"... whassisname... the Murder Magickian from the Zero Temple? I can see him sulking around from the corner of my eye in fact..."
"Nahhh, Setheus has a unique signature, a..." Annie pauses for a moment searching for a word that will translate, "... certain vibration to him. This is something else completely".
"Another Player?" Dent doesn't so much guess as give voice to what they are all thinking, "How? I thought everybody in the Game was onboard with the big plan... everybody still livin' that is".
"Maybe not" Annie ponders still staring up at the ceiling - for a moment she thought she saw it, a rough painted eyeball peering back down at them only to have it vanish in the time it took the mind to register its presence, "There's still the Circle".
"The Circle's shattered, honey..." Drown lights up a cigarette and blows a puff of smoke through the still air, "... or damn near enough to be considered as such. Even if they weren't though, it wouldn't matter... we have the building protected, remember? No one gets in here without our say-so."
"Pfft", Annie breaks away from her ceiling vigil to meet Drown eye to eye, "Or so you hope..."
"See, that's your problem right there...", Drown flashes a curt-cute smile from ample cheeks at her fellow Fiver, "...you need to have confidence in your work for it to actually work. Otherwise it's all just bullshit and bluff dressed up as ritual".
"Well maybe when this is over I'll give you a lesson in what real confidence is, Drown..." Annie smiles with facetious diplomacy.
Drown counters, parrys and strikes with one word: "Promise?"
"You two done playin' top-dyke?" Dent interrupts the exchange with soured impatience. The two women turn as one to the diminutive mage both contemplating excruciating responses to his impertinence.
"Because if you are, we got other shit goin' on right now that be needin' our immediate attention", Dent plows through the cold stares drilling into him with an oblivious charm, "So, what's the plan? I mean we wait for now, okay... but then what?"
After a long moment where no answer presents itself to any of them - Dent, Annie and Drown all turn towards Frater Da'ath, who eventually draws in their attention by the sheer weight of his unwavering silence. In fact the Perfected Knight of the Illuminated Dusk hasn't heard a word his companions have been saying. Instead his attention remains absorbed on the graffiti scrawl before him. At first it caught nothing more than a passing interest, but then, the longer he stared at it the more the arrangements and patterns took root in his curiosity. There was something both familiar and alien that nagged at his consciousness demanding an immediate translation. It has taken some considerable effort on his part to decipher the words, but he is close, very close actually.
"...hey, you alright?" Dent's question barely registers across Da'ath who responds without looking.
"Don't you see it?" the Knight asks the others even as his mind finds another word weaved into the puzzle-sentence.
"What?" Drown asks, the dread knotting up in her guts as a realization begins to dawn much too slow upon her.
"This!" Da'ath taps the dotted "i" drawn in a fat bubble on the wall with frantic insistence - a light of recognition burning behind widened eyes, "The Pattern! I think I finally deciphered it..."
It all goes down at once:
Dent gives a bewildered laugh to his graying colleague, "You're trippin', man. There ain't nothin' there but a buncha bricks...".
Mistress Drown reaches a conclusion that comes too late to launch the shouts of warning building inside her.
Annie catches a whiff of instinct and slides forward ready to strike at whatever happens next.
The mysterious Donovan Sethius, in turn, laughs with a voice that cannot be heard by ear alone.
Frater Da'ath speaks the words outloud without his usual inflection, helplessly aware now at the curious fact that he actually didn't intend to say anything at all really...
... "I am the song that my enemy sings"
The words, though muttered more than spoken, send the earth beneath the Five to rumble and the walls around them to tremble in the wake of their utterance. The sentence before Da'ath glows with the inate light of luminescent fish swimming under iced water. The letters of which begin to melt, flow, curl, bend and meld into a restless symbol constantly rearranging itself from one form to the next. From deep within its fluctuating curves - the sleeper within stirs and awakens out of the folds of non-existence he has buried himself in. A single seed of awareness sprouts open up from the symbols heart. An equation of seemingly endless reductions finally end against the sum of his being. He hears the words spoken across the void, the words he wrote with subliminal graffiti across the street hours before.
It was the plan all along. He knew if he left the words out there in the open long enough, one of the Five would 'see' it on their way to the meeting without actually seeing anything at all. Once read the subliminal graffiti took root in the consciousness of the reader, slowly its tendrils burrowed deeper into the thoughts, strangling all resolve with obsession as it coiled tighter around the will of its host. In enough time, not too soon to give itself away, the message would embed itself into the occipital lobe of the brain to appear before the viewer: "I am the song that my enemy sings".
The words itch with a fever. A thousand tiny legs run across the brain. All effort at ignoring the message consumes the attention that much more with its presence. There's only way to scratch at it. You have to say it outloud, you have to give it expression before the scream you hold back burns a hole through the throat.
"I am the song that my enemy sings"
It is too late now. Caught in the grip of a complex possession sigil, one created to act as an emergency psychic ripcord for its designer. Once pulled it yanks their consciousness across the void and allows them to reboot himself into the body of whoever activated the sigil by speaking it outloud.
Frater Da'ath screams with naked agony. He drops to his knees tearing both vest and shirt from his body, exposing the pale tattoo of a magickal seal inked across the heart under the gray mane of his chest. The seal begins to emit a blue smoke that wafts with the stink of burnt bacon. The green-blue ink of the circle binding the seal begins to revolve, an ouroboros trying to cough out its own tail. Frater Da'ath doubles over and clutches his face with the palms of his hands.
"What's going on?" Dent asks Drown, seeing the mute recognition wash over her face.
"He's here" she mutters, uncoiling the whip she wears on the side of her hip.
"Who?" Annie asks scanning around the room for any sign of a breach of the five circles.
Frater Da'ath looks back up at them. His eyes now puddles of shadows in which raw white stars float glistening with a faint celestial light.
"Me!" Da'ath snarls with a strangers voice coming from too far deep within him to be his own.
"Adam!" Drown gasps before catching herself...
A cold smile foreign to the face that wears it, lifting himself back off the ground the Knight winks at the Alchematrix, "Who else?"