The Shattered Garden
Jul. 13th, 2010 03:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonUnder a sanguine moon, hanging bloated and pocked with shadows, the Hunt.
This is the Shattered Garden. Where skeletal trees of wrought iron and rust are draped in vines of raw wire; each strand knotted with the fruit of dangling earphone-speakers that squawk and hiss an endless loop of hysterical weeping. There are patches of tinted light bulbs that bloom waist-high off stalks of erect power cords. Their light seeps into the darkened shores of the Garden, fills as flickering puddles of sickly illumination and it is not long before you find that you cast no shadow within their glow. Step carefully as well! Grass sharp as razors glisten with the dew of a viscous poison and sprout like threats from the red clay earth. The best bet is to stay on the Path... though by doing so it will only be that much easier for the Only-Opponent to find you. There will be a temptation to follow the winding trails of ancient footsteps spied just off the Path. The tracks at first glance will appear to be filled smoothly with a sheen of ice that glistens bright as hope, but upon careful inspection the realization occurs that it is actually broken mirrors that fill their depths and their progress leads only to Sorrow's Empire.
I remember (vaguely as I remember all things here; where memory corrodes quick and self-identity wanes with each step taken) being told that this was once Frequency Eden. A paradise of golden splendor and silver inspiration that in its center held the Tree Eternal. These gates were once watched over by an arch-angel who bore both flaming sword and celestial grace. Then after the millennia shed and epochs passed as seasons, for reasons inconceivable, this arch-angel suddenly commanded the gates to be flung open, stepped (floated?) inside and immediately upon arrival tapped the tip of that terrible sword to a single blade of grass (so green, so delicate as to have been plucked from a Walt Whitman poem)... and paradise burned.
Perhaps the angel grew bored with waiting for either its creator or its beneficiaries to return. Perhaps it went insane with grief or rage or love or... maybe this was never Frequency Eden at all.
Whatever it is it's a bad bardo, one where even ghosts are prey and the only way back is to remember how you got here in the first place.
But there's no time.
The Only-Opponent is closing in.
***
Move quick.
Don't look back. Don't pause. Don't think - just go!
Duck under barbwire cobwebs and swat away insects hatched out of threaded bolts as they nibble the skin with ferrous mandibles and lunge blindly with syringe-needle stingers. Hop over coiled centipedes with bulbous eyes whose surface is a thousand television screens and spit candy flavored venom. Plow through the swarm clouds of Cinderflies, whose luminescent bodies ignite into green flames upon contact.
Cross over a river of soured mother's milk, stumble down empty graves as wide as valleys, climb hills carved out of the skulls of giants.
Then a memory flickers -
Cross-legged naked in the Charioteer's Asana, breath pranayama regulated to slow the system to an epsilon trance and between the massive scyring mirror a single black candle burns. Across the dust of the mirror's surface, and embedded within the forehead of my reflection, a single sigil has been dabbed to mark my intent.
No, not my intent.
Hers.
She stepped out of her body on astral recon and never returned. This was her mirror and it was charged with her Work to offer an elusive map, an Ariadne Noose stretched taut into the Black Infinite. "Here there be Monsters." Lodge Geburah gave strict orders not to follow. They warned me she went too deep, too quick into the Howling Lands marked forbidden by our superiors in the Council of Eleven.
But she was my love.
And love is my will and so I...
... groan and snap of iron branch.
A croaking groan rattles behind me. I've heard it before. When I was a kid and I wouldn't go to sleep despite my parents threats and pleas. For I knew there was something bad waiting in the room when the lights went out. They insisted it wasn't real. It wasn't there. And they'd kiss me on the forehead, turn off the light and leave me cowering under a cocoon of blankets as the Thing-That-Wasn't-There circled around my bed.
No, don't remember. Not that. Focus on the candle flame. The dust Sigil. Her.
Bolt!
The thing is behind me now. Its steps loud as closing artillery fire, its labored breath the thunder that will herald the rising of the dead.
Don't, don't, don't... look back! Because no matter how horrible I imagine the beast to be it will, by its nature, be in fact a thousand times worse.
But then it roars out for me to stop and in doing so seizes me in command.
For it wasn't the word but rather the voice that spoke it...
Risk a peek, just a glance, a small scratch of an all-devouring itch...
... and the Only-Opponent was Her all along.
Her astral body has been torn from the inside out and restitched with the wire vines and barbwire webs of the Garden. Seven black holes wheeze and suck the light into her body where her chakras once spinned. Hollow eyes hold only portals to starless nights from which no dawn will ever rise.
In that moment two names arise and clash against the shores of thought scattering the panic that has seized me. One hers. One mine.
I only have time to speak one of them before I forget.
If I say mine she is trapped here forever; hers and I will take her place.
She pounces in a blur across the scant distance between us...
... and before I can speak, lipless teeth spring open and speak a single word before snapping across my throat.
My name.
And with it time slows to a crawl, vision blurs as all light across it converges to form the outline of the Dust Sigl as it burns with white incandescence before me...
... as I return to the mirror, the asana, the otherwise empty apartment.
And with a gasp I cry out her name... one last time before it vanishes forever from my mind.
This is the Shattered Garden. Where skeletal trees of wrought iron and rust are draped in vines of raw wire; each strand knotted with the fruit of dangling earphone-speakers that squawk and hiss an endless loop of hysterical weeping. There are patches of tinted light bulbs that bloom waist-high off stalks of erect power cords. Their light seeps into the darkened shores of the Garden, fills as flickering puddles of sickly illumination and it is not long before you find that you cast no shadow within their glow. Step carefully as well! Grass sharp as razors glisten with the dew of a viscous poison and sprout like threats from the red clay earth. The best bet is to stay on the Path... though by doing so it will only be that much easier for the Only-Opponent to find you. There will be a temptation to follow the winding trails of ancient footsteps spied just off the Path. The tracks at first glance will appear to be filled smoothly with a sheen of ice that glistens bright as hope, but upon careful inspection the realization occurs that it is actually broken mirrors that fill their depths and their progress leads only to Sorrow's Empire.
I remember (vaguely as I remember all things here; where memory corrodes quick and self-identity wanes with each step taken) being told that this was once Frequency Eden. A paradise of golden splendor and silver inspiration that in its center held the Tree Eternal. These gates were once watched over by an arch-angel who bore both flaming sword and celestial grace. Then after the millennia shed and epochs passed as seasons, for reasons inconceivable, this arch-angel suddenly commanded the gates to be flung open, stepped (floated?) inside and immediately upon arrival tapped the tip of that terrible sword to a single blade of grass (so green, so delicate as to have been plucked from a Walt Whitman poem)... and paradise burned.
Perhaps the angel grew bored with waiting for either its creator or its beneficiaries to return. Perhaps it went insane with grief or rage or love or... maybe this was never Frequency Eden at all.
Whatever it is it's a bad bardo, one where even ghosts are prey and the only way back is to remember how you got here in the first place.
But there's no time.
The Only-Opponent is closing in.
Move quick.
Don't look back. Don't pause. Don't think - just go!
Duck under barbwire cobwebs and swat away insects hatched out of threaded bolts as they nibble the skin with ferrous mandibles and lunge blindly with syringe-needle stingers. Hop over coiled centipedes with bulbous eyes whose surface is a thousand television screens and spit candy flavored venom. Plow through the swarm clouds of Cinderflies, whose luminescent bodies ignite into green flames upon contact.
Cross over a river of soured mother's milk, stumble down empty graves as wide as valleys, climb hills carved out of the skulls of giants.
Then a memory flickers -
Cross-legged naked in the Charioteer's Asana, breath pranayama regulated to slow the system to an epsilon trance and between the massive scyring mirror a single black candle burns. Across the dust of the mirror's surface, and embedded within the forehead of my reflection, a single sigil has been dabbed to mark my intent.
No, not my intent.
Hers.
She stepped out of her body on astral recon and never returned. This was her mirror and it was charged with her Work to offer an elusive map, an Ariadne Noose stretched taut into the Black Infinite. "Here there be Monsters." Lodge Geburah gave strict orders not to follow. They warned me she went too deep, too quick into the Howling Lands marked forbidden by our superiors in the Council of Eleven.
But she was my love.
And love is my will and so I...
... groan and snap of iron branch.
A croaking groan rattles behind me. I've heard it before. When I was a kid and I wouldn't go to sleep despite my parents threats and pleas. For I knew there was something bad waiting in the room when the lights went out. They insisted it wasn't real. It wasn't there. And they'd kiss me on the forehead, turn off the light and leave me cowering under a cocoon of blankets as the Thing-That-Wasn't-There circled around my bed.
No, don't remember. Not that. Focus on the candle flame. The dust Sigil. Her.
Bolt!
The thing is behind me now. Its steps loud as closing artillery fire, its labored breath the thunder that will herald the rising of the dead.
Don't, don't, don't... look back! Because no matter how horrible I imagine the beast to be it will, by its nature, be in fact a thousand times worse.
But then it roars out for me to stop and in doing so seizes me in command.
For it wasn't the word but rather the voice that spoke it...
Risk a peek, just a glance, a small scratch of an all-devouring itch...
... and the Only-Opponent was Her all along.
Her astral body has been torn from the inside out and restitched with the wire vines and barbwire webs of the Garden. Seven black holes wheeze and suck the light into her body where her chakras once spinned. Hollow eyes hold only portals to starless nights from which no dawn will ever rise.
In that moment two names arise and clash against the shores of thought scattering the panic that has seized me. One hers. One mine.
I only have time to speak one of them before I forget.
If I say mine she is trapped here forever; hers and I will take her place.
She pounces in a blur across the scant distance between us...
... and before I can speak, lipless teeth spring open and speak a single word before snapping across my throat.
My name.
And with it time slows to a crawl, vision blurs as all light across it converges to form the outline of the Dust Sigl as it burns with white incandescence before me...
... as I return to the mirror, the asana, the otherwise empty apartment.
And with a gasp I cry out her name... one last time before it vanishes forever from my mind.
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no subject
on 2010-07-13 08:43 am (UTC)no subject
on 2010-07-13 04:23 pm (UTC)