Lich

Death climbs up from the tenebrous places. Where it nested in the day, the sewers beneath the trees, the slums between the hills. Death sniffs in the murk, so the leaves shiver. Death reaches up to pluck the plump fruit, death drinks the rain that grew them. Coughs and slobbers from a million mouths, molten sputum and the sludge of its shit, but no tears will slake death's dry cheeks. Death is hiding in the rust, singing in the sand. Death is soft as dust.

We cleave it open to cast down the dead, but the earth is not the ossuary. It is itself the lich.

Immortal Vespertine

He woke from apprehensive dreams, into vertigo and sweat. Iylum had been seeking him, while he hid together with Kyrig. But the taint left smoldering footprints behind, and no refuge could they keep.

He felt there suddenly unanchored, and paralyzed, like a stone in a flood. This was not his world; he had been deracinated from his own and was numb to this one. He had sat down some hours before to sleep under the lee of an oak. He stood now and beheld an impossible simulacrum of then, everything fixed in an immutable twilight, withholding the entelechy of night.

Comprehending the immobile sun, he experienced a profound transformation of perception. First as a disequilibrium, a catatonic aporia, then with plenary awe. Time had become wholly noumenon, uncoupled from its ontic covenant.

With only a coat and staff, he walked out into a world hushed by celestial coma.

Days Dwindling

The days are dwindling. Dim this eve, dimmer the next. The Lady withers and winters; noon cool as morn. A thousand thousand dawns have sprung from her womb; she is used up. The last are lame, dwarfed, blighted.

At day's dwindling the mother of light is distant and thin. I see her plainly: Look into the os of time! Acronycal dread crawls in me. The wind reeks ash. The earth turns adust. The Sentinel is cadaverous, a grey face in a bottomless black well.

The days' dwindling swallows us like the serpent of acrasy gorges on the egg of youth. We slick into the belly of entropy.

Tempest

No record of Palas survived its colossal fall; no account of its amaranthine splendor, its impossible size and arcadian conditions, is firsthand - no objective distinction can be made between the myth and the experience of that ancient sanctuary of man.

Equally unreliable is the assertion that the gods then lived in accord, with their subjects, with one another, or that they were conflated; and it is the competing theory that to historians is less incredible:

That from the Deep Sea came the first gods, a fugitive kind which named themselves the Apostates, and the aftermath of their settlement was the Tempest. So great was the scale of this epiclysm that even its specifics were annihilated; what relationship between Apostates and their subsequent ectypes, how no vestiges are found of a state so pervasive, why no further such allotriomes have since impinged us - these are the so-called enigmament of our era's advent.

Conversation with a Dying God

I know this place.

Yes. This is - was once - the Beacon of the World. Behold collapsed glory! An inept wonder. The conclusion of all vanity. The wreckage of paradise!

You have brought me here because your work is complete?

Never complete. See down there, that litter of shelters, like sediment. The vomit of your ceaseless determination! I am come here to die where Iylum died. Face you west and lament the final sunset. I have covered the world in fire. Now shall it be covered in darkness.

Lord, you abandon me! What purpose is left for me in desolation? This place is no wonder. It is a graveyard of the gods.

Never a purpose had I for you. It was you who pursued me. As you witnessed the murder of my kin, so you were cursed to witness the murder of your own.

I have forgotten who I was. This man whose face I wear, his mind is obscured in a wake of smoke. I am a newborn, in a dying world.

Then die with it.

Mercy, Lord! Let us worship you, as a fire in the night!

Iylum would that you worshiped no gods. I would that no men live to defile us. No matter. Both of us submit to extinction.

Then die, the last of you! But we still live, some of us.

There are no victories left to you. You will live in the bones of your empires. Your children will be strangers to daylight, born blind. You will scrounge in the dirt until your own tombs are dug. And the last of you will lie down in them, because there will be no beauty left for you to fight for.