Threshold

He opened his eyes, to find security in the asterisms. Orientation relaxed the waking vision's grip, his throat unclenched with a sigh. As he breathed out, reflexively, the pit breathed from him. Trepid, he lowered his stare into the lightless expanse.

By place he counted back time, the anterior shrouded by a labyrinthine canyon, a trap he had thought eternal. Freed, he came out onto a littered and sulphurous moor, that descended onto salt tundra. There the wind had belched up a long squall of dust; northless, untethered, he flickered across the scrub until spat out on a basalt plain, trackless and corrugated in strange configurations. It graduated into a wide, shallow stair, that banked on chalk cliffs at the cusp of the world.

Here was a vast emptiness, in it no features to distinguish near from remote; an immense hollow - not like a chamber, he discerned no boundaries but the line where he stood, and the eclipse of the sky. As if he had found the sunken sun, an extinguished megasomatic entity, the corpse of a star.

Here he stood in lasting contemplation of that unknowable space. Motionless; time's surrogate prosody hung.

Longer, he brooded the solitary articles at his feet: Two stones, fist-size and worn.

Then, ponderous and resigned, he traded them, then walked out to the brink.

"Lord!" spake behind him.

Falling Away

Opened eyes blind, by the awful magnitude of nothing. Lost from land's end and falling, down, in, away. Tumbling, tumbling. Closed throat stuck, by the choke of abyssal terror. Tumbling. Into the empty sun's dead heart.

Somnorine

By steps he retreated from Iylum's domain, and driftered far in a darkling wasteland.

A throng of dawn mirages expected him; fires on the mountain crowns that soon cooled to vermilion, indigo, taupe.

No other living thing did he meet. With the wind he walked, over lands sagged into slue, through jungles cinereous and mute, across oceans frozen.

So his own circadian process deteriorated. Sleep shrank to syncope; a malaise of oneirataxia conjured dweomers of cadaverous behemoths, mundified by a blood deluge, the welkin's eye opening into a vault of oblivion, coruscating xanthochromatic.

Like the peakfires, this delirium glutted then waned. He quit sleep. He could not remember what last he ate, or ever eating. Still his doom vexed him, so he walked. Over dunes of ash, through starlit wealds of argent stone, across the void of seas.

A doubt burgeoned, then festered: Was it the world execrated, and him spared? Was it the world in fugue, and him lucid?

Was the world final, and he the final arbiter?

Depth Perception

The ravine was long, narrow, like the mountain had cupped her palms between her knees. The sides of the niche, that he remembered verdant and treacherous with moss, were wan and rotting in a bath of gloom. The wreath of forest delineating the precipice was slumped in retirement. All the bothies on the walls were sagging into fuliginous sediment, the mulch of civilization in decay.

He looked up from the lap of the cloh at the loft of the night, incubative, and felt smothered by the cosmos; as if sunk to the very floor of an ocean as deep as the gulf between stars. His weight drained and pooled in his feet, his tail of gravity listed; ahead rolled below.

The bed of the gulch became an escarpment, its jambs prostrate, and his view toppled to survey his altitude from the horizon. There guttered the tumid sun, like a chthonic inferno, sucking him down its desiccated throat.

Gods Last

Departing Iylum's necropolis, he passed the blackened hull of a grange and its tract. There toiled a man alone, back bent to the barren earth, so to deterge it with sweat, and eat, and live a little longer.

He obscured himself below the path and hurried on his way, or else his numinous aura might be detected, and aligned with this fatal causatum.

Crossing the high bridge into a bordering cloh, he met a woman strange and ragged. With the fence she struggled, so to thrust herself into the nadir, but was too weak, too gravid, to climb and to fall.

He sued: "Do you accept death? I ask you. Do you really? How do you know? What is the quale of acceptance?" So she presented his hand to her bare womb, full but cold. "It is the subtraction of will." Pitying he touched her with death, and she wandered the other way.

Arriving the river's native side, plangent he knelt. To forget hunger, to slough infirmity, to last undying through the night of years - but still to know grief, was the greater curse. Now would she know it too?

He saw his reflection in the mirror. To him it spoke, but he would not remember the words, their sounds or shapes. Reviled it touched him with life, and he came awake.

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.