|
|
August 10, 2003 |
|
| Amber | Trump Deck | Logs | RL Pictures | Main |
Montmouth Manor ...
The massive mosaic doors whine, creaking laboriously open. A faint shadow of a silhouette sips through drifting stealthily through the chamber. Lengthy whorls of dour black tresses writhe along the lissome spine of her back - eerily agile within the dusk. The feminine figure pauses by the foot of the bed - a dizzy glint of fathomless jade eyes riveting the span of Arion's frail body.
Spirals of darkness dance playfully in the dim light of the trellis-lined room, snatching away at the traces of light from the open door and tearing them apart as they seek to penetrate into chamber. There is little sound and even less movement, the figure within asleep perhaps or simply unaware of your presence.
The pale oval of Ada-Shazandra's faintly Oriental face glistens - etched with haunting waxen detail - a crisp cameo amid a lather of luxurious tresses. Her mind is supernaturally keen - frigid with a single morbid thought - those brilliant jade green eyes molten with the milk-veined texture of flawed jade.
Palpable - a ripple of psychic energy rivets your senses - subtly unnerving like a twinge of electricity that causes your heart and blood to pump hazardously faster.
Perhaps it is some subtle acknowledgement of another presence triggering response but something on the bed stirs. The recovering invalid draws a ragged breath...no...the jagged sound falls short of the truth of this. Under the lens of preternatural observation something quite not right reveals itself. Arion's actions turn from a natural awakening to a thing....preprogrammed, the rasping breath holding little of meta-reality. The voice, however, remains constant, a growing hiss, as of leaves rustling against one another. "Ah, another visitor. What new accusation does this turning bring to my wearying ears?"
Jolts of intense thought cruise through the inner core of your substances, aching as they question the essence of your existence - prodding, invasive and jabbing - an intangible vigor rapes all knowledge and thought - usurping your consciousness into Ada-Shazandra's thirsty, potent mind. The lady says nothing.
Arion shifts to sit more, reclining against the carven headboard easily. He has recovered considerably, though there are bouts of weakness too that are frighteningly potent. "Lady Shazandra....sister," the voice intone, rippling inwards from the furthest darkened corners of this place. "What a present surprise..." Leaves rustling against one another despite the lack of breeze....vines whisper words as they entwine, sliding against each other....a voice? Why suddenly this pervading attar? More than roses this....
Ada-Shazandra's slim ebony black brows quiver and bend - portraying the perfect relic of a tempest, marring the luminous brand upon her balmy forehead, "Speak to me thing," she hisses a rasping hue, "What," the lady hesitates, her milky eyes rippled with whorls of incandescent jade lightning - insightful to your essence, "What are you?!"
The interplay of twining tendrils in the bipedal semblance is masterful in complexion and mechanic, a tongue of wrapped leaves and coiled petals lilting the illusion of speech and even intellect with grotesque profundity. "Have you forgotten me so quickly?" the echoes coagulate with such aural perfection the vision almost regains cohesiveness despite the knots and cords of vegetation that shape the limbs of the thing, the mesh of capillary vines that silhouette a torso and branch upwards in mimicry of an aquiline head. As if careless of the illusion a spectral elemental wreathes though the glamour of fleshy solidity, eclipsing briefly a spider stalking with serious regard up one corded vein defining the figure's twisted arm, a blackened and dried branch underlying it skeletally.
Ada-Shazandra smiles - the jaggedly tilted sensuous expression apt to hinder human hearts. The lady pivots, her waltz-like stride shrouded by the flourish of downy velveteen skirts, "Bugger off, sweet scented fiend," she chimes grasping the curvaceous relit of her cross bow from the marble table at her side. She aims, a single lethally precise eye sealed shut with a wreath of tangled black lashes."
A hand raises in a warding gesture against the aimed weapon...no, not a hand, nothing even vaguely like a hand, a splay of woven vines touched by new buds even in the continual darkness. "What are you doing?" comes the rasping question.
Ada-Shazandra intones, the Anglican relic of a voice honeyed sweet - "Delving into the abyss of destruction, beloved," she coos, that ruthless reed-like finger pressing the knob of the deadly trigger - releasing an acidic thrust of a bolt - mercilessly aimed between the herbaria sockets of the thing's eyes.
The upraised defense proves ineffective against the onrushing force of the bolt, exploding into green tatters without slowing it. Not-Arion's head is ripped backward as the shaft enters not-eye socket and plunges into the headboard behind with enough force to crack it, a SCREEL exploding from the serrated edges of emerald lips as the vine thing is wretched backwards, spiders exploding in a stream from where the eye should be to pour down the bolt shaft as the construct crumbles, vines untangling as the construct slowly dissolves into individual strands.
Ada-Shazandra arcs a dour crescent of an imperial black brow, "Impressive!" she rasps, idly lowering the curvaceous relic of her crossbow. The lady - garbed in the grotesque grandeur of the Victorian era - smiles, her livid lips tilted delectably up, her enchanted potent gaze greedily keen.
There is no response save a slither of unraveling vegetation and the chitter of spiders still pouring from where the things 'skull' would have been. Even that stream thins ere too long however, leaving at last only a tangle of vines where once that which was supposedly Arion lay....
Ada-Shazandra hums a melodious hue, the empty tip of the bow pressed to the bud of her *moist* ashen rose lips. The woman sways back in a fell swoop of ethereal grace, exhaling, "Fi, Fi, Fo, Fum - " Her eloquent jade green eyes rove the room, gaze arid and ardent - frantically searching for clues beneath the phenomenal curl of silken lashes, "Something wicked this way comes."
On cue, however melodramatically, the whispers begin as the lady's own fall away and the spell shatters completely. Swirling upwards from no discernable source they grow in volume and complexity, increasing to the point where the vibrations of their passing achieve an uncomfortable level, an unforeseen wind choosing that point to rip through the room with random violence, tearing at plant and bed cloth unmercifully in an unseen grip.
Rampant perhaps, the wanton breeze ravages through Ada-Shazandra's lithe silhouette, tossing her frame intuitively back. Eager, yielding and uncannily pliant to the billow and tug of the mysterious breeze she bends back. Her milky eyes close, the silken curves of superb lashes cast miraculous shadows over the striking curves of her porcelain pale cheeks.
A sudden report sounds as the wind catches the chamber doors, slamming them back against their supporting walls. With a force not so much lessened from the winds howling the whispers flee over the bent willow of the woman in their path, their echoes quickly diminishing in a convoluted race from the room.
Ada-Shazandra feigns back, her see-saw silhouette lured by the clamor of arcane noise ad rabid whispers. The woman moves out the beating wind-banged doors and glides down the hall towards the staircase.
Downward. Ever downwards. At the edge of perception the gathered whispers flee as if a portent of impending doom. Stair and rail fly by dreamlike blurs in the pursuit, landing acting as the nexus of direction...but never gravity. Down. Down. And then, there is no where left to go, the whispers melting into the very earth at the depths of the sprawled edifice that is that manor...swallowed into the earth.
The Cellars...
Ada-Shazandra descends down the whirlwind of antique cold stone steps, her presence lured by the rabid flurry of surreal winds. She carries no candle, her path lit by the incandescent glamour of demonic jade-green eye. The subdued rustling whisper of velvet carpets the stoic pebbled floor, as the dowager pauses to salvage focus from her dream-like reverie.
The aural wisps weave further in a subterranean dervish, their last echoes starting to die out between the stones of the cellar floor. Whispers of power wrenching on a will strained to its peak, the sound grating on nerve like the creak of ship timbers under a storm's relentless stress. Bent but as yet unbroken even as those self-same masts billow with empowered air and launch the vessel of their being forward in a nigh uncontrollable surge.
The luminous orbs of Ada-Shazandra's eyes grow unbearably large, mirroring the jab of unease that cruises through her nerves. The lady gathers up her cumbersome old-fashioned skirts, sinking onto the eerie span of the floor. Palms - delicately doll-like and translucent as though wrought from alabaster - splay over the cracks on the stone, eerily immaculate fingers dabbling across the cracks.
The stones answer with their silence as the last of the sibilant voices linger on the edge of conscious realization, still below. Cold rock, rough with disuse seems to press upwards into the smooth flesh of that weighs lightly against it. Focused senses open outward of their own accord to delve the deeps in unconscious desire. There...teeming life of the underworld scurries about its random patterns...reverberations of open spaces long since forgotten...doomsday promises from ancient and cursed wards; the restless rustle of entombed remains trapped like fossils from another age. There is nothing of hope or light here, just a miasma of decay. But just beyond. just there...a glimmer of familiarity...Arion.
Ada-Shazandra withdraws with a stunned pant, rolling nimbly backwards upon haunches - the dusky skirts ballooning in a dour velveteen cushion around her - lending her a childlike deceptively innocent appeal. Rabidly, the woman blinks, whispering a haunting relic of an arcane curse. A pause and she exhales a thin waft of perfumed air, the tepid tension within her corset-bound chest deflating as she forces herself to breathe once more. Lavish curls of her dark black lashes drape over the jade splendor of her almandine eyes.
Even the slight change in proximity and contact from the ground causes the tenuous link to that one recognizable entity to waver and fade to near imperceptibility.
A tragic slant of luxurious lashes lingers restful over the lofty curves of Ada-Shazandra's porcelain pale cheeks. Her miniature silhouette is swathed in a dense vortex of myriad shadows, her gown ravaged by the uncanny breeze that ruffles through the cascade of ebony black floor length tresses obscuring her visage. Her eyes open - marred by the white-veined milky texture of flawed jade. The lady flexes those keen tapered fingers, pressing them to the siphon cracks with reverent hesitation. A lure of her potent mind and all of her empathic senses spirals forth seeking to connect with the wheezing whispers of the unsettling, achingly familiar presence.
Almost immediately, the presence reasserts itself; immune to your questing presence under deep blankets of earth and rock, cocooned in veils of power...but there nonetheless. Something terrible rears at the inquisitive probe at one point, a quasi-being of rotting flesh and putrescent essence whose very presence is an affront to the living cells of existence and a horrible reminder of a lingering shadow or disease whose tendrils touched every part of blood and flesh with the intimate familiarity of not a lover, but of a carrion worm.
Instinctively, the valor of Ada-Shazandra's compelling mind recoils - her temperate senses jarred by the grotesque realization. The woman shivers violently, the reed-like pillar of her back feverish and frail. Yet hers is a soul born into the macabre. She smiles a livid vision of a melancholy smile and stretches deeper, seeking to coil and usurp the essence of this familiar force with stubborn desperation.
As suddenly as the presence appears, so it vanishes as the seeker pushes past it. A moment of wonder hovers however, perhaps at the...entity's lack of attention. It is as if light were refocused against a mirror elsewhere and in passing, the invader caught merely a blinding refraction of it but for a moment. Past the surface of this horrible reflector the sense of familiarity increases manifold, drawing honed senses to it sharply as a myriad of cavernous tunnels, hungry pairs of feral eyes and the dead skeletons of runes flash by peripherally. Nearness brings definitive recognition and certain unease at the state of the besought. It is a will and mind stretched to terrible limits in a vivid recollection of a splayed dissection subject, membranes stretched outwards in a plasmic star, their point twisted into chains the fade from this reality into countless others. It is as if something vaguely octopoidal in nature were reborn as a puppeteer of unfathomable dimension. Of essence flesh is shaped, colored deadlights of multiple souls dimly pulsing at the heart of the thing.
Ada-Shazandra's invading curious mind melds with the conflagration of her chilling senses - winding with potent psychic precision into the despairing pits that lie beneath the shell of the cellar floor. Waxing and waning with the lilt of passing shadows, the lady calls from her throbbing heart without a voice - "Arion? Brother?" Her tepid lips echo in a broken whisper the words she thinks into the gloom, "Is there anything left of you, beloved?"
Somewhere in the depths of the thing there is a shifting of curved bone, marble flesh and ropey tendon, the half of the pseudo-pod that remains somewhat humanoid in appearance focusing more clearly on the lurking presence, despite its intangibility. "Ada..." comes the multitude of whispers, obvious strain taking its toll excessively on even the simple formations of speech. "What are you..." a dropped thought of obvious worthlessness considering the circumstances. "You...must...leave," follows the weave of sound and thought that settles like cobwebs around your awareness...clinging.
The prodding whirlwind of Ada-Shazandra's kittenishly curious mind recoils - like an all-too-tight cord that snapped from exceeding pressure. The woman blinks away the milky hue of exhausting concentration from the almandine depths of her exotic eyes - her silken lashes coated with teary condensation. Crouched child-like and disheveled, the mistress sits on the harsh frigid floor - pale palms spread fan-like across the cracks. She is unfathomably still for what seems an eternity.
The retreat seems none too soon as more than Arion's awareness turns attention to the intruding presence of the Lady Shazandra. Images of those flexed and strained chains tightening against their fleshy bonds as Arion's will focuses on them...controlling, wielding. He is lost to you then as waves of power ripples though the room, tearing at the fabric of your spectral self even as it flees the heart of this nightmare darkness. The pulsing where once might have formed the torso of a man grows brighter, a quartet of alien stars that call out with their -own- voices. Then in a frozen heartbeat all is whispers beneath the cold stones that bite into flesh. So horribly...beneath.