1.0 Impact
Gargulec
impact!
- Location
- a garden
1.0 Impact
Although you belong to the Silence now, your thoughts during the terminal stage of your fall are a cacophony. Regret and anger, despair and determination – all in equal measure, all mixed so much that you don't know where one begins and the other ends. But the ground closes in fast and you can tell where you are headed – a vast wood, mottled with spots of chalk-white, hills or domes of sort – and the nearer you are to it, the less you think and the more you fear.
The fall should not kill you. You should survive. But are you unsure. The last moments – where through the corona of flame surrounding you can see that you are going to smash into one of those chalk-white domes – are a flurry of a single thought repeated over and over again: the image of your body splattered on the pristine surface, a red, ugly splash.
You scream in terror, briefly. Your body smashes against the surface, shoulder first, and there is a terrible, cracking sound; but before you can tell if it is your bones or the dome, the pain of the impact quakes through your mind, knocking it out. Mercifully quickly, so you don't even have the time to wonder if that is how death feels like.
Darkness takes you.
The details of your surroundings come in one at a time, as your eyes move away from the hole your fall punched through the carapace above. The realization that you know what that carapace is unfolds gradually. At first, it is a sense of familiarity that then, through attempts at focusing your sluggish thoughts, develops into understanding. You are looking at a shell. An external skeleton of some great, now dead beast. A beast that was not fully born, not fully formed. An aborted, leviathan Intruder, slain during the period of vulnerability as it was bursting out of whatever it had been parasitizing. With that size, it had to be an entity of power, perhaps a minor, old god, a hero of ages, maybe a body of timelessly brilliant poetry. The angels beset it during its birth, through spears into its soft flesh and killed it, allowing the bulky corpse to plummet down to the base earth, where all things discarded and rejected come to rot. You look through the old wounds and, sure as that, you find them. Minor punctures, where the spears of the Celestial Host pierced the flesh of the young Intruder. Now, rays of light fall down through them, insignificant when compared to the bright column you have allowed with your plummet. The water you are sprawled in must had come through them. Years and years of rain slowly pooling in the cracks and services of old, brittle bone, becoming home to mosses and algae and all manner of little, light-abhorring creatures: eyeless fish, translucent-skinned water-serpents, pale-fleshed newts. Briefly, you regret that this is where your fall brought you. The crack in the shell that you have caused will allow more light inside to seep inside Now, more light will come inside, and this dark world will be forced to adjust and change, or else perish. You wish it wouldn't be so. You wish that your disruptive act could be reversed and the dark, dank realm preserved from mutability.
There is something odd about this thought, and so you do your best to brush it aside. Considering stasis and change will do you no good now. Instead, you try to look around some more. It is the best that you can do, given how you don't think you could raise your arm now even if you tried to. But with the light directly shining onto your face, the gloom beyond the bright pillar is all but impenetrable. Resigned, you slump back into the water.
As much as you wish that it would go away, a thought comes over you that now, unable to die, you will stay like that forever. An angel's shattered form, half-drowned, with vines and moulds growing over it, amphibians nesting in crooks and cracks of its body, bleached into salt-whiteness by the sun's direct shine. Perhaps only the slow movement of your eyes will betray that there is still some semblance of life inside, but maybe with the help of time, even they will finally freeze in place. You picture that – a figurine-like quality to your body, bound in place with underground vines growing as thick as steel ropes. You note that the mental image fails to horrify. In fact, a part of you sees it as perfect. In this emptied carapace, no one will ever find you; you can hope that with time, even this sluggish, subterranean life around you will ossify and quiet. Thus, you will be freed from all burdens and be given to the never-ending stillness until even your enduring mind will forget what motion is.
It takes some effort to convince yourself that it is not a state you should seek and exalt, and even more to convince yourself that even if you were to wish for it, it is not likely to happen. Those who are touched by the deathly power are not easily broken and even more difficult to keep broken. In time – days, weeks, maybe months – your body will mend itself, the damage reverting until you can walk again, raise yourself from the murky pool and see what the base earth has to offer to you. Therefore, you should brace yourself for a long quiet.
As you think that thought – a living, vibrant thought – a jolt of pain shoots through your mind, bright and warm. Curiously, you focus on the sensation and find another pulse shock you, drawing a stifled, anguished groan from between your lips. The heart in your chest skips a beat, then accelerates; fresh blood gushes from your wounds.
Your mind reels back from these bodily sensations; a fleeting sense of abjection overcomes you. This base shell, this perishable skin and those breakable bones, wrapped in a soft weave of muscle and flesh which, in their time, will give way to decay. This death you have narrowly avoided. It is all disgusting.
The revulsion brings comfort. Your heart once again grinds to an almost-halt. Blood ceases flowing and returns to oozing, so slowly that it might as well be tar. The pain quickly fades back, becoming nothing but just another fact of your existence – such that you are an angel, that your wings are broken and that your left elbow-bone is a shattered smear. The last part, in particular, draws some detached worry – such damage will take a long time to revert and heal.
Once more, the thought is met with a sharp sting of pain, becoming only more pronounced as you linger on it. It is like there is a scab somewhere in your mind, covering all that hurts, all that lives and that you are picking on it. You shouldn't. It only brings hurt. It only brings change.
It is then that you realize, in full, perfect clarity, that it is what you have to do. Scrape this wound open. Keep it open. Force the Silence's restorative power to work through it, instead of doing what it wants to do the most: preserving. Freezing. It is not going to be pleasant. In fact you know it is going to be a sea of helpless struggle that you will have to endure if you ever want to drag yourself out of this pit. You take a mental equivalent of a deep breath, and take read to tear the scab open. But before you can, you hear something that should not be here. Voices, a number of them. Men or women or other living things. Not close, but nearby. Somewhere outside.
Instinct orders you to quiet. The base earth crawls with scavengers, bone-pickers that devour what falls from higher realms, and with only your voice to defend yourself, you would not be the most difficult of prey. Your mind, always at the ready, serves you an image, gory and vivid, of how you could become a feast for them. It is not often that such wretched creatures feast on the bodies of angels.
Next, however, you think of the ocean of pain you have to swim through, and think of mortal medicine; simple help which allows the body to mend and heal. A slightest bit of it would be of so much help and would spare you so much. So much effort, so much time. So much torment. Not all that lives on the base earth is vile, you reason. Some beings are good of hearts, other can be reasoned with, can be bribed, can be convinced. Worst comes to worst, you still have your voice. It can help you.
With that thought alone, you almost raise your voice and call out. But you hesitate. It is a risk. You don't know how major. But there is much to be won.
[ ] Call out to whoever is out there.
[ ] [Absolved from Decay] Stay quiet, wait for them to pass, and force yourself into mending.
Although you belong to the Silence now, your thoughts during the terminal stage of your fall are a cacophony. Regret and anger, despair and determination – all in equal measure, all mixed so much that you don't know where one begins and the other ends. But the ground closes in fast and you can tell where you are headed – a vast wood, mottled with spots of chalk-white, hills or domes of sort – and the nearer you are to it, the less you think and the more you fear.
The fall should not kill you. You should survive. But are you unsure. The last moments – where through the corona of flame surrounding you can see that you are going to smash into one of those chalk-white domes – are a flurry of a single thought repeated over and over again: the image of your body splattered on the pristine surface, a red, ugly splash.
You scream in terror, briefly. Your body smashes against the surface, shoulder first, and there is a terrible, cracking sound; but before you can tell if it is your bones or the dome, the pain of the impact quakes through your mind, knocking it out. Mercifully quickly, so you don't even have the time to wonder if that is how death feels like.
Darkness takes you.
***
The pain that wakes you is eerily distant, so much so that your first thoughts as you lift yourself from the unconscious haze are confusion if it is pain at all. Vaguely, you can recognize that your body is broken, but there is a disassociated kind of clarity to this understanding, almost as if you could see yourself from the outside, watch the ruin smitten on your corporeal form and appraise it like an impartial judge. You recognize that you lie half-submerged in a fetid pool, and that you can't remove yourself from it, as all attempts you make at motion end in the same sort of helplessness. You are aware that multiple of your bones are broken, some of them almost powdered by the strength of the impact and that you should be right now at the limits of what even an angelic body can take. But you are like certain that you are not dying, likely not even close to that and that although the damage you suffered should render you into thoughtless, world-shattering agony, what you are experiencing is a cold, detached numbness. A slowness, yes, that's the word you are looking for. Your thoughts, your heart-beat, your breath, the oozing of the blood from where your skin is punctured: it is all slow, paced. Quiet.
The details of your surroundings come in one at a time, as your eyes move away from the hole your fall punched through the carapace above. The realization that you know what that carapace is unfolds gradually. At first, it is a sense of familiarity that then, through attempts at focusing your sluggish thoughts, develops into understanding. You are looking at a shell. An external skeleton of some great, now dead beast. A beast that was not fully born, not fully formed. An aborted, leviathan Intruder, slain during the period of vulnerability as it was bursting out of whatever it had been parasitizing. With that size, it had to be an entity of power, perhaps a minor, old god, a hero of ages, maybe a body of timelessly brilliant poetry. The angels beset it during its birth, through spears into its soft flesh and killed it, allowing the bulky corpse to plummet down to the base earth, where all things discarded and rejected come to rot. You look through the old wounds and, sure as that, you find them. Minor punctures, where the spears of the Celestial Host pierced the flesh of the young Intruder. Now, rays of light fall down through them, insignificant when compared to the bright column you have allowed with your plummet. The water you are sprawled in must had come through them. Years and years of rain slowly pooling in the cracks and services of old, brittle bone, becoming home to mosses and algae and all manner of little, light-abhorring creatures: eyeless fish, translucent-skinned water-serpents, pale-fleshed newts. Briefly, you regret that this is where your fall brought you. The crack in the shell that you have caused will allow more light inside to seep inside Now, more light will come inside, and this dark world will be forced to adjust and change, or else perish. You wish it wouldn't be so. You wish that your disruptive act could be reversed and the dark, dank realm preserved from mutability.
There is something odd about this thought, and so you do your best to brush it aside. Considering stasis and change will do you no good now. Instead, you try to look around some more. It is the best that you can do, given how you don't think you could raise your arm now even if you tried to. But with the light directly shining onto your face, the gloom beyond the bright pillar is all but impenetrable. Resigned, you slump back into the water.
As much as you wish that it would go away, a thought comes over you that now, unable to die, you will stay like that forever. An angel's shattered form, half-drowned, with vines and moulds growing over it, amphibians nesting in crooks and cracks of its body, bleached into salt-whiteness by the sun's direct shine. Perhaps only the slow movement of your eyes will betray that there is still some semblance of life inside, but maybe with the help of time, even they will finally freeze in place. You picture that – a figurine-like quality to your body, bound in place with underground vines growing as thick as steel ropes. You note that the mental image fails to horrify. In fact, a part of you sees it as perfect. In this emptied carapace, no one will ever find you; you can hope that with time, even this sluggish, subterranean life around you will ossify and quiet. Thus, you will be freed from all burdens and be given to the never-ending stillness until even your enduring mind will forget what motion is.
It takes some effort to convince yourself that it is not a state you should seek and exalt, and even more to convince yourself that even if you were to wish for it, it is not likely to happen. Those who are touched by the deathly power are not easily broken and even more difficult to keep broken. In time – days, weeks, maybe months – your body will mend itself, the damage reverting until you can walk again, raise yourself from the murky pool and see what the base earth has to offer to you. Therefore, you should brace yourself for a long quiet.
As you think that thought – a living, vibrant thought – a jolt of pain shoots through your mind, bright and warm. Curiously, you focus on the sensation and find another pulse shock you, drawing a stifled, anguished groan from between your lips. The heart in your chest skips a beat, then accelerates; fresh blood gushes from your wounds.
Your mind reels back from these bodily sensations; a fleeting sense of abjection overcomes you. This base shell, this perishable skin and those breakable bones, wrapped in a soft weave of muscle and flesh which, in their time, will give way to decay. This death you have narrowly avoided. It is all disgusting.
The revulsion brings comfort. Your heart once again grinds to an almost-halt. Blood ceases flowing and returns to oozing, so slowly that it might as well be tar. The pain quickly fades back, becoming nothing but just another fact of your existence – such that you are an angel, that your wings are broken and that your left elbow-bone is a shattered smear. The last part, in particular, draws some detached worry – such damage will take a long time to revert and heal.
Once more, the thought is met with a sharp sting of pain, becoming only more pronounced as you linger on it. It is like there is a scab somewhere in your mind, covering all that hurts, all that lives and that you are picking on it. You shouldn't. It only brings hurt. It only brings change.
It is then that you realize, in full, perfect clarity, that it is what you have to do. Scrape this wound open. Keep it open. Force the Silence's restorative power to work through it, instead of doing what it wants to do the most: preserving. Freezing. It is not going to be pleasant. In fact you know it is going to be a sea of helpless struggle that you will have to endure if you ever want to drag yourself out of this pit. You take a mental equivalent of a deep breath, and take read to tear the scab open. But before you can, you hear something that should not be here. Voices, a number of them. Men or women or other living things. Not close, but nearby. Somewhere outside.
Instinct orders you to quiet. The base earth crawls with scavengers, bone-pickers that devour what falls from higher realms, and with only your voice to defend yourself, you would not be the most difficult of prey. Your mind, always at the ready, serves you an image, gory and vivid, of how you could become a feast for them. It is not often that such wretched creatures feast on the bodies of angels.
Next, however, you think of the ocean of pain you have to swim through, and think of mortal medicine; simple help which allows the body to mend and heal. A slightest bit of it would be of so much help and would spare you so much. So much effort, so much time. So much torment. Not all that lives on the base earth is vile, you reason. Some beings are good of hearts, other can be reasoned with, can be bribed, can be convinced. Worst comes to worst, you still have your voice. It can help you.
With that thought alone, you almost raise your voice and call out. But you hesitate. It is a risk. You don't know how major. But there is much to be won.
[ ] Call out to whoever is out there.
[ ] [Absolved from Decay] Stay quiet, wait for them to pass, and force yourself into mending.
