2018-04-27: Fragments of Madness
- Log: Neriah 073 18-04-27
- Cast: Isiris Shango'Ra, Neriah Parringer
- Where: Felkirk Chapel
- Date: April 27, 2018
- Summary: Isiris encounters an unusual Priestess of Althena.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The lonely church may have been the center of a once vibrant and sprawling town in Glenwood, however many years ago.
The alabaster statue of the goddess Althena would have brought peace to many of those who prayed, however many years ago.
However many years ago, this would have been a good place.
That is to say, however many years ago, before he arrived.
The threads of things have long since grown taut, truth stretched to the breaking point in only moments, a pull on the mind that feels the edges of everything begin to raise, the hackles of a long suffering world. Seeing this thing, it will yet suffer longer.
A surge of blackbirds blots out the guy in a gust of cackling feathers as they surge towards the small town, their wingbeats pasing as staccato hadows across the verdant grasses and clay as they flit across the beaten path. Like the wind, they go where they will, crows settling on what's left of every building, a hundred handfuls of eyes looking and laughing at a thousand angles and in a thousand voices.
When he sets foot into the town, the voices only chatter louder.
A traveller, the same as any other. Not tall, by no means any dominating figure. A long grey travelling coat hides most of him, his hands barely visible beyond the hem of his sleeve. His is not curiosity, his gaze travelling ground with the same aplomb of anything almost dead. If he is armed, he doesn't walk as if he is so, a drifter only come to pay his fair tithe.
When he finds his way to church, as is the only building left mostly intact in the ruined town, he walks as if he is the only man left on earth, finding a pew near the back to sit quietly and mind his own, eyes never lifting to meet the great statue dominating the room, the stained glass illuminating her from every angle in splashes of color.
<Pose Tracker> Neriah Parringer has posed.
They are some very wet crows. An endless rain has fallen over much of Glenwood, never seeming to grow drier than a persistent drizzle. Deep puddles and pools ripple through what's left of the old town, beginning to drown some of the rubble left behind. Perhaps the villagers left in search of better fortunes. Or perhaps they were gone long before the rain - before the war.
Only the statue of the Goddess remained behind, lit dimly by the wan light of what few rays of the sun's mercy can slip through the murky cloud. The colours that play across her face and dress are muted and faded and reflect the way the water drips in streams down the panes of glass, as though someone left this place out far too long and most of the pigment in it had run. Only the sound of raindrops pelting the church roof can be heard now, a muffled hiss that soon fades into white noise.
In that near-silence, the soft click of a high heel against cool stone seems brilliantly, startlingly loud.
It comes from somewhere off to one side, followed by another step, slow and stately. From the shadows in what must once have been the opening to the rectory, a figure emerges - a starkly white one.
The priestess's cloak and garments don't seem to have faded like the rest of this place - and yet, she seems, at a glance, solid enough. The deep hood she wears keeps most of her face in a dark shadow, revealing only a pointed chin and full ruby lips to hint at her prettiness. From beneath the sleeves of the underdress she wears under the cloak, her hands are covered with delicate white gloves.
"You have chosen a curious village in which to seek respite," the Priestess says as she begins to approach, her voice low and neutral. "But Althena's sacred places lend themselves to it."
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The birds outside regard the rain with curiosity, a delighted titter echoing across the rafters overhead. But not a single bird pauses to shake the water from their feathers, not a single bird seeks cover in the rain. They sit at their roosts, waiting for the one below to reach the absolution he appears to seek.
His arms bridge across his knees as he leans forward, his silhouette a fatigued and pious one, the folds of his voluminous coat bunching up at his neck as he remains settled. At first, the traveller pays the arrival of the priestess no mind, so focused is he on the wood of the floor beneath him.
She is not cut from the same cloth as this place, her voice smooth and young, neither hostile nor cruel, neither kind nor generous. Her lips, so red so as to painted with blood, are not of the kind which has habitually known a smile in overlong. This is what he can tell from the scent of things, from the way she displaces the air, this is what he can tell without truly even looking up. To approach him is to feel the seed of things sprout. A profane birth, slick enough to be imagined felt under the feet. As she approaches, it slowly threads through everything, as she treads too close to the loom.
A mop of dark hair ensorcells him and damns the sight of things. Aside from the faintest glow, it is hard to see anything of his face at all, though he wears no hood al the same. The man's hands slowly interlock together as the words are left aside for long lightning-strung moments. The quiet patter of the raindrops overhead have long since become the only respite in the ache of silence following her word by the time he breathes, a long, slow, calculated sound.
"Yes, her sacred places, worshipped by so many," he agrees, in the most intimate way.
His voice is mercilessly gentle. There is no harshness or roughness in his voice, but it leaves nothing uninsinuated. Every thread pulled, every idea in the mind is suggested. He is kind enough to acknowledge everything in a few words. "But there can be no respite in these places, not yet," he continues, saying nothing untoward directly.
"I have come a long way... and I would first like to see her dance."
<Pose Tracker> Neriah Parringer has posed.
Technically her lips are painted with dark red lipstick, but the colour is about right for darker blood, as if she'd kissed an open wound and the colour had lingered.
The decay of the place seems to stop at the boundary of the sister in white, and yet what hangs around her is somehow even colder, in its own way - her aura is less one of light than of a stark, unnaturally serene presence, like a white paint swatch against grey stone.
A couple of curls can be made out within the shadow of the woman's hood, dark like raven plumage, but not much more. The click of heels against the floor rings out again as she moves slowly across the church, like a participant in some procession in which everyone else has been lost to time. She doesn't head directly for the stranger. Her course takes her across the front row of pews, towards the statue, faintly illuminated by the rain-soaked tatters of what passes for the light.
"There are some things that She wishes for us to leave to one side," the priestess said, her back to the dark-haired stranger. She looks up at the stone semblance of Althena, watching the dripping shadows and shapes moving across the alabaster features like living things.
"Dance... song... drink... more," says the Priestess, still not turning to face the visitor. "Sometimes, we gaze through a window, not realizing that our own breath clouds it. That we see only the patterns we create, and not what they hide. That is why She returned to this world. Not to dance... but to guide."
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
She never comes close enough to do more than shuttle across the threads, the harp song light and elusive in her passing. The strings ache with only the slightest touch, shivering with each heartbeat. That is 'reality.' The sky hangs a few inches too low over him, and it only seems to get worse whenever he talks. The unreality of things is inimitably familiar, every word he speaks a cipher hiding a part of the thing itself. It is in every breath, every wreath hung around his words cut from honey.
He is kind.
A stray beam of painted gray light flickers silver across his dark hair as he moves, shifting his glance only slightly as the priestess speaks, the muscles of his jaw moving, if she were to glance in his direction. But no sound comes from the traveller as she leaves open the door for him, the way that she speaks weaving an image of abandoning thoughtless excess. An idea that pleases him, until he turns his head to one side, as if to better hear her, though in truth it can hardly be said that he is of a mind in this world at all with the expression.
"An enchanting dream," he agrees, standing.
Parts of him move this way and that. As he stands, he also remains seated, an agonized sinner in the pew seeking absolution. He steps away calmly, the tread of his footfall a bass counterpart to the sharp click of the priestess' heels. "Everyone to be still, and cold. But deep beyond this world there is a song. Pervasive, it is in all things, and all hearts." He strides beyond the line of pews, not making any particular path to meet the priestess at the statue, instead preferring to look away, out of a window.
He gets up again from the pew, again leaving himself behind.
"If you can hear it, it means that you are strong enough to hear the song of God."
The other of him walks away from the priestess, to favor the remnants of the bowl set at the entrance of the church, long since crumbled. These things are only shadows of him, ghosts spawned by a thoughtless impulse. It is easy to look at him, and wonder which is his real mind. But a glance is enough to tell. He has not moved at all.
The traveller's hands wring together lightly, without anxiety. "I have come to see her dance," he repeats. "Because I have heard this song. The question that is," he thinks aloud. "Is she only a lie, a pretty thing invented by the iscariot and the faithless... or is she the one who will dance for me?"
"Does she lie to you," he asks, never lifting his eyes from the ground.
"Or does she bring you to me?"
His voice never rises higher than a whisper.
"The window is there, pleading to be broken."
<Pose Tracker> Neriah Parringer has posed.
Beneath her robe, unseen, the priestess lowers her eyelids ever so slightly, more out of irritation than anything else.
Outwardly, she does not move from the statue, just gazing up at the face of the alabaster deity. She just lets the odd man talk.
The odd men. When she does finally glance back, the priestess, her eyes out of sight, follows one of the phantoms of the man as they head for the window, the other towards the church bowl, but they're dismissed, the feeling of her gaze more than the visual cue of it falling on the seated figure.
"No song comes from here," she says gravely, "save for the song of blight and sadness that the small voices of this place whisper. The violet murmurs that whisper to those thoughts that fester where the light cannot touch but the dreadful things may reach. The unknowing hummings of those who walk in footsteps that shimmer blue with the signs of the heavens. What you seek, friend...."
The priestess turns fully, and begins to move from the statue again, plotting a course towards a small metal box to one side of the altar. She gently eases the door open to reveal little more than old dust inside, the scent of ancient spices and plant matter long surrendered to time.
"...does not live in this place," she finishes her sentence. "And what She speaks is no song."
Hand resting on the tabernacle, the priestess shrugs her shoulders slowly. "I would prefer that you not break the window. It is dry in here right now. It will not be if you start smashing things."
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
"So you can hear it," the traveller observes placidly.
He finally looks up, and his eyes are the most abominable crystalline blue.
"Is it not the most captivating aria you've heard?"
Few people can hold eyesight with him for very long. His eyes are of the sort that causes the eyes to water if you look into them too long, a cornflower blue that shines of its own volition, but shimmers in just the wrong angles and in just the wrong ways, with far too many edges and far too many things that nest in those edges, like a mirror that has been broken and set aside for the infestation to begin. It is hard not to imagine the things that breed in the striations of his shining blue irises. An intimate suggestion that tugs on the mind again and again....
His face is conventionally smooth, though his face has the angular cut and long lines of a predator. No matter the voice, his is the soft expression of something far from gentle. Even now, he stands, and this time the one who sits is the idea left by the wayside, taking slow steps out of the lines of this church, his bootfall more solid as he strides along towards her, his hands neutral at his sides, his gait calm. What you seek is not in this place.
"Do you imagine so?" he asks calmly, stepping alongside her as she minds the tabernacle, but makes no move to engage her further than that, preferring instead to look to the great statue, now a distance away. "I don't think that's true. This song is in everything. And the one who sings it is God. If it is not her, if she does not know how to dance, then she is just another pretty lie told by Heaven. Just another iscariot." The traveller smiles gently. It would be a pleasant expression.
"Then, I will definitely kill her."
<Pose Tracker> Neriah Parringer has posed.
The Priestess does not seem like she will look away. The hood conceals the details of her features - but beneath it, the oddly Euclidian man can make out a glint of a curious colour.
Human eyes do not normally come in a shade of pale orchid, with tiny sparks like dull embers burning in little hellfire patterns behind them.
Whatever the Priestess is made of, she keeps her eyes fixed on the real figure of the man, seeming to see the phantom images for what they are and relegate them in her mind to the realm of delusion. Her hand lingers on the tabernacle, thumb lazily tracing along its edge. "You hear many things but I suspect none of them are what you believe you hear," she remarks, her tone level, but with a cynical dryness to it.
Finally, she lowers her hand from the metal cube, letting it fall to her side once more. "I suspect you will have rather a harder time doing that than you seem to think. But then, I am only a listener who does not know what an iscariot is," she says in a somewhat lower voice, lacking any real inflection. Almost a drone. "Of course... what else should I be to you?
"For one who understands what it is to be lied to by heaven... do you truly come to seek truth in the eyes of its messengers... in the places where heaven's fingerprints are most numerous?"
The Priestess tilts her head to one side to look up at the strange, ill-defined man beside her. For a flicker of a second, the light catches her just right that the sparks in her eyes seem all the brighter - and somehow, in their way, far more dreadful than her serene countenance.
"One wonders where it is that you seek the truth. Do you turn your back to the heavens and find it where it lies... like sea glass upon a shore? Or do you bow your head and listen to the voices which whisper in places that cannot be seen under a great light?"
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
Isiris Shango'Ra neriah
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The traveller's delusions flicker, and reset. As the priestess can see behind him, she will notice that they repeat their previous actions, all getting up from the pew in series, moving to the window, the bowl, towards her. The young man steps up past her again. Even as he stands by her for a moment, he seems content to look up at that statue, reverent to something entirely different than what he is looking at.
"So you seem to believe," he reflects fondly.
He has a strange way about him, the way he moves. It doesn't seem entirely rooted in the physical. His subtle step does not carry an overage of exertion to it, but he seems to move imperceptibly faster than even the slightest movement would suggest, as if he were skipping some section of space or another. As if here were himself one of the delusions that pace the church upon his arrival. He faces her, though she would be hard pressed to remember the time when he decided to do so. He strides around her, looking along the length of the priestess and watching the strength of her resolve--no, that's just an ideation. Just another delusion.
He never actually turns, still looking up at the statue.
Her eyes, her voice, they border on the cicada. Her cynic had provoked the mildest of smiles in him, but her riposte returns his calm. "Do not misunderstand. I do not seek truth. I carry it with me, the whole time."
When he turns, it is the most painfully slow motion, as agonizing as the dawn. There is no grandiose motion to it, no great flourish. He responds to her voice with the full weight of his attention. And she will hold up all the weight of heaven on only her shoulders and hers alone.
"I feel closer. It is as if you understand this cruel thing."
To be this close to the traveller's obsessions is suffocating. He steps nearer the priestess. "You say these things, as if you did not hear what I heard. Speaking of a pretend goddess in our mind who does not know to sing, who does not dance. Who does not know thing thing we know, the inimitable reach of mercy. And I find myself to wonder. You ask me where I listen.... but if.."
His hand raises, to touch at one of the folds of her robe and cloak, the loose seams that hold it together. His touch is curious. If she does not shy away, does not flee from the traveller, he will feel along the edge of her sash and past her cloak, right until he reaches the clasp of the cape, the sigil of Althena at her neck. "..if I were to answer you.." he continues to wonder, his eyes reflected in the metals of the claspwork, "...would you run away?"
He will not take his hand from her until she decides.
"You say it is hard to kill an iscariot. But if I invited you to walk with me to show mercy to these lies... tell me, pious maid. Would you not pick up the knife?"
<Pose Tracker> Neriah Parringer has posed.
The priestess in white does not move - like a pure white rock in the middle of a whirlwind of phantom strangers wandering from place to place around her, none of them especially rooted in the laws of physics and reason.
And yet it doesn't seem to rattle her. The eldritch layers of person and not-person resolve themselves in her vision with startling clarity. Only when the one that is actually present begins to turn does the priestess tilt her head ever so slightly to one side, not giving ground as he steps up to her, still talking. She simply listens.
Until the odd man reaches out and places his hand on her cloak, and parts the fabric just enough to rest a hand on her sash. It's at her hips; he'll have to go all the way up the her body to get to the sigil clasped at her collar. From the way the dress follows her figure, it could be a surprisingly inviting journey, should he be allowed to take it.
He wont be. He doesn't make it halfway there before he can feel what happens: An immense surge of some kind of dreadful ENERGY. It is felt a split-second before it is seen or perceived to the other senses.
It feels, to the psychic, like someone has just opened the doorway to the deepest part of Hell and let the screams and miasma pour free.
It manifests a tenth of a second later. Surging out from around the priestess, a field of shimmering, arcane patterns suddenly projects, an irresistable wall of force. It does not strike him - it simply pushes out from her body. The man's hand may remain in contact with it, but the field will push it out of contact with her skin. Bizarre fluctuations and eldritch patterns weave mind-boggling lines across the face of the shield, forming patterns that go nowhere and everywhere, in and out of madness.
"Keep your hands to yourself," she says flatly.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
His touch is rebuked, the nightmare energy blooming from her. The bale of heat from Hell blows his coat around him, and the nonsense weave of night knitting itself tightly underneath his hand forces it away from her skin. Horror, madness, and the inimitable sweep of the dark esconces him, threads of terror crawling in the energy. Blue eyes settle on the surface, reading the patterns.
One by one, each of the duplicates fall to their knees, catching fire in turn and bursting into thick oily black. The writhing black spreads and stretches from the pool, bursting like boils into flutters of dark feathers, nonsensical amalgamations and knots of black fluttering around the two of them, settling in the rafters and pews in one chattering horde of squirming black. Scores of blue eyes shine.
The traveller never lifts his hand from the swell of her shield, cupping a hand over the chaotic writhe appreciatively. As she speaks to him flatly, he looks up calmly, his eyes flicking across the patterns and swirls of formula. "Is it really my hands that you turn away from?" He asks politely, his touch never leaving the shield. "Even should you," he asks quietly, stepping close enough that he no longer needs to outstretch his arm, his touch trailing lower against that madness field. "All that you will turn aside in the end... I wonder, that should I devote myself to a scintilla of your lost innocence, if you will only amuse me awhile..."
From his fingertips, the black begins to crawl, a cold and necrotic thing. Thin threads of dead angel's hair squirm over the shield as the dark begins to spread. As he manipulates the psychosis with his hands, the hair begins to form a black milk, fingers and soon fully-sized hands lifting from the infection as they palm and paw their way across the priestess' dark shield. It is not clear what he is trying to do. Even when the black spread begins to curtain her bubble, will she still proudly stand her ground? Or will she do even more?
"Confess to me, young devout, and show me the mercy you know.."
<Pose Tracker> Neriah Parringer has posed.
The shield is not putting out much heat at all; the sense of hellish horror is more metaphysical than tangible, a sense that the soul could very well curdle.
The priestess looks on, expression difficult to read with that hood in the way as the duplicate strangers melt and erupt away into something noxious and nonsensical. Finally, as the man continues to fondle her shield, she cants her head a little to the left, watching as the threads of dead energy begin to knit their way up the shield.
They find resistance. A charge of some sort pulses along the shield; the threads that come into contact with it can't make it all the way, and those that threaten to encroach higher find some part of themselves being bled away, as though each step up the shield were stripping off their charge and consuming it. Energy pulses through the field, the eldritch forces gaining another layer of complexity. The black spread doesn't consume the field - the field simply absorbs it seamlessly and draws its energy into itself, bolstering it, as if one energy marries hand in hand with the other.
The priestess frowns a little.
"You seem to be under a misapprehension," she says quietly as she lifts delicate hands. She carefully tugs off her right glove, then her left. With slender hands, she traces her fingers along her hood and pushes it back.
For those who have seen Neriah before, the change in her style is stark. For those who have never seen her, it is like the hood of purity slipping back to reveal sin and night poured into a mould of beauty. She's let her hair grow out, the raven curls framing her features to lend them a pale, porcelain-doll delicacy; her eyes have shifted to an orchid hue, ruddy red light dancing behind them.
She lifts her right hand and holds it out towards the stranger - but no attack comes. Fingers splayed, she simply reveals something.
Deep cuts carved into her palm, drawing out a shape in fresh, red blood. The lines form a stigmata - a symbol. A twisted delta.
"That I am young and innocent to what it is you and I share," she says with a slight dip of her lashes. "You fooled me a bit before, pal, but I can feel our mutual buddy in there."
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The threads of angel slip from his fingers, trawling away into nothingness. Only curiosity stays his hand, a start causing the traveler to draw away rather than simply pierce forward. Shining eyes look at his hand curiously, as if it had simply betrayed him. The world shifts around him, and splinters. A kaleidoscopic view of the same instant, over and over again... he looks up a hundred times before he sees.
"...!"
'Do you think she knows what to do with us?'
The stigmata hewn into the priestess' hand as she reveals herself is the only thing that sparks any sort of reaction in the traveller, locking g eyes on the symbol unseeingly. It might be easy to imagine he simply doesn't have any agency in the matter, as he shows no conscious memory of the symbol, and seems, in truth, to be looking through it. He regains himself after only a moment.
"...I wonder," he begins, "what else you are not innocent of...."
One hand opens slowly, and shimmering dark ripples from the wound he inflicts by slamming it into his chest, fingers wrapping around the hilt of a blade as he draws it from his chest. Steel of a technology beyond what is imaginable in the world draws from the would, the long curved edge of a sword rippling into view. "It's been some time since I've received such a plain invitation," he asides. "To accurately determine the soul of cruelty with only a glance... an adored ability. Perhaps you will be the one whom will lay at the head of all creation, in the end."
As he raises his sword, it is actually plainly evident it is not an ornamental display.
The earth shifts as he begins. The string grows taut.
"Perhaps I face an angel, today."
Insanity peels away at the edges of everything, hands gripping and clawing at the floorboards desperately around them. He never concedes his grace, his serenity. Even as he stares at the so-called priestess. "I am only a messenger in the end, the one who fell, the one who seeks. Who are we to question the forces that occur far above our head? I have only one purpose in these long abandoned and suffering worlds. Maybe you are the one."
"But that means that I must love you, like so many of my favored. And that of any other, our predestination means I will be the one to make you suffer the most.."
The amount of energy building within his traces is more than enough to flatten the delapidated church.
<Pose Tracker> Neriah Parringer has posed.
The shield just seems to feed on the energy that creeps across it, the eldritch patterns forming a horrifying kaleidoscope that makes absolutely no sense to those trying to follow the patterns with the eyes. And Neriah keeps on holding that hand out.
Even as the man in front of her slams his hand into his chest and pulls out a weapon. Her eyebrows arch ever so slightly.
So this one's a little crazier than Millenia. Okay. I can deal with that, Neriah reflects. If he gets to be a problem I can always just eat him.
Common ground or not, she follows that sword with her eyes, then snaps her gaze towards the face of the obviously crazy man in front of her, watching how his expression holds that odd serenity even as he starts powering up through that weapon. The floorboards begin to buckle and shudder.
Neriah doesn't move. She merely lowers her eyelids. "You have a tall, tall hill to climb, my friend," she says. "My entire life has been suffering. Pain and torment. Grappling with generations of death.
"Killing death."
Something else begins to build. The shield remains in place, but the power radiating out from Neriah swells and eddies. The patterns rippling along the shield begin to flood outwards. They swell into flowing shadows, tenebrous grasping hands of indistinct form, obscene tendrils against which the impressions of screaming faces yawn and howl before blurring into more grasping hands and writhing tendrils and gaping beaks and eyes.
The horrific power reaches out to intertwine itself with the swelling madness and serenity, as if to take its hand and test it, to feed on it and taste the insanity behind it. To enjoy a little nibble.
"An angel... how flattering," she says, her voice underlaid by a lower, throatier version of her own cadence to lend her speech an odd, dissonant echo. The orchid shade of her eyes shifts to a ruddy, malevolent red. "But no... the Chains of Arius didn't hold an angel.
"Maybe you'll even find out more."
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The energy channelled would be baffling to anyone outside of this church. It flares dangerously and beyond the borderpost of what mages can withstand, and yet there is no corona, no visible energy aura. Merely horrific whispers that slide through the air, as hands crawl from every corner, feeling alongside the surfaces of new teeth in the surfaces of the walls and floors. The world slowly tilts on its axis, seeming to list further and further from reality, as the wires holding up the world sing with unimaginable pressure.
The hands crawl over the statue of Althena, turning the goddess black.
There is nothing that is reasoned when that cascading power settles against the shadow flare. Again and again, it intertwines itself, only for the edges of his own power to reset and wind through the motions of it again, looping again and again, losing more of its identity each time. As it is, she says she has sufered every moment of her life, every moment pain. The rapid corruption of the church's reality spreads quickly, so much like pain.
The messenger's eyes half-lid, in an eerie mirror to the priestess.
"I would expect nothing less."
And with one stroke of the blade, he cuts everything down.