In the Flooded Woods of Midrandir south of The Shadewood, south of the current capital's border, sleeps a dead kingdom older, truer, more dimensional, rooted deeper into the landscape, understanding better the magic of existence.
It was one of those electrically blue days when the tallest mountain cracked, it's spine breaking under the pressure of its inhabitants, the deep unseen weight of sorceries. Time did not seem to pass as much as much as build, slowly gathering weight. The sky seemed to drip silver. Those were the last days of an empire. A late summer with gray ladies nearly dead to all the poetry written in their names, sunlight trying to penetrate through the fog.
A population of thunderers and hags. Were-elves streaking in and out of forests at night to leave subversive handbill at door and window. They dragged through wet streets speaking in languages older than the stones of cities buried in sand. They began to feel they're sinking into history, as if the dead really do persist. They remembered a land where you could somehow walk, and not need the Waygates, and bones still could rest in peace, nourishing ghosts of dandelions, no one to plow them up. The gods had to intervene. Dozens of birds swarmed around a woman, all her loses made a blessing in her hand. This was Sabra. An angel descended from an electrically blue sky. Any truth their life possessed was buried in this central rock. Their one escape, a dreamless sleep. The Hollow Pillar.
Before that, rain poured in the abstract garden. White nightmares voiced on the floor below. Rain in the boots of the people in Nureck. Rain on the nameless moor. It was a late summer.
In stillness they sought a form of self-defense. Even then they began to dream a return to great palaces, the great jaded hulks, boarded up but still standing, as far as anyone knew, in this city, always on the edge of comatose slums. A beggar revealed himself to be a saint, Legin of Lechsea.
It was a land policed by the Emperor’s linguists, by technicians in death-system control, disease consultants, profiteers of the fetus industry. "The seventh floor wants you to read it and sign it", "You're free to be nothing", "Music is the final hypnotic" these are all things they whispered in his royal ear.
The saint wondered whether he'd need a new following or whether the old would simply rearrange itself to accommodate his second coming. Either way he'd be the epoch's barren hero. He seemed impatient with the world for not knowing the things he knew.
The old age of youth, a rising belief in death-in-life, there was too much gravity in the universe. Whatever horror was ultimate subsumed into an even more immobile category, paranoia.
the blindmaidens naked on styrofoam pedestals, the sellers of ancient medicines, the masters of trance, the black stoics exhibiting their puncture marks, the knifemen and poisoners, every head melting in the wrap of The Sound. Mystics in heat, translucent boys fondling the tits of missionaries' wives. They pressed against each other, chained to their invisible history, the youngest among them knowing of all needs that one is upper-most, the need to be illiterate in the land of the self-erasing word.
The Emperor, usually located somewhere on the outskirts of a vast population center, sat on the bed or floor, never in chairs, sucking up bad hash, waiting for the ever-rumored to come slipping in out of the glades in a comically elegant carriage into which seven or eight bodies might eventually drop, musicians, long blond girls with perfect legs, most in soiled old clothes and mauled boots.
There was a remote secret, something one might seek to reach only through the unbent energies of certain drugs. A puppet drug of technology, made and marketed under supervision, a contingency weapon devised by City paranoiacs seeking geometries deeper than we know of, their voices uttering secrets we are never told.
The Emperor became both frightened and totally immobile, distrustful of everyone in the room, growing heavier by the second. He tried to reason his way out of this conjuncture of fear and stone-weight.
His last words were not spoken, only written on a discarded memorandum scroll:
You are hunter prophet
You are lion's paw
You are angel avenger
Come to my door
West the vanished mountains
East the barren fields
Shining bird
Sleeping long and deep
Dreamed pillar
Down the highlands
They're counting up the dead
Music playing in the highlands
To be younger than the ones you kill
And remain a velvet child
General and his lady
You have lost the war
I have lost the war
The Fall Equinox came to these whole ashen plains. The wind blew so hard blood glazed on the sides of trees. All hope of waking lost, in the nightmare of the ashen plains.
Nature had become imbecilic here, forcing its pain to find a voice. There was never heard a sound so primal. It expressed the secret feculent menace of a forest or swamp. They could almost feel the sound under their feet. In the stillness it seemed extremely near, mossy flesh touching their ankles. The beauty and horror of wordless things. It began to snow late in the day of Equinox. It was real snow and it was falling now. Riders, wayfarers, snow emergency routes, salt spreaders, bridges and tunnels and ports. Snow was coming down the sky. It was falling on the city and on the countryside. Snowstorm.
Silence came in, sculptured by spoken dreams, by pain-voices, Lord of the Night's children. Praying to their master all over this frost and harrowed city.
Autumn had only just began and the mornings were cold and dark. Lights dissolved in low fog, silent men clutched eyes in pain, apparitional in black slickers. Derelicts were everywhere, often too wasted or tired to beg. There was pure sound now, shrill wind, a voice from the evilest dreams. Sabra was trying to blink her way back to the realm of events, but her long druid's face rested, having slid into a shallow trance, fallen into the habit of simply listening to silence endowed with acoustical properties, Music of a dead universe.
In the house near Duindil where centuries pass like the empurpled clouds, there is moonlight on the river and great rotting towers arrayed across the night. They couldn't go out West to find privacy. There was no safe land left. They needed to build inwards, that was the only direction left to build. Building inwards. Those were the orders of Lord Iston Moonpearl, his slight diffident voice, never cresting, belonging to an alternate entity, a small man lodged in his chest cavity. Iston is waiting for the first line of light to appear across a tall tower window, experiencing a rare moment of solitude and whispering to the wind:
Being young restores the god that eats itself
Better than the feast that ends
When they pick us from their teeth
They will study us not by digging into the earth
But by climbing vast dunes of rubble and mutilated stone
Seeking to reach the tops of our buildings
Here they'll chip lovingly at our spires, mansards, turrets, flower pots, pigeon lofts and chimneys
Scaling our masonry they will find
The encrustations of art and culture, decade by decade
There was a sound in the darkness outside, a sudden tumult over the city. The town more dead than alive. The sun is still below the horizon. The day feels like rain, but for now the air is uncommonly clear. Ice and sunlight turn the construction to electric-white lines of energy.
Creatures of fable spoke the words of sleepers, singly, coupled, in chorus. The rhythms made no waking sense. Lord Iston thought they were warning him ... visibly angry that he couldn't understand. Undreamed grammar floats in his spittle. Dispossessed elves run around up on the roof, gibbering, dancing on a Latin balcony. Their bodies lacquered, sprayed with the rarest of pressurized jellies. Iston's bride, Morwen, had a magic face, a face everyone knows. She stared at him from across the bedroom.
Past the cemeteries towards Anurin, tides of ash-light broke across the spires. It was clear the inhabitants became interested in endings, in how to survive a dead idea. Spending their evenings running around in little circles. The inhabitants led a scattered life. Probably some kind of astral madness. Their rooms yielded no secrets, it became obvious they were mourning, or whatever the elven equivalent of mourning is. They got stuck in new levels of madness every day. All over the country there was nothing but madness. Anurin was the sheer peak.
At the end, bearers of a weight that went beyond simple pounds and ounces, men and women single file, leaning into the wind, following mountain guides, traveled to some sort of center. They flooded the paths behind them, escaping their own homes in narrow and elegant warships, riding into the sunset like a sort of funeral for their empire.
d20 Random denizens of Mirandir (50% chance of being an ancient, thousand year old imperial elves. Otherwise usually a human)
1. Artist, specializes in taking a tiny stitich and ripping it wide, blinking (teleporting) while the blood flows.
2. 2d6 Marauders not eager to browse in this particular room, they feel displaced.
3. 2d4 Gaunt dogs picking in the rubble for scraps of food
4. Patron saint of all those who hear the river-whistles sing the mysteries and who return to sleep in wine by the south wheel of the city.
5. Traveler who lost his soul and only talks about traveling.
6. 2d6 Living effigies of sane men leading normal lives.
7. A very snaky boy. Sheer snake. Heavy lidded reptile eyes.
8. Scientific genius of the underground. Elusive and crazy, wears disguises of various kinds.
9. 3d6 Barbarians with a quaint sense of theatre.
10. A tall laconic man with a scar.
11. A slow motion sprinter. a Quickling fey seeming to move in slow-motion.
12. Diane, bad posture, smudged fingers, horrible posture. Her voice burns slightly. Literally causes things to go in smoke. Just slightly. Unless she shouts.
13. Mylon, folk singer from the West. Lean black man with strange eyes. Carrying a dead dog.
14. A convocation of 3d10 martyrs, divine kidneys, lungs aloft in smoke visible behind their skin. They are perishable but never ending.
15. Rat bastard
16. A leper planting trees.
17. The Anti-king and duplicate bishops of hallucination.
18. d4 Bloody oxen
19. d4 ladies in chiseled jade, panne velvet, attar of damask rose
20. 2d4 men trapped with the voice, vocal range of bats. They're something in-between.
