There is an overwhelming, smothering sense of Presence in the writhing dark--the feeling of sharing a room with another being hideously magnified a hundred thousand times. Except what is Present, what Speaks, is so far beyond personhood as L understands it that no conversation is possible. Will I die if I don't? he asks, and the writhing swarm beneath his feet, the Song that calls to the brainstem, the Presence that perfuses them all answer: All will kill. All will die.
An instance of the red-haired man erupts in L's path, corona-in-oilslick eyes rolling in his head, mouth working--HELP ME--before he's torn to pieces again. Dunes and hillocks of writhing bodies heave around him, throwing up great rows of tombstones, tumescent piles of skulls.
Distantly, the one other person here--the fractional person--the beacon leading L through the red-washed blackness hears him speak and stops. She turns back (it is all she can do; she cannot walk back against the call of the Throne) and holds her feathered arms wide, awaiting his approach. (Nothing hinders him yet except the sucking shifting devouring sink of substrate beneath his feet; the chitin is sharp, it may pierce, but they do not turn on him yet.
Not yet.)
She will embrace him as he reaches her, and cup taloned hands over his too-small shell-like ears. don't listen. she expresses. walk.
Behind her, unnoticed--her small capacity for attention is fixed on him--the floor undulates, insects draining away like the ominous outgoing tide before a killing wave.
Something looms in the distance, texture more than shadow in the dark, arching high and starred with blood-red pinprick stars of consumption.]
cws continue; Throne-space is grody
There is an overwhelming, smothering sense of Presence in the writhing dark--the feeling of sharing a room with another being hideously magnified a hundred thousand times. Except what is Present, what Speaks, is so far beyond personhood as L understands it that no conversation is possible. Will I die if I don't? he asks, and the writhing swarm beneath his feet, the Song that calls to the brainstem, the Presence that perfuses them all answer: All will kill. All will die.
An instance of the red-haired man erupts in L's path, corona-in-oilslick eyes rolling in his head, mouth working--HELP ME--before he's torn to pieces again. Dunes and hillocks of writhing bodies heave around him, throwing up great rows of tombstones, tumescent piles of skulls.
Distantly, the one other person here--the fractional person--the beacon leading L through the red-washed blackness hears him speak and stops. She turns back (it is all she can do; she cannot walk back against the call of the Throne) and holds her feathered arms wide, awaiting his approach. (Nothing hinders him yet except the sucking shifting devouring sink of substrate beneath his feet; the chitin is sharp, it may pierce, but they do not turn on him yet.
Not yet.)
She will embrace him as he reaches her, and cup taloned hands over his too-small shell-like ears. don't listen. she expresses. walk.
Behind her, unnoticed--her small capacity for attention is fixed on him--the floor undulates, insects draining away like the ominous outgoing tide before a killing wave.
Something looms in the distance, texture more than shadow in the dark, arching high and starred with blood-red pinprick stars of consumption.]