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Post by Admin on Oct 27, 2012 13:30:56 GMT -6
Continued from rpgqod.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=hell&action=display&thread=180Bardiel is yanked into the Abyss by countless formless, there-but-not-there "hands." The silence is complete - and yet hundreds and thousands of voices all cry out against their imprisonment as one. The darkness is complete - but at the edges of vision lie swirling forms of things no sane eye can decipher. Was it a woman peering coyly behind her hair, or was it some monstrous beast snarling hungrily? The chain binding Bardiel to the material world in Hell is surrounding by blacker-than-black shadows seeming to gnaw on it - only to vanish completely once spotted. The "hands" continue to pull him through - or are they simply leaving him to float in the endless nothing of oblivion that is also the font of creation?
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Post by Hallow Sancti on Oct 27, 2012 14:06:53 GMT -6
The darkness slowly thins like mist freezing away, or maybe it's something the eyes can just get used to...
Things begin to stay instead of fading, crumbled corners and fallen pillars shaping themselves out of the darkness. Rubble literally chokes everything. Skeletal branches protrude from between fallen chunks of architecture. The facades of the buildings have fallen away to show the tattered remains of rooms. Streets wind off in every direction most blocked by fallen stones or dropping suddenly into the darkness.
The whole place is slimy with a black ooze, turning everything oddly bluish and grim. The wind picks up and blows a few stained pieces of litter across the stones. It sighs through the ruins like a long held breath.
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Bardiel
Bourgeois
Outlands Wanderer
Posts: 147
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Post by Bardiel on Oct 27, 2012 21:28:17 GMT -6
It had a hunger, an insatiable desire to be filled. A bleak longing for a cup, a bowl, a river, an ocean of love, but still it would not be enough to fill their hearts, hearts riddled with holes, draining sanity away, empty and empty. He watched as he began to unwind, body unravelling, unmaking his soul. Together they screamed for a miracle to come and complete them. Death would not give them what they needed to free his heart form her. Fly little angel, she did not speak, her tongue running up his neck, teasing him with gifts half remembered, that space directly behind your head where the it hides, let’s be the end together you and I. Still he fought, fought to escape, running from the name carved into his heart. Where are you now? He heard a voice speaking in the language of silence, felt the touch of that awful expanse. It tried to hold on to him but still the empty space was denied, even as she screamed; You’re abandoned! Try as that lonely voice might to bring him back into the deep forest of her embrace he faded away like a dieing song laughing madly through the passionless vacuum.
“So you hound me even here.” The stranger was concealed by darkness but there was no mistaking the velvet in those words, the words that lived now only in Bardiels memory. Fear gripped him, drove him forward in blind flight, toward the blade that would fell him, the brother that would curse him. These things he feared, but that was not what hurtled him through the skies, the mind destroying terror that sent him burning through heaven, crashing through earth, straight through hell and beyond. Still falling, even now. He looks up through his greasy mass of hair and smiles, perfect golden lips pealing softy over shining pearly teeth.
“Stop it, just stop it.” She wraps her slender arms around her body as if to protect herself from those words. She trembled, and he remembered she was only a little thing. He didn’t want to make her cry. But when she looked down at him there were no tears in her deep dark, star filled eyes, only a quiet and helpless pain. “Why are you lying to me?”
He said nothing. It had all been said already.
“So you’re doing this thing to yourself because of them?” This time something did swim there, emotion bringing to life her alabaster features. She held them back. She let them die.
Kneeling in one graceful motion, with the sound of silk water running over skin, she extends a porcelain hand to tuck away his matted locks, but he jerks his head away, giggling maniacally.
“You were no martyr brother, please,” the ivory woman insists. “Mock me not.”
They are silent for a moment, and all is quiet. The silence stretches out to surround them, so complete that each is not even able to hear the others breathing. Then he opens his mouth, strangely lucid. He takes her delicate chin in one of his twistedly disfigured hands so that their eyes can meet.
Bardiel felt a twinge somewhere behind his eyes. They exploded into bloom like bloody, burning flowers. Black sludge erupted violently from the orifices of his face as it spiralled away into the void. His wings twisted and snapped and split, spitting splinters of bone to orbit him like a veil of knives. His body began to shrink into itself, contorting, limbs curling like some alien arachnid drowning in a toxic foam.
Bound to his withering form by chains of boiling blood, linked by tissue ripped from his own arteries, the crucifix looked down at him, its bleak light as apathetic and callous as the ultimate night that ultimately surrounded him, and entered him.
Are you insane? Her sightless eyes opened all over him, like blinking wounds. You can’t drag God down. Still he played amongst the mists of fantasy, the sound of madness trumpeting out the absurd, breathing into her an animalistic heart beat. The dieing embers of him were now hers to feel, he had no more fire, but somehow the promise of light was still there, the deadly promise of fuel waiting to burn, volatile, unstable, special.
Warmth came, a bizarre thing, a polluted light that sunk down deep into the ashen labyrinth of that dead place, lost yes, infinitely lost, a light for the forgotten, a light made more perverse by its tainted memory, now the shadows it cast festered in the abyss, horrid parodies of the darkness they once were. It knew it was not alone, it could feel her eyes looking in on its monstrous form, giving the creature shape. Giving the nightmare direction. A path toward the light.
Even as Bardiels lungs burst like balloons into shreds of meaty fabric the stoic radiance of the crucifix knitted him back together, he had no body, his body was destroyed. Lumps of flesh and feathers packed close together by the pressure of the abyss were all that remained bloated and bleeding like some wretched egg. Bardiel raised a hand to the membrane of his small world, the only thing between him and the end of all things. He pushed, hatching from the flesh egg in a shower of embryonic fluid.
He was all alone. Alone, her voice echoed. She came to him then, talking to him, watching him lie there before her. Singing gently, whispering dark secrets of despair. Please sleep, forever in your memory lonely with me, she sang. Like silken sheets of winter, the cold caressed over him, undressing his stress. Hiding the angel away, no he was gone again. Always looking for him, searching deep down in the sewers of that barren empire, even stepping tentatively out into the light where she would look longingly for him in the sky, wondering if the sun was crying for the son it lost, and if it did it must be in some sad, insignificant way. She did not care enough for him to cry, the darkness sung sweetly into his ears. Goodbye. Goodnight. Lost in her lullaby of lies, the darkness covering the maze of his thoughts, making the strange corridors perilous, the twisting winding path of his history, and the city of the Fallen’s dreams hugged tight by the shadows that pressed themselves eagerly against those streets, wantonly against his body, so coldly distant and remorseless.
The scar crossing his chest began to move. Something was within, gestating inside himself, gorging itself on his desires, inflating like a maggot gnawing on the fruit of his organs. Pearl like blisters began to appear in the unhealing flesh, they lengthened, growing into a forest of countless teeth, warping the bisecting wound into a pallid grimace of crooked blades. Like some gigantic quartered maw the jaws of the scar ripped open, cracking his ribcage. The God eater started devouring him alive.
Timidly it kneels, bringing his face close. It extends a black hand as substantial as smoke, the gesture a fragment from his own memories. The shadow leaned forward, a winged creature reflected in its dark mirror infecting the void with strange sensations. Carefully it brushes his lips, the caustic kiss painting them with a poisonous tar.
Is this you? She whispered again, together with him but alone. I’m alive he remembered, as he was before surrounded by the dammed. Your plan, the choir of mutes sang, it’s a pointless shot in the dark, it’s not fair, I’m lost, he thinks. But my God, my fear will be worth any price. To force feed them all this chaos, silent while they weep.
Consciousness slowly returns and for what feels like the fist time, Bardiel struggles to speak. To him in that empty place, it felt like they would be the first words that had ever been spoken ever. It would be the proclamation that brought the light of creation into existence, the syllables that dawned time and brought an end to the primordial night. Once he had spoken there would be no going back. A genesis for the voice itself. He wets his lips. And says;
“Tastes like rainbows.”
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Post by Hallow Sancti on Oct 27, 2012 21:52:57 GMT -6
The wind blows a piece of litter right onto the Fallen's face, covering his eyes and filling his nose with the scent of frozen death...
Then as sudden as it came the wind is gone, and the ensuing silence rings loudly in the ears.
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Bardiel
Bourgeois
Outlands Wanderer
Posts: 147
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Post by Bardiel on Oct 28, 2012 7:39:22 GMT -6
The Fallen’s wings open to try and catch the ominous wind sailing through the ruins and he rises off the ground. As the winds dies, like everything else in that place, Bardiel remains suspended above the floor. He tries to touch down but only manages to struggle helplessly over the ancient rubble. Bardiel can feel himself falling still, but remains perversely stationary, as if in orbit. With a cry of mounting panic he claws feverishly at the empty void between him and the decrepit street before suddenly crashing back down, landing on his face.
“What I’m doing… Is it real?” Bardiel mutters to himself as the dust around him settles. Bringing two fingers to his lips, he wipes them slowly across the side of his face and looks at them for a moment, seeing things that might or might not be there.
Eventually the feather haired Fallen rises to his feet and begins cautiously making his way through the littered streets, wings pulled in close against his body. The crucifix around his neck glowed silently but the light it gave off did nothing to banish the shadows, instead they grew longer and stronger in that greasy radiance. Bardiel gripped the cross in one hand and found it had stuck to his chest, superimposed over his unhealing wound. Recalling it had been wreathed in flames, he pries it free, expecting burns. Instead a fleshy mucus of scar tissue clings to the crucifix's back. Bardiel lets the holy artefact fall back on its chain, struggling to not think about what it could mean.
Alone in an extinct universe Bardiel wanders, searching for the Queen.
“Wait for me.”
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Post by Hallow Sancti on Oct 29, 2012 10:17:59 GMT -6
It seems as though Bardiel's breath stirs the wind. A sprightly breeze tugs at him as it passes down one of the few unblocked streets, stirring tatters of stained cloth and paper in the empty skulls of the buildings.
Somewhere close there is a soft thump, and a small cloud of dust jets into the air.
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Bardiel
Bourgeois
Outlands Wanderer
Posts: 147
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Post by Bardiel on Oct 30, 2012 3:57:50 GMT -6
Bardiel immediately freezes mid step, his eyes wide, panicked ears straining against the whispering of the breeze. Like a bow drawing back to fire, he crouches low to the ground, trembling with adrenaline. Unconscious ticks twist his mouth and flex his fingers as the Fallen coils himself into a stance his mind forgets but his war forged body recalls with eerie clarity. Wound like a spring, Bardiel remains frozen still, his heart hammering against his chest.
One, two, three heart beats and growing louder, surely the treacherous rhythm would give his position away. The towering Fallen slowly opens his mouth, breathing heavily. The fear in his eyes has been replaced with an infectious excitement that was smouldering like a fever. Heedless of the tiny voice of reason in his head Bardiel races toward the plume of dust, scrambling over the debris which blocked his path, the heavy chain back to Hell sailing behind him like the string of a kite.
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Post by Hallow Sancti on Nov 12, 2012 20:19:25 GMT -6
The dust settles slowly, drifting away in the wind. As Bardiel nears it's source he can see a great library. Towers of books are stacked like children's blocks surrounding an ancient bench. A pale creature is curled on the couch, cobwebs draping her form but not entirely hiding the segmented joints of her arms and legs.
One of the ruined books has slid from the creature's lap to shatter on the floor below. The pages are scattered far and wide and the ever playful wind whips the last one aloft towards Bardiel's face, again.
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Bardiel
Bourgeois
Outlands Wanderer
Posts: 147
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Post by Bardiel on Nov 16, 2012 2:59:58 GMT -6
Bardiel’s mad charge forward painfully slows as he comes into the looming presence of the fossilized library. As if the air around the fallen had gotten heavier, he slogged forward like a drowned man forging against the pressure that pressed down on and around him. His lungs fought like the breath they pumped in and out was mud. He places his hands on his knees, seemingly to rest himself, but the Fallen twists his head around this way and that, perhaps trying not to catch his breath but the buzzing roar of static that could be seen tormenting him behind the smile he wore on his face.
Like a snake his arm strikes, snaring the fluttering bird page just as it enters lethal range. The ancient paper crumbles slightly, still flapping feebly against the bars of the Fallen’s hand cage as if remembering the life the wind had briefly lent it. Bardiel looks over the escaped page, eyes softy tracing the symbols marked upon it, remembering, and mouth watering.
“Thus passes the glory of the world.” The page becomes a ball which passes Bardiel’s lips as he pushes it down his own throat, swallowing it whole.
Like a puppet whose strings have been pulled, the chain fettered Fallen slowly brings himself back to his full height, and turns his terrified face toward the creature on the bench. He begins to step toward, one hand outstretched, pushing through the cobwebs that were sometimes brambles and sometimes lace but never real, covered with thousands of black spiders, clinging to his wings like ash, crawling things that had been old and forgotten before the first amoeba had ever formed in some primordial ooze. Parting the haze of the veil, he sees it’s face, which he at once both despises and desires- then nothing.
A shadow passes itself over the Fallen’s golden features, hiding them and he mutters darkly to himself, that hand that had shown him the way becoming a trembling fist “Maybe why I can’t fall asleep... maybe I’m awake in her dreams.”
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Post by Hallow Sancti on Dec 4, 2012 22:56:34 GMT -6
The creature stirs in her dreams, moving fretfully as the cobwebs shift. She curls in on herself with her hands over her face. She makes a soft noise of complaint as more cobwebs fall around the two of them.
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Bardiel
Bourgeois
Outlands Wanderer
Posts: 147
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Post by Bardiel on Dec 17, 2012 7:24:32 GMT -6
Beneath the rotting wings of the fallen that loomed over her, his fractured presence rivalling even the decayed library that rose high into the abyss. Broken and going to ruin, enduring, indomitable against the ocean of darkness that broke against them, eroding away what could not follow the ghostly halo of light that he wore, that leads safely back to shore. Beneath the rotting wings of the fallen, bathed in the haunting glow of the will-o-wisp, the girl on the bench looked so small, and maybe to the sad eyes of the mad, even in this dead place, she looked alive.
In the grim light it was hard to tell what Bardiel’s face looked like, but there could have been something there, as realisation dawned in a land where the sun never could have. Something akin to hunger that perhaps even the void understands, if for no other reason than because nothing breeds hunger. Awakenings were painful, Bardiel knew, and he was no prince, although he might have once been any number of curious things. Without a word, he wraps a hand around her throat and lifts her up, tearing her from the embrace of her cobweb tomb, and presses a branding light made of metal and chains against her chest.
Like a drowning man, the fallen lashes out, struggling to stay afloat. Grasping about blindly he grabs hold of her, but she sinks like a stone and he can’t let go… But neither can the noose around his neck, and he hangs, perpetually falling, in orbit, laughing breathlessly at the view before beginning their way back, climbing up the gallows with his teeth.
And Bardiel is holding the creature’s hand, helping her rise from the weathered stone bench, where before there had only been the void now there where the shadows of chaos.
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Post by Hallow Sancti on Feb 28, 2013 22:31:07 GMT -6
Her blue eyes open wide and she tries to shriek but only chokes, convulsing violently. As they lift into the air she struggles, twisting and grabbing for a small case on the ground. She manages to loop just one finger through the strap, still trying to make some noise. Tangled in the chain the two hang over the silent ruins, dust drifting through the darkness.
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Bardiel
Bourgeois
Outlands Wanderer
Posts: 147
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Post by Bardiel on Mar 7, 2013 0:41:18 GMT -6
Looking down through the shadows Bardiel watches as he leads the odd demoness away, a pleasant expression on his face, his mouth moving, shaping sounds and syllables which made words that he couldn't hear. He was too far away. He couldn't warn the Bardiel on the ground that what trailed behind him was coming closer, he couldn't see the stillness of her features or feel the chill of her dead eyes. Tangled in the chain he tries to call out to himself as he chatters away in blissful and deadly ignorance. His voice comes out in a strangled gag, metal that he couldn't feel biting into his throat, cutting off the poisoned blood his diseased heart relentlessly pumped into his brain. She was there also, as the edges of his vision began to fade, the darkness of the void slowly drawing a curtain of eternal sleep over his eyes, over her dead eyes.
A sound, soft as a feather but there. She was making a noise, and the startling realisation strikes him that the noise was real, that the feathery haired demoness was real also, alive even. Encouraged by this turn of events the Fallen goes on to discover, to his complete surprise, that they are both being strangled and that he, Bardiel, is in fact the one doing the strangling. Relief floods through the Fallen's limbs and he lets the heavy chain his hands? go slack, releasing them both from its, his? hold. Taking a few burning breaths he turns to the strange demon.
“Thank goodness,” he laughs half heartedly, speaking to himself more than anything, voice raw “I thought we were in real danger there for a moment.”
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Post by Hallow Sancti on Mar 7, 2013 21:21:16 GMT -6
She coughs once more and then whispers "Who are you? You are not Her." Her joints creak softly as she moves back a step. "There is no one else here." Her eyes dart around and she hugs the case she'd reached for so desperately against her. She edges further back from him, until her bare feet hit a piles of books sending them cascading off the broken edge of the building. Another small plume of dust rises from their landing place.
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Bardiel
Bourgeois
Outlands Wanderer
Posts: 147
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Post by Bardiel on Mar 7, 2013 22:40:09 GMT -6
Bardiel freezes, as if his body had been suddenly crystallised in stillness. Waves of confusion ripple just beneath the nondescript mask of his face was the only indication that the whispering of the only voice, that wasn't in his head, had reached him. His composure breaks as she backs away from him, a treacherous hand rising to keep her in place, but the Fallen's teeth finds his fingers first and the impulse is resisted as he bites down on the digits.
He mumbles around the hand in his mouth, nodding his head up and down “I can't really be here then. That's a load off my mind.” His voice is oddly eloquent, given the hand in mouth, full of a confidence and a certainty his body did not reflect. “Isn't it obvious your majesty? Haven't you read any of these books? It should be clear who I am.”
All at once the Fallen straightens his back, tattered wings flaring dramatically out from his back, a cocky half smile on his face as he turns to defiantly confront the immense impossibility of the Abyss. “I'm Change. I'm an Idea. I'm here for you sweetheart.... I'm the Hero!”
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Post by Hallow Sancti on Mar 8, 2013 22:12:35 GMT -6
She stares at him, eyes widening as far as they can. Her voice strengthens as she speaks longer, though it remains a high pleasant fluting. "What is a "Your Majesty", pray tell?" She shifts a little leaning towards him while still staying out of his reach.
"Do I need a hero? I did not know that I was in a tale." Her eyes narrow. "Is this a..." She stops mid-sentence to stare at the stacks of books accusingly. "Are you what is called a dream? I do not think I like to dream." The pale purple creature looks him over from head to toe, frowning. "It is too exciting."
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Bardiel
Bourgeois
Outlands Wanderer
Posts: 147
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Post by Bardiel on Mar 11, 2013 0:43:05 GMT -6
The fallen crosses his arms and frowns childishly “No!” he snaps, stamping a foot down to emphasise the point. “I shan't tell you. The truth would be so unbelievably exciting that it'd turn your whole world all topsy turvy upside down.” Bardiel rocks his head from side to side, spinning the air around his ears with a pair of corpse like hands. It doesn't last long, and soon the gentle smile on the fallen's face turns sour, as if sickened by the fool it had been attached to.
“Right...”his voice seems to summon him closer, wings spreading to surround them both, although he does not move a feather. He was no longer a guttering candle, madly dancing about until it died, he was as steady and suffocating as rising smoke. “Explain to me Yourmajesty, what are you, if not a killer? And why are you here?”
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Post by Hallow Sancti on Mar 14, 2013 11:45:41 GMT -6
Another book tumbles down as she leans away from him and his wings. "This is the Ruin of Dis, and it is not in the world. She took it out of the world and only She can turn it topsy turvy, as you say. It is her playground and I am just an old plaything." The creature shrugs, looking down at the dust. Her fingers brush through the bleached locks of her hair.
"I am a purposeless toy. And I am not a "Yourmajesty". What ever that is..." Her eyes widen and her lips part. She squeaks out a whisper. "Are you... are you looking for HER?"
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Bardiel
Bourgeois
Outlands Wanderer
Posts: 147
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Post by Bardiel on Mar 14, 2013 21:46:57 GMT -6
“Well yes.” Bardiel turns his head to the side guiltily, a wry grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Sort of, anyway. Not exactly, but almost.” He idly aims a kick against the darkness at his feet, sending up a silent plum of dust, as he searches for what to say. The lilac manikin can practically hear the sound of fallen's thoughts as they tumbled over in his mind, whipping themselves into a delirious frenzy.
“You know... I'm a law man. Not exactly, but almost.” A building enthusiasm was creeping its way into his voice that seemed to animate the air around them as the ghostly lantern chained to his neck danced with excitement. It was strange, the feeling that seemed to well up from all around him like someone had gabbed hold of their collective breath and held it over a vast fall, his helplessness giving power and reality to the height, an absurd notion of serene anxiety, of letting go just to see where he would fall.
“You can be my deputy! Better then being an old toy, well I think so anyway. You can still be both if you want. There are a lot of bad people out there that need to be brought to justice, people that plan to murder the future. We'll be the champions of hope! We'll need a name... how about the Enzeru Knights?!”
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Post by Hallow Sancti on Mar 16, 2013 21:24:55 GMT -6
She attempts to follow his logic, frowning and nodding right up to the point he mentions her joining him.
"You want me to come with you? To help you? I-" She stares at him, her limbs trembling with tension, mouth open before she swallows hard. "You want.. me?" With a sudden jerk she propels herself at him her arms open.
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