Doom

[luv 3469]

The disheveled hag does not sleep in her swamp. She sleeps anywhere, and everywhere, and nowhere. Sometimes all at once.

 

The cavernous place where she now chooses to lay her body down for a few hours could hold a thousand fortresses. A veritable sea of pitch black water stretches from underground horizon to underground horizon. They are not the horizons of the tumultuous world above, but closer—much closer—to an entirely different kind of madness.

 

She visits this place often, and always by herself, but she is never alone.

 

Some called them demons. Some called them spirits. Regardless, the vast shadows that linger behind the veil of the mortal eye, to see such one could only dream. Ekatn checks in dutifully. Makes sure their bedding is comfortable.

 

They must not awaken.

 

She lost her eyes long ago, so it is her mind that traces their cavern. What she’s seen has always chilled her beyond the concerns of flesh and bone, so that she no longer shivers at the touch of ice against her skin.

 

When she is down here, her blindness is a blessing. It is horror enough to feel their presence. To walk in their realm, even. To know what it is that awaits after this world.

 

And so, she must keep them at bay.

 

Horror has begun to stir. Ekatn sensed it with the last new moon, hoping against hope that it would settle itself once more—but now its apocalyptic desire squirms to be amongst the others, growing ever more restless.

 

She removes her blindfold. Her tattered robes fall around her ankles, and she pads out across the murky lake, emptiness beyond.

 

Ekatn splays her fingers across the surface. Her hair hangs over her face, hiding the lines of age, and the scarred ruin of her empty eyes. She learned long ago the secret ways to walk between realms, to traverse the impossible distances of this harsh reality in moments, back and forth a hundred times before each new dawn. Sometimes, she forgets where her physical body has been.

 

Her mind drifts down, now, through the water. She muses briefly at the thickness.. To place the entire burden of faith upon glass is pure folly, and yet there is no other choice.

 

On the other side, the Inferis is all hellfire and chaos and screaming, frustrated anticipation.

 

It is bigger than a mountain. Is it one of the small ones? Ekatn hopes so. She has never dared probe the defenses of the largest—the ones that seem able to devour gravity and time itself, eaters of not only worlds, but entire planes of nightmares. They make her feel very small and insignificant, like a single mote of frost in a blizzard.

 

She focuses on the great and terrible threats before her. A new sight becomes hers.

 

Another Ekatn waits for her there, in the dreamscape. This ageless being towers behind a black sun, the strands of her hair floating into the heavens, her eyes whole, crystal-blue, and shining all with the celestial energies of the world’s final dawn.

 

She is beautiful. She is a goddess. She is struggling to press the sun down below the horizon.

 

The fiery black orb fights back, trying to rise again. It burns the goddess’ fingers.

 

Life. Life is the key. The living souls of the realm, this place that Ekatn once longed to conquer using the very beasts below. She slithers from the vision, as gently as she can, and tries to soothe it with the croaking of toads. She’s reach into a pocket of her garbs to withdraw a small mason jar, a pair of eyes belonging to some sort of amphibian. She’s cradle the jar close to her heart and murmur with a horrified tremor in her voice.

“My Lord… What is the meaning of this?”

 

“Why have you not come for me?”

 

Spoiler

@The King Of The Moon

 

[lemonke 6014]

An elderly creature lay somewhere around the tainted lands of arcas, where the inferis have been stomped onto it, merely observing an engraving of a rose resting on her biceps. A simple image, yet that excavated a wave of ancient memories, of events that she had experienced with a specific person. However, words came out of her dry lips with a raspy voice:
"S-She has the answers. She has the eyes of the toad ... But is she still alive ...?".
The towering being wondered unto herself with a bemused expression on the left side of her is face while her hideous features of the further side were molded into a disappointed grimace:
"Of course, she is still alive. After all ... she's the banshee queen, isn't she? ...-You need a whole army to take her down! ".
An ominous laughter echoed like a shriek within her odd, different tone, followed by a shake of her head. Alas, the figure can not do anything else, and soon she would have resumed such a journey to seek answers, to grasp what once was of hers. A enigmatic purpose for sure!