✦ oh here comes the dying hour!

[faelyn]

𝐑𝐄𝐈𝐍𝐂𝐀𝐑𝐍𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝐓𝐇𝐑𝐎𝐔𝐆𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐓 𝐄𝐎𝐋𝐈𝐀𝐍 𝐇𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐘

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xxxxxx𝘕𝘈𝘔𝘌 ─ n.a xxxxxx 𝘓𝘖𝘊𝘈𝘛𝘐𝘖𝘕 ─ book xxxxxx 𝘛𝘐𝘔𝘌 𝘗𝘌𝘙𝘐𝘖𝘋 ─ the age of afterxxxxxx𝘋𝘌𝘙𝘐𝘝𝘌𝘋 𝘍𝘙𝘖𝘔? ─ fall of eolia

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over the course of a millenia, there has been much discourse on certain methods of reincarnation as the entity of rebirth is heavily entrenched in eolian culture. eolians are immortal and death is a uncommon and is considered a mysterious event. shortly after a burial ceremony, red hyacinth and vials of hyssop oil are set to burn on altars of liquid fire, dedicated to the entity of rebirth, to petition for the usherance of their loved one into being reborn.

blood connections have been scorned throughout history as the method is viewed as unnatural, usually used between doctor and patient. through the blood connection, lifeforce and innate eolian magic is exchanged between the pair, and when utilized properly, certain kinds of magic-borne illnesses can be healed through the input of un-contaminated magic from the doctor.

however, there have been documented cases of certain tragedies that have occurred during such procedures. most detail the deaths of both doctor and patient, while others have recorded a series of events considered… too uncanny to go down in history.

[faelyn]

𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐈𝐅𝐀𝐂𝐓 𝐎𝐅 𝐑𝐄𝐃 𝐇𝐘𝐀𝐂𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐇 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐇𝐘𝐒𝐒𝐎𝐏 𝐎𝐈𝐋

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xxxxxx𝘕𝘈𝘔𝘌 ─ you, the scholar xxxxxx 𝘓𝘖𝘊𝘈𝘛𝘐𝘖𝘕 ─ mausoleumxxxxxx 𝘛𝘐𝘔𝘌 𝘗𝘌𝘙𝘐𝘖𝘋 ─ the age of caderexxxxxx𝘋𝘌𝘙𝘐𝘝𝘌𝘋 𝘍𝘙𝘖𝘔? ─ origins unknown

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if knowledge was power, you did not want it.
oh! how you now despised the art of knowing! how you wanted to forget about this mausoleum of languages and ash cadavers and artifacts whose fabric were ingrained in history!

for there was no catharsis in this existence, where the very breadth of your soul once burned with hellfire and the desire for the things of old… all of it extinguished in an act to exorcise the secrets of universe for there was no freedom in this act of exorcism, where you are purged of your body and plunged into existence of another. when you were forced to know, to interpret, to learn the history of a race that were near gods, with ichor in their veins and power at their fingertips.

the vestiges of their souls have inhabited your body, their wills fusing with your own until your face is pressed at the feet of an altar of liquid fire. red hyacinth dust spills down the length of your face, you cannot scream as tongues of fire lightly caress the planes of your cheekbones. the only sound from your lips... a single tremulous sigh as if you were home alas.

[faelyn]

𝐉𝐎𝐔𝐑𝐍𝐀𝐋 𝐎𝐅 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐃𝐎𝐂𝐓𝐎𝐑

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xxxxxx𝘕𝘈𝘔𝘌 ─ the doctor xxxxxx 𝘓𝘖𝘊𝘈𝘛𝘐𝘖𝘕 ─ doctor's cottage xxxxxx 𝘛𝘐𝘔𝘌 𝘗𝘌𝘙𝘐𝘖𝘋 ─ the age of cadere xxxxxx𝘋𝘌𝘙𝘐𝘝𝘌𝘋 𝘍𝘙𝘖𝘔? ─ deciphered journal

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for i, alone, am left of all that lived, bent in this narrow conviction as i drive myself mad in this house of a dead man where i swear i hear his skeleton rattling from his grave. it screams and it screams and it screams


oh here comes the dying hour!


i will hear his voice until the day i die. for i cannot rid myself of it. i cannot rid myself of the sound of his dying breath. a deathrattle of blackened ichor and the last vestiges of immortality.

oh how i long to fold myself into shadow and bask in bleakness for an eternity if only to forget the vow i will soon break. the vow made to a dying man, whose bloodied knuckles once ran black with liquid shadow. oh old man marley, gentle in life but who screamed with such primordial vehemence i hear it as if it is the ichor running through my veins.

because i cannot save her.

will he forgive me? surely not.
surely he would set me upon a pyre in the afterworld. let me burn like the wick of a candle. see how glorious the flesh of my body burns beneath a fire, turning half-crushed and all forgotten. it is what i deserve. for what good is a doctor who cannot heal? a puppateer who cannot command his puppets with a flick of the wrist?

because i will not be able to watch as she morphs into a mirror of her father’s last dying image. i will not be able to endure it as blackened clots spew from her lips as immortality drains from her brittle bones.

i will not be able to endure her death.

[faelyn]

𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐓𝐇𝐑𝐄𝐄

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xxxxxx𝘕𝘈𝘔𝘌 ─ the doctor xxxxxx 𝘓𝘖𝘊𝘈𝘛𝘐𝘖𝘕 ─ puppateering stage xxxxxx 𝘛𝘐𝘔𝘌 𝘗𝘌𝘙𝘐𝘖𝘋 ─ the age of cadere xxxxxx𝘋𝘌𝘙𝘐𝘝𝘌𝘋 𝘍𝘙𝘖𝘔? ─ artifact of the altar

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the tongues of the dark sound like bones unlocking. its hellish blackness interlaced between the bony ridges of the doctor’s palms as he worships healing runes siphoned from his native tongue. igneous magic at his fingertips as its power rises with each archaic line derived from history itself. as its might becomes enough to rival the stars. to connect a doctor to his patient. to fufill a vow made to a dying man.

surely it wouldn’t be so bad to go through with it?
perhaps rebirth had found old man marley after all, reincarnating him as a parasitic memory. a skeleton locked in a closet, whose voice finds its way beneath the floorboards. for where rabid nails had gouged halfmoons into his skin, the parasite of his memory had burrowed its way into the doctor’s skull, a screaming, writhing mess of distended red veins and a vicious mouth stained with black.

“forget the missing rune… forget the consquences.”it says. “do it. do the blood connection. save my daughter, doctor.”

she was entering the last stages of the cadere… and when she woke, she had gone entirely mad. for black tar had eaten her pupils to oblivion, an equivocal madness wormed its way into her eye sockets, bleeding into a state of utter psychosis.

“oh here comes the dying hour!”

in another life, he would’ve done the honourable thing. he would have refused to carry out the blood connection. he would’ve deemed it sacreligeous… ungodly. he would’ve let the cadere gorge on her immortality and when it was done, he would’ve had her body buried and gone to the altar himself to burn red hyacinth and hyssop oil in her memory. to petition for her reincarnation into the next life.

in another life.

but in this life, the doctor heard the skeleton locked behind the closet. he heard its voice finding its way beneath the floorboards where rabid nails had gorged into his skin. where a parasite of a memory had wormed its way into the doctor’s head and he could not dislodge it.

“you have nothing to lose… while the life of my daughter hangs in the balance.” the words were a trigger as he split his palm open with single bloodied nail. as his blood seeped into the partition of her bloodless lips and turned it a burning… raging red.

igneous black poured from his fingers as he worshipped the healing runes siphoned from his native tongue. the doctor repeated it over and over and over again until he lost himself in the hellish blackness in his veins… until he was but a conduit for the primordial bond that formed between patient and doctor.

until the blood connection was forged by the liquid ichor in his veins, a cavernous thing that settled at the base of his ribcage, slithering between the porous stitch of his bones. there was an insatiable hunger about it, for it took and took and took… until it had devoured something vital. something that had once been so ingrained into the fabric of his soul that he could not stifle the scream that shattered out of him.

but through his tunneling vision and surges of igneous black, he found her[/i[ eyes… unblinking as she stared and stared and stared. for the black tar that had once eaten her irises into oblivion had receded. the bloodmoon sores melded back into her skin, no longer raised against her skull. all traces of the cadere… gone.

the doctor had cured her.

vestiges of gold spilled down the length of her face, soaking her lashes with honeycomb dust and the sunrise. he reached for her then, cradelling her face in his bloodied hands, tarnishing her pious skin with traces of his sin. his ungodliness. he pressed his forehead against hers, his eyelids gilded with gold as his bloodshot eyes flitted shut… then opened.

for it was only then, did he realize the eyes staring back at him were still open… as if preserved in a place between time and space. as if… as if she were unequivocally, irrevocably… unmistakably dead.

eirlys. eirlys. eirlys.
he might have screamed it. he might have prayed it. his lips might have moved to the sound of her name, an incoherent spill of language that scathed the backs of his throat he shook her hard. rabid nails gouged halfmoons into her shoulderblades, until liquid red soaked the hollows of his face. until all he was left with was the slack-jawed, open-eyed face that had once been his religion.

she was not dead. he rejected it.
so if he could not bend heaven, he would drag himself down into hell itself. let his flesh light with hellfire… and his everlasting lungs of ichor inhale the smoke. for if he was deemed unholy by the eolians and their pagan gods, he would become a god himself.

so he reached down into the very depths of himself and to the cavernous thing that lay curled at the base of his ribcage. the blood connection. no longer did it slither between the porous stitch of his bones, for her death had extinguished its hunger, leaching its essence until it was a ghost of its former glory. until it began to fade entirely.

but the doctor did not allow it. he would not allow it.
igneous power surged into his veins, siphoned directly into the bond that existed between doctor and patient. blackened filaments that exuded such power, it could bring the heavens to their knees. oh how oblivious the doctor had been to the raw… untapped potential in his veins!

come back. no longer was he a doctor, for a doctor would not demand such things of the heavens. a doctor would not summon such power it made death recoil and the pits of hellfire to abate. a doctor could not resuscitate what was dead. rise. his very breath roils with life as he exhales into the cavernous thing in his chest. let not death make you hollow… let it make you whole.

for under his command, flesh and bone and ligaments, once stiffened by death,stitched themselves together. syncopated shudders coalesced into a sequence of lurching strides, until he was face to face with a slack-jawed, open-eyed eirlys… resurrected from the dead.

oh! no longer was he a doctor… for he had become a god.

[faelyn]

the altars of red hyacinth and hyssop oil that once burned have now sputtered out. no longer do rings of smoke suspend themselves as halos, the altars have not been burned since him. for the twin bloodmoons of eolia hang heavy across the skies… they foretell a bloodletting.

for there is he, who crowns himself a god of his own making, declaring himself conqueror of the age of cadere. conqueror of death itself… he claims to ressurrect the dead, ressucitating their bodies back into the world of the living.

but those he resurrects… they do not come back right.

throngs of gnats swallow them whole, accumulating in a patchwork of writhing glasswings on unhinged jaws, slackened by death. they travel down the backs of their throats, devouring the flesh that had blackened and begun to rot from within their skin. still, the dead move as if they were the living… they talk and laugh and down barrels of honeycomb wine. their movements lurching as if controlled by an invisible string. by a puppeteer.

it is what they have begun to call him… the puppeteer.
onto his temples, black dew drips, an echo of the cavernous thing that binds him to the dead. that allows him to control them. he drives himself mad, pupils erratic as he stares at the ghoul of a teratornis once summoned by hallucinagens, now conjured by his own ravaged mind.

“oh don’t you see it, old man marley?” he would throw his head back, the column of his throat ripping open with laughter that was half cackle. half groan. he jabbed a finger at the monster that hunched in pools of shadow, its naked scalp saturated with darkness. the teratornis. “kill it!” he screamed it now, palms clamped over its ears. “kill it, old man! kill it-”

before, the eolians would have recoiled, gazes averted from the madman and the dead he had resserected. they would’ve fallen to worship at the feet of this god who could resurrect the dead, beseeching for him to stay his hand and let the dead rest at last.

but they were off their knees now.
so they rise with their pitchforks, torches burning bright against their skin as they bridled a puppeteer newly conscercrated as god of the dead. and when the he fell, the dead whose faces belonged to those they had once loved so fiercely… fell with him.

[faelyn]

𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐈𝐅𝐀𝐂𝐓 𝐎𝐅 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐇𝐈𝐋𝐋 𝐎𝐅 𝐁𝐎𝐍𝐄

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xxxxxx𝘕𝘈𝘔𝘌 ─ you, the scholar xxxxxx 𝘓𝘖𝘊𝘈𝘛𝘐𝘖𝘕 ─ mausoleumxxxxxx 𝘛𝘐𝘔𝘌 𝘗𝘌𝘙𝘐𝘖𝘋 ─ the age of caderexxxxxx𝘋𝘌𝘙𝘐𝘝𝘌𝘋 𝘍𝘙𝘖𝘔? ─ origins unknown

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strange how easily everlasting lungs of ichor give out from screaming. you had let the madness hollow through this wrapt reserve of sanity… what sanity would left for you after this? what sanity would be left for a scholar who had been forced to traverse through a valley of calcified bone?

blackened ribcages, so scorched by fire, clicked and clattered beneath the soles of your feet, sticky with rivulets of crimson as swollen welts broke out across your skin. as you became one living body in a sea of bones. for the bones have begun to rattle, grinding themselves into little more than shafts of pallid dust as they screamed. their voices a disjointed mockery of the rhymes and riddles so familiar, you could’ve recited it in death.


oh here comes the dying hour
light the pyres, stay close to their fire
don’t you know? they gorge themselves on your deepest desires
oh here comes the dying hour

[faelyn]

𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐅𝐎𝐔𝐑

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xxxxxx𝘕𝘈𝘔𝘌 ─ the doctor puppateer xxxxxx 𝘓𝘖𝘊𝘈𝘛𝘐𝘖𝘕 ─ mausoleum xxxxxx 𝘛𝘐𝘔𝘌 𝘗𝘌𝘙𝘐𝘖𝘋 ─ the age of cadere xxxxxx𝘋𝘌𝘙𝘐𝘝𝘌𝘋 𝘍𝘙𝘖𝘔? ─ artifact of the hill

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the mausoleum moaned. for its iron capacity had been breached, it overflows with caskets and cadavers and madman who made himself out to be a god.

when the puppeteer woke, the altars were burning. it raged against the twin bloodmoons of eolia. fumes of red hyacinth and burned hyssop oil thick on the air, dusting his lashes as rivulets of shifting candlelight seared his eyelids, catching onto the metallic gleam of pitchforks and spades as they marked the walls in thin, parallel streaks.

“get up, puppeteer.”

the puppeteer had half a mind to laugh. the very sound cracked through him, dripping from his lips as if it were the blackened vestiges of a collapsed star. oh! had he raised him from the dead as well? “its you! old man marley!” hands, once honed with grace enough to cleave apart skin and bone, now shook as he reached out to the undulating darkness. “you have returned from the dead too! haven’t you, old man marley?” the taste of iron had seeped into the seam of his lips where his mouth cracked with a grin that spread from ear to ear. “i cured your daughter, old man! i raised her from the dead… indeed! i am a god!”

“old man marley is dead, puppateer.” the face that loomed over him was obscured with umbra, liquid scarlet awash over their bodies from the twin bloodmoons overhead. a face that did not belong at all to old man marley… no, not at all. “and you are not a god. you are nothing, if not a madman.”

some part of him stilled at that.
the vestigial jolting pulse at the base of his throat thrummed. beneath his skin, there was the hot rush of blood in his veins goaded on by potent bite of violence. he saw red. the puppateer shot forwards, but he was wrenched back by the starved hands circumscribed by shadow. ““i saved them! i saved them all!”” he spat each word out, clots of bloodied salvia dripping from his maw. “they are alive… because of me.”

“but are they truly alive, puppeteer… or should i say, doctor? you were that once… weren’t you?” the voice was everwhere and nowhere. his accuser come to reap his unholy soul. “were they alive when their skin peeled from their bones?” the hands at his shoulders shook him… hard. “were they alive when the wine they drank bloated their skin? were they alive when you controlled them as if they were puppets?” the face above him sneered. “no.. no, they were already as good as dead. you did not ressurrect the dead. you are not a god.”

for it was only then when his eye was drawn from the iron wrapt reserve of the mausoleum and to the space beyond. his eyes little more than black pitlesss sockets that were wide enough to swallow sin… erratic pupils that ran over the scene over and over and over again. an unearthed space where red hyacinth lay uprooted— and a mass grave lay in its wake.

“we buried your ungodly creations… you corrupted their souls until they were no longer the ones we love.” there was such venom…such pronounced resentment in their utterances. “we have burned red hyacinth in their memory. we have put them to rest.”

it is a strange thing to see a god fall to his knees.
his head bowed over his collarbones, he does not scream. for the mausoleum has lapsed into a deathly soundlessness… before the earth and hell and heaven began to shake.

it is a strange thing to see a god fall to his knees… even stranger to see the dead rise. to see them unearth themselves. to claw their way out from beneath layers of reddened earth and see them, not resurrected, but lorded over by an invisible hand. all of them vessels for the igneous power that once redeemed their bodies from the cadere… but now that controlled their deadened bodies entirely.

“look at them! they live… don’t you see? they are your family!” his rebirth tasted of fire and fumes of sulphur derived from death itself… but oh! why couldn’t they see? “i have resurrected them!”

but they did not listen. they would not listen.

for they were upon him.
“stop this!” his shoulderblades slammed into the iron walls of the mausoleum… so hard that the bones in their caskets began to rattle in outrage. “i am doing it for the good of you all-”

the words rotted in his mouth.

oh how he relished in the way rabid nails gouged halfmoons into his shoulderblades, so familiar that it felt like stepping into a closet of childhood ghosts. if the doctor had closed his eyes, it was as if he was in another time. another place… not too far off from this one.

the violence was a trigger.
tongues of darkness lashed from the puppeteer’s palms as if apart of an interlocking series of ligaments and tendons formed in a crush of hellish power. its very essence was born from violence, its nails clicking against his hallowed ribs.
but this time, he allowed the blackness to fester. to morph into the executioner that lurked beneath his skin as blackened filmaents distended into the cavernous thing in his chest. help me. he sighed into it, his very breath exuding liquid gold and ichor into the bond that existed between the very fabric of his soul to the dead. help me.

the eolians had begun to scream.
they should’ve heeded the twin bloodmoons that hung heavy over eolia. bloodmoons that foretold a bloodletting… an imminent massacre that would turn the moon red with blood. for the dead pounded on the mausoleum and its iron reserves. bones rattled from within their caskets, while the bones of the dead groaned, snapping into unnatural angles in a syncopated rhythm.

but the eolians did not relent, they seized the puppateer by the bones that portuded in raised arches at his throat. rabid nails gouging halfmoons into his skin… before they opened a tomb.

help me. but, not even the dead, who had unearthed themselves from their graves, could stop what was coming.
the puppateer knew it too. knew it right down to the very marrow of his bones even as he spat and wailed obscenities at the starved hands that surged with the liquid gold of eolian magic. starved hands that shoved him into a tomb with a corpse whose flesh still hung ripe over its bones.

it was all the puppateer could do not to weep. for he recognized that face. he recognized those hunched shoulders outlined with the gold caliber of candlelight. old man marley. the puppateer surged upwards, thrashing beneath the starved hands that held him against the corpse that had once been his dearest friend.

choking on his own spittle and liquid smoke, he screamed with such vehemence the words that had been tethered to his throat for so long. he screamed it until his everlasting lungs of ichor shattered. he screamed it until he became the embodiment of hatred… until he became the abomination they made him out to be.


“oh here comes the dying hour!”


the tomb slammed shut.

[faelyn]

𝐓𝐎𝐌𝐁 𝐎𝐅 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐃𝐎𝐂𝐓𝐎𝐑

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

xxxxxx𝘕𝘈𝘔𝘌 ─ the doctor puppateerxxxxxx 𝘓𝘖𝘊𝘈𝘛𝘐𝘖𝘕 ─ mausoleum xxxxxx 𝘛𝘐𝘔𝘌 𝘗𝘌𝘙𝘐𝘖𝘋 ─ the age of cadere xxxxxx𝘋𝘌𝘙𝘐𝘝𝘌𝘋 𝘍𝘙𝘖𝘔? ─ inside a tomb

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

let me rise upon ruin and gorge myself on bones turned to dust.
light the pyres! burn them quick! for even now, i hear them screaming the words. i hear them as the eolians light the altars that once burned with red hyacinth and hyssop oil, with turpentine. i smell bruning flesh as they burn my creations with fire so hot, it sunders bone.

suddenly i am no longer in my body. i am seeing through the eyes of the dead. i see calciferous fire turning molten as it burns through the streets, through the dead and eolian alike. this fire.. it cannot be stopped. so they write their stories on their bodies as they burn, liquid gold spilling from their palms as they imbue their bodies with their eolian magic. as they intergrate this tragedy into the heart of the city and its artifacts.

i see eolia fall.
and so i scream from the crypt, imprisoned for an eternity in an earthly tomb of warmed oxygen and iron. i am punished by the living and dead alike. my voice, a condemnation, as i speaks in riddles and rhymes that would soon be spooned into the ears of babes in cradles.


oh here comes the dying hour
light the pyres, stay close to their fire
don’t you know? they gorge themselves on your deepest desires
oh here comes the dying hour

[faelyn]

𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐋𝐎𝐆𝐔𝐄

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

xxxxxx𝘕𝘈𝘔𝘌 ─ you, the scholar xxxxxx 𝘓𝘖𝘊𝘈𝘛𝘐𝘖𝘕 ─ mausoleumxxxxxx 𝘛𝘐𝘔𝘌 𝘗𝘌𝘙𝘐𝘖𝘋 ─ the age of afterxxxxxx𝘋𝘌𝘙𝘐𝘝𝘌𝘋 𝘍𝘙𝘖𝘔? ─ origins unknown

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

you fell to your knees.
for the prying hand in your skull had relinquished its hold and you… you were free. no longer trapped in a gilded cage of artifact and memory. you were free.

oil heavy rain sluiced down the hollows of your hunched body as your ears were filled with the sound of grinding bone. your mouth was so full of smoke and red hyacinth, your jaw cracked in an effort to contain it… for something was shifting in the mausoleum.

for like a vision of old, the sea of bones had begun to rattle once more, parting to reveal a tomb, so scorched by fire, it was black as pitch. for tongues of darkness roiled on the obsidian length of the casket, reconfiguring itself into the language of eolian.

help me.
your blood, your bones, your being screamed. for the invisible prying hand was back, its divine touch impish and near playful as its voice seeped into your veins and compelled your fingers to move of its accord. you could not resist it.
for there was the glide of obsidian beneath your rabid nails, before the tomb was flung wide, an igneous blackness swallowing you whole.

and from the darkness, the puppateer emerged… a god of his own creation punished by the living and dead alike. his voice, a condemnation, as he screams into the dark, his madness his only utterance as he throws his head back. tongues of darkness surging to his palms as igneous power devoures the world. a power enough to make the dead rise.


"oh here comes the dying hour!"

[faelyn]

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