• Memory • The Layers of a Troubled Man

[Abaddon]

Prologue: The Layers of a Troubled Man
Vhalar 8th, 714


‘She’ was a mistress of inescapable cruelty. Her victims bled, they screamed their hollowed cries, and they wilted until they could think no more, succumbing to their fates in her grotesque embrace. The fields were a place of indescribable revulsion. Stripped of all decency, the dreamers were ferreted along like cattle, to their dooms, to their violation, to their ‘death’ until reality rescued them. Abaddon could never be rescued, no, he would always meet his bitter end here.

This was a place few could forget, the glinting fluids of sliding flesh icing the skin with foul stickiness. As the beastly woman had her way, she clutched her victims, sliding a tendril up from the depths of her being and up the body, into the nose, pushing painfully until the victim felt a pop, as Abaddon did in this very moment. Agony filled his mind, vision of the dark dimming until slowly it came back to a red fog, erupting from the muddy earth to a gasping breath.

Emerging into the red forest as he called it, Abaddon found himself predictably in the second layer of his own personal nightmarish world. Here, his legs moved despite his own will, his body filling with the need to run. Run, run, and run forever, until the heart beat so hard his chest hurt, and his lungs felt like a black fire searing into his soul with corrupted taint from the cherry red mists surrounding him. At last, a long, chitinous appendage drove into the ground in front of him, and his body skidded to a halt, going lateral with the ground.

Fighting for purchase, he kicked and beat at the mud until he could find purchase, but the Harvestman’s insectile eyes met his gaze the moment he stood, all eight of them a piercing red, redder than the red of the red forest, and bleeding out into the very air with fiery fury. At once its pincers opened, and the black maw of its jaw unhinged and gaped, a shrill scream shirking Abaddon into flinching. Every. Single. Time. The noise sung to his core and gave him a fear so palpable it sickened him into vomiting on the floor of the stone cathedral he found himself in.

This was why he hated sleeping. This was why he stole the wakefulness of others to stay so far from this place.

It was the room of a temple, of black smooth granite. Chains hung loosely from the ceilings, clattering from a breeze breathed from the catacombs of the place. All the doors were closed, but they rattled, and monsters growled and seethed behind them. This was the Temple of the Crossroads, a headache-inducing place. Doomed souls screamed for safety, and a woman of a young age cried and begged at the door, for him to open it. Every time, and without fail, he knew she would turn into a grotesque fiend, a beast of seven heads and blades for fingers, other unsightly things jutting from ‘her’ body. So he didn’t open that door, and he left it closed. It would then drag his injured body to another door at random, and never into the black abyss it came from. Abaddon was certain he could never best ‘her’ and dreaded the idea of being taken anywhere else.

Next, a window. This was the quiet door to the Snow, the Freeze, or the Chill. He hadn’t settled on a name for it, but a wiry worm man, the Stretchpuppet, waited for him out there, seeking to plunge itself into his body and puppet him through the icy wastes until at last it gave him mercy through the plummet down a cliff, a great fall that ended in him waking up in another strange place.

That place was the Dourge, a place one did not come back from until they woke, and as Abaddon knew very well, dreams could feel longer than reality, or shorter, but the Dourge was one of those places that time dragged on and on, its humiliating nightmarish perversions so disturbing that he avoided that window. In fact, he hadn’t touched it in Arcs.

No, he preferred to wait here, as the darkness encroached. The Crossroads became the Oblivion after a time, a realm of darkness where nothing could be heard, not even the tinny sound of an ear in total silence, or the throb and pulse of a heartbeat. Nothing in its entirety, a sobering feeling of emptiness, of oblivion. It wasn’t good for the mind, not by a stretch, but he could pound, he could scream, and he could live and thrash and rage without any senses, without any pain, and the will dancing around in his powerless being gave rise to a sense of something that wasn’t so terrible, something tolerable. In a way, sitting at the Crossroads was tapping out, to say to your fears that you were going to do nothing, say nothing, and listen to nothing, and so it obliged with nothing, a concept few minds could handle without insanity. Abaddon was no exception, but that coiling strand of loose, wispy brain material in his skull kept itself isolated as a painful desire to inflict such things on others. A story for another time, surely.

There was another doorway, one he’d not touched since the first time. The wall of flesh, something that tortured and haunted him for nights to come. If he touched it, as far as he knew, his hand would get stuck, and it would start dragging him into its being. From there, an adventure into the deeper layers of the dream found itself to be so terrifying that his mind had tricked itself into forgetting, horrors absent the body or manipulating it in ways lacking description. Oblivion was far better than the something that waited there. He’d often consider trying again, only to falter at the undulating walls, disgusted and terrified, never daring to try.

These nightmares knew he was lucid, and so they never relented. They never gave him a sense of peace. They never dulled, they never dimmed, and they certainly never gave him a shred of mercy. Many a night, he slept uneasy, if he could even sleep at all because of these places. These ‘layers’ of a rotten fruit were of the low hanging variety, and truly gruesome things that never gave him the void he would rather run to were common as the rain, his mind reaching for this particular set of nightmares only because he could suffer a little before finding himself where he wanted to be, not that he could control his own destiny in the matter.

And so he prayed.

Praying was indistinguishable from groveling.

“Kielik, lord of the oblivion, of my soul, of my mind, of my vessel. Your nightmares terrify me, I know better than to sleep, I want to ... pass on, just once. I beg of you, I’ll make them stay awake. They’ll stay awake, I’ll stay awake. Forever. As long as I can. As long as I can. Bring me solace, make me your agent of the world. All the things I’ll do for you, if you free me, and let me loose. Please. Please.

Ticks turned to Bits.

Bits turned to Breaks.

Until he was sniveling on the ground in a heap, mind lost to the void, to the total adulation of his cruel Master. Let me free from this place. I want to wake up. I want to stay awake. I want ... to be remade by you. Taint me with your will. Anything, and everything you’ve ever wanted, I will do for you. Now let me go.

“Let me go!” screamed a voice that could not be heard by its owners. Over and over, the wailing rose and fell, quelled by the weight of the nothing around him on his mind, the repetition, the hopelessness of it all. “I can’t steal away their nights for my own.” Let me go. “I want. To wake. Up!” Nails gritted into a floor without feeling, the mind knowing it was there, that it was being impeded, even though the texture and the feedback of muscles pushing was disturbingly gone. “Kielik!”


All-consumed by oblivion, molded and ripped to shreds, he took to retching, to pushing at the limits of this place. The most pronounced feeling was emptiness, a change in the amount that he could feel when he spilled the contents of his stomach upon the imagined floor. On and on, until his body finally agreed that he should wake.

A chill crept down his spine, mind in vertigo spinning until he awoke once more. It was as if he’d never slept, eyes still tired, the lure of the dreams tugging on his eyelids. Refusing, he opened them wide and shot out of bed, collecting himself and bursting through into the night to find some hapless victim to claim a few more Trials of wakefulness from.

This was Kielik’s game.

[Rakvald]

Here's your stuff!

Name: Abaddon

Knowledge:

Nitahi: Sleepless Nights: Why You Should Never Sleep
Dreamwalking: Lucid Dreaming

Loot: n/a
Injuries: n/a
Renown: n/a
Magic XP: Dreamwalking thread.

Points: 10 for solo
- - -
Comments:

Some great creativity going on here with the emean demons and such that were described. Such a vivid nightmare. Some good character development too, when Abaddon seems to capitulate to Keilik. I wonder who Abaddon will be trading nightmares with next.

The imagery was so vivid and well described, I could picture it and it was creepy as f. I like how you used the unseen horror of things he imagined he might see if he opened the door for that woman's voice. Great stuff.

If you feel I've missed anything or if you have questions about your review, please don't hesitate to send me a quick PM. Thanks!

Please add the following code to your review request Layers of a troubled man

Code: Select all

[center][img]/gallery/image.php?album_id=39&image_id=7932[/img][/center]

[/color]