[ React | L E V I A T H A N S E A ]
Posted by Elestirnė on 5/1/2005, 5:53 pm "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
69.162.50.93
Ravenglade was no long beautiful; Ravenglade was no longer beautiful! it fairly stank, swimming in excrement, screaming a litany of purposed power and the struggle for conformity - - it vomited untruths, it reeled with lies and yet! and yet the denizens flocked to their leader, their King, their vulgar, untaught foal of an Overlord! The skeletons, rolling in misery and the painful stabs of horror, gaped beneath the soil to the grass above where still, still! still stood the bittersweet remnants of a life unlived; Elestirnė, his ripe eyes glaring, stood in silence upon the outskirts of the great meadow, shadowed and hallowed and hollowed and vague - - he stood and saw little. There first came the untaught, the unlearned, the shallow and the simple: clawing, begging upon bended knee, whimpering and licking at the feet of he who would be their Lord and Master: dogs! all dogs! beaten and battered creatures, hungry for what little scraps Pinnochet could give them, and he a scrap himself! unwanted, sophomoric, stupid and unwise! Elestirnė, had he been capable, would himself have retched - - but he was no simpleton! had he, had he allowed the bubbling sickness, the wretchedness he'd felt since first that bodiless voice had called Pinnochet's name, had he allowed it to take hold of him, grasping and wandering the skin of his body, he would have fallen to the self-same debauchery as he saw now played out before him! And now the dumb, the simple passed from audience with the Great King himself, and he was forced to look upon the ungrateful - - they spat at each other, they spat upon each other, they wrested for position, they clawed for rank - - they, twisted caricatures of worth, were vile and uncouth, mistakes of nature and nurture, mistakes of creation, of procreation, of life and of existence! he would have cried for them, but rather he laughed, and it was a cruel laugh, a curling, misshapen laugh which twisted in the air and broke the silence of simpering pleasantries. He caught a one's eye - - and there he stared, reaching into the pupil, into the iris, into the very thought of the creature itself and found, amongst the darkness and the dankness and the sharp relief of simplicity, absolutely nothing! and it was there that he realized, Elestirnė of the Ravens, Elestirnė of the Falcons, Elestirnė of the Dimension! that he was not for the Glade, nor the Glade for him; were he to remain, and this he decided, Pinnochet before him, the great King would last no more than an hour - - for he would cleave from the stallion his very will to live and dog his heels, he would shed his blood and his tears and they would flow together as the very wine of mercy - - but mercy! mercy for whom? for himself, for the Glade, for Pinnochet? for the Dimension, that such a simple creature would no longer be called Captain and Patriarch? And thus, when Elestirnė believed none could fall quite so low, so low as the Glade had fallen with the uprising of it's King, so low as the Dimension had fallen to have accepted one such as he as Lord, He was brought to see that he was wrong - - Sgorr, who had made his merry way from the Meadow - - Sgorr, who followed the footsteps of Pinnochet as though he were a bit.ch in heat - - Sgorr, who appeared timely and inappropriately and proclaimed before all that the King could fight no battle on his own - - Sgorr stood before the stallion and spoke the damning words of a friendship untested by title and rank; and again, Elestirnė found himself caught in laughter, though now it was blithe, hysterical, a bright bubbling laughter which brought tears to his eyes and forced his breath from his breast. It was hysterical! it brought him to his knees and kept his breath from him; it charged his body as it curdled, twisting and becoming something darker, something deeper, something more difficult and dangerous and horrifying - - and he was reborne in that moment, wreathed in the jumbled beauty of his decrepit soul, wreathed in the shadow of a thousand decaying thoughts, wreathed in fire and ice and snow and heat, in happiness and beauty and lust and intrigue. His voice burst forth from his lips and he, had he wanted to, could never have kept the words from booming forth, from catching against his teeth and becoming a strange, vague hissing - - he changed, his body contorting, his muscles screaming - - and the air lifted and the shifting shadows of night crept forward, towards the gathering, toward the dank! the insipid! the infantile! the Ravens! he spat upon the soil, he forced himself to his feet; he, groaning in a new, writhing kind of pain, brought himself forward and toward the meadow - - and here he stopped, silent, brooding, his eyelids heavy and hooded, his upper lip curled, his step heavy and heady and dark.
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