[ React | L E V I A T H A N S E A ]
Posted by Elestirnė on 5/2/2005, 8:44 am, in reply to "ad" "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."
64.178.108.144
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. He was no beauty then, but a creature of a darker purpose - - and that darker purpose, strange and alien though it was, thrilled his mind and body and soul and left him, Elestirnė of the Ravens, filled with Heaven and Hell and the promise of each; he was a stranger to them - - and amongst them he felt no safety, no serenity, but rather the diseased continuance of a hopeless past revisited in this vile present: they disgusted him, black and decrepit, crying manuscripts of false pride across the barren landscape - - they were horrible, rank, coloured with pretension and a truth which he could not fathom. He found himself, still stable in the darkness, the remains of his laughter decayed at his feet, and lost himself almost at once; he fell into the sweet respite of the Rogue - - landless, lawless, leaderless - - and was suddenly created anew, a false creature, a strange creature, knowing only land and intrigue and the copper bitterness of blood. There he stood, surveying the covey before him, and knew at once what destiny the Dimension would hold: atop a hill, lit only by a shaft of sunlight which split his crown and left only his eyes in shadow, he cried aloud. He cried aloud knowing that the Glade would turn to his voice, that the Glade would glance upward and see, amongst the trees and leaves and heavy boughs, a stallion estranged and horrifying, yet beautiful for all of that. He cried, reckoning nothing of Kingship or Rank, caring little for Titles or Pleasantries, wanting nothing of what Pinnochet or his aimless bevy of idiots could offer; he cried, and for the first time the Dimension was audience to the scream of the Order - - it carried, shattering at last against rock and stone - - it twisted, falling from his lips and catching there, fading against the skin and teeth - - it rang, and for a moment Elestirnė did little more than listen, his own voice slipping away and returning: and, cruelly, it made him glad.
"Ravenglade!" he cried, raising his voice against the echo of his own scream - - below, the audience paused and Elestirnė caught the eye of Pinnochet; here, he smiled wickedly and, pausing only to pick his way from his stony hillside, made his way into the coven below. They, like scared children, stepped from his path - - he did not spare a glance to his back, where they fell into his wake with wide eyes and parted lips, but focused his intent gaze upon the Great King; a foal! a foal! a filly foal! was the greeting which the grey stallion received, his eyes narrowed and lip curled. His breath hissed from his mouth, rank, decayed, and he spat in the face of he which they called Lord - - no Lord was he! small, a crawling creature hiding behind rank and title! a dumb imbecile, a usurper of the Throne! he was not worthy to stand before Elestirnė! he was not worthy to stand before this Kingdom! "Figurehead," the stallion hissed, squaring himself in this Great Audience, his wide shoulders rolling back, his back straightening - - he lifted his massive head and stood, a tableau of strangeness, a full hand taller than this Great Patriarch. "Liar." His disgust was audible, it dripped from the words as though it were honey: but this was no balm, no soothing reassuring speech - - this was mockery, an instigation, an invitation to open battle and war - - "You, Pinnochet, are no more than this dirt beneath my feet," he began, extending a foreleg to crush against the grass in example, allowing the forward motion of the action to carry him another step closer so that, now, he breathed no more than an inch from the nostrils of the King.
... continued
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