Monday 7 September 2020

A Song From the Dead

 I know you don't like this - but I DON'T CARE.

This is nearly the end anyway. So, if anyone is still interested in the big letter-writing Rulers of Ir fantasy paracosm I ran for a couple of months.

First Chronicle of Ir - The Beginning

Seconds Chronicle of Ir - The End

Transcript of the Gronference - Last Ditch Attempt to Save the World, or Idiots in a Room?

Primary Sources; the Letters of the Rulers

Only two things remain; to tell of the rescue f the Herald of Ir, and (if we play this out) to discover the results of the expedition proposed on the final day of The Gronference.

Meanwhile, I'm sure all of you are fascinated to discover what happened as a result of the (probably) final battle between the Armies of Highvern, lead by Tadaitzol, wielder of the sword of Motherfucking Destiny, and the undead hordes of the Mourgelands lead by Lich-Witch Vauphiria Donkor.

Well, we have this final report from the strange Underworld of Ir...



A Song From the Dead




"I will speak to you of a stage a little closer to the infinite dark. The catch before the fall, the brief breath taken by the failing climber in the seconds before the unending drop. Ur  -the inverse  echo of Ir, that worlds condensed afterlife.
 
We have a vast land here in Ur, infinite, or near-infinite, and suffer need for no resource but memory and light. Ir is our sky, a celestial void, for those of us bound within the grey and glassy world of death. The ending of mortality is our weather here, the untangling of each virus is our light and the unending deaths of microbes form the substance of our sound. So it is that, where nothing dies, we are both deaf and blind.
 
So it is our sky burns brightly of late, the wars of Ir accelerate, our land of glass mountains and silver seas bakes beneath the blaze of falling souls. Our population swells.
 
There in the shoals of mortality which roll above us like bright pillars of unreachable storm, of which Ulukaa is to us, something like a sun, the cities stars, and battlegrounds our brief Pleiades, there are black scars, winding tears in the pulsing light and ocean-sound of death. Dark nebulae, of which the Moureglands, that place of desert and undeath, is the deepest and the darkest of them all.
 
So it was that many watched in amazement as light burned and blistered against the borders of that black land like fire spreads across an unlit ship in dark watches of the night, first pebbling and rolling up and down its margins, then bright sparks bursting like fireworks until in a handful of moments, jagged fingers of fire leapt into the black borders, like a fire-elf gasping at a blackened log, and dug in.
 
We watched here, the dead, Ab, Un and Neverborn. Souls fell like rain.
 
Then, like fire following fuel across a wooden floor, the gleam leapt into the dark, sparked and rushed, then bloomed alike unto an opening flower or an exploding star.
 
All of Ur, all out slow grey arcologies, bathed in the cataclysmic light and we, the dead, fading and forgotten, knew that some great Doom had struck Ir in these, its last days.
 
Then, they fell, like twin suns, like demons of flame, one Ice-white the other the pulsing infra-black of a doomed necromancer swollen with souls and blistering with avoided time, howling out entropy like a gale.
 
The two grasped and grappled like gods cast into the void. One, male in form, crackling with the katabatic energies of that crystal queen grasped in one hand the memory of a blade, a blade of Motherfucking Destiny, all could see. His body torn, tortured and rent like a saint or a beggars clothes, bleeding the freezing blue-white fire of his own imperious wrath, his form clasped across its broken pieces by his own imperious will and hate.
 
Hate drove them indeed as death dragged them down, falling into grey Ur like mating birds.
 
The second rode a caul of banshees to her long-avoided doom, spirits spilled from her like a tornado of souls, screaming and singing, praising and wrathful, weeping and wailing, some clawed at their black mistress like crows pulling down an eagle, others, more commensurate to command, or else of other mind, hauled her upwards, or seemed to, for that entropic witch, dense with spells hurled her charm-craft and enochian knowledge upwards in chains of signs and great webs of burning symbology, such magic as I can find little memory of in my own patched and overwritten books of thought.
 
Yet all her rage and all her art were not enough. That other, white, cold, as clear as ice and cold as wind, hooked the witch, drove fingershards of resentful anger deep into her dark soul. For every spell she spoke, he knifed his rage a little deeper, for every squirm, a squeeze, for every wrench a returning choke.
 
The sorceress railed madly at her captor. Hurled spells from her gaze and imprecations of fire from her tongue, enough to scorch and unmake any soul. And so the icy warrior fell, blasted by spellcraft, his face, eroded to nothing, his memory, that absolute treasure of the dead, erased
he very name scoured from his now blank and faceless form.
 
Yet she could not scour his hate.
 
What wrath it was fell amongst these two, such rage as would roar in the face of entropy iself, sustaining its own life by its own hate, and its own hate by its own life, regardless of the world, or peace, or time, or death itself.
 
For as long as She fell, He would force Her fall. There was and would be no escape.
 
All this in a moment, like meteors or burning worlds hanging in the air like paintings of the apocalypse. A fresh memory here in Ur, a rare enough thing.
 
And after them, as if some fair covering wet and bowed with days of rain, bending to its centre, dripping, stretching and tense with its unrecoverable load of souls were pierced by the thrust of a sword then, like a rapier prick, a torrent of souls.
 
After the witch and the warrior they fell, a rain of fire and light, enough to blind the dead. Screaming and howling they flowed after the fallen pair, mortal many, bright with the pale fire of their freshly lived lives, and undead, some, those bound to bones, looped up into our sky by necromantic magic, now returned.
 
We thought then, all of us I think, that this was the long-suspected end of Ir, that the grey sickness and its mycelium of despair which gangrened the cradle of our lives had weakened the substance of what-is so that like ripe fruit bursting, or a pustulating boil pierced by lancet, the whole was done and now every last and final soul of Ir would fall to Ur and then the darkness unfold us all. For only by the light of your lives, and your deaths may we see and speak, and only on your memories may we feed.
 
This was not the end, not yet at least. Only some great war betwix the Ice Queen and her undead foe. Some vast folly, or mighty deed. (For us, there is little to choose between the two).
 
This was not the end.
 
But it was perhaps, the beginning of the end."

2 comments:

  1. Very, very good prose and imagery. Reads like the creation myth of an apocalyptic religion

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  2. I think it is very epic, in sense of mythological battle - something that happens not between mere people but deities and forces of reality. Thank you.

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