Myriad Worlds: The Sibilants

Excerpt from The Dreams of Harrison Peak, by Gomph Uspleki:

It hangs there, in the empty velvet, a chain wrapped around its ankle, hanging from an ice-crystal too far away to be seen. Its arm outstretched, its lipless mouth open in delight, or pain, or song. What once might have been wings now dangle uselessly. Its broiling corpus now full of a thousand souls, living or hoping to live as one does, full of shattered dreams and hopeless futures.

Kings live here, and Queens. Dukes and Earls of uncompromising nature spend hours plying their efforts towards games of chance and strategy. Penitents and petitioners seek audiences with the Holy Quatro, or the Two Kings. They come bearing offerings of meat and root, drink and coin. They clothe themselves in their finary, hoping the fortunes of the long-dead are not visited upon them.

The winding halls, like twisted veins through marrow and silt, echo with the cries forgotten. The wise hide their heads, as their babbling tongues now speak only foolishness, beset by the truth this cadaver conveys. The new priests rise, new faiths from the empty holes that ring the spinal column. New songs to push back the quiet darkness, to feed the wild and untamed absence. And yet life does live in the bones of the dead. Food and drink, dance and song. What mockeries must they be?

A thousand names for a thousand places. The Underheel. The Spine. The Apex. The Sancrum Halls. The Rhumy Cuts. The Knee, the Upper Shin, the Charnal Wrist. A thousand places with a thousand names, all buried in the hidden depths of our own souls. What lives can be built in the hollow bones of a being long dead? What hope is there for a people so small, when even now a giant of unimaginable size hangs dead in the empty Velvet?

Who was this being, and who hung them there?

Yea, not only for the Aeolam is the harrowing truth of the land. Where your foot touches so touches you, and those who land on this necrotic shore never return. Oh, the flesh may return — scarred and worn by the harsh umbranian air — as may the name and the clothing, but deep within such shattered masks lie beings of unknown scars and sins. What must be done to survive in the white ivory halls? What horrific monsters are shaped by the land in which even screams become whispers in fear? What must you become, to someday return?