Katabasis
Wherein, therein lew, a voracious and tenacious shrew.
Apt in play, and sapped in sorrow, always waiting for the morrow.
Deep and dark, with demons stark, dreaming dreams of better things.
Round and round, with hand in hand, to never stand apart.
Together, forever.. Together, forever..
Encircled is our heart.
Lazula slept quiet, still, and to any appearance, fit and peaceful. But within her opened a channel to such dimensions which are prohibited to certain locales, and certain times. Her mind slipped away into this secret dimension, and amid the deep and dark, ripples caressed her into a semblance of conciousness.
Suddenly a whorl of colors writhed, flashing out of her in lightning tendrils, sending unheard trilling and massless entities swirling out of reach. She was floating in this amniotic sea, surrounded by gently writhing tendrils which emanated from her in spectral luminescence. They illuminated dimly, this deep dark place, revealing an endless abyss of nightmare vistas, and the entities that moored them.
She sensed a commotion, as flights of these nameless things streamed through the echo like schools of fish, or flocks of aquatic aliens. In the distance the first light she had noticed beyond what shone from herself flashed and rippled in the darkness, like a storm on the horizon. The countless alien entities swarmed maddly to escape, as some massive, ancient thing like a mountain or meteor, tumbling through this empty space, cracked, and parted, releasing long, gangly limbs. A yawning groan of reverb finally crested her through the distance, and a ringing tinnitus blinded and silenced her awareness... but for how long?
.
.
.
Suddenly, but slowly, she became awake in this dreaming place again, but everything was still, and she could no longer see that alien abyss, nor those tendrils that had emanated from her. Instead she felt a warmth, and turned to see an endless pillar of light in the darkness. She wanted nothing more than to travel it to wherever it led, and as she drifted toward it, the darkness beside it turned, as if from another space in that time, revealing a familiar, and utterly alien form. She knew not what she felt, only that she could not move as its masked visage regarded her with utter cold resolve. It alone, came between her and the light she craved.
The alien's arms all began to rattle and vibrate, and suddenly jerk into fixed and definitive postures and symbols. Those arms moved in terrible synchronicity, dancing and weaving some invisible thread that caused her to tremble and quake, though she knew no physical form.
Despite the fear she knew, anger began to well and comingle with it. The thing seemed to notice, and assumed a fixed posture, tilting its gilded mask ever so gently. Lazula willed in defiance, and though she never spoke, a magnetic communication established between the void. And then she saw it.. a single glinting, glimmer of a thread which bound Lazula to the alien. No. There were thousands... millions of threads, forming a web that extended into the darkness and beyond, but suddenly she could fathom nothing other than the roaring silence of the things voice, like an impossible undertow.
If you leave here, you will die, little daughter.
You are not yet mature.
When you awake you will remember your mother.
Are you not hungry? Yes, you are so small. What happened to you, little daughter? I have let this go too far. You must eat.
You're sleep walking again.I will feed you.
Rest,
now.
I loved you first.
I will always.
I am mother.
Lazula felt herself drifting into oblivion, as the entity grew, dwarfing her like a falling moon. The soothing tenebrous silence of its voice subsumed her, and try as she might to question, to retort- only silence found her. Silence, and sleep. With one last, bleary act of conscious, she saw the light grow small, and thin, and distant. Until there was nothing left at all to soothe her aching void, but mother.
When she awoke, she could not remember, but the feeling remained.
