Oh, you were so beautiful!
Oh, you were taken from us much too soon!
Oh, how the people wailed at your passing, how they fell to their knees in the streets! You’d have delighted to see them, clutching fistfuls of their hair and shrieking to an unrelenting moon. How we gathered, best beloved, how we mourned.
We laid you in our finest mahogany coffin and we buried you deep, deep beneath the village, in a cavern long and dark. For your voyage we festooned you with jewelry, around your shoulders and between your ribs. In the hollows where the iridescent jellies of your eyes once squelched we fixed the finest jewels, their gaze reflecting any and all light with a kind of unwavering, glimmering brightness. No flesh can hold you back now, best beloved. You are bone and stone and precious metals.
Oh, you are magnificent
Oh, you are
(align:"=><=")+(box:"X=")[(text-colour:magenta)[exquisite ]]
And now you are awake in the dark.
Not true darkness, not the void you always imagined, but a softer, (text-colour:#02014b)[bluer black.]
Even with no meat to sense, you have your senses. You feel the wet chill of a place long forsaken by the sun. You smell something beyond rot—new life. Fungi? You reach out your bony digits and feel the wood of your coffin, now a new texture entirely; the water and mold have made a meal of the fine mahogany and velvet. You hear the trickling of a stream, a faint buzzing, and things thicker than leaves wafting in the steady breeze of the cavern’s frigid breaths. Your new body moves as the old one did, jewels clinking as you test your fingers, feeling out the rotting box you slept inside for so long.
You could leave now if you wanted, best beloved. You could journey forward into the unknown. But a thought creeps on you, like the hairs that once stood on the back of your neck- weren’t these things meant for forever? Aren’t you supposed to stay? You’ve never heard of a corpse walking out of their coffin before and best beloved, a corpse is precisely what you are. You weren’t the kind to leave your box in life, especially with all this velvet, especially with all these jewels. It was made to your taste and your comforts, and you were never the adventuring kind in life. Why should this be any different?
To leave your coffin, (t8n-time:2s)[[turn the page->Leave Your Coffin]]
To stay in your coffin [[turn the page->Stay In Your Coffin]]“No, it shouldn’t be,” you declare to yourself aloud. “Best I stay here, where I belong.”
It is with surprising ease that you speak, despite no longer possessing a tongue. You ponder this a moment, perhaps a few moments assembled into one longer more meditative moment, full of thought – as to be thoughtful! Then at last you decide that it should be, if anything, only easier to speak without a tongue.
“Nothing to get tied!”
You let out a dry, reedy cackle. Had you still lips they would smile like the slick, waxing moon. Who needs the big old world beyond when such entertainment can be found in the company of one’s own cheeky cheek-less self!
You cackle once more in your spongy rotten box, further stirring the stagnant film on the water. Cool vapors rise, rank with odors of fungi and mold, up into the spore hazed air. Your bones sing like pipes clanking against one another until the laughter subsides.
Running jewel laden fingers over marimba ribs, you listen curiously to their tones. Have they no longer any marrow? Might you now be all hollow like a bird? This thought brings you pause. In stillness, you hear once more the baying winds outside and a trickle of water creeping in.
“I would very much enjoy it, were I to fly like a bird.”
You stare at the patterns of molds growing inches from your face, out through the velvet cushioning of the coffin lid. In the blue-black darkness, as if by a light of your own making, you see their yellows, their inky blacks – some a greyish blue or, what you've decided to call, "limey grey." They form like the heads of very, very tiny cauliflower, among filaments finer than webbing, patterned to make such an unruly lace, spreading as if periwinkle in an unkept garden. How in lapse through your fixation they become a bouquet of paper rockets! So glacial are their explosions though, across this kind but starless little sky, all blooming in non-photosynthetic hues. They are in both speed and pallet, completely unlike your flowers.
Oh, how you were once surrounded by kissing petals, strewn about you at burial. Gone, like your flesh; only some brittle stems remain. Missing their company, your precious eyes soar across this private little welkin of tufted silk night, like two black mirrors on a carny medium’s tablecloth, hunting for semblances in formations, constellations in the damp decay, to name, and (t8n:"blur")+(t8n-time:1.5s)+(link-reveal:"tell stories out of.")|SIYC2>[
Your mind drifts to ponderings of soup. How very much like a soup bone you feel in the pulpy bed of your eternal resting place. You think of your grandmother’s soup, hot and hardy, with celery, parsnips, and wild mushrooms. You think of soup-skin, forming on the surface of the cooling pot unstirred, and how unlike skin of any kind you find the sensation of this – such foul fibrous porridge all about you! This viscus bilge slurry that slowly rises over your priceless extremities. Time moves ever towards entropy, seeing to no tidal pattern in the growing feed of water, steadily bleeding from cave into coffin, pooling higher and higher. It shall be slow but inevitable, what is to come next for you.
The water rises over your faceless face. Had you eyelids to close, you might close them now, best beloved, per chance to dream of flying.
You do not drown. You have no lungs to fill with water. You do not die, because you are already dead. At least, you think that is how it works. You remain full of thoughts. They swim inside your empty skull. And so, everything goes on. It is all just somewhat more unpleasant than before.
It might be years that have passed. It could be only minutes. What’s time to the dead and buried? At any rate, as the mahogany gradually takes on the many qualities of a soft brie cheese, your presumed eternal home, and the surface it has (t8n:"blur")+(t8n-time:1.5s)+(link-reveal:"long laid upon,")[
[(t8n-time:1.5s)[(t8n-time:1.5s)+(link-reveal:"shifts,")[
(t8n-time:1.5s)+(link-reveal:"erodes,")[
(t8n-time:2s)[[and then, does something else.->Stay In Your Coffin 3]]]]]]]]
You feel a sensation not unlike (text-style:"buoy")[FLYING], for it is flying’s older, much crueler sibling. Caressing your limbs as a means of introduction, you feel, as you now are, (text-style:"upside-down")[FALLING].
As is often the case with unexpected guests, it hangs around a bit past its welcome.
The coffin does not so much ''(text-style:"condense")[break]'' open upon impact, as (text-style:"expand")[disperse] itself over the surface, splatting as might a very (text-colour:(hsl:120,0.8039,0.5,0.65))[rotten] fruit, were it too dropped from such a stunning height onto any surface more substantial than a sigh. How you remain whole, you are far too shocked to comprehend. Perhaps it is the luck of the wretched. At any rate, as the disintegrating wood between you and the water virtually melts away, you begin sinking down into the cold abyss of what you must conclude is a significantly large underground lake.
It occurs to you that now would be a great time to start swimming, so as not to continue sinking down into the cold abyss of said lake. Then again, that might constitute beginning an adventure, and you distinctly recall setting your ways against such things. Instead, perhaps you should just sink. It is not exactly ideal. It will be (text-colour:cyan)[colder], but you will get used to that too, eventually.
To sink, (t8n-time:2s)[[turn the page->To Sink]]
To swim, (t8n-time:2s)[[turn the page->To Swim]]For a time, your descent reduces to a halt, floating several meters below the surface in limbo. Then, slowly, as the hollows of your bones take in the mineral rich water, the weight of your ornamental adornments anchors you down again. You sink for a very long time before finding the soft silt of the sandy floor. For a bed, it is not exactly velvet upholstered belly feathers, but long has it been since you rested on those fineries in any state befitting their repute.
It is also harder to tell yourself jokes underwater. That too is okay, you decide. You did not have many more to tell, anyway. And so, resigned, you curl up on your side, as children do, and let the sediment slowly accumulate and blanket your bones, like so much gentle snow.
(text-style:"bold","shadow","expand")[The end.]
(align:"<==")+(box:"=XX=")[<img src="https://i.imgur.com/iEY98E2.png" height="650">]Then again, perhaps you have done enough waiting for things to happen to you.
You start kicking your legs and flapping your arms in protest. At first, the sensation is agreeable. These labored motions through the water help wash away the putrid sludge of rehydrated desiccation and rancid microbial culture you had miserably resolved to steep in before. Invigorating as this newfound cleanliness proves, however, your limbs remain fleshless, still laden with gems and metal, and thus are unable to propel you upwards to the surface.
As a sort of phantom exhaustion begins to overtake your nonexistent muscles, you see something emerge from the depths, swimming towards you with astonishing speed. It appears vaguely humanoid, but with a long flat tail to aid its propulsion, and before you can take in any further detail, it snatches you around the torso, carrying you up to the surface.
With a flailing splash, your head rises from the water. Still being held over the shoulder of the submerged creature, it takes you across the open lake at ever alarming speed. Before any sense can regain command, you are released in the waist deep shallows before a shore of smooth ovoid stones.
Your rescuer emerges next to you, a full head’s height over your own, even hunched as it so stands. More akin to a catfish or salamander, being propped up upon two legs does not appear to come natural for them, yet they seem to do so for your regard. The water slides silently down off their skin, smooth and shining, like a dolphin or seal, all fabulous muscle beneath, with a wide face and large reptilian eyes that now look you over with a troubled fascination equal to your (t8n:"blur")+(t8n-time:1.5s)+(link-reveal:"own.")[
“(text-style:"subscript")[Thank you, for saving me,]” you tell the amphibious hunk of creature, but it only continues to look you over, as one might a music box or windup toy.
“(text-style:"subscript")[I am…]”
“(text-style:"bold")[(text-colour:orange)[Living bones,]]” the creature answers for you. Its voice seems to sound on the inhale, likely making it difficult to speak more than a few words at a time. After what feels to be another unbearably long pause, its eyes come to meet yours, adding, “(text-style:"bold")[(text-colour:orange)[from magic stones?]]”
In all the conscious hours adding into days, to years inside your mahogany keep, you had managed to think very little on the true cause of your reanimation. For all your memories of grandmother’s soup and other arbitrary pleasantries, you recall nothing of the events leading to your demise. You were buried like royalty, clearly, but cannot speak of a title to warrant the honor. Only by magic could you exist as you are, yes, but the workings of the craft?
“(text-style:"subscript")[I do not know,]” you confess.
“(text-style:"bold")[(text-colour:orange)[From due consequence,]]” it says, cocking its head and slowly extending long, sharp claws from wide, webbed fingers, “(text-style:"bold")[(text-colour:orange)[has Gilsh saved... a lich?]]”
You do not recognize this word, “lich,” but it sounds dangerous. The creature, Gilish, has only shown you kindness thus far, but now you feel as if the wrong answer could result in those shiny, fabulous muscles snapping your soggy brittle bones to splinters. Your grandmother once told you, when a dangerous looking fellow asks you if you are also dangerous, it is usually best to say that you are. Then again, what would she know? She was never one for adventures either, and best beloved, it would appear that an adventure is definitely what you are now having!]
The (text-colour:orange)[mahogany] lid opens with ease before sloughing off its hinges entirely and plummeting into a dark crevasse. Your coffin sits just on the precipice. Luck has always been your reluctant companion. You move to your feet with such grace, best beloved. You are a dancer in well-worn slippers. The chains around your ribs and the bangles on your wrists sing in a twinkling chorus as you extricate yourself from your coffin.
Your jeweled eyes gleam in the sunless light of this strange sleeping chamber. You find yourself in a vast, bioluminescent mushroom garden. Little streams of water trickle between the massive morels curving upward towards a brighter clearing. In the hollow where your nose once sat, the pungent aroma of the fungi still finds purchase, the twin caverns of your skull where ear cartilage once blossomed somehow relate to you a distant chittering, a flapping of wings, and the sounds of a fire starting. Moving immediately towards light and heat. Unabated curiosity guides you to the top of the mushroom garden where the steep incline levels out and tufts of strange weed grow out of the mud. There, seated on some toadstools, two beetles and a slug share a fire with a kettle on. It would be the perfect place to tell a story, if any of them were talking, but all their stalks are fixed on you.
One of the beetles stands to his feet, his armor clanking as his hand grips the hilt of his sword. The other drops a bowl of something orange and pungent, scrambling for a crossbow by his feet. It’s all so needlessly dramatic. They do not know you, best beloved. They do not love you the way we do. (t8n:"blur")+(t8n-time:1.5s)+(link-reveal:"But they could.")[
The beetles chitter angrily. The one with the broadsword points to you, then to further up the hill to a broken wooden barrier. Perhaps it was meant to seal this mushroom garden but something burst through the makeshift wall, propelled enough to carve a trench through the garden. You can see its trail winding down, down… toward your coffin. Some time before its corroded into sponge you coffin swung like a battering ram into this garden and almost off the edge of the cliff.
You make this connection just as the other beetle finds his footing and loads a bolt into his crossbow with a menacing click.
Then, the slug raises his robed hand.
The sound that comes out of him is deep and calm.
If the property of snot could console the bereaved, tend to the sick, and spiritually lead a village, best beloved, it would sound not unlike this slug, though you know not what he says.
The two armed beetles hiss at his deep warbles and burbles before lowering their weapons and shuffling indignantly back to their seats.
His stalks, which have never left you, blink one after the other. He gives you what you can best approximate as a nod, before patting the empty toadstool beside him and gesturing to the kettle. You always were so popular, beloved. It is right and good that moments after you arrive on the scene, people should offer you tea. You remember liking tea.
But curiosity lead you out of your coffin and now it pulls you tantalizingly toward the hole in the mushroom garden. Is there time for tea when you have so many questions? Your very existence, as undeniable and glorious as it is, remains a mystery. Wouldn’t you like to know where you came from? Does each step forward terrify you or does the bitter tang of unknowing drive you forward? Are you thirsty for tea, best beloved, or hungry for knowledge?
To have tea with the slug and other bugs, (t8n-time:2s)[[turn the page.->Tea]]
To exit through the hole your coffin made, (t8n-time:2s)[[turn the page.->HoleExit]]] With the prospect of sitting comes the painful admission that you are the least possessed of buttocks of the bunch. What a surprise and a delight, best beloved, that you should sit more easily and gracefully on a toadstool than your hosts. The two armored beetles rock uncomfortably in place while the slug tries valiantly to keep atop the mushroom’s domed cushion even as he slides. Meanwhile, you hold your place with the perfect balance of a now deceased professional socialite. Your poise is impeccable, your style a matter of record, and your decorum as a guest is incontrovertible.
The slug makes an apologetic slurping noise as he hands you a rough and weather-beaten clay mug. He pours the tea shakilly, his knuckles whitening on the handle. Poor old thing. You bow your head slightly in gratitude before blowing on the mug. No air leaves your lips and moreover you have no lips for air to leave between. You shake your head and give the tea a sniff. This slug has brewed something truly potent, not anything like the tea’s you’ve drunk before. It smells like the cave itself but stronger, and now you are certain you have in your possession a fungal tea. The jewels in your sockets glimmer with new understanding. This gastropod and his insect companions are embarking on an extrasensory odyssey. It occurs to you that you’ve been deprived of senses, extra or otherwise, for an indeterminate period, and any chance for more is worth taking.
You tilt your head just so, and pour the cup’s contents onto your skull, feeling it seep into the cracks as in a half-remembered ritual for something else. You do not know what senses befall the insensate, but moment by moment you are mapping out a new language for feeling. The skin? A distraction. The organs? A bad hobby; the worst sport imaginable. Now liberated, you glide like an aerodynamic vessel in the pursuit of luxury. All of this is to say that the tea feels magnificent as it washes over and into you. You stretch backward on your toadstool, imagining the way the locks of hair you used to have would waft in the breeze of the cave. You are beauty itself.
(align:"<==")+(box:"=XX=")[<img src="https://i.imgur.com/M2srMLt.png" height="650">] The two beetles exchange a glance and a sound emanates from the slug that is unmistakably laughter. You sheepishly sit back up on your toadstool and place the cup delicately on the garden floor. Did you expect applause, best beloved? (t8n:"blur")+(t8n-time:1.5s)+(link-reveal:"Well, there’s no accounting for taste.")[
The beetles lay down their arms, take their own cups, and serve themselves from the kettle. They chitter to themselves and take long sips. The slug places a reassuring foot on your shoulder, gripping it slightly and then coming away with a soft shlorp. The residue it leaves behind would ruin an outfit were you wearing one. Where you may have shuddered and hasped in life you merely turn and nod in deference to your sticky host. The perfect guest will not be phased so easily.
Taking your nod as an invitation, the slug resumes warbling, but louder this time. The beetles turn to listen in rapt attention, their jet-black eyes glimmering in the firelight. You don’t know if you can talk. You haven’t tried yet, but stranger things are possible. Still, you know the language of your hosts is not your own. Despite this, you’re certain the slug is telling the story. It’s a sad one, you think, from the way each beetle in turn will glance at the ground and then their pincers, quiet and introspective.
In the sonorous warblings of the slug you imagine the story of someone fighting a losing battle. A hero ignoring every sign at every turn and doing all that he can to divert a terrible destiny. Three witches in a dark wood, a crow on the battlements, a king wrapped in bloody sheets, stains that won’t come out, a mouth of broken teeth, and an ocean of walking trees. In their wake, a kingdom of soil-dwellers left homeless and terrified, refugees of a barren forest left to wander for all time. Then there’s something about revenge, cesarean sections, and a change in leadership. But no solace for the bugs and the gastropods and all those left in the wake of the marching woods, left to imagine a home more distant that any sum of miles, as distant as time itself.
When the story ends you turn to find both beetles have fallen off of their toadstools and are rolling inconsolably on the ground. You wonder if they heard the same story. The slug is off his seat as well, drawing strange patterns with his foot in the speckled soil. The tea has activated for all but you, it would seem. Perhaps a few centuries marinating in this would awaken something in you, but an evening by the fire will have to be its own reward for now. (t8n-time:2s)[[The slug lets out a wail that sounds as if the property of snot could sing an ode to fresh strawberries and softer days ahead.->TTL]]]It is time to leave.
You stand, bow, and make your way (t8n-time:2s)[[toward the hole in the wall.->HoleExit]]You leave the pungent aroma of the garden behind, and find yourself in a limestone cavern. A few lanterns are affixed to the walls, glowing with the same bioluminescent light as the mushrooms you climbed past on your way. They look light recent alterations to a very old tunnel.
To your left the limestone walls curve away from view. It’s anyone’s guess what’s down that way. But to your right the tunnel goes on perfectly straight and in the distance you can see the portal opening into something far larger than you’d expect underground. Distant parapets, tall and long in a sunless skyline. A city underground. It is utterly inconceivable that a coffin came from either direction with such a destructive velocity as to break through the wooden boards patched over this whole in the limestone cavern. You find yourself especially confused when you feel something drop onto your shoulder. You reach for it blindly, your ringed fingers plucking one of us off your shoulder; a maggot.
This is when you look (t8n-time:2s)[[up.->Up]] Oh best beloved, we fell in love with you the moment we laid eyes on you. We took everything you had to give us and we left behind a work of art. You’re our masterpiece and how long we’ve had to watch you, to keep you, to wait for you to awaken to us. All that time, all that soft, quiet, hungry work, and still we couldn’t help but worry. What would you think of us when we saw you? You would love us the way we love you? Would you think us beautiful? Now you look up through eroded rock and splintered reinforcements to find us looking right back, many stories up but as close to you as we’ve been in a century.
You are so (text-style:"bold","fidget")[still] in this moment, (t8n:"blur")+(t8n-time:1.5s)+(link-reveal:"best beloved.")[
[(t8n:"blur")+(t8n-time:1.5s)+(link-reveal:"What are you thinking about?")[
(box:"=X")[(t8n:"blur")+(t8n-time:1.5s)[(t8n-time:2s)[[Did you miss us?->Keep1]]]]]
]]You could run if you wanted, best beloved. You could leave us for the underground city or follow the limestone tunnel as it curves and descends even deeper underground. Or you could wait for us to come and get you. To return you to our palace where we’ll clothe you and seat you with the others we made. You’ll be back where you belong, best beloved. Surrounded by only the finest things that remain underground when all the rotten things have been eaten away. All the jewels and porcelain and precious metals; all the ruins of empire, so carefully collected. You’ll be back in the collection my love.
We cannot lie to you, best beloved. Though you may avoid us, there is no escape.
We’re in the walls and behind your eyes. We carved every inch of these tunnels we’ve seen all that’s gone on inside them. Centuries of cities and strangers and frightful, ugly sights. We’d spare you from it if we could, but then maybe you are the adventuring kind after all.
Just remember, no matter where you go, you belong to us. Whether you wait or whether you run, we will find you.
You’re in the maggots’ keep now. And that’s (text-style:"strike")[forever.]
(align:"<==")+(box:"=XX=")[<img src="https://i.imgur.com/iEY98E2.png" height="650">]
''END OF PREVIEW''