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A False Prophecy From an Angry Mind |
Fire on a black landscape. Glowing crimson against absolute pitch. At least that’s what it was a first. Then came the sound. It was a truly violent crescendo of noise, words silently thrumming somewhere far far away. It had a beat to it, though it was fairly drowned out by the sheer power with which each new sound came. The words flowed like lyrics. They were tinged with something sinister, something wrong... She couldn’t make out what they were, but memory of them would sharpen with awakening. That lasted for about three and a half minutes. The song of hatred and loathing died out. Then truer words began to play across hearing. It sounded like a string of numbers, with something whispered silently in the background. The string was hard to follow upon the first sounding when they faded in, but got easier to identify with more repetitions. It was heard to be ‘one, three, eighteen, three, twenty-one, thirteen,’ then it would repeat again and again. There was a single spoken word, barely audible amongst the string of numbers. It floated, spun, rang with the repetitive sound of wicked words spoken from ancient tomes used to bring doom upon the ones intended for slaughter. Then came the images. The fire against the background was still there, on occasion musical measures with notes floated across the field of vision in faded white, starkly contrasting against the flaring black. If one could play music in their head by reading sheets with measures, it would go with the same staccato as the number chain when spoken out loud. The black on which the fire burned began to shine, developed into an oily black that reflected the flames dancing across it. Then he walked through the fire. He was wearing mostly black. The pants, the belt, the trenchcoat, the boots were black. The shirt underneath the open trenchcoat was white. The hair was black, and so were the eyes. It couldn’t be sure who this person was, many people came and went in Khazan, and no one would ever see some of their faces. This was a face that no one wanted to see. It had no deformities, no scars, no blemishes. But no one would dare say he looked handsome, if it was only for the expression on his face. It was a glare. Not just any if-looks-could-kill-you’d-be-a-smoldering-pile-on-the-floor glare, but a glare of pure hatred. Some would be foolish enough to say it was rage, but the lips did not curl. The brow furrowed and the jaw was clenched as tightly as the fists would in a bout of fury, but this was not rage. Just anger, maybe. But it did loathe, and it did so greatly. Merely looking at that face made a person want to scream and run away. But then they would realize that they took so much energy to scream that they could not move. With a look into his eyes, a person could feel that they were having their very souls pierced with something more sharp than the finest weapon the finest blacksmith could ever mold. Those eyes had the power to make someone feel as if they were drowning in a godless emptiness that offered no sanctuary to no one. She felt worthless. For once in her life she felt totally worthless. Did his face or eyes show any signs of purpose? It is not sure. The fire advanced, wrapped around him, swirled like a tornado from the nether-reaches of Hell, and came down upon the watcher like rains of blazing stone from the heavens. Then the fire parted and encircled him. And the sight was even more ghastly than before. He floated, slowly spinning in a circle in midair, with arms raised to his sides, only with elbows bent and hands at head level, feet hanging limply side-by-side, and head held high. A savoir he was not. The boots, shirt, and coat were now gone, and on his back... ...were wings of bloody quivering flesh, long pointed teeth instead of feathers, a truly morbid parody of an angel. Blood soaked him from head to toe, soaked into his hair, poured from his eyes instead of tears, dripped down his fingers and back and pants, fell off of his feet onto the black below, and pooled below him like a great red ocean. On his chest was a bloody scrawl. ‘MISERY,’ it read. Blood dripped from slits across the wrist, from an invisible source in his hairline, from under his fingernails and toenails, from his mouth and nose... ...and he was smirking... It was not the same look of unmitigated loathing, this was a smirk of gloating, something that found something funny about the whole experience. He stopped his slow spin in the air, facing the watcher. And he slowly floated in. He smiled a toothy grin, teeth red with the blood he bathed in. And he floated in until all that could be seen were his shoulders, his face, and those dreadful, dreadful wings. And he began to mouth something, though the words began to float through the air as his mouth stopped moving, opened to let loose with a scream that only came as the whispering of a dark language, and burst forth with a dark gush of blood unmatched by bullet wounds and knife lacerations... Your visions started to change And upon his forehead, with each letter slowly etching themselves onto his forehead at the same time, appeared the word ‘FEAR’. The watcher was afraid. And she screamed. She jarred herself awake, bringing her out of that damned unconscious world. She pushed herself up out of her bed, and gave a short scream capable of waking up everyone within a single block radius. As if anyone cared in that section of Lowtown. She had just woken herself up. At first her heart beat very rapidly, and her breathing came heavily, but those slowed down within a few seconds. She had been having the same vision for the several past weeks. She had gotten used to it. It didn’t seem disturbing to her that she was used to something that was so wrong. She smiled happily to herself. Today was the day. Today was the day she ensured that he would never touch her. She was not aware that her visions made this man out to be more than he would actually be. He was not truly evil, he was just fairly powerful, and would try very hard to leave the corpses of everyone who got in his way in his wake. She began to hum a cheerful tune to herself, hopped out of bed, and went to her kitchen. She lived in the upper level of a duplex, with the staircase going down to the open foyer below. There was currently no one living downstairs, though the owner was searching for a few tenants. She took a moment to peek out into the hall with the staircase. Yep, the noose was still there from when she had tied it yesterday. She went to the kitchen, and grabbed a few disposable gloves and a roll of masking tape from a drawer. She then went to the bathroom to find her razor blades. The building’s owner had discovered the body of his tenant, Eliza Corrigan, upon showing some prospective new tenants his building. They had smelled something faintly rotting while outside, but only noticed the body upon seeing her feet dangling from above the staircase. After losing his clients, the owner called the local precinct, who sent a medical team and a few investigators. They concluded that Ms. Corrigan had used two methods to commit suicide. She had first filled a pair of latex gloves partway with ice water, dropped a razor in each, and taped them against her forearm to prevent water leakage. She then proceeded to get atop the staircase banister and slip the noose around her neck. Before jumping, she used the razors she had slipped into the gloves to slit her wrists. It hadn’t been a good plan, but from the effort put into it, this lady was awful determined to die one way or another. One investigator, a low-ranking detective named Derek Galloway, decided to look into her background, and discovered something that troubled him. It did not trouble him Galloway because she had a squeaky-clean background, that she had no criminal record and had never needed counseling or psychologists in her life. What troubled him was that Eliza Corrigan had been a seer. She had been able to make prophecies. There were a surprising amount of prophets in Khazan. Most ignored their gifts, convinced that soothsaying was to only be done by those ordained. Some other went on to create ministries, and gain cult-like followings. Others were called crazy, put on medication, and thrown into asylums. But, this past week, there was a mass trend among many of the prophets of Khazan. Several dozen had committed suicide or died in on way or another. Some had thrown themselves in front of cars, some hung themselves, some overdosed on whatever was handy, one had even gone as far as taking hostages and forcing the local law enforcement to do it for him. Another frightening aspect was that a handful of the crazier seers had either etched the word ‘misery’ on their chests, or the word ‘fear’ on their foreheads, or even both. Galloway found it was a trend only among lower prophets, ones lacking truly powerful abilities. But he found that it slowly seemed to be climbing up to those with more powerful seeing ability. They managed to control their urge to die better. They instead released this new-found fear by taking pens and writing, or taking knives and cutting several words into whatever wall they could find. Once again, the words ‘misery’ and ‘fear’ popped up. And so did ‘hate’ and ‘anger’ and ‘why.’ But, at the center of the collage of words was always a string of numbers. 1 3 18 3 21 13, that was the sequence. No one was able to determine what it really meant. Added up, it was 59. That number seemed to have no real significant value. Others merely tried to find anagrams or tried to convert the numbers into mathematical equations. They came up with crazy theories and concepts, some went as far to claim the return of Quietus or the coming of the Final End of Khazan. Only Galloway looked through the libraries of each prophet, and found that most had some version of the Khazanica Kabbalah. So, he sat down, and began to translate and interpret. He had much number crunching to do, as the number chain was near indiscernible from a big number, to lots of small numbers... When he was done after a week, he was genuinely confused. None of his results pointed to any prophecies, or any grand evil destined to wreak havoc in Khazan. Not a thing. Galloway concluded that it was just a mass hysteria that influenced the judgment of the seers of Khazan, and that it had struck the ones with the least ability to block it first. This advice went out to all the great seers of Khazan, to try and halt their visions as they went to bed, to prevent themselves from seeing what this single man considered the deranged vision of a single powerful telepath. Of course, a grand investigation was held after that claim, but no telepath with the motivation or the power to perform such an act could be tracked down. The investigation was stopped shortly afterward. Galloway later checked upon the seers that hadn’t committed suicide, and found that some had drawn what they had seen. Only one or two had done exceedingly good jobs, painting the most macabre portrait he had ever seen in his life. It was a portrait. The background was of fire clinging to nothingness, and in the foreground was a man in black pants, dripping from head to toe with blood. He had angel wings that looked like they had been skinned, and instead of feathers there were these little white pointed things, maybe horns or fangs... Upon the chest was the word ‘misery,’ and on the forehead was ‘fear,’ both scrawled in blood. Whoever was sending out the visions was a twisted bastard. One had even done the face fairly well. He would have to remember to look for this fellow, post a bounty or two on his head. After all, there was no way there could be someone who had already gained a fear following in Khazan without actually arriving there. But, the question remained. Why did so many prophets go crazy over what was supposedly the same dream? Was something wicked truly coming to Khazan? Well, this was Khazan, Galloway told himself. It was nearly expected for some great and powerful evil to come along every once in awhile. No biggie. Written by Ren Start - 03/18/2002 End - 03/24/2002 As you can tell, I was not in the best mood that night. I felt much better after writing this.
I read through this several hours later, and realized this has too many mistakes in it. Not really my best work, either...
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The C. Force © 1996-2002 Matt Laskowski --- The R. Force © 1995-2002 Ren