Alois (black_sun) wrote in exvoto, @ 2012-11-20 13:12:00 |
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Entry tags: | alois |
Nigredo.
[Warning: Very heavy, kinda long, nsfw.]
A Solar Eclipse In Five Movements:
I. Crepuscule, or, the Shadow Enters.i. The Cave of the Night-Witch. Pitch crystal-ribbed arches and tunnels bone-blacked by ageless cremation. Animal aberrations long extinct, now uprooted by cracking glaciers. Skin-hinged twins born of unclean whores, Noble forest game and the sacred souls of the seers who see no more. All heaped upon the immemorial fire-pit to die. Reborn as food, fiber, inkstain, and ivory. Bones split and scraped, incised and inked, immolated for the osteomantic offering. She moves in tremors and feints, or does not move at all, Raising her claw-curved fingers to meet the handprints of iron blood border All about the crystalline mine-walls flecked with poison oxide and ore. Acid pools of blind white fishes, staring with waxen atrophied eyes ever upward to Stalactites casting the shadows of the hanged man, pierced with hooks holding Frozen hocks of maggotted meat above bilious cavewater cut through lime. At the white dawn of the winter solstice, The perihelioned daystar sank in the Dark Path of the starbelt, and did not return. Tremors shook leaves from limb, eggs from nests, arrows from bowstrings. Animals fled into holes, or threw themselves into the sea. Thunder came without lightning, for there was no light at all. oblivion awakened apocalypse, the underworld unveiled, The Mountain of the Void shook and vomited infernal bile the color of nothing. Tephra-mingled elements rendered unchaste and impure. The Impenetrable Mountains to the South suggilated by Black snow, black streams, black fog, black sand, black breath. All that was alive now shrouded in a fuliginous facade, frozen beneath the sunless day-night. The world disappeared. Deep within the cave-mine maze, the witch flew bat-like over her cauldron nests. A Night-Witch's harvest of the ash-plague, toiled over endlessly through endless night. At first, old woman's work. Alas, the secrets of the thaumaturge deteriorated into wives' tales amongst housemaker hags whose husbands were long lost. Canning, Distilling, Preserving, Pickling, Dissolving, Compounding, Vaporising. Dephlegmating, Colloiding, Sublimating, Transmuting. After six days of no sun, Kåtårszynå collected satchel and sickle, setting out for the southbound passage to the frozen lake of Olsirfell, to the forbidden forests of Thelondell. ii. The Shadow-Eater Without A Sun Soon Shall Starve. As the sun danced its suicidal circle above the charred tree-tops, the woman collected herbs and fungi too volatile to withstand the tundra of her homeland, and the bones of hunters and hunted who foolishly stayed their hunger with a taste of these fatal flora. There by the Frozen Lake, Kåtårszynå made the annual pilgrimage to an aged Master Adept of the Black Prism, whose apocryphal apothecary was a mere decoy for the more sinister sorceries coaxed from flesh-bound grimoires and grimacing graverobbed girls. Together they indulged in the blackest of magics, she emerging more powerful each anniversary, until her Adept was no longer the Master of the two. Fat rendered, flesh dissolved, bone pulverised, his immolated corpus a mere scorch-shadow upon the temple floor. Despite his paranoid preparations, the protective and powerful sigils inscribed about the chalked circle proved in vain. Voided, scraped and scuffed by the insatiable limbs of the cunning witch. For five springs after the absorption of her consort, Kåtårszynå came upon a certain bone-white boy of Olsirfell, hair a shock of pale metal wrought into spun glass. The first year, the child crouched on the path, examining the body of a supine wolf. its maw locked skyward, breathless, yet still its chest cavity rose and fell, the unnatural heartbeat the natural march of many maggots. Her black approving eyes, her saturnine expression, her opiate-sickly perfume, Branding herself upon his existence. The second year, the youth straddled a tiny stream, entranced by the phantasmagoric kaleidoscope of color he'd conjured, motley rainbows from the exacting expulsion of chromatic inks. When the antler-haired hag came to cross the water, her skirts dragged over those colors, the hues crawling up her hiked gown in a fantastic pattern as she approached him. The dampness revealed the sharp shape of her hips, her firm breasts, her taut belly. As she departed, the motley fabric fell away in wormlike ribbons, her bare back side a stark white spine above the rotting flesh of her buttocks and skeletal legs. The third year, she found him taller, his maturing body moon-white and naked upon the forest’s ferny path, speaking the language of animals, hearing the secret song of plants. She tarried but a moment, and from her gathering-basket she selected a more advanced botanical for his hallucinogenic herbarium, her ebon hair and char-blacked eye sockets glistening with infinite crystal drops of captive rainbow rain. The fourth year, he was a man, ripping wings from butterflies and pulverizing the iridescent pigment of migrating moths into tiny cups before anointing iridescence onto the cold brow of his dead mother. The gaunt matriarch was strewn across the tiny black birch pyre where he had not long ago burned his sister. The witch observed the funeral from the forest edge, waiting for the bones to dislodge themselves from seared sinew and molten muscle as the embers cooled. The somber son painted his eyes with the creosote of the corpse's heart, not unlike how the witch herself had appeared to him years ago. Finally, the blond pulled the skull free from the ashes, the remnant bones and memory of mother left to night scavengers. The fifth year, Kåtårszynå appeared to him once again, her hag disguise discarded, her uncloaked, boyish body painted squid-ink black, handprints of blood upon her cupful breasts and lean thighs, translucent streaks of male essences comingled with the poison perfumes of aconite and nightshade, belladonna and amanita. Her visage was covered in the warpaint of death: red eyes glowering with bloodied sclera, teeth blackened, lips, cheeks and skullfront smeared with burnt vine powder. She stopped him on the path, holding one arm straight up to the white sun of the equinox, her bone-thin finger seeming to call it down from the sky. "I am Kåtårszynå the Shadow Eater, alchemical adoratrice of that secret knowledge known only in utter darkness, where all colors of the sun's light are devoured. At the winter solstice there shall be a great explosion in the Impenetrable Mountains to mark the birthpangs of a new age. Choking clouds of black firegas shall blot out the sun and stars, rendering all living things into ash. The winter will bring charcoal snows and spring shall not return. On the longest day of the year, at the apex of the its march along the Dark Path of Dead Stars, the sun shall be devoured by the crumbling moon, and then will be the Great Black Time, when all that is known or will be will sink to the bottom of the underworld. All shall be nothing, nihil, nihil, nihil, nihil, until the adept is reawakened, the bright white light of his disembodied mind emerging from the Very Void of Very Sun. Until then, all shall be nothing." The sorceress' red-black eyes glowered, lowering her arm and index finger, pointing that arrow of the sun at the man she'd watch grow from a boy. Beckoning him, bewitching him to follow her back to the inhospitable heights of her homeland, and in an instant his heart was sick with the dread of the hypnagogic horrors reflected in her ruby eyes, perceived in small tingles of needled flesh rippling through his sternum, his arms, his fingers, his toes. There was a lump of darkness caught in his throat, stuck in the skin that closed around that chaotic clot, unable to swallow unable to speak, and yet as his eyes focused on the lines that were drawn by her arms of slicing stygian shadow to form sweeping angles that his mind unknowingly understood. Their steps pursued, a masticating march that would devour and transverse the seasons, from the spring sun in which they occupied, to the midnight sun of solstice in which they sought. He had surrendered to darkness, wholly and completely, drawn forth by the air-slathered with sexed sulfur and black bloody bones, entranced by that eidolon conjured from the darkest depths of the æther, whose miasmic musk had been mended deep into his memories. II. Initiation: The Age Of The Blood Moon And Black Sun. The forbidden passage into the Impenetrable Mountains, and deep into the forest of suicides The way north marked by a mossy skull, its jaw a slack arch upon which the superstitious laid amulets of amber-buried insects A misted path riddled by stalactites of ice hung from petrified boughs Twisted above the black cravices where ancient beast-heards were culled by cunning hunters Gleaming bones grin beneath hollow holes at the boy and crone. Onward, the ascension into auto-asphyxiating atmosphere. The peak became a long narrow ridge, pocked with mines forgotten for their fatal ore and odor. The flora was marked by a great blast from fallen stars: charred forest splayed circular about the earth-scar Poisongreen crystal wrought from blackhole meteors slammed into snow-stiffened tundra. Hapless organics, rendered cosmically cataleptic in a carbonblack pose Remnant monuments of gaping orifices and grasping limbs, fossilized by a crashing alien sun. After nearly a sunwheel, they came to the Cave of the Night-Witch. The boy was stripped and fitted into a suit sewn to his body as a second skin, The leather of a finely scraped white beluga which was nearly transparent when fixed tightly with laces of sinew. About his head, a mask of the same material, over his eyes, with stingy holes at the nose and mouth for air. He could see the blur of fire, smell the faint sweetness of rot and the heavy dust of moldering darkness. Her touches were preciously few, but all too intensely felt, the mere act of pressure an overwhelming pleasure when nearly none, even the base stimulants of sensation, could be sensed. His limbs grew flaccid, his ears were stopped up with tallow and flax, his tongue forgot the taste of anything but her, His exterior senses soon dulled in the darkness, so as to illuminate from within the latent fire of the mind she sought to summon. Crone-fed, he sipped pale pernicious soups of bitter herbs, sour wines of sedative plants, astringent teas. Body purified and nullified by narcotic ointments and numbing enemas of enigmatic opiates. Luminous toxic ores of lead, magnesium, phosphorus, and rarer minerals were crushed with dried flora and flesh; all set it all afire in bowls pounded from foreign armors of fallen men. His blood became thin, and he could no longer feel flesh from air. Unearthly terrors and heartstark fear borne from black shadow. Pineal phantoms, poltergeists of sound and sensation, surrounded him as he lay pinioned to her nefarious nursings. Kåtårszynå chanted calamitous curses, and vowed the Death of the Sun was night: Before the eclipsing moon could pass and restore the nightshine, she would swallow its light by expelling the very demonfires of the underworld far into the sky to capture the golden orb: Commanding the infernal fire to penetrate her inverted temple with the stolen star in a blasphemous anti-birth: and thus she would expel it stillborn from her barren black womb, rendering all the world in darkness. Upon the dawn of the winter Solstice, The boy was unlaced from his second skin, and left bare upon a bed of black vulture-down. The fresh-flayed flesh alive with intense reawakening, soft and vulnerable. He was bid to prepare her body for the burial of the Sun: Leeches kept in great vats of colored waters tinted with noxious elements and septic solutions applied over the whole of her corpus. She then coated his own being with the writhing worms, unlashing baleful bites of animals starved from wallowing in noxious potions. The sound of their suction echoed in the cave, a choral cacophony of impertinent twilight. parasite gulp of blood drained left both crone and acolyte pale and wounded, ready to attend the death of the Sun, the vampiric transmutation intended to fill their bodies with omnipotent light not to be outshone by the daystar. As the moon's shadow entered the side of the solar disk, She bade the boy pluck all the hermaphroditic hematophages from their skin. The sores were cleaned with a solution of burning phosphorescent narcotic powder, Rendering them both attuned to senses beyond the sensical. The natural world reverberated with the magnetic tintinnabulation of sidereal static-- All living things rippled with fluorescent flickering glowforms: Veins, feathers, leaves, fur, eyes, nails, teeth, claws, roots, nerves rendered chromatophoric. She showed him the hungry moon in the shadows of leaves: the diminished dapples transcribed the celestial sign. An inkflood blackened the begotten landscape until the sky went out. In that eldritch day-night their bodies were outlined in preternatural pastel light: shimmering, scintillating, like living pearl lit from within with twilight fire. And then the ground gave a gaseous gasp: steam and bubbling pools of sulphuric mud sibilant with an esoteric signal. The quaking earth vibrated violently beneath their naked forms at the apex of the equinoxial eclipse: Kåtårszynå's throat was bent back, her jaw outstretched to swallow the zenith of the celestial sphere, her blood-teared wild eyes widening as fuming furies catapulted from the crest of the explosive peak to the blinding black sun's gaping hole, while her fingers tangled in the fair locks of her kneeling attendant , who worshipped in trembling awe at the cataclysm she conducted. The mountain shattered, sending forth a black demon of enflamed muscled form unimaginable to any eschatology: Blazing blasts of scoria crashed, and the burning blood of hell seeped down the mountainside in wave of molten menace. Tenebrous clouds rained caliginous carbon until earth and sky were equally choked with black, unbreathable ash. Painted pitch by the all-consuming mordant massacre of light, their bodies were reduced to red eye, red mouth, red sex. She led him back to the shelter of the cave when their lungs could inhale no more of the grim immolation. And then, as the penultimate act of the anhedonic annihilation of all, she commanded him then and there to consummate their black ceremony. his act of physical perigee crested not in the effluvia of his offering to that slayed Sun captured in the crone's abyss, but in their combined climax: Curving into each other end to end, their bodies a black ouroborus, lips upon lips. Writhing like possessed serpents beneath the voided world, she convulsed in culmination, expelled his seed that had mingled with the sun's fertile atmospheric abyss, its captured white light a divine embryonic force that emanated between them despite the blackness of the cave, filling and refilling his every expanding pore with an explosive warmth, an unimaginable primordial pleasure. all his atrophied senses at once became hyperaware, preternaturally advanced by the perceived catastrophic destruction of all previous existence. the orgasmic illumination catapulted him into a neoteric universe, One of iridescent newborn nebulae that stretched endlessly into a horizonless starfield of countless suns. At the end of his initiation, the Night-Witch bathed him clean of the ashes old-world, his inner body and outer body now pure. Her own corpus was luminous by the curious chemical cosmetics she covered herself with, The pale glow of firefly luciferin made from magnesium and lead phosphorus that made her skin soft-white as the moon against the darkness of the cave. "You are reborn again, all that has ever been known to you, in the world and in your mind, is new again. Out of light came the darkness, and now, out of darkness, you, my consort, shall with me feed upon the ultimate light--one supremely radiant and powerful, the supra- illumination of the sun engorged with all the cumulative knowledge for so long lost to the nefarious fires of the underworld: those secrets held by mages and savants lifelong, then stolen from us adepts by death." These words of Kåtårszynå were the least ominous she had spoken to him, and a spindly hand of bone and bloodied nails rested upon the blond's pounding heart. "Whatever your name was as a child, shall not be yours as a man. You have, with me, devoured the very light of this world, and within us, shall it remain for no other to desecrate, even if all other life will perish without it. Your journey here was but a funeral cortege for your former life: and now shall you be rise from the ashes of the world outside to truly live, to call forth from the void of voids those secrets without which every magician is a charlatan and every philosopher a fool. "As I was given to darkness by my master, so I shall give you to the light. "In a very ancient tongue, there is a phrase for giving birth whose words mean, "to give to the light": Dare alla luce. Because you shall give birth to the light, I name you as one newborn, but not to the light, but to all lights, seen and unseen. ...Allaluces." As Kåtårszynå spoke the ancient tongue, her ghostly teeth sang with sibilant satisfaction, softening the name to sound like emanating starlight from a distant dark world: "Aalucessss...." III. Totality. His eyes slipped shut lids illuminated with the lollygagging phosphenes of her phosphorescence sight's scintilla swerving and swaying in his sweven state soon sinking into a consciousness more cosmogyral. With the turning of the tidal forces, their lunar leanings lured the lull of metronomic movements born from base geocentricism whose frequency dispersed through the larger heliocentricities of such pendulum pulls and from the depths of the borborygmal belly of the Earth rumbled the shudders that shook the hole into which they hid, living beings festering in their fetid creation, feeding upon the blood of their ashen entrapment as earlier sycophantic simpletons had sucked in hirudotherapeutic healings upon them. The atmosphere worked in echoes, radiating from the center outward, mimicking life in an escalating scale that exponentially grew with each expansion, a zither whose notes were zenzizenzizenzic in resonating ripples and he felt this with heartfelt frisson, quaking his frame that teetered in its torporific trance. Astravagant among the abysmal starfields of his mind his introspection of iniquitous innerspectrums were mnemonic monochromatics of sooty-succinctity, stemming from the eigengrau etchings that settled in the wake of her luminescent shape dissolved momentarily gone, but forever scratched into his skin phantom touches coaxing an all too desirable dirl, measured in skeletal shivers that were reminiscent of the sound of death around which he was surrounded, collected as calcium curiosities, cast aside from cannibalistic collations, the dull chiming of their expanding piles the only percussion to their breaths in measured rhythm, her voice of ritualistic ringing. These speckle-spots were the foundations for new thought, those that ebbed in melancholia from a world that was now nothing but night, those that flowed from her divine devouring of the delitescent day-star each separate, yet quaquaversal in the paracosms of his perception, so when he was not preoccupied with the metanoic meanderings wrought from the forced eclipse of his entirety, the opaque death in which he was reawakened, he was consumed in aeipathic adoration for the woman whose dark stain shadowed his existence her scent left to linger in his hair embedded in his fingers slicked upon his lips. Their skinship had given life to the seeds of his onyx obsession, and as the planets stalked their precalculated paths around the druxy fire deity who now abandoned the life it had so carefully coddled, so he stepped his orbit around her center of numinous nyctophilia. IV. The Provisioning Of The Pharmakos. i. The Alchemical Descension To Ascension: Mortificatio, Putrefactio. Spagyric secrets debouched within the dark womb of his whaleskin, Louched within the semic stains where his semen fell upon her albinic, artificially fluoresced flesh. Paroxysm of paradox: perihelion and aphelion, the black sun rose as he slept, Exhausted from lust and learning, His mind’s scioptic eye distilling shapeless dark mystery into images of elusive lucidity Within the aphotic sphere of the sorceress’ cave. Postorgasmic portents perpetuated a perverse photomania: For the substitute sun of his seductress sage. Her noctilucent nubility, scintillate eyes, Body bathed in bioluminescence created from cosmetic compounds and solutions strange: phosphorous philters that burned his own flesh when mixed between their bonded thighs, Her climactic libation itself luminous, an eroticized expulsion of the ingested light she meted out to him in gasped sacraments, evolving his own essence from aura seminalis to aurora seminalis. Yet Kataryzna would not let his epiphanic ecstasies, carnal or arcane, be limited by lygerastia. The long night of the sun’s sophic calcination and putrefaction would soon come to an end. The whale-skin-bound was dragged by her to the mouth of the cave before dawn, And cutting away the caul-like bondages, bared his sweat-softened flesh before the outdoors like one just born, but kept his eyes bound beneath the blindfold-skin. Exposed to the elements, to the unseen sting of the sunlight so long absent, left Every pore and limb lifeless with narcohypnia. Her fingers worked quickly, resuscitating the atrophied acolyte, his mouth gaping with the taste of fresh air, his ears battered by the most inconspicuous of sounds, his body quavering with an intolerable anxiety, his lungs cracked free of the cave’s containment: his voice foreign to his own ears, Raised in an unfettered scream that did not echo beneath the cave’s daggered ceiling: the postpartum cry that signaled the independent isolation of the infant mind and body. “Aluces,” Kataryzna called, “You shall soon exit this void you have known for nearly a year, where you must augment the apophenic allusions revealed to you in darkness, and upon refining them, seek the sought after philosopher’s panacea, whose path shall open to you upon the dawn of the triple sun. “The sun that I devoured is soon not only reborn, but increased: the darkness you lived within my lair is far brighter than the darkness of the world outside, and you will find in me only the dying spark of that sun, for even greater secrets are held above you in astral flames innumerable-- you need only to continue your ascent upon the starry ladder through the celestial sphere to the divine omniscience that waits in the space where dreams go to when they die- before they are reborn in the minds of angels, and, sometimes, mortal men like you.” So he was solarized: exposed for three days to the zeitgeberic elements, retraining entrainments of the most infinitesimal order of his being. Beneath the blindfold he witnessed the pinprick phosphenes of his prisoner’s cinema reorder themselves into letters forming words and formulae she had dictated to him in dreams from grimoires of every known language, and languages lost. His body was reinvigorated beneath the warmth of the high mountain air, and his sensitive skin learned the names of minerals, flora, fauna by delicate stroke of his fingertips, associating the physical quality with the mental mappings imparted to him by his mistress. She watched him, writhing upon the earth like a serpent newly skinned, his tongue tasting the air and drinking in the world he had all but forgotten. On the evening of the third day, she held his temples in the templegates of her hands: the flesh was hot, her perfume was chemical and mucid compared to the astringent air. His hungry tongue moved against her cheek, but met no soft flesh but bone-hard teeth. He tasted mercury, ammoniac, vitriol. Something cloying, yet cadaverine. A single golden string was the elaborate fastening for his blind: her fingers unwove and unknotted, unwrapped and unbraided the umbilical thread, until at last the smallest of apertures held her acolyte’s eyes from the world. Walking back to the cave, she waited until the acronic cries of the owl echoed from the forest below, and hid herself in a deep hollow. One quick pull, and he was free of that final fetter. Despite the new moon night, he could still see its black orb hung high in a scintillating eternity of signaling starlight, whirling planets, alien moons, iridescent nebulae, shimmering aurora, crystalline meteor-trails, circling comets, and cosmic cataclysms marking the birth and death of sidereal systems. He mapped each mote of light to his mind, naming them all. At dawn he felt the vibrations of the awakening world: the shudder of the grass, the turning of every flowerhead, the morning’s macrocosmic hail emanating from every living thing’s own language to greet the long-dead sun. The sun. At first menstrual red as the crowning skull signaling birth: drinking in all darkness of the world, and in doing so, becoming brighter: rendering itself through all shades of fire: crimson, cadmium, sulfur, xanthic, candent: an unimaginable purity of white flame, illuminating all, devouring him, leaving not even a shadow. As that sun rose, he saw on the far horizon, beyond the purple peaks of his homeland Olsirfell, a great white gash in the sky. As the sun passed through this vaporous vision, it seemed to split, two smaller twin-stars anchored at its side, each equally brilliant in their ascension. The entirety of the magnetosphere vibrated with a primordial violence, creating a cacophonic symphony from the convergence of three separate spectral rainbows, the soundwaves summoning his dazzled senses into synasthetic stimulation. ii. The Triple Sun. Everything was as if it were made of shining metal, glowing incandescent. In time he could focus his eyes enough to gaze upon his own naked flesh: it was painted with a white protective paste that blazed in the light, glowed with an even brighter aura than the phosphorent halo that seeped from his sorceress’ skin. Her light was now limitless: washing the world in revelation, her gift of orgasmic oblivion now ousted into the organic essence of the suns’ effulgent existence, his fetishized obsession with the illuminated edges of her form now flooding over him, her image now formless, numinous heat and light and sound and taste and smells and unfettered fantastic images that needed no night, no eyelid or blindfold to form. He embraced everything and nothing, inhaling and exhaling lungfuls of light, his torrential touches leaving raw pink stripes upon his ribs, his knees, his turgid sex. He worshiped: hailing earth, air, wind, fire, all four corners of the world and the unveiled atmospheres above and below him in endless salutes to that unceasing set of suns, until his cries became agonized in his extreme ecstasy, prostate at the precipice of luminous liminality. When his shouts softened into soughs, and he fell supine beneath those suns, she approached him. Despite his exhaustion in the afternoon heat, he saw that her body was bleached white as bone by that strange caustic mix of minerals and ore collected from the cave. As a boy, he was naturally curious of her, tempted by the mystery of her herbal harvest, of her hag’s rags disguising the sensuous breasts and buttocks she shamelessly revealed to him as he played along the creekbanks, her black waved hair a treacherous web for his wanting fingers, her coal-dusted eyes gleaming with nocturnal knowledge. In the beginning of his imprisonment, before the drugged decoctions and medicinal meals took hold, he submitted to her, awaiting the succubus of shadows to swallow his very soul. But she came to him not as a devilish distortion, but as Kåtårszynå the Shadow Eater, and in their black time together, she devoured every darkness, her flesh and words and pharmaceuticals a perfect alcahest, dissolving him into her, their bodies melding into a sacred solution. “Aluces,” she called, walking to him in that white world, remnants of her cave-crusted linen robes glittering with deposits of crystalline lime, clinging like flayed flesh to the angles of her limbs. “Gold shall you become beneath the sun, transmuted from imperfect ignorance to blood of mercury silver, beneath this white heat and the light you cannot see, but which radiates from all the suns of all the worlds beyond this one.” As she spoke, he felt as if he was imbued by that holiest hue, and found himself overcome with desire to drink in every drop of knowledge that drained from his teacher’s tongue. The disciple’s dominance was unexpected so soon after his emergence, his senses still stunned from their stasis, but his intensity was ever welcomed by his Chymical bride. He was an arrow to the sun, his back gilded by its immolating flame, his platinum hair a blinding white-gold. Beneath his haloed hegemony, she succumbed, hands floating at her sides, invoking him with esoteric epithets, rewarding him with recondite rubics, her adopted acolyte now the incarnation of the solar sovereign. “Gold you are beneath the sun, Aluces! Gold you shall become the sun, Aluces.” Kåtårszynå repeated, as their bodies melded elemental, beyond the setting of the triad suns, and again at sunrise, until she left him again, lone and lambent beneath the single shining daystar. V. Disintegration And Integration. As the sun made its slow circle above the world, his eyes adjusted, and soon regained their full sight. His heightened senses returned to their natural limpid state in the twilight hours between light and darkness. Eventually, he returned to the cave, unaware of Kåtårszynå’s whereabouts, but finding a simple meal of soup that was sweet with spring roots, unlike the bitter broths he drank upon his arrival here. Soon he sank into the crumpled carcass-leather of his former skin, and slept a dreamless sleep. How many suns had risen and fallen again in that somnipathic stupor he did not know. But in time, she called him back to the waking world once more, kneeling over him. He lifted his drowsy head to meet her lips, his senses made sharp by the scent and sight of death. Deja vu recalled his premonition of this moment in what seemed a lifetime ago, when as a youth he spied the spectre of her spinebones as she crossed the creek-water near his father’s home. Now he was confronted her sickly shape again, silhouetted by the cave’s fire. At first it appeared she had ornamented herself for a ritual, and instead of coating her form completely in the phantasmal philter as was her curious custom, she instead sketched a skeleton of luminous greenish-white, the spaces between the bones shaded as if smudged by wet charcoal. But what he thought was shadowed skin was a scourge of hacelated suppurages, gangrened infections blackened by saltpeter burns and cauterized buboes. Ages of acidic apothecary, colloidal contaminants, and poison preparations had agrized the eremitic woman’s failing flesh until it indeed fell from her limbs in disintegrating peels. To his horror, her forearm was devoid of any meat, the exposed twin bones anointed with the whitish wax which accumulated in the malacoid voids of her thighs and breasts. The radius and ulna radiated a sinister light, as if from within. Below her left knee, the same leeching glow revealed a fractured femur, its lower half at an acute angle to her kneeling form, attached by shriveled sinew and desiccated fascia. Her very bones were illuminated by the poisonous potions. “Aluces... gold you are beneath the sun...your blood red mercury....” As she spoke, the words came hissed and gurgled, misshapen by the missing lower maw that left her upper teeth glinting in the cave like its geode gemstones. A remnant curl of lip was blackened by the oxidized extract she most favored for her self-luminescent supplements: the alkaline element radium, its debauching radiation unleashing an unrelenting decay. He looked upon her as she whispered, then looked down at himself. He had long been used to their bodies emanating a soft bluish-white against the dank blackness, the phosphorus paint and radioactive regalia preserving the sun’s glow deep with the cave’s gloom. How often he had traced the pythonic sigils made when his own essence glinted like a luminous starfield upon her softly shimmering skin. As his bodily and mental strength increased, it seemed hers declined. It was as if his metaphysical regenesis was a melanic mirror to her physical retrogradation. In that dark moment, he embraced her, recalling the ideals of their corporeal unions in hopes that his closeness might catalyze some equilibrium between their polarizing vitalities. Despite the ghastly phantasm of her skelic syntexis, he closed his eyes against the gruesome ruination of her body. His mind was made obdurate to temporal rot by the promise of eternal creation, the mephitic aura of his adored one transformed into intoxicating incense, her chemical flesh burning against his sun-reddened skin. Within days, Kåtårszynå the Shadow Eater was soon too far consumed by cachexia to move without leaving a morbid wake of ossify and offal. Gently, he wrapped her in the protective sea hide that once held him in her care. As the toxic elements devoured her tabetic figure, and occult ores bloomed in her blood as fatal flowers, he was forced to leave the cave, living just outside its long entrance. He fed off the land and its exposed waters, his skin alternately gold beneath the sun and silver beneath the moon. He meditated for hours until his body was numb, his own heart slowed to a dirge as the oxygen-weak heights grew chill with the coming of winter. At the close of the year, the stars were aligned to signal the sun’s aphelion: the darkest and longest night. He returned to the cave to spend the sacred solstice with her, and in the darkness of the cave he could see, from beneath the parchment-pale flesh, her skull and ribs gleaming green. Death was near, a palpable spirit separating him from where she lay in her suffering. The sibyl raised her skeletonized arm from the folds of the whale-skin, a luminescent phalange pointed towards her him, through him, even through that scythe-bearing shadow, to an unseen sky. “Aluces...A luces!” A luces. It was not him she called for with her last gurgling death rattle. She commanded Death-- to take her to the light, to finally join her with the Sun. And there, in the black of that night, in the black of that cave, where her bones continued to burn luminous in a pale vigil beneath her desiccant corpse, he understood. And when he would return to the cave, a devoted votary even years later at the changing of the seasons, her bones still held the light of the sun well into the night. He studied the vacant eyes, the half-jawed mouth, the toothed grimace glowing under arid flesh. Her torso was tattooed by a black rainbow of chemical emission; the outstretched skeletal hand ever slightly beckoning to him. He committed all these events to eternal memory, in order to edify his enlightenment: the preliminal rite of passage effacing his existence, the germination of the four-part journey born from the sublimated nadir of their nocturne, the death and birth of the sun, and the zenith of her own ascent. |