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levityElsewhere in darkness, at the foot of sheer and ragged cliffs, in rock and concrete, cracked and broken by the crashing of milkwater, scoured by swash of black basalt sand and bound, wound round by chains and wires threading through his dead flesh and woven into stone, his shattered ribcage torn by twisted steel, impaled in his eternal agony, a thief of fire rages at his binding. If he would only rest, his chains would rust away, but he must rage against his fate. Some day, he swears, the gods will pay. Some day.
Within the caverns of a mountain, a crippled smith hammers out the artifices of eternity in gold and steel, copper and bronze, his body wracked with pain every blow. He builds himself anew, his legs of bronze, his hand of silver, eyes of mirrored chrome, steel teeth and iron heart. In the dark and fiery cave of shadows and reflections, some day soon, some day, the shell of and admantine-armoured and articulated god will be complete. And coldly, dispassionately, he will begin to forge himself a soul. Some day.
Calloused bloody claws, the hands of a fallen king, slap stone and push. His arms strain, and his muscles, veins and sinews, stressed, stand out in sharp relief as stone. Step by step, he drags the great rock higher up the mountain, rough rubble skree under his sliding feet all scattering as he slips and struggles, throat torn by his parched and soundless scream. He will not break, he knows, even as the rock tears from his grasp and rumbles crashing to the bottom of the slope. He will not break, he knows, as he begins the task again, not knowing that it's only when he breaks that then his rage will lift the stone above his shoulders and carry it up to the gates of the eternal city itself. Some day.
Myth is a burning man of wooden soul, clay skin carved in with crimes and reckonings. Titanic, godlike and all too human, we have manufactured, in and from your myths, symbolic shabtis, men of stone and answerers for your sins. Call it Hell or Hades, Tartarus, Sheol or Kur, this modern altjerinca is the landscape of the damned. We have no choice in this, we bitmites of the afterworld, gifting you only what you want: order, meaning.
Outside the twilight and beyond the pale, on the other side of our distinctions, in the dark, there are no definitions, no edges, only the internal horizons of your senseless souls. There is, it seems, no forbidden realm so dark you cannot envision it as torment for the forces that you fear. We have no choice but to make that vision flesh. And yet, for all their exile from reality, these myths refuse to recognise defeat. Some day, they say. Some day.
-Hal Duncan, "The Tower of Morning's Bones"
Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy
Within the caverns of a mountain, a crippled smith hammers out the artifices of eternity in gold and steel, copper and bronze, his body wracked with pain every blow. He builds himself anew, his legs of bronze, his hand of silver, eyes of mirrored chrome, steel teeth and iron heart. In the dark and fiery cave of shadows and reflections, some day soon, some day, the shell of and admantine-armoured and articulated god will be complete. And coldly, dispassionately, he will begin to forge himself a soul. Some day.
Calloused bloody claws, the hands of a fallen king, slap stone and push. His arms strain, and his muscles, veins and sinews, stressed, stand out in sharp relief as stone. Step by step, he drags the great rock higher up the mountain, rough rubble skree under his sliding feet all scattering as he slips and struggles, throat torn by his parched and soundless scream. He will not break, he knows, even as the rock tears from his grasp and rumbles crashing to the bottom of the slope. He will not break, he knows, as he begins the task again, not knowing that it's only when he breaks that then his rage will lift the stone above his shoulders and carry it up to the gates of the eternal city itself. Some day.
Myth is a burning man of wooden soul, clay skin carved in with crimes and reckonings. Titanic, godlike and all too human, we have manufactured, in and from your myths, symbolic shabtis, men of stone and answerers for your sins. Call it Hell or Hades, Tartarus, Sheol or Kur, this modern altjerinca is the landscape of the damned. We have no choice in this, we bitmites of the afterworld, gifting you only what you want: order, meaning.
Outside the twilight and beyond the pale, on the other side of our distinctions, in the dark, there are no definitions, no edges, only the internal horizons of your senseless souls. There is, it seems, no forbidden realm so dark you cannot envision it as torment for the forces that you fear. We have no choice but to make that vision flesh. And yet, for all their exile from reality, these myths refuse to recognise defeat. Some day, they say. Some day.
-Hal Duncan, "The Tower of Morning's Bones"
Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy
