Ravageknight-eternal - Godking Of The Void - Tumblr Blog

On Dark Wings

A knock at the door.

It’s him.

Uncomfortably tall. I feel like he is leaning over me in the doorway, leering down like I am something small and frail and exposed. I have a memory of being a child once at church dwarfed by an enormous, agonizingly detailed Christ, bloody and bruised but with a stone-still expression staring down at me from lifeless dark eyes. I am there again.

It’s dark out. Moonless. Even now I can feel the heat, moisture collecting on my skin. Pouring down my spine. I start to realize I have been waiting for hours. The tension of my muscles spasms like I’m being pulled on marionette strings.

The Man is in a trench coat. He does not sweat. His face is angular, but smooth, with the wax-clay composition of a corpse. My heartbeats seem to take centuries. Beat.. Beat.. Beat..

I blink and gag, gasping for air as a freakishly long finger reaches down my throat. It’s like something alive. But I can’t move, I can’t scream, even the gag is caught and silenced as if it were a small pathetic thing quickly extinguished. His hands are pale spiders. I have seen them everywhere, reaching into my windows and retreating under my bed, I know their too-smooth texture, remember the ease with which I am subdued, carried, hoisted.

We are outside now. In the Forest. It should be dark but there is light, so much light, and it hurts to be beneath, an appalling brightness that brings out bottomless animal fear. Heat across my body. The probing, painful digit brushes my heart. Flexes across my spine.

His sunglasses are eyes. Huge, black spheres around an inhuman face. His coat becomes wings, black cataclysmic wings.

The Thing That Came in Summer

The world changed. Boundaries shivered. Something that had been *right* became *wrong*, just for a moment, just long enough for the slightest passage. No fanfare, no drama, no lights and catastrophe. Just the motion. Just the transition. Easy. Simple. Welcoming.

The world slid around the visitor like so much smooth water becomes glassy and transparent moving quickly across river stones. Sharp-edged shards appeared suddenly— some breakage would always occur— but then it was over. Unnoticed.

This place was like the last one. A warm, comfortable night. Moonlight thrown down from a crescent slash across verdant growth, murmuring water not far away. Voices, maybe, but hidden as small living things sang their final climactic choruses in the omnipresent dusk. The *hum-hiss-chirps* came everywhere. In a multitude of directions.

*Opportunities*. All of them.

The thing lay still. Unmoving from its arrival. An impossible chill radiated off of the strange, glossy shell in shimmering waves. Steaming faintly like so much unnatural foggy streamers. Anyone nearby would’ve noticed their breath despite June heat. But already, icy tendrils and summoned flakes were dissipating, leaving only wet traces here and there, exposing the thing.

It tasted the air. Unseen cracks and pores flexed. Inhaled. Exhaled. Scented growth, sensed heat, tasted motion. Unnatural senses unfurled in an eerie kaleidoscope. Somewhere at the core of thing came excitement. Eagerness.

Something dark and wet shivered. Shook, slightly.

There were voices now— close. Everything else had fled away into the incoming darkness, birds flittered and squirrels dodging, insects silenced and stilled. So the voices came. Close. The thing had no need to detect their joy, no desire to catch the flirtatious tones. Words meant nothing but signifiers of life, mind, and potential.

The bodies neared. They shone warm, bright as stars, vivid with pheromones and heat. The thing spied deeper, elated at glimmering brain waves and lightning neuron-linkages, all awash in so many dancing colors. Memories. Thoughts. Feelings. Innate, ancient drives that were beautiful, striking. But they paled compared to the thing, felt tiny and childish to it’s own singular drive, the final purpose that even now came in increasing waves.

*So close*.

But the thing had to wait. Kept itself tidy, tight. Moonlight and sunset vestiges glinting in cool, cold rivulets across its chitinous exterior.

The voices were close.

Closer.

Closer.

Just *there*, just at the edge. They mingled and tangled, brought so much rising into the air. The thing knew it could not fight it’s instincts any longer.

It shivered. Shook.

And grew.

A U T U M N: R E Q U I E M

Heart of forest leaves down in the color of murder and fire, mind in fog and chilly downpours, bones made by clawing leafless timber that wants to gouge bleak skies. Autumn endless.

W I N T E R: T Y R A N N I C A L

Heart of marble, mind of icy lightning, bones of inky black water. Winter eternium.

The towers wait, the tombs hum. The fortresses crumble, the dams rot. This decay is beautiful, this decay is endless and stalwart. It cracks and cleaves and splits, it’s tendrils push up, out, sling across, surge through. Sunlight and the drip-drip-drip of tenacious waters. Did Rome at its height dream that one day so little would remain, did the great statues abandoned in eternal sands know that their truest accomplishment is to warn of grandiose nature made frivolous, pathetic, from marching time? Our fate remains the same, irrelevant and brief— and beautiful.

I sit on the ledge, surrounded by concrete and glass— irrelevant monoliths and irreverent designs, all inhospitable, all hostile. Featureless as the faces of the dead. Snow comes down like pale, cold stars weaving through chilly air. Flex my fingers, see my breath spiral against cold air, my heart beating steadily.

Cold metal against my skin. Heavy.

The primary visitor safari and campground of Jurassic Park: Arizona. Now featuring an open air display of the vicious Velociraptor!

*”Please keep all hands and in feet inside the ride at all times! Please do not—“*

Conrad and Lucy didn’t pay any attention. The Time Cadillac ride always started the same way. And they were too busy all over each other, submerged as deep in youthful needs as the Cadillac was submerged in deep time. Conrad was already kissing Lucy again, breathless and with too much saliva as the slick, black car slowly rolled over a desolate landscape that would’ve fit Hell or the airless Moon than Earth. Lucy ran her hands through her boyfriends short, combed brown hair, feeling the car lurch a little. Far away came lightning flashing beneath cataclysmic looking clouds all purple, bruised, and furious looking. She caught glimpses jagged landscape burbling, saw the eerie monoliths of volcanic happenstance which poured streamers of superheated gases into impossibly thin air. For a full threat minutes they rode over different variations: fire, ice, black blistering sands— even a sea bottom, flat and dark, with a single earthwide ocean far above.

*Boring.*

Conrad pressed a hand to Lucy’s thigh and she shivered just as they emerged onto land, felt humid air over her skin as kisses pattered themselves on an exposed throat like so much intimate rainfall. This place was disgusting: impenetrable swamps dominated by huge armored vegetable spires, encrusted with moss and lichen, and haunted by sprawling insects so massive that no matter what Father Martin would say it seemed downright ungodly that any Creator worthy of worship could’ve made them. Fingers brushed an innermost thigh, probing, just as their slow passage brought an automobile sized centipede to eye level. Arthropleura rose in undulating waves as cascades of armored legs cracked themselves against its plated sides, a dozen angry red chitinous sides. It was Conrad who yelped in fear, wide eyed and stupid, one hand thrown up against the monster of yesterday. Human hearts beating fast, beating hard.

Apocalypse thrown across supreme desert like a deathly blanket. Lucy just saw bones— miles and miles of bones, discarded skeletons that went on across eerie dark colored dunes. Sharp, ozone tinged air took an effort to breathe. God only knew what lived here. Was whatever had survived even lucky? Could it be considered *luck* to live here, in this silent world, a sun scorched wasteland dominated by the silenced dead? It chilled any motion between them. They huddled close. Quiet. Would this fate befall Man, would the fatal blessing of the atom undo everything.. usher us back into a final, silent world?

Giants sprouted up from ruin. Fast, fleet-footed things that in ample opportunity became behemoths, titans. An age of Olympian reptiles with no bounds. They grew, fought, lived, died. Mountains that walked, shield-faces that battered and slammed, clubbed tails that concussed. Lucy watched the very first flowers bloom: elegant purple splashed over white petals.

Conrad reached.

Something buckled, something bent. No trespassing. A cosmic reprimand that even here in this imaginary space would not and could not be allowed. It all happened in a moment. The Time Cadillac protested just barely, hissing faintly. Then nothing.

They stared. Mesozoic countryside stretched out into warm, evening sunshine. Skyscrapers redwoods loomed above ginkgos, cycads, ferns in majestic immensity, and threw thick shadows on grassless ground. Conrad felt his mouth go dry. Ancient mammalian fear rose from primordial memory.

Something roared in the gloom.

Hey, so I have a website now!

Lots of craziness there. Check me out at https://thesovereignarchive.blogspot.com/?m=1!!!!!

Hey, so I have a website now!

Lots of craziness there. Check me out at https://thesovereignarchive.blogspot.com/?m=1!!!!!

I was just a boy. A young mind brimming with questions in a small town tucked away from the world by lonely willow-choked roads and thick swamps. Seems so long ago.

I remember the reverend, all red-faced and swollen above me, like an ugly moon. Angrier words that lashed out at the room beyond him, turned the crowd to a thrall with answers that even as a kid I knew were unsatisfactory. My mind knew only a future where it seemed that Man had triumphed over God. Man had walked on the Moon, and Man had split the atom for its Promethean gifts. Where was God, I had asked, completely serious, inside a Saturn V, or an H-bomb?

The lashings my father gave me for this heresy were not at all delivered in the form of sermon.

I still remember the day. Claustrophobic heat that drains your muscles. Turns every breath shallow lest you drown in humidity and sorrows. I skipped church now regularly, slipping away into all consuming greenery. My worn bag stuffed with the essentials for any young would-be apostate: warm bottles of Coke, smuggled turkey sandwiches, books about men trudging on red Martian sands, and a fishing pole. Perfect.

Somewhere far away cracked thunder as I caught glimpses of nasty thunderhead clouds between bayou canopy. Deep within me stirred superstitious fear of righteous lightning to drop me dead— but I pushed it away and continued the track, eager to pluck anything from the river. Each step through the muck lessened my worry, whistling.

The sky darkened. Deepened into bruised, ominous darkness. I felt the thunder in my belly. I grew frantic as any boy would, bravado and cheer as banished as the sun had been. Crashing through brush, trying to retrace my steps— something exploded. I was thrown. I could feel the heat of flame, sense fire in some primeval heart within my being as it sprang, ferocious and eager. Through half lidded eyes I glimpsed inferno. Struggled. Fought to stand.

I ran.

I hit something. Hard. Landed in the muck right on my rear just as rain began to pelt the good earth in droves. Lightning split the sky’s imitation of night, I scrambled, and looked up.

It was a woman. Tall as any man I’d ever met. Skin pale like moonlight, and hair pristinely golden and long, rippled with crimson wildfires and blue moss. Crowning her head were perfect, black antlers, elegant and regal. She was bare. My heart thudded in tandem to the storms song, and I was stuck fast, enraptured. Silvered eyes watched me— looked beyond me. To something I can’t possibly understand.

We started at one another. She tilted her head, just slightly. All around us the world creaked and groan as hungry wildfire snatched up everything in sight, turned all things living to choking ash. She was unfazed. Serene. I wept silent tears. Unblinking.

And then, without a sound, without so much as a breath— a single upheld pale hand closed, and the fire was gone. Thin, blackened trees whispered in the faintest breeze. Impossible. A miracle.

The woman— the goddess?— looked down at me in the mud. The silver eyes, a faint smile, and with quiet footsteps, disappeared into the tangle.

I’ve told no one else of this in my sixty years of life. Who would believe an old man about his forest savior? The fire was unwitnessed by anyone when I scrambled back into town, and my only greeting was a cuff on the head for missing another service.

My property, my home— it’s there. Built at the place I first witnessed something beyond explanation. And every night, under the rain or unblinking stars, I sit out on the deck, amidst a chorus of singing creatures shrouded in shadow. Waiting.

Hoping.

*… everything is overgrown, everything is swallowed up like it was just a dream. Vines, moss. Trees big as the skyscrapers downtown from the Academy that had to have grown in a day. I think sometimes I can hear them warbling. Like music..*

*—- can’t find my way back. The path forks. Over and over. Sometimes it feels like I’m in a tunnel, or maybe an egg. Everything bends up over me, and I can look down at myself, surrounded by so much green. Little lights dancing. I don’t remember the last time it was night, but I know there is no daylight here*

*I tripped and stumbled into a pool that glittered and crackled. It burned. It tasted like the sea on my lips, and now I feel it, layered over my bones, crashing waves to the pulse of my heart. I can feel the warbling. A Pattern—*

*I see so much in my vision. I see this place, all burnt and ragged rock, stretching off into the horizon broken by so many blazing mountains. I see this place as the Traveler sings to it, weaves life up from sulfur and hell and death, makes hazard into haven. I see this place, a seed tucked away in possibility, thinking. Unfolding. It looks back at me. Standing on so many cracks, marooned across so much potential. It has a single, blaring red eye*

*A saw a man in the forest. I saw a dragon that spoke to him. Fireflies danced around and between them like so many stars in the night, beautiful amber motes. The man looks like me, and I know I am him, but he is not— me. He has traded his memories for something so much more. I can feel what radiates out. It is so powerful willows around him groan faintly as they grow, white tendrils sprouting vermillion and violet flowers. Secrets are traded. Fates are sealed*

*A shadow crosses the ground and speaks so many lost names, smothering brass in rot, drowning glass in night, and I am falling, falling, falling*

It’s a huge space, a room in somewhere so vast that the horizon is just endless black wall and endless black space.

There’s an ocean with dark waves you can sense and hear, but can’t see.

And an island at the center of it, with a city. Look around you and see the ships. They are behemoths, huge and angular and organic, arching skeletal profiles silhouetted. They are waiting.

Everything is smooth as stone and ebony like a night without stars, cut through with fine lines of amber, gold, ivory. Soft, organic light pulses in those countless lines. Ancient, undeniable heartbeats.

It’s freezing. Your breath comes out in billowing fog. Thin, dark ice frosts across structures as if it were a fine artisanal coating.

The doorways are too tall for anyone human, and they flower open, or the seams vanish making the entrance into a wall. Nothing has blemishes, nothing here has been built. It’s grown. Manifested. Every surface is eerily warm against the biting cold, ridged with intricate carvings so small you have to feel them to know they are there.

Everything is too big for normal people, avenues are so wide and broad, buildings like skyscrapers that simply vanish up into shadow. It goes on and on. A labyrinth for titans.

Everything meets at the center, at a statue ringed by black water in circular canals, but it’s so massive that you can’t see it up in the gloom, just two claws on the mount, and giant legs bent backward at the joints. Is it a God for the vanished builders? A triumphant warrior? You feel an awful foreboding, an ominous realization that somewhere far above you— the statue is looking back.

They know you are here.

We sit in the car awhile. It’s quiet. Dark. The rain runs down the windshield in little rivulets and rivers, an intricate little geography that draws in so much of my attention that I don’t realize she’s talking for a full minute.

I don’t ask her to repeat herself, much as I want to. She talks when she’s nervous, fiddles. I can see her rubbing her hands together, clasping and unclasping, looking out into the darkness. A lone streetlight down the road throws amber light over everything, everything wet and dark. More droplets racing down the glass.

She kisses me. I don’t fight it, or press back. I can feel the fear in it, this moment of reaching out. It feels like falling. Her big, brown eyes are damp. I’m afraid too. We watch each other, face to face. She looks tired, so tired— do I look like that? Is this what happens to people who—

The streetlamp flickers, and dies. We’re plunged into darkness. I can feel my heartbeat pulsing, my mouth is dry. I realize I can’t hear the rain falling on the car anymore, or see any tracing rivulets.

And then, from everywhere, is light.

A dance.

The crash of behemoth legs, thick as tree trunks. Pillars to hold up flanks that could encompass all of the sea and sky and earth. Rising. Falling. Walking mountains claiming this Earth in deliberate, primordial strides led by yawning shadows.

A dance.

Furious horns and proud frills. Cracked shield-faces thrust up, out, and retracted, unyielding. Painted in striking bold pronouncements from one clan or another. Dizzying arrays of horns like an endless parade of the finest, fiercest blades. Sheathed in keratin to exaggerate, enlarge.

A dance.

Swaying, armored sides. Lashing tails clubbed and spiked, beaked mouths barking, snapping, coughing. Angry forms thrilled for a fight, eager to prove against predator malevolence. A thud shattering hungry teeth. A crack that splinters bone. A sickening slash at flesh that brings bloody rain.

A dance.

A thousand, thousand voices. Chorused, harmonized thunder. It sings out. It whispers. Valleys caressed, mountains mapped, islands charted; all by those who sing, those who speak. Entire histories dwell in those reverberating hymns, whole cataclysms preserved by undulating notes and howling requiems, chirped directions, screeched prayers.

A dance.

Great, crashing jaws crack the moon into pale macabre slivers like pitiful bone. Splintered, fragmented hopes dashed on fang numerous and terrible. They are swift and silent as death, archangels in the flesh and bear names as devastating as holy disaster. Shadows leaping, twisting. Leviathans sprawled. The dragons of old. Alive.

A dance.

Something ties them. Something conjures thoughts too abstract for the minds of mere primitives, something too vivid drives impossibly intelligent stares. In every guttural snarl are unspoken designs. Through slashing claws emerges a design. A unity.

A mind.

Does anybody else get really antsy when they’re feeling lonely? I don’t know how to stop feeling like this. I have trouble sitting still, I endlessly scroll, I go back and forth in my mind. Dunno what to do.

You dig. You’ve been digging a long time. A featureless blue sky sprawls, staring down at you. It scorns you white-hot sunlight, painful and scorching. Judgmental as long vanished gods.

You’re dirty. Dust on clothes that in another world, another time, were expensive, implication of status. Now they’re just a shell. A hollow you live inside of.

Digging. Digging. Digging. A shadow crosses the sky on huge wings, plunges you into darkness for just a heartbeat. There’s blood under your fingernails. You swore you scrubbed and scrubbed, you were careless this time, so careless—

It’s done. Another doll in the dirt.

Dusk comes and chases the Sun over the horizon to usher in perpetual, desert midnight. Cold, unblinking stars manifest in silence. You numbly climb into your car beneath them. Driving away from this, from the thing you broke.

She’s there by the side of the road. Bloodied. Gazing at you.

Every mile is accompanied by that face.

No other cars. No gas station light, no haven town.

Just a cracked, porcelain face and bottomless, black eyes.

It’s such a beautiful town. You’ve been driving for so long. Endless, parched desert stretching in every direction. A cratered, monotone landscape changed only by distant table mountains that seem impossible, purple smudged mirages. They’re not real, you tell yourself, driving on a thin asphalt ribbon to nowhere. Not real.

It’s such a beautiful town. You’ve been driving for days. It comes up out of the desert floor like manna from Heaven, like a miracle. Quaint little homes and businesses, all draped in familiar Americana, red and white and blue everywhere. Signs smile with the words “Open For Business!”— it’s wonderful.

It’s a beautiful town.

You’ve been driving for.. how long has it b—-

You pass carefully cultivated parks so green they seem like dreams. Like a fantasy oasis. Homely baseball diamond, football field. Neighborhoods that should be filled. Alive.

Where is everyone?

What’s happening?

It’s a beautiful town.

You’ve been driving for so long.

Road after road after road.

Avenue after avenue.

Empty homes. Empty parks. Nothing but silence.

It’s a beautiful town.

This rifle was the Devil’s favorite. He slew legions of angels with it in the War of Heaven, hungry golden bullets that could crack universes and turn concepts into meaningless bundled words. It is beautiful. Metal so black it’s almost blue, refined onyx overlaid with silver, ivory.

You pulled it from dead hands. Victorious.

It feels perfect— familiar. Like an old friend. The sinking Sun descends and throws warm red light over everything, drowns this world in blood.

Somewhere deep down inside, you can’t help but feel that this weapon, this rifle— has been waiting for you.

There is a woman in black at the edge of the town, standing just off the side of the road.

The Sun is everywhere, bleaches everything that it touches, like this world is a scattering of bones turning ever paler under its gaze. But the woman stands, still as a mesa, her cloak defiantly still against any clawing desert winds.

Her wide hat plunges her face into shadow completely. You see no features— nothing except staring, golden eyes.

Watching.

Where do you get your inspiration from?

Jeeze. I’m inspired by everything. Music, certain feelings and atmospheres. Things will simply snap into place in my thoughts and I’ll see very vividly what they’re producing.

How to make friends on here? I’m having trouble meeting anybody new, and it’s been kinda rough. I work second shift, and so clubs, etc, don’t work out, even on weekends. Hopefully I can meet new people here.

The Moon blesses me, rising into the sky in all its pale and hallowed glory, a howling face at my back against darkness.

Bones split, break. Pitiful human things to be discarded. My blood is an inferno and it burns against my veins, hot, flooding through the gaps in torn skin, turns snow crimson-black. Steaming.

I scream, and in turn my jaws shatter, buckling into a terrible snout. Teeth crack like sickening musical notes, flattering to the sidewalk as I lose them. Eyes bulge, midnight colored tears clouding my vision, until my sight glows with ethereal shadow unseen by any other eyes on the planet.

Spine broken before subsuming into something broader. Armored. Wings fuse outward, and then catch the wind, unfurling. Fingers mangled, lost, regrown anew in devastating talons.

My new jaws work, once, twice. Strong. Strong enough to bend iron, cleave flesh. Claws grasp in eager need, slashing at the cool air—

A howl in the distance. Familiar, and terrifying. Beautiful. My new face does not smile or grin, but even yet, I feel hungry joy.

With a flap like thunder, I sail into the night, searching for an old friend.

I’m up.

All that remains are silent chambers, aglow in waiting, alive with hissing thought

Mausoleums for whole worlds, each cell a tomb, each tomb a memory, empty of the dead

The starless skies are shields and swords, forged by celestial might, an uneasy warning

A forge that burns, that makes: bones into iron, flesh into lightning, desires and dreams turned to screams and howls

Beware the Legacy, remember the Lament

Utopia lies in hallowed ruin, guarded by those who know only long, slow cycles

Waiting

Waiting

Waiting