Post by Sicko on Apr 22, 2019 16:06:49 GMT -5
This is a story of three brothers, and it started so much longer ago than anyone had conceived.
In primordial times when man was just rising in order from being apes, a million years before the birth of Christ, the clans of cave dwellers had many "gods", though they had no real term for it. Worship was not organized. Early man just looked up at the stars, wondering what was out there in the dim, Cro-Magnon center of their brain, and gave thanks to the dim idea of a something out there that gave them strength in the day's hunt. But one million years ago, when the earth was still forming, was a time of chaotic magic, and entities walking the earth and walking among the early man.
Three of them existed at the same time. No one knew where they spawned, who created them, or if they had always been, since the dawn of time. Perhaps not even they knew. But as man slowly grew in intelligence from animals to the clan dwelling cave herders that began making rudimentary tools, the three brothers awakened to the possibilities.
Their power was fed by these mortals. As they lived among the encampments and walked among them, they began to be revered by the clans, put on pedestals as witch doctors, healers. The early man began to look up to them, and even when the brothers spoke to each other about it, they each kept it secret in their hidden hearts the pride that swelled within them at being raised above the other members of their clan in status. The shaman of each of their tribes. Early man had no such words for worship, but the cult of personality was forming around each of the three entities. And in turn, they felt stronger every day.
Three brothers. Each one of them gained power from a different aspect of their tribes.
They did not have the names that would come to be associated with them yet. Those would not rise until the cradle of civilization began in the Tigris and Euphrates, thousands of years after the Cro-Magnon had moved on. But the brothers kept their positions of power, and clans grew around them, worshipping them for their aspects. And each aspect brought the entity power, which they then shared with their cult, treating them as their avatars. Life, pain, death. In that way the three brothers grew strong, and equal.
And in time, they gained names, names of power. Abnegazar, Moloch, and Shadrach. Life, pain, death.
In time, their cults grew in the burgeoning cities of early man, in Ur and Akkad and Jericho. Their power grew equal, but the brothers were growing jealous of each other. They looked upon the worshippers, the cults growing in all of their names and they grew mistrustful. Because life was worshipped, but pain and death were becoming lusted over. Abnegazar, the kindest of the brothers, feared for himself as his two brothers grew in power.
And, once, thousands of years ago, when they met, Shadrach finally attempted to betray them. When the triumvirate met in their sacred place, as they had for millenia, Shadrach brought with him a special knife, that he had had forged in his city and enchanted by his mystics, a godkiller blade which could cleave through anything, even pierce the heart of one of his brothers.
They met to discuss their affairs, as they had always done, not knowing the trap lying in wait. And when they stood close enough, Shadrach withdrew his necro-blade and stabbed Abnegazar, wounding him mortally. The embodiment of life fell, and Shadrach whirled. But his brother, the embodiment of pain, smiled in relish. He knew it was only a matter of time before his brother, who was fed by eons of wails of torment from screaming, dying men, would have tried this. "Oh, brother," Moloch said with a smile, "why can't you see that we are the same?"
"We are not the same," Shadrach denied stoically, "Because you have more in common with that fool than you do with me. You are the struggle to keep life, while I am the release and the nothingness. For centuries, since we first emerged from the caves and walked as the witch doctors for the clans of ape men, when their wounded have come, sick from illness, wounded by mammoths in the hunt, you have drunk their pain and their blood, and used it to become strong. But every one dies. And I have become stronger."
Shadrach, thinking he had the advantage, did not see that his oldest brother was not finished by the necro-blade, and that, in his own blood, Abnegazar was drawing three sigils in his own blood.
But then, just as he raised the necro-blade over his head to bring it down, he began to feel the life draining from his limbs.
Shadrach fell to his knees in their cave. Moloch turned, in confusion, and Abnegazar, in his dying breath said to him, "I have used the last of my magic to bind him. He is being sealed in a realm by these three sigils, and he cannot be let out until the sigils are reversed." Howling in terror, Shadrach began fading away.
"But brother, what about you?" Moloch said.
"I will go to a realm of my own, to hibernate. I will sleep forever," Abnegazar said.
"And what will I do?"
"I do not know, brother. But I must go." And with that, the entity faded himself.
And time passed. Moloch retreated to his own realm, though not locked away. Their cults continued on, without their figureheads, but soon became fringe elements as civilization rose and religion formed. Moloch watched it all. He evolved into something entirely different, but he still continued to seek out avatars to feed him pain, and bide his power. Because he knew one day, his brother would be free of his prison. And so he waited.
And he wouldn't have long to wait.
There was one who opened his eyes, brought to him by a fervent pretender, and it was him that opened Moloch's eye. He was the strongest champion of the three. Life, death, two absolutes on either end of the spectrum, but he knew in his heart that this one promised only pain.
So, to take it back to where Moloch first laid his eyes on his champion.
The deputy had been sitting behind a desk, reading a Maxim magazine and ogling some C-list actress in a photo spread.
Ephrain shut his eyes, blinking them blearily. He still had no idea what had happened, he found himself in a bombed out ruin of a house in Palo Alto, with no memory of what happened. Now a confused, seven foot tall giant sat looking at a lazy sheriff's deputy as he thumbed through a Maxim magazine and lazily hooked a booger from his nose.
"Burned your house down with your wife and kid? Good fuckin' deal," he said, examining the mined treasure.
Those words reverberated here and now, in the cold white cinderblock of my "room" at Springdale. He was stripped to the waist, wearing only the powder blue scrubs pants they provided inmate-sorry, residents. Ephrain is stripped of everything, a defanged beast that's retreated into a deep cove to slumber and dream my past life dreams. He has nothing left, no treasures, no princess. Ephrain recalled with a pained grunt, the only fragmented memory that was presenting itself, as in that long ago moment, the deputy had sit up in his rolly chair, savaging the baby, newborn from fire, with a smirking look. "You're a real piece of work all over, aren't ya." With relish, he had poured through the file, and he extruded pictures of the arson. A picture we've seen before, of a twisted limb, a little girl's black and charred foot. "Killed them both, murdered them," he said, that smug smile on his face.
All Ephrain has left in the world are memories like these. Good fuckin' deal...
This cell was small, and cramped, with only a grated window letting in a shaft of light. It would almost be a closet except for the high, soaring ceiling.
Ephrain had spent two days here. His senses dulled, his voice mute, unable to do anything but cringe at the broken glass shards of memory.
He stands, running his fingers over the diamond grates covering the window. Illuminated by the moonlight.
Ephrain exits his room the still of the night and the pale moon the only real illumination all the way down to the nurse's station and phone desk at the very end of the ward. There was a creepy chill in the air and the bone white of the moonlight washed everything of color. And it was there that Ephrain saw her, at the end of the floor. She grinned up at him from the floor, her lips painted in a bloody smile. Her body was a blackened, charred mess of meat. She lay supine, like a broken doll, and her pale skin and the multitude of wounds all over her... that wasn't as terrible as that smile.
"Come on. Join me down here.
In the boiler room.
Dance with me."
Ephrain blinks.
It is in this moment that Moloch really becomes aware, because it is in this moment someone else is calling out to him from another plane. Someone who is trying to use the broken man to become free.
Ephrain screws his eyes shut. It's just another hallucination, he tells himself.
She's still smiling at him, as one slim, white, bare leg is grabbed by an invisible hand. She kicks her foot up coquettishly. And then she's dragged down towards the stairwell. Towards a lower level.
It's not real. It's not. Headache is pounding enough to make his head explode, and he drills fists into his temples to push out some pressure and Ephrain is screaming. It's not real. It's NOT REAL.
Good fuckin' deal, huh?
"Ephrain, can you tell me why you left your room last night?" We are in Daniel Shomron's office the next day.
He steeples her fingers, smiles professionally. Doctor Daniel someone who's fascinated by these cases. He writes down everything for analysis and observation, he dissects these traumas so that he can get a fancy write-up in the Journal of Psychiatric Medicene or somesuch. Twisted cases like Ephrain fascinate him.
"Ephrain, ever since you admitted yourself you've complained about these headaches and these flashes of visions, you call them. We need to work on your plan for coping. Because I've noticed in our one on one sessions, the headaches start in periods of stress. Can you tell me what's caused these headaches last night?"
"Let's start you on some new medication," he says, writing in his pad.
The addled, mute monster is somehow thankful as he leave the office. Before he came to the Springdale he was a lost cause, but there's some niggling feeling of hope. I join the queue of patients going to a sliding glass window to get their meds, carrying my new scrip from Dr Daniel. Behind the glass, an orderly named Jerome lords over it, bald mocha head gleaming under fluorescents. After dinner is art therapy, making finger paintings with non-toxic paints among a group of variably deficient men.
No more headaches. No more visions. He is laying on his rock-hard cot after lights out and he is trying to rest. He can rest, because Dr. Daniel is right and his pain can be lessened through medication. He can do this...
"Come joinnnnn me Ephrain..." her voice is a lilting singsong, and just the tip of her blonde hair flits into my door frame.
NO. No, no! It can't be. He exits to the ward, following after. She's down the hall, all he sees is an afterimage of blonde hair and a trailing white dress... My head is pounding, a spike right between my eyes, and...
He stops, and look for Jerome. He's behind the glass partition at the nurse's station, back turned. He's talking on the phone, and his lowered, amorous tone of voice tells him he's not calling work business... Ephrain storms past.
His wife is waiting, playing peekaboo from the stairwell, her bright grin looking back at Ephrain. Flirty, fun. Despite the stretched grimace of her burned face.
"You've always been obsessed with death. You've courted her for the longest tiiime," she sang, and she twirled down the stairs. All I saw was spinning white silk and her hair. "But those visions of you becoming the beast, that isn't the avatar of death, that isn't the end you were so desperate for... that was your way out. That was power, virility... life..."
We are down among the pipes of this old hospital now. And hard, packed earth.
"You wanted it both ways, in both worlds. But living has become too much a chore for you, Ephrain, and that beast, was just a mask you put on. But the mask has taken you off... and now you have nothing."
Ephrain feint around one of the boiler pipes, trying to sneak up on her, but she remains just out of sight. He has become aware of a clicking sound, like a thousand castanets.
"We all dance in the end, Ephrain. We dance through life..." The clicking was louder, it was a cacaphonous scraping and clacking, and the metal grates of the floor were being pushed aside.
"Or we dance into the next world."
The rising skeletons came from underneath, in hidden sewage tanks, and underground mass-graves.
They began building each other, connecting their mates bones together as they began linking hands in a ring-around-the-posey type of circle.
They began whirling around, a dance of death.
Her arm hanging off by a few cords of muscle, had joined hands with one skeleton, and they joyfully moved to the clicking of a million bones.
"Come with me, Ephrain... you know you want to..."
He screamed then, long and loud, on and on... it was enough to awaken Moloch. And he sensed that it was the touch of someone, locked in another realm and sealed behind three sigils, reaching out and trying to touch someone's mind. He saw a soldier being courted to be on the front lines of a war.
The next morning, rosy fingers of light came through the windows of Doctor Daniel's office as he stood, recording my progress on her chart. Ephrain smiled beatifically.
"So, you slept through the night, then?" he said, amazed. "No headaches?"
The mute, addled man only smiled, as the corpse nuzzled her dead, decaying, burned flesh against his. He said one word then, and one only, forced out of him by forces he could not comprehend, set in motion millions of years ago.
"None."
In primordial times when man was just rising in order from being apes, a million years before the birth of Christ, the clans of cave dwellers had many "gods", though they had no real term for it. Worship was not organized. Early man just looked up at the stars, wondering what was out there in the dim, Cro-Magnon center of their brain, and gave thanks to the dim idea of a something out there that gave them strength in the day's hunt. But one million years ago, when the earth was still forming, was a time of chaotic magic, and entities walking the earth and walking among the early man.
Three of them existed at the same time. No one knew where they spawned, who created them, or if they had always been, since the dawn of time. Perhaps not even they knew. But as man slowly grew in intelligence from animals to the clan dwelling cave herders that began making rudimentary tools, the three brothers awakened to the possibilities.
Their power was fed by these mortals. As they lived among the encampments and walked among them, they began to be revered by the clans, put on pedestals as witch doctors, healers. The early man began to look up to them, and even when the brothers spoke to each other about it, they each kept it secret in their hidden hearts the pride that swelled within them at being raised above the other members of their clan in status. The shaman of each of their tribes. Early man had no such words for worship, but the cult of personality was forming around each of the three entities. And in turn, they felt stronger every day.
Three brothers. Each one of them gained power from a different aspect of their tribes.
They did not have the names that would come to be associated with them yet. Those would not rise until the cradle of civilization began in the Tigris and Euphrates, thousands of years after the Cro-Magnon had moved on. But the brothers kept their positions of power, and clans grew around them, worshipping them for their aspects. And each aspect brought the entity power, which they then shared with their cult, treating them as their avatars. Life, pain, death. In that way the three brothers grew strong, and equal.
And in time, they gained names, names of power. Abnegazar, Moloch, and Shadrach. Life, pain, death.
In time, their cults grew in the burgeoning cities of early man, in Ur and Akkad and Jericho. Their power grew equal, but the brothers were growing jealous of each other. They looked upon the worshippers, the cults growing in all of their names and they grew mistrustful. Because life was worshipped, but pain and death were becoming lusted over. Abnegazar, the kindest of the brothers, feared for himself as his two brothers grew in power.
And, once, thousands of years ago, when they met, Shadrach finally attempted to betray them. When the triumvirate met in their sacred place, as they had for millenia, Shadrach brought with him a special knife, that he had had forged in his city and enchanted by his mystics, a godkiller blade which could cleave through anything, even pierce the heart of one of his brothers.
They met to discuss their affairs, as they had always done, not knowing the trap lying in wait. And when they stood close enough, Shadrach withdrew his necro-blade and stabbed Abnegazar, wounding him mortally. The embodiment of life fell, and Shadrach whirled. But his brother, the embodiment of pain, smiled in relish. He knew it was only a matter of time before his brother, who was fed by eons of wails of torment from screaming, dying men, would have tried this. "Oh, brother," Moloch said with a smile, "why can't you see that we are the same?"
"We are not the same," Shadrach denied stoically, "Because you have more in common with that fool than you do with me. You are the struggle to keep life, while I am the release and the nothingness. For centuries, since we first emerged from the caves and walked as the witch doctors for the clans of ape men, when their wounded have come, sick from illness, wounded by mammoths in the hunt, you have drunk their pain and their blood, and used it to become strong. But every one dies. And I have become stronger."
Shadrach, thinking he had the advantage, did not see that his oldest brother was not finished by the necro-blade, and that, in his own blood, Abnegazar was drawing three sigils in his own blood.
But then, just as he raised the necro-blade over his head to bring it down, he began to feel the life draining from his limbs.
Shadrach fell to his knees in their cave. Moloch turned, in confusion, and Abnegazar, in his dying breath said to him, "I have used the last of my magic to bind him. He is being sealed in a realm by these three sigils, and he cannot be let out until the sigils are reversed." Howling in terror, Shadrach began fading away.
"But brother, what about you?" Moloch said.
"I will go to a realm of my own, to hibernate. I will sleep forever," Abnegazar said.
"And what will I do?"
"I do not know, brother. But I must go." And with that, the entity faded himself.
And time passed. Moloch retreated to his own realm, though not locked away. Their cults continued on, without their figureheads, but soon became fringe elements as civilization rose and religion formed. Moloch watched it all. He evolved into something entirely different, but he still continued to seek out avatars to feed him pain, and bide his power. Because he knew one day, his brother would be free of his prison. And so he waited.
And he wouldn't have long to wait.
There was one who opened his eyes, brought to him by a fervent pretender, and it was him that opened Moloch's eye. He was the strongest champion of the three. Life, death, two absolutes on either end of the spectrum, but he knew in his heart that this one promised only pain.
So, to take it back to where Moloch first laid his eyes on his champion.
The deputy had been sitting behind a desk, reading a Maxim magazine and ogling some C-list actress in a photo spread.
Ephrain shut his eyes, blinking them blearily. He still had no idea what had happened, he found himself in a bombed out ruin of a house in Palo Alto, with no memory of what happened. Now a confused, seven foot tall giant sat looking at a lazy sheriff's deputy as he thumbed through a Maxim magazine and lazily hooked a booger from his nose.
"Burned your house down with your wife and kid? Good fuckin' deal," he said, examining the mined treasure.
Those words reverberated here and now, in the cold white cinderblock of my "room" at Springdale. He was stripped to the waist, wearing only the powder blue scrubs pants they provided inmate-sorry, residents. Ephrain is stripped of everything, a defanged beast that's retreated into a deep cove to slumber and dream my past life dreams. He has nothing left, no treasures, no princess. Ephrain recalled with a pained grunt, the only fragmented memory that was presenting itself, as in that long ago moment, the deputy had sit up in his rolly chair, savaging the baby, newborn from fire, with a smirking look. "You're a real piece of work all over, aren't ya." With relish, he had poured through the file, and he extruded pictures of the arson. A picture we've seen before, of a twisted limb, a little girl's black and charred foot. "Killed them both, murdered them," he said, that smug smile on his face.
All Ephrain has left in the world are memories like these. Good fuckin' deal...
This cell was small, and cramped, with only a grated window letting in a shaft of light. It would almost be a closet except for the high, soaring ceiling.
Ephrain had spent two days here. His senses dulled, his voice mute, unable to do anything but cringe at the broken glass shards of memory.
He stands, running his fingers over the diamond grates covering the window. Illuminated by the moonlight.
Ephrain exits his room the still of the night and the pale moon the only real illumination all the way down to the nurse's station and phone desk at the very end of the ward. There was a creepy chill in the air and the bone white of the moonlight washed everything of color. And it was there that Ephrain saw her, at the end of the floor. She grinned up at him from the floor, her lips painted in a bloody smile. Her body was a blackened, charred mess of meat. She lay supine, like a broken doll, and her pale skin and the multitude of wounds all over her... that wasn't as terrible as that smile.
"Come on. Join me down here.
In the boiler room.
Dance with me."
Ephrain blinks.
It is in this moment that Moloch really becomes aware, because it is in this moment someone else is calling out to him from another plane. Someone who is trying to use the broken man to become free.
Ephrain screws his eyes shut. It's just another hallucination, he tells himself.
She's still smiling at him, as one slim, white, bare leg is grabbed by an invisible hand. She kicks her foot up coquettishly. And then she's dragged down towards the stairwell. Towards a lower level.
It's not real. It's not. Headache is pounding enough to make his head explode, and he drills fists into his temples to push out some pressure and Ephrain is screaming. It's not real. It's NOT REAL.
Good fuckin' deal, huh?
"Ephrain, can you tell me why you left your room last night?" We are in Daniel Shomron's office the next day.
He steeples her fingers, smiles professionally. Doctor Daniel someone who's fascinated by these cases. He writes down everything for analysis and observation, he dissects these traumas so that he can get a fancy write-up in the Journal of Psychiatric Medicene or somesuch. Twisted cases like Ephrain fascinate him.
"Ephrain, ever since you admitted yourself you've complained about these headaches and these flashes of visions, you call them. We need to work on your plan for coping. Because I've noticed in our one on one sessions, the headaches start in periods of stress. Can you tell me what's caused these headaches last night?"
"Let's start you on some new medication," he says, writing in his pad.
The addled, mute monster is somehow thankful as he leave the office. Before he came to the Springdale he was a lost cause, but there's some niggling feeling of hope. I join the queue of patients going to a sliding glass window to get their meds, carrying my new scrip from Dr Daniel. Behind the glass, an orderly named Jerome lords over it, bald mocha head gleaming under fluorescents. After dinner is art therapy, making finger paintings with non-toxic paints among a group of variably deficient men.
No more headaches. No more visions. He is laying on his rock-hard cot after lights out and he is trying to rest. He can rest, because Dr. Daniel is right and his pain can be lessened through medication. He can do this...
"Come joinnnnn me Ephrain..." her voice is a lilting singsong, and just the tip of her blonde hair flits into my door frame.
NO. No, no! It can't be. He exits to the ward, following after. She's down the hall, all he sees is an afterimage of blonde hair and a trailing white dress... My head is pounding, a spike right between my eyes, and...
He stops, and look for Jerome. He's behind the glass partition at the nurse's station, back turned. He's talking on the phone, and his lowered, amorous tone of voice tells him he's not calling work business... Ephrain storms past.
His wife is waiting, playing peekaboo from the stairwell, her bright grin looking back at Ephrain. Flirty, fun. Despite the stretched grimace of her burned face.
"You've always been obsessed with death. You've courted her for the longest tiiime," she sang, and she twirled down the stairs. All I saw was spinning white silk and her hair. "But those visions of you becoming the beast, that isn't the avatar of death, that isn't the end you were so desperate for... that was your way out. That was power, virility... life..."
We are down among the pipes of this old hospital now. And hard, packed earth.
"You wanted it both ways, in both worlds. But living has become too much a chore for you, Ephrain, and that beast, was just a mask you put on. But the mask has taken you off... and now you have nothing."
Ephrain feint around one of the boiler pipes, trying to sneak up on her, but she remains just out of sight. He has become aware of a clicking sound, like a thousand castanets.
"We all dance in the end, Ephrain. We dance through life..." The clicking was louder, it was a cacaphonous scraping and clacking, and the metal grates of the floor were being pushed aside.
"Or we dance into the next world."
The rising skeletons came from underneath, in hidden sewage tanks, and underground mass-graves.
They began building each other, connecting their mates bones together as they began linking hands in a ring-around-the-posey type of circle.
They began whirling around, a dance of death.
Her arm hanging off by a few cords of muscle, had joined hands with one skeleton, and they joyfully moved to the clicking of a million bones.
"Come with me, Ephrain... you know you want to..."
He screamed then, long and loud, on and on... it was enough to awaken Moloch. And he sensed that it was the touch of someone, locked in another realm and sealed behind three sigils, reaching out and trying to touch someone's mind. He saw a soldier being courted to be on the front lines of a war.
The next morning, rosy fingers of light came through the windows of Doctor Daniel's office as he stood, recording my progress on her chart. Ephrain smiled beatifically.
"So, you slept through the night, then?" he said, amazed. "No headaches?"
The mute, addled man only smiled, as the corpse nuzzled her dead, decaying, burned flesh against his. He said one word then, and one only, forced out of him by forces he could not comprehend, set in motion millions of years ago.
"None."
