The Shadows Behind The Throne, Whispering.
Oct 17, 2021 11:41:45 GMT -5
CJ Phoenix, Lissie Hope, and 3 more like this
Post by The Vanguard on Oct 17, 2021 11:41:45 GMT -5
He walked, barefoot in the desert sand, as he surveyed the wasteland ahead of him. It was blasted, scorched earth as far as the eye could see. In the distance, through the blowing curtains of dirt, large, tentacled nightmare machines floated back and forth, titanic sentries watching the blasted desert. The apocalyptic scene shimmered and wavered, and he was struck by the stark reality of his senses. His face was blasted by dirt and grit from the nonstop assault of the wind. The heat beat down on him like a palpable, heavy burden, sapping his will.
A rough hand clapped on his shoulder, jovial and playful, and a familiar voice hit his ear. Where once it was roughened by rage and alcohol, his father's voice bellowed out cheerily, "Another day at play under the fields of god, eh boy?"
He was expecting a trick, or an attack, but as he turned, he saw his father standing there beside him, just as weatherbeaten and sandblasted as he was. He had a shovel jauntily cocked up on one shoulder.
This was Donald Fehl as he'd been in his prime, too... the corded muscle, the titanium blonde hair feathered into a mullet that was very of it's time. This was Donald-as-Danny-remembered-him from childhood, an idol, a hero.
And instead of the rough abusive language peppered between the adversarial relationship, there was instead, the type of working solidarity reserved for coal miners.
The former Erich Von Himmel led the way down a dune, looking back and expecting his son to follow.
Finally, he did, still marvelling at the surreality, and yet the gritty realness of his surroundings. They made their way to a sort of camp, where he could pick out other figures through the sand. One greeted them both with a hug, and he was even more shocked to see her, here.
"Chelle?"
Michelle beamed at both of them, her blonde hair wrapped up in a bandanna, "We've got a hit in sector 4, Nate excavated something."
"Nate...?" Danny double-taked, "Chelle... Nate... died - "
But as he looked into the pit, and he saw the form from behind; Not wasted from heroin, not ravaged by time... it was as blurry as a mirage, but he saw the back of Nate Nawrocki working at a rock with a pick.
He looked up into Michelle's face, only to find her and his father looking somberly at the approaching shade.
It whirred silently on monstrous anti-grav lifts.
Steel-cable tentacles and science-fiction cannons bristled out of it from every angle. Complex machinery.
It was like a child's nightmare of a mechanical squid.
It was coming this way, and from deep within it's mechanical works came a flat, brazzing voice from a speaker, and it just blared one word, "DIG,"
A gun swiveled towards him as he stood there, dumbfounded by this reality. It's muzzle glowed with a fierce blue light as it readied a killing charge.
"DIG," the alien, distorted squawk came from the machine again, and, haltingly, following the logic of the dream, he picked up a fallen spade and walked over to the excavation squares, preparing to do just that.
His spade dug into the earth, and he looked across the grid and saw Michelle, who gave him a happy wave, but went back to digging.
"What are we digging for?!" he shouted, expecting one of the floating nightmares to turn back his way, to blast him to pieces with a hundred guns or shred him with tentacles.
"If you want this desert to bloom into something useful, you've got to water it with your heart's blood, they told us in that way they've got," Nate said, to his right, and he looked up into the adjacent pit to find him. Redd Dogg was digging in a vintage throwback Lakers jersey and backwards cap.
His brow furrowed, and he set the spade aside. "Nate, who the fuck are you talking about?"
Nate just smiled like the cat who ate the canary, pointed skyward at the machines moving in their tight, back and forth sentry routes, and whispered, "Dig."
Bemused, he did. His spade dug up clumps of earth. Again, and again, until every muscle in his upper body felt pulled and he felt weak from the effort. He was near the point of heat-drained collapse when he struck something hard and unyielding, a solid, unbroken talisman in the earth. He pushed loose sand away, stared in confusion and dug his fingers into the ground, pulling out... a handful of loose teeth.
From an adjacent pit, Donald peaked his head up. A broad, genial smile spread on his face, and that may have been the most disconcerting part of this all, seeing him not wasted by age, drink and disease... "Hey, put 'em under your pillow and you'll have a fortune by morning."
He threw the spade aside, with sharp alacrity and fury. "No. This is ridiculous... it's not real."
"The only thing real, son, is what you do if you don't do their digging," suddenly getting serious, Donald said, and he pointed with his chin over his shoulder.
There, at the edge of the field, was a towering citadel of stone steps that wasn't there before. It was across the length of a soccer field, criss-crossed by floating mechanical HR Giger squid. It was black towers and spires reaching up into heaven, accessed by steps stories high into the doorway.
Above the tower, the bright shine of the desert was giving way to a swirling, dark vortex of clouds.
"Well, I'm not playing this stupid game anymore," he told Donald sternly, trying to assert his will on the dream's linear flow. "I'm not digging."
Every gun from every machine turned on him, glowing with fierce blue light.
He pushed himself out of his pit, standing straight up, defiant. The faceless automatons trained on him impassively, tentacles scraping the ground. Michelle tugged at his arm, trying to get him to get back into his foxhole. "Danny... why are you doing this, don't you know there's no sense to it?"
"No, because I know what this is about."
"You think you do, but you don't."
"Why are you all just standing here putting up with this? Why don't you try to enter the citadel?"
Michelle's face coursed with a wave of emotions before settling on confusion, then on a blank-robotic does not compute that tells him that's just not the way things have ever been done. "The light will take you to pieces," she finally says.
He scoffs.
He turns to the field across from the citadel of stairs, and starts to walk. The sandy texture of the dunes gives way to cracked, desolate and broken earth. But despite this, the guns pointed at him did not fire. His feet burned and blistered as he stepped on the stone, but he bore it with a grimace. It felt like he was both breaking the rules of the dream logic and yet completely staying inside of a boundary.
And he reached the first step. And everything changed.
Strewn across the step, his limbs contorted and twisted, was his father. Not young and in his prime now, Donald-As-He-Ended-Up was withered and frail from cancer, skin waxy stretched over a skull face with sunken, purpled eyes. "When you didn't play the game they wanted, they pushed back," he said weakly. "Why didn't you play the game their way, Daniel?"
"Donald... dad..." he registered shock at finding him on the stairs. "You - you died... because of Jason..." the memory came back into the dream.
"I died... because there's evil in the world... and if you don't play by it's rules... evil will come for you."
"No, dad. No. It can't be that way." He shook his head, blanky refusing. "What are you talking about? You told me there was a way that Jason could never beat me. You said -"
"Jason. Samson. Blake. The Black Dragon. Many heads has a hydra. Many forms for the devil to come in. Not all related. Beware..."
And then, Donald lays his head down on the stone steps, dying again, and for the second time, he found himself holding his father's long-dead body. The wave of shock and grief washed over him on the steps.
It started as a trickle from that, as it reached his ears.
Crestfallen, he cradled Donald's withered shell, but he heard the dripping onto the stone, and then as it intensified. He looked up to see the white stone begin running with blood, as it began running in long rivulets down each step. He watched, in swiftly-dawning awe, as the steps began to course stronger with red-black ichor. He let Donald lay on the steps, and he staggered up, blood pooling around his feet. He craned his head up to the top of the stairs, and; far at the top, up an innumerable flight, he saw a throne, at the epicenter of the storm above; This is where the blood was running from.
He started to climb again, willing his numb feet to move.
He climbed up several more flights before he came to a square landing, and a voice gave him pause again.
"You did it, you brought water to the desert," Nate said, then coughed into his hand. "Lucky us."
"Nate...... how did this happen..."
Nate was sick again. His eyes were hollow, his cheeks thin. He sighed, sitting on a step sticky with claret. "The answer been in front'a you all along, bossman... but you want a simple why, amirite."
"The answer you want is it's the darkness in Jason's heart. Or in yours. But those are just players. Ever since ya stepped foot in there with her a year ago, you've allowed yourself to be a spectator in a game, and it's one you've been keeping your eye on case you needed to be a player."
"Redd..."
"You always knew it was coming... your question was, what's it gonna be when you arrive."
He grunted, "Enough with this cryptic crap, Redd. Talk to me. Tell me what's coming."
With a sigh Redd folded his hands together, elbows resting on his knees as he sat forward. Finally, he shook his head.
"I'm tired, bossman. Got to get going. Remember. You got duties, but you also have a bigger fight."
Redd stood up, bone weariness aching through his every pore, as he stood up. He passed by Danny, and began trudging down the stairs, sadly leaving him behind. In shock and trying to make sense of what it all could mean, he watched Nate go, wanting to call him back.
But then, sullen and angry, he looked to the top of the stairs.
The throne was up there, within reach. And he could make out darkened, shadowed negative figures standing by it and around it, but the seat of the throne was dripping blood.
"I know who you are!" he called up the stairs. "I know your names!"
They didn't respond to him, but seemed to be talking softly among themselves.
"I've been watching you fucks get by for too long, keeping my eye on you in case you were going to step into our division."
Again, the shadow figures murmured to each other, and some seemed to ripple with polite laughter.
He stood there, on the landing, his feet planted firmly in the puddling, sticky-black blood, standing his ground.
"You hear me? I see you, Phi -"
And then his eyes snapped awake.
Breathing heavily, his upper body stripped to the waist and drenched in sweat, his sheets wet from his back. The entire fevered dream was fresh in his mind.
He sat up, groaning, feeling every bit of it. Glanced at the clock. 3:12 AM. Fuck.
The grim, foreboding menace of the dream replayed in his mind, over and over as he sat there, elbows propped on his thighs and head hanging in the dark. The tentacled machines. Dig. Pulling out teeth. "Another day at play under the fields of god, eh boy?" The citadel. Climbing the stairs.
The throne, dripping blood.
The shadowed figures around the throne, murmuring and whispering.
He tried to forget it, to put it out of his mind... he knew that at noon today, he was meeting Dion and they were going to go over strategy 'cause they had the Dangerous Gentlemen to worry about, but the dream... the dream was not fading from his consciousness... in fact, it wouldn't go away.
He picked up the phone, finger wavering over his contacts before finally, determined, punching for Dion.
"...Yeah?"
"Hey. It's me. Yeah, it's late... early. Sorry. Listen..."
"I mean, you've got me here now. But shouldn't you be sleeping? We should be getting as much rest as we can for our defense against the Dangerous Gentlemen."
"Yes, we should concentrate on Dangerous Gentlemen."
"Glad to hear it. Those two aren't going to be pushovers; its our first time showing the world how we want this division to grow."
"Yeah, I know, Benedict is young and hungry, and Crowley is experienced... they both have a skillset that matches mine. I know, okay... it's just..."
"Daniel. Its 3 AM. I'm half-sloshed, talking to you in a cold sweat. You're free to speak your mind, yeah?"
"I think we need to go bigger, Dion... we're a part of something in this fed, and we can't ignore it... I know, I've been super aggro lately, being rough with you in training, being a shithead to Benedict, and it's just... I've been... anxious."
"I get that you're anxious. I am too. Hell, you know what its like before a major title defense like this. But giving me a call this late in the evening isn't going to help either one of us. We're a team, yeah? This is something we both wanted from the get go. You're the muscle that takes it too seriously, I'm your comic relief that knows when to throw hands. We just need to-"
He thinks of Nate, telling him "You always knew it was coming... your question was, what's it gonna be when you arrive. But we need to get our shit together, because there's storms on the horizon. And I want us to be prepared for it."
There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then...
"If its what I think you're referring to, our investment opportunity, we just need to play things by ear. We get the word, we help out. That's how all this works, right? You know everything I know about that situation...which is a lot more than most people do. Not a lot of us have an interest with market movement like I do. ...Look, I'm sure you want to talk about this more, but lets pick this up at a time that is more...majestique, y'know?"
"Listen... we'll talk at noon," he finally says. "Sorry for waking - well... sorry for the last few weeks."
"Hey, its no trouble. I did say anytime, and you're taking advantage of that. Just...message first so I'm ready for it, yeah?"
He hangs up the phone, holding it and bouncing it lightly in his hand as he considers everything he just said to Dion. He blows out a tired, exhausted breath and leans back on the bed.
When he closes his eyes, he can still see the throne, in his mind.
A rough hand clapped on his shoulder, jovial and playful, and a familiar voice hit his ear. Where once it was roughened by rage and alcohol, his father's voice bellowed out cheerily, "Another day at play under the fields of god, eh boy?"
He was expecting a trick, or an attack, but as he turned, he saw his father standing there beside him, just as weatherbeaten and sandblasted as he was. He had a shovel jauntily cocked up on one shoulder.
This was Donald Fehl as he'd been in his prime, too... the corded muscle, the titanium blonde hair feathered into a mullet that was very of it's time. This was Donald-as-Danny-remembered-him from childhood, an idol, a hero.
And instead of the rough abusive language peppered between the adversarial relationship, there was instead, the type of working solidarity reserved for coal miners.
The former Erich Von Himmel led the way down a dune, looking back and expecting his son to follow.
Finally, he did, still marvelling at the surreality, and yet the gritty realness of his surroundings. They made their way to a sort of camp, where he could pick out other figures through the sand. One greeted them both with a hug, and he was even more shocked to see her, here.
"Chelle?"
Michelle beamed at both of them, her blonde hair wrapped up in a bandanna, "We've got a hit in sector 4, Nate excavated something."
"Nate...?" Danny double-taked, "Chelle... Nate... died - "
But as he looked into the pit, and he saw the form from behind; Not wasted from heroin, not ravaged by time... it was as blurry as a mirage, but he saw the back of Nate Nawrocki working at a rock with a pick.
He looked up into Michelle's face, only to find her and his father looking somberly at the approaching shade.
It whirred silently on monstrous anti-grav lifts.
Steel-cable tentacles and science-fiction cannons bristled out of it from every angle. Complex machinery.
It was like a child's nightmare of a mechanical squid.
It was coming this way, and from deep within it's mechanical works came a flat, brazzing voice from a speaker, and it just blared one word, "DIG,"
A gun swiveled towards him as he stood there, dumbfounded by this reality. It's muzzle glowed with a fierce blue light as it readied a killing charge.
"DIG," the alien, distorted squawk came from the machine again, and, haltingly, following the logic of the dream, he picked up a fallen spade and walked over to the excavation squares, preparing to do just that.
His spade dug into the earth, and he looked across the grid and saw Michelle, who gave him a happy wave, but went back to digging.
"What are we digging for?!" he shouted, expecting one of the floating nightmares to turn back his way, to blast him to pieces with a hundred guns or shred him with tentacles.
"If you want this desert to bloom into something useful, you've got to water it with your heart's blood, they told us in that way they've got," Nate said, to his right, and he looked up into the adjacent pit to find him. Redd Dogg was digging in a vintage throwback Lakers jersey and backwards cap.
His brow furrowed, and he set the spade aside. "Nate, who the fuck are you talking about?"
Nate just smiled like the cat who ate the canary, pointed skyward at the machines moving in their tight, back and forth sentry routes, and whispered, "Dig."
Bemused, he did. His spade dug up clumps of earth. Again, and again, until every muscle in his upper body felt pulled and he felt weak from the effort. He was near the point of heat-drained collapse when he struck something hard and unyielding, a solid, unbroken talisman in the earth. He pushed loose sand away, stared in confusion and dug his fingers into the ground, pulling out... a handful of loose teeth.
From an adjacent pit, Donald peaked his head up. A broad, genial smile spread on his face, and that may have been the most disconcerting part of this all, seeing him not wasted by age, drink and disease... "Hey, put 'em under your pillow and you'll have a fortune by morning."
He threw the spade aside, with sharp alacrity and fury. "No. This is ridiculous... it's not real."
"The only thing real, son, is what you do if you don't do their digging," suddenly getting serious, Donald said, and he pointed with his chin over his shoulder.
There, at the edge of the field, was a towering citadel of stone steps that wasn't there before. It was across the length of a soccer field, criss-crossed by floating mechanical HR Giger squid. It was black towers and spires reaching up into heaven, accessed by steps stories high into the doorway.
Above the tower, the bright shine of the desert was giving way to a swirling, dark vortex of clouds.
"Well, I'm not playing this stupid game anymore," he told Donald sternly, trying to assert his will on the dream's linear flow. "I'm not digging."
Every gun from every machine turned on him, glowing with fierce blue light.
He pushed himself out of his pit, standing straight up, defiant. The faceless automatons trained on him impassively, tentacles scraping the ground. Michelle tugged at his arm, trying to get him to get back into his foxhole. "Danny... why are you doing this, don't you know there's no sense to it?"
"No, because I know what this is about."
"You think you do, but you don't."
"Why are you all just standing here putting up with this? Why don't you try to enter the citadel?"
Michelle's face coursed with a wave of emotions before settling on confusion, then on a blank-robotic does not compute that tells him that's just not the way things have ever been done. "The light will take you to pieces," she finally says.
He scoffs.
He turns to the field across from the citadel of stairs, and starts to walk. The sandy texture of the dunes gives way to cracked, desolate and broken earth. But despite this, the guns pointed at him did not fire. His feet burned and blistered as he stepped on the stone, but he bore it with a grimace. It felt like he was both breaking the rules of the dream logic and yet completely staying inside of a boundary.
And he reached the first step. And everything changed.
Strewn across the step, his limbs contorted and twisted, was his father. Not young and in his prime now, Donald-As-He-Ended-Up was withered and frail from cancer, skin waxy stretched over a skull face with sunken, purpled eyes. "When you didn't play the game they wanted, they pushed back," he said weakly. "Why didn't you play the game their way, Daniel?"
"Donald... dad..." he registered shock at finding him on the stairs. "You - you died... because of Jason..." the memory came back into the dream.
"I died... because there's evil in the world... and if you don't play by it's rules... evil will come for you."
"No, dad. No. It can't be that way." He shook his head, blanky refusing. "What are you talking about? You told me there was a way that Jason could never beat me. You said -"
"Jason. Samson. Blake. The Black Dragon. Many heads has a hydra. Many forms for the devil to come in. Not all related. Beware..."
And then, Donald lays his head down on the stone steps, dying again, and for the second time, he found himself holding his father's long-dead body. The wave of shock and grief washed over him on the steps.
It started as a trickle from that, as it reached his ears.
Crestfallen, he cradled Donald's withered shell, but he heard the dripping onto the stone, and then as it intensified. He looked up to see the white stone begin running with blood, as it began running in long rivulets down each step. He watched, in swiftly-dawning awe, as the steps began to course stronger with red-black ichor. He let Donald lay on the steps, and he staggered up, blood pooling around his feet. He craned his head up to the top of the stairs, and; far at the top, up an innumerable flight, he saw a throne, at the epicenter of the storm above; This is where the blood was running from.
He started to climb again, willing his numb feet to move.
He climbed up several more flights before he came to a square landing, and a voice gave him pause again.
"You did it, you brought water to the desert," Nate said, then coughed into his hand. "Lucky us."
"Nate...... how did this happen..."
Nate was sick again. His eyes were hollow, his cheeks thin. He sighed, sitting on a step sticky with claret. "The answer been in front'a you all along, bossman... but you want a simple why, amirite."
"The answer you want is it's the darkness in Jason's heart. Or in yours. But those are just players. Ever since ya stepped foot in there with her a year ago, you've allowed yourself to be a spectator in a game, and it's one you've been keeping your eye on case you needed to be a player."
"Redd..."
"You always knew it was coming... your question was, what's it gonna be when you arrive."
He grunted, "Enough with this cryptic crap, Redd. Talk to me. Tell me what's coming."
With a sigh Redd folded his hands together, elbows resting on his knees as he sat forward. Finally, he shook his head.
"I'm tired, bossman. Got to get going. Remember. You got duties, but you also have a bigger fight."
Redd stood up, bone weariness aching through his every pore, as he stood up. He passed by Danny, and began trudging down the stairs, sadly leaving him behind. In shock and trying to make sense of what it all could mean, he watched Nate go, wanting to call him back.
But then, sullen and angry, he looked to the top of the stairs.
The throne was up there, within reach. And he could make out darkened, shadowed negative figures standing by it and around it, but the seat of the throne was dripping blood.
"I know who you are!" he called up the stairs. "I know your names!"
They didn't respond to him, but seemed to be talking softly among themselves.
"I've been watching you fucks get by for too long, keeping my eye on you in case you were going to step into our division."
Again, the shadow figures murmured to each other, and some seemed to ripple with polite laughter.
He stood there, on the landing, his feet planted firmly in the puddling, sticky-black blood, standing his ground.
"You hear me? I see you, Phi -"
And then his eyes snapped awake.
Breathing heavily, his upper body stripped to the waist and drenched in sweat, his sheets wet from his back. The entire fevered dream was fresh in his mind.
He sat up, groaning, feeling every bit of it. Glanced at the clock. 3:12 AM. Fuck.
The grim, foreboding menace of the dream replayed in his mind, over and over as he sat there, elbows propped on his thighs and head hanging in the dark. The tentacled machines. Dig. Pulling out teeth. "Another day at play under the fields of god, eh boy?" The citadel. Climbing the stairs.
The throne, dripping blood.
The shadowed figures around the throne, murmuring and whispering.
He tried to forget it, to put it out of his mind... he knew that at noon today, he was meeting Dion and they were going to go over strategy 'cause they had the Dangerous Gentlemen to worry about, but the dream... the dream was not fading from his consciousness... in fact, it wouldn't go away.
He picked up the phone, finger wavering over his contacts before finally, determined, punching for Dion.
"...Yeah?"
"Hey. It's me. Yeah, it's late... early. Sorry. Listen..."
"I mean, you've got me here now. But shouldn't you be sleeping? We should be getting as much rest as we can for our defense against the Dangerous Gentlemen."
"Yes, we should concentrate on Dangerous Gentlemen."
"Glad to hear it. Those two aren't going to be pushovers; its our first time showing the world how we want this division to grow."
"Yeah, I know, Benedict is young and hungry, and Crowley is experienced... they both have a skillset that matches mine. I know, okay... it's just..."
"Daniel. Its 3 AM. I'm half-sloshed, talking to you in a cold sweat. You're free to speak your mind, yeah?"
"I think we need to go bigger, Dion... we're a part of something in this fed, and we can't ignore it... I know, I've been super aggro lately, being rough with you in training, being a shithead to Benedict, and it's just... I've been... anxious."
"I get that you're anxious. I am too. Hell, you know what its like before a major title defense like this. But giving me a call this late in the evening isn't going to help either one of us. We're a team, yeah? This is something we both wanted from the get go. You're the muscle that takes it too seriously, I'm your comic relief that knows when to throw hands. We just need to-"
He thinks of Nate, telling him "You always knew it was coming... your question was, what's it gonna be when you arrive. But we need to get our shit together, because there's storms on the horizon. And I want us to be prepared for it."
There was a pause on the other end of the line. Then...
"If its what I think you're referring to, our investment opportunity, we just need to play things by ear. We get the word, we help out. That's how all this works, right? You know everything I know about that situation...which is a lot more than most people do. Not a lot of us have an interest with market movement like I do. ...Look, I'm sure you want to talk about this more, but lets pick this up at a time that is more...majestique, y'know?"
"Listen... we'll talk at noon," he finally says. "Sorry for waking - well... sorry for the last few weeks."
"Hey, its no trouble. I did say anytime, and you're taking advantage of that. Just...message first so I'm ready for it, yeah?"
He hangs up the phone, holding it and bouncing it lightly in his hand as he considers everything he just said to Dion. He blows out a tired, exhausted breath and leans back on the bed.
When he closes his eyes, he can still see the throne, in his mind.