IP: 92.17.245.181
Posted on December 26, 2010 at 08:42:21 AM by Christoph Rouault
The stones stretched before him suddenly turn to water and rush at him, huge waves dumping load after load of thick, heavy water, laden with rotted corpses and swollen flesh onto him. He starts to panic, his breath getting faster, and then he’s coughing, and sitting up, choking, in bed. Grasping his throat, he bends forward, eyes bulging, until he can breath easily again. These dreams of water have cursed his nights since his traumatic journey to the castle the day of the flooding, which to him seems not too long ago, but to everyone else is probably long in the past. He hears rumors, sometimes, echoing along the stone walls of the core’s castle, of the disruption and destruction of the old ways of life, but he cares not, as long as they stay away from his castle. He remembers clearly the day he came here. They had reached the core after the others, mud-caked, his mouth still foul from the floodwaters he had almost drowned in. It was only due to his grandfather’s quick thinking that he was even alive. He’d looked up and seen the crumbling summit of the castle, choked with ivy and crowned with red rust rises above them, and for the first time in his short existence, felt like he’d reached home. It had been a strange feeling, but nevertheless as he clung his deformed arm to himself, he couldn’t help but notice that he felt comfortable in the withdrawn, ruinous, brooding hulk. The immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. The avenues of spires rich with zephyrs still call to him in the deep hum and throb of cold stone. Arches and aisles, dim stairs and moth-hung rafters, the building calls to him, and his tiny, deformed heart had answered. That first time he had stumped his way across the threshold, eyes wide with glee, had been the best move of us life. And he had never left. In the time intervening in which he had grown from that curious toddler to the lanky young man who now crouched on a bed made from stolen cloaks and cushions in a filthy heap in a room with a ceiling so low it was necessary to stoop to avoid the decayed, sagging ceiling, he had insured that nothing would change about the castle. He viewed it as his – who else knew it as he did? Who else could swing through, over, under the roofs, the cellars, the crumbling panorama with the ease he did? His malformed features, scaled hand and shrunken arm might have made him unusual company for other faeries, but he had been taken to the heart of the owl, bat, spider and rat communities of the castle. Still coughing slightly, Christoph raises himself to his feet and glares around him, his sunken eyes intense pools. Coarse as he appears, he is an integral part of the Castle. Without him, something would be missing to any sociologist searching for the completion of a circle of temperaments, a gamut of the lower human values. From the cramped room in which he slept, Christoph oversaw the proceedings of the castle. He had wormed his way into the workings, gaining trust or simply forcing his way in. Through this daily proximity to the ordinary, his face had gained a shut, dry look, his mouth quite expressionless, curving neither up nor down but his eyes were always dark and hot, often half closed but their eloquence smoldered through the dark, long lashes, his only truly beautiful feature. His clothes hung on him in a savage cloud of material, and beneath them he was a thin, high-shouldered boy. He stumped from his room, leapt a few stairs in an easy stride, his shriveled arm swinging uselessly at his side. Upwards he went, to the rooftops of the castle, finding, somehow, on the way, a warm loaf of bread. He leant contentedly over the warming parapet, his chin cupped in his scaled hand and, with a hundred towers below him, contemplated contentedly a lifetime of what others would see as pointless drudgery throughout the castle. He turned to the other direction and considered, spread out before him in mountainous facades, a roofscape of the castle, its stark walls pocked with nameless windows. He wondered how others lived their lives. Did all those people whose movements seemed so spontaneous, so random down there really live simply by their whims? Did they truly not have a vocation, how could they ignore the castle when there was nothing, nowhere like it in the whole of Shaman? His half-sister had tried to visit him – he winced to remember it. She had at first struck him as perhaps acceptable – she was almost completely silent, and her monkey tail made her adept for climbing the stonework, but her smoking and her clear inability to understand his adoration of the castle had made her unsuitable for company. It had become painful to be in her company, and the morning she had spent with him had been the longest he could remember since he had arrived at the castle. His voice had groaned with disuse, and the horror of her look when she first saw and heard him had been enough to warn him off faerie company for a good while. How did they stand each other? Several apparently insignificant tasks later – re-breaking windows which some fool had attempted to fix, cleaning a room which had fallen into disuse, winding the clocks which had been forgotten – Christoph found himself in the courtyard of the castle, cleaning the ground floor windows. He hated being outside on the ground floor – in fact, he tried to stay away from the ground as much as possible. Most people didn’t bother climbing upwards into his lofty quarters, and if the did, they would not question him. Here, he felt most vulnerable from attempts at company, or query, or removal. Although no one would be successful at making him move, he did not like the idea of it being considered, or having to be dealt with. He hunched his shoulders and cleaned the panes quickly, the cold winter sunshine uneasy on his back. ...And the sun was white, as though chidden of God… |
Replies:
- your pale skin is a razor sharp wire; - By epos January 14, 2011 at 08:42:23 AM
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