Part 1: Not Mysterious Enough
The room was quiet.
The room was quiet, though it scarcely deserved the description. Three surrounding walls were made of rough-hewn stone slabs and the floor pocked and pitted in a slick, uneven mess as water from the stalactites above dripped down onto it, forming into stagnant pools. There was no fourth wall, as the room opened into a wide cave mouth that extended out into inky black darkness. Rubble littered the floor of the room as the slow, inexorable passage of time slowly ground the walls down into nothing but memories.
The room was quiet, but it was not entirely dark. Patches of luminescent moss grew in the cracks of the walls — nourished by the damp and the mineral rich surroundings. The glow was just faint enough to make out general lines in the void. Just enough to stir the imagination into hidden horrors.
The room was quiet. But it was not empty, however. In one corner sat a hunched bundle of rags, curled into a ball against the two rough stone walls, attempting to make use of the closest thing the room provided to security or protection. It was not a large bundle — humanoid perhaps, judging from the outline, young, as well, not yet fully grown, and female. The young girl was quiet because she had been taught what happened when she wasn’t. And the reason she was there, hunched against the wall rather than trying find her way down the cave tunnel was likely to do with the chain currently secured to a metal spike, driven into the pitted rock of the room’s center. The other end of the chain was currently manacled to her ankle, giving her enough room to reach the walls, but little else.
The room was quiet, but that was changing.
It began faintly, from down the cave tunnel — a gravelly rustle as stones were knocked against one another. Irregular, yet, and very clearly not the measured footfalls of the robed figures that occasionally deigned to feed the child.
And still too far away to make out anything in the too-faint illumination provided by the moss.
Closer now. Something scraping. Dragging against the stone floor. But no, that wasn’t quite right. It had a strange echoing quality, just ever so slightly out of sync with itself. A rhythmic susurration that lulled the child into a dazed stupor.
And then the sound stopped. Whatever was approaching from the hall remained far enough away to be cloaked in the emptiness of the cave. The sound quieted for only a moment before there was a sudden and loud hiss of air — a bellows rush that sent a warm and fetid odor washing over the child, waking her from the haze that she had fallen into.
And then, the sound resumed, furious and thrashing. No longer the rhythmic slither, now violent! Hurried! Voracious! As the creature drove towards the girl in a flurry of unrestrained motion.
A flash, and the girl could see now what approached. She screamed, crying desperately for help that would not—could not come. And then scream was over in a heartbeat. Silenced.
The sound was not, however.
But it too eventually ended.
And then the room was quiet, once again.
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Chasing Tales
"Ne cherchez plus mon cóur ; des monstres l'ont mang". -- Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal.
Moderators: Olivia Diogenes, Millicent Grim, Hunter White
- Corlanthis
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- Joined: Sun Nov 20, 2005 6:50 pm
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Chasing Tales
Post by Corlanthis »
"LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR? IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?"
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