Those folk that live by the edges of the world up north, where you can see the world turned to empty and unfinished along the horizon, they have a peculiar tale.
The tale of a flame that dwells in emptiness.
Some'll tell you of the horrid screams that echo along the shore, the voice of an abomination even the waves cannot drown out.
Some'll speak with wide eyes of that figure flitting across the horizon, ever going north.
But I'll tell you the full story, 'fore I ventured out and saw the beast myself.
I'd come to visit these lands, once upon a time, to learn of their lives, write down their histories.
They told me many pleasant things and gave but a single warning - never venture out to the north by sea, else you'll return in a pyre.
I'd not listened then, young fool that I was.
So I set off north with a crew of fools like me….
It came for us in the night.
A flaming thing of death and hate, screaming and clawing at our ship.
Oh the screams… they almost sounded human, like human screams…
I know not what that thing was… I shiver to imagine what made it…
Our ship turned to a pyre, just as those wise folk told me.
Took with it my crew, my legs, my eyes, and spat me out into the sea.
I live, yet that day remains burned into my memory still.
So when I warn you, friend, it is best you listen.
Go north, and you shall return to us in a pyre.
You search.
You burn.
You die.
You are reborn.
Again.
And again.
And again.
And again.
And he arrives.
You know it.
It is important.
A bee flies by
Perhaps he is Khotru?
You've been searching for so long…
So you fly to him.
He appears amidst a place of tall buildings.
You watch him, holding onto his book, standing by a metal thing.
He cackles, his voice familiar.
Others gather.
They fight, shouting words and making things.
The one who might be Khotru smiles and shouts as well.
Something changes, something is forgotten.
You've already forgotten so much.
You cannot even remember what Khotru is like.
The one who might be Khotru touches the metal thing and disappears.
…
You fly through another place.
This is where that one went, the one who isn't Khotru yet still feels like Khotru.
There is much red here.
There are skulls and there is blood.
There is silence, praise and screams.
Is this Khotru?
You do not know.
You do not remember.
Perhaps the man will know.
You see him, in a place of white stained in red.
He sees you, he beckons to you.
You land and look at him.
You know him.
“Tatiana?” - he says.
A name.
Once your name. A name a bee remembers.
You grip your talons into his arm.
Yes, once more a monster.
Beside him, beside Ahmed.
In the city that never was but now will be - Khotru.
To the new wounds you shall claw out in this world!
[CW: Gore and indiscriminate violence]
Do not look upon the northern highlands.
Do not give in to the solace within the blizzard.
Do not gaze upon the Scarlet Mistress.
Gods know your eyes will be the first piece of you she’ll claim, the wracking waves of hurt pressing down upon those feeble orbs, your brain giving up, surrendering to the holy white void. Nothing left of you to know, aside from the mark she'll make, the devastating scars she'll leave.
This creature knows what it means to be claimed. She is the final sum of painstaking years spent wasting away, a game whispered among hushed tones, hollow traditions dancing in skulls. At the End of it all, the Emperor was proven capable of a near-impossible feat: taming the beast which has, and shall continue, to outlive him. The tracing of her pristine throat, the gentle scratch at the back of her jawline…and she purrs. Ripples spurred within flesh, a bond shared through the ghosts of an inferior Empire's agony.
Ahmed (Praise be to Him) renovates, makes anew.
Tatiana (Forever in Her Resplendent Grace) annihilates, casts aside what no longer serves.
New acquisitions of skull masks beckon a tide of hovering stories, embedded through time and ears, calling to mind the numerous spectacles, the carved memories, when the Void-Star had plucked the still-beating hearts out of servants and victims alike.
When she sought to fill a vast subterranean stretch of holes by tearing skin from back, the withering sheets still desperately hanging to support the front of the body as they're stabbed, pockmarked, sketched upon, seeping wings of tapestries clamped open for her grisly performances.
When she aimed to reclaim significance by decreeing a mass pillage for glass so that a shimmering, glorious mansion could be built for the two loving birds, the barbaric queen forcing anyone who shattered a piece to consume the wretched mistake they'd made, the ugly reflections catching in their enflamed gums and administering themselves as tiny artists, the source of red paint never empty.
When her amplified, neo-reptilian shrieks could rupture eardrum and sanity alike, when the whirling twitch within the thin disc of one of her tail feathers could signal another inferno of loss (or a grueling brand, no longer something removed from the everyday, but embodied in action, meat)…
…when receiving a gracious kiss from the Mistress meant getting her forming beak caught on whatever lived beneath her lips, the gleaming raptor residing under her skin seeking to pull her recipients' living mask apart entirely, precise vivisection of sinew and tendon…
Yet in the wake of his wife's horrid atrocities, revelations in the life she was condemned to lead alongside his intimate embrace…Ahmed remains untouchable.
Not again, she thinks, not to you. Never to you, not after everything you've done to get here, to erase what that cruel woman had done to you, to us.
I'll never hurt you, or leave you again. Our Story deserves that much.
And that is my Promise.
Touring “Reflections” of a dying world.1)