09-16-2018, 11:39 PM
<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Nothing+You+Could+Do" rel="stylesheet"><style> #titanbackground{position:relative;z-index:1;width:550px; padding:20px;padding-top:40px;padding-bottom:0px; background:#000 url('https://s22.postimg.cc/3zsrwqw2p/ramiel_smoke.jpg')no-repeat;background-size:100%; box-shadow:0px 0px 15px #000;border:2px solid white;border-bottom:0px;} #titancontainer{position:relative;z-index:3;width:500px;margin-top:300px;padding:2px;background:#b1baaa;box-shadow:0px 0px 0px #000;opacity:0.6;border:2px solid white;border-top:0px;border-bottom:0px;}#container p{margin:0;} #titanmessage{position:relative; z-index:10;text-align:justify; padding:30px 20px 10px 20px; font:12px 'Times new roman', serif; line-height:1.25; color:#020a20;}#titanname{position:relative;bottom:20px;font:52px;font-family: 'Nothing You Could Do', cursive; text-shadow:4px 4px 4px rgba(0,0,0,0.3); color:#000;letter-spacing:16px;text-align:center;}#titanquote1{z-index:35;position:absolute;top:326px;left:150px;color:#fff;font:16px 'Nothing You Could Do', cursive;opacity:0.8;text-shadow:1px 6px 2px rgba(1,0,2,0.9); color:#fff}#titanquote2{z-index:35;position:relative;margin-top:-10px;color:#020a20;font:20px 'Nothing you could do', cursive;}</style><center><div id="titanbackground"><p id="titanquote1"></i></i>this is the man pulling on his iron chains</p><div id="titanimg"></p></div><div id="titancontainer"><div id="titangradient"></div><p id="titanmessage">At the edge of the dead land, it is not so terribly dark.
While it is semi-dark here, where the land drops off abruptly into the ocean he’s just inexplicably motored through, the brittle light up above strokes down into the water like old hands. It is a comfort, this last bastion of normalcy for a creature made for open-sky prairies and decidedly not any place underwater. But it is a comfort that – like most things in life (and death) – cannot last.
He sinks into this new reality. <i>Sinks</i>, because there is a hole in his head where Carnage shot him with rotten Pangean soil. <i>Sinks,</i> because the sickness is spreading from that point outward, leeching memories and pulling faces from a brain that had once thought itself wholly protected. <i>Sinks,</i> because that same brain is being refilled with the dark god’s commands, weighed down, down, down by desires that would otherwise never have been his own.
After all, they’ve had exactly one similar desire, he and the dark god, but nothing like this.
<i>Find Pangea.</i> Check. The command comes again. <i>Follow the path. Find her heart.</i> And oh, how ironic it might have been before! Because he had found her heart in the end, his black light at the end of the universe. He hadn’t been able to bring her home, but it had been so much better than that, meant so much more than that. It had cost him his life but it was absolutely worth it. Gail did the impossible, not for Carnage, but for him.
Ramiel doesn’t remember any of that now, standing in the sunken kingdom, he himself sinking further into the mud. He only knows what he is supposed to do, only realizes that he should move before he becomes a relic mummified in the tarry muck for some other poor bastard to dig up later on. So he moves deeper into the gloom. The ground sucks at his feet as he looks for the path, making it hard to move anywhere at any rate of speed faster than a slow walk. No matter, he doesn’t know what he’s looking for. He’d much rather find the right path in this unsettling place than waste time on the wrong one.
His metallic gaze levels on a suspicious spot of darkness just beyond. The salt-soaked, dead trees bend around the spot like they are leaning away, like they want nothing to do with it. Perhaps they stand in warning to those who would travel beyond their funeral pose. As he nears it, the stormcloud grey stallion sees the faintest green glow emitting from its depths. <i>The path to her heart.</i> Uneasiness worms its way into his guts. But alongside that uneasiness is a hard certainty – this is it. So he goes forward because the god commands him to. And who is he to decline the demands of a deity, especially one who he believes brought him back from the dead?
He owes Him everything.
The abyss swallows him, or seems to, as he gropes his way through underwater Hell. All the while, his head begins to pound with a worsening headache. Ramiel had attributed it to the pressure at first (he is sure Carnage is trying his best to keep them comfortable in such impossible conditions, but perhaps his magic is being stretched thin between them all). It starts low and radiates towards his forehead, ending in a sharp CLANK of pain against his skull. He swears he can hear it, the pain, almost like a sound he heard once long ago.
(Langoliers crunching through time, breaking, tearing, twisting…)
He shakes his head and through the water it is like in slow motion. It isn’t enough force to shake the memory to the surface of his brain. It leaks out instead, trails in the dark water alongside blood from his shark-bitten neck.
The radioactive green light grows stronger. It illuminates strange movement as he begins to skirt around a bleached tree. Something rises, spawned from the deepest recesses of this forgotten and forbidden land. Its shape is vaguely equine, but even from a distance Ramiel can tell something has gone horribly wrong in the execution. Skin is sloughing off in large chunks from its bloated, water-logged body. It isn’t alive, clearly, but it is standing in the middle of the path he needs to traverse. He walks towards the once-horse with as much confidence as one can when you’re a land-based creature under millions of gallons of saltwater, intending to get by with as little hassle as possible. It charges.
He doesn’t remember the woman who had helped him escape the Afterlife before. He doesn’t recognize that it is his grandmother Adolpha who wants to kill him now, her one green eye crazed and spinning and echoing the same color as the Heart’s light (the other eye missing in action entirely). Her once proud wings are now severed at the joint and dragging in muck, the tendons ripped into ribbons and barely attaching them to her body. She bears down on his slow crawl forward and rises up onto her hindlegs, muscles popping and separating with the effort. Adolpha kicks out with her forelegs on the descent and even as he’s shying away, he feels her rotted hooves crumbling against his left shoulder. It hurts, but not any more than the bite that follows along his topline. Ramiel bucks against the contact. The water slows his counterattack but he manages to dislodge her; he feels her teeth fall out like raindrops onto his back.
He can’t hope to outrun her. With an instinct that surpasses all: his memories spilling out of him, the orders of their dark god, the ceaseless throbbing inside his head, he becomes a ghost. He slips into death easily and wastes no time. While the nameless dead woman searches for him with animalistic hunger, Ramiel picks up a piece of petrified wood with his mind. The end is sharp enough to get the job done. It stabs through one side of her head (grey matter oozes like a cloud in the water), comes out the other side, and travels down to pierce her front legs together in a sick sort of hobble. Even brainless and tied, the pitiful creature still tries to shuffle her back legs to get to him. He comes back to full solidity and leaves her behind. There is no remorse in his golden gaze when he goes.
CLANK. His headache worsens to the point of nausea. It nearly doubles him over, blinds him in the haze that has nothing to do with the sunken kingdom he travels. All the while, the light grows fiercer in the distance. <i>Follow the path</i>. How much longer? <i>Find her heart</i>. What about his own? What if it isn’t strong enough to make it? What if his head bursts into a million pieces before he has the chance to complete it?
CLANK. <i>Who am I?</i> <b>“Who am I?”</b> He says out loud, the words garbled in the seawater. He thinks he’s gone mad, or maybe he has always been? Who’s to say? Ramiel stumbles in a deep patch of mud, falls hard to his knees. He thinks about staying there forever. CLANK. He forgets how to get up, how to move. CLANK. Bright green light that reminds him of the foothills in the morning light – CLANK. Where is home? Where is he from? CLANK. The fleeting feeling of red love bursts in his chest, of a promise of eternity made somewhere far from here. Another promise, this one black and deep, like a still river. Pinpoints of light pricking the backs of his eyelids, each one someone he cares about, each one someone who cares about him. CLANK. All gone. All gone. All gone. <i>Who am I?</i>
Time passes as it is wont to (minutes, hours, days), and he pulls himself up.
The clanging headache is still there, but he feels lighter, somehow (purging memories will do that). He has never felt worse in other respects. The slimy sickness in his stomach still threatens to spill forth. This place is decidedly <i>not right</i>. His knees are bruised from his fall, but he manages to find the crater that shelters the heart. Ramiel slides down the walls of the pit and into the hallowed space. The alien light washes over him and results in a paradox of emotions, contentment and unease both in equal amounts.
<br><br><br><br></p><p id="titanname">Ramiel</p><p id="titanquote2"></p></p><br></div></div></center>
While it is semi-dark here, where the land drops off abruptly into the ocean he’s just inexplicably motored through, the brittle light up above strokes down into the water like old hands. It is a comfort, this last bastion of normalcy for a creature made for open-sky prairies and decidedly not any place underwater. But it is a comfort that – like most things in life (and death) – cannot last.
He sinks into this new reality. <i>Sinks</i>, because there is a hole in his head where Carnage shot him with rotten Pangean soil. <i>Sinks,</i> because the sickness is spreading from that point outward, leeching memories and pulling faces from a brain that had once thought itself wholly protected. <i>Sinks,</i> because that same brain is being refilled with the dark god’s commands, weighed down, down, down by desires that would otherwise never have been his own.
After all, they’ve had exactly one similar desire, he and the dark god, but nothing like this.
<i>Find Pangea.</i> Check. The command comes again. <i>Follow the path. Find her heart.</i> And oh, how ironic it might have been before! Because he had found her heart in the end, his black light at the end of the universe. He hadn’t been able to bring her home, but it had been so much better than that, meant so much more than that. It had cost him his life but it was absolutely worth it. Gail did the impossible, not for Carnage, but for him.
Ramiel doesn’t remember any of that now, standing in the sunken kingdom, he himself sinking further into the mud. He only knows what he is supposed to do, only realizes that he should move before he becomes a relic mummified in the tarry muck for some other poor bastard to dig up later on. So he moves deeper into the gloom. The ground sucks at his feet as he looks for the path, making it hard to move anywhere at any rate of speed faster than a slow walk. No matter, he doesn’t know what he’s looking for. He’d much rather find the right path in this unsettling place than waste time on the wrong one.
His metallic gaze levels on a suspicious spot of darkness just beyond. The salt-soaked, dead trees bend around the spot like they are leaning away, like they want nothing to do with it. Perhaps they stand in warning to those who would travel beyond their funeral pose. As he nears it, the stormcloud grey stallion sees the faintest green glow emitting from its depths. <i>The path to her heart.</i> Uneasiness worms its way into his guts. But alongside that uneasiness is a hard certainty – this is it. So he goes forward because the god commands him to. And who is he to decline the demands of a deity, especially one who he believes brought him back from the dead?
He owes Him everything.
The abyss swallows him, or seems to, as he gropes his way through underwater Hell. All the while, his head begins to pound with a worsening headache. Ramiel had attributed it to the pressure at first (he is sure Carnage is trying his best to keep them comfortable in such impossible conditions, but perhaps his magic is being stretched thin between them all). It starts low and radiates towards his forehead, ending in a sharp CLANK of pain against his skull. He swears he can hear it, the pain, almost like a sound he heard once long ago.
(Langoliers crunching through time, breaking, tearing, twisting…)
He shakes his head and through the water it is like in slow motion. It isn’t enough force to shake the memory to the surface of his brain. It leaks out instead, trails in the dark water alongside blood from his shark-bitten neck.
The radioactive green light grows stronger. It illuminates strange movement as he begins to skirt around a bleached tree. Something rises, spawned from the deepest recesses of this forgotten and forbidden land. Its shape is vaguely equine, but even from a distance Ramiel can tell something has gone horribly wrong in the execution. Skin is sloughing off in large chunks from its bloated, water-logged body. It isn’t alive, clearly, but it is standing in the middle of the path he needs to traverse. He walks towards the once-horse with as much confidence as one can when you’re a land-based creature under millions of gallons of saltwater, intending to get by with as little hassle as possible. It charges.
He doesn’t remember the woman who had helped him escape the Afterlife before. He doesn’t recognize that it is his grandmother Adolpha who wants to kill him now, her one green eye crazed and spinning and echoing the same color as the Heart’s light (the other eye missing in action entirely). Her once proud wings are now severed at the joint and dragging in muck, the tendons ripped into ribbons and barely attaching them to her body. She bears down on his slow crawl forward and rises up onto her hindlegs, muscles popping and separating with the effort. Adolpha kicks out with her forelegs on the descent and even as he’s shying away, he feels her rotted hooves crumbling against his left shoulder. It hurts, but not any more than the bite that follows along his topline. Ramiel bucks against the contact. The water slows his counterattack but he manages to dislodge her; he feels her teeth fall out like raindrops onto his back.
He can’t hope to outrun her. With an instinct that surpasses all: his memories spilling out of him, the orders of their dark god, the ceaseless throbbing inside his head, he becomes a ghost. He slips into death easily and wastes no time. While the nameless dead woman searches for him with animalistic hunger, Ramiel picks up a piece of petrified wood with his mind. The end is sharp enough to get the job done. It stabs through one side of her head (grey matter oozes like a cloud in the water), comes out the other side, and travels down to pierce her front legs together in a sick sort of hobble. Even brainless and tied, the pitiful creature still tries to shuffle her back legs to get to him. He comes back to full solidity and leaves her behind. There is no remorse in his golden gaze when he goes.
CLANK. His headache worsens to the point of nausea. It nearly doubles him over, blinds him in the haze that has nothing to do with the sunken kingdom he travels. All the while, the light grows fiercer in the distance. <i>Follow the path</i>. How much longer? <i>Find her heart</i>. What about his own? What if it isn’t strong enough to make it? What if his head bursts into a million pieces before he has the chance to complete it?
CLANK. <i>Who am I?</i> <b>“Who am I?”</b> He says out loud, the words garbled in the seawater. He thinks he’s gone mad, or maybe he has always been? Who’s to say? Ramiel stumbles in a deep patch of mud, falls hard to his knees. He thinks about staying there forever. CLANK. He forgets how to get up, how to move. CLANK. Bright green light that reminds him of the foothills in the morning light – CLANK. Where is home? Where is he from? CLANK. The fleeting feeling of red love bursts in his chest, of a promise of eternity made somewhere far from here. Another promise, this one black and deep, like a still river. Pinpoints of light pricking the backs of his eyelids, each one someone he cares about, each one someone who cares about him. CLANK. All gone. All gone. All gone. <i>Who am I?</i>
Time passes as it is wont to (minutes, hours, days), and he pulls himself up.
The clanging headache is still there, but he feels lighter, somehow (purging memories will do that). He has never felt worse in other respects. The slimy sickness in his stomach still threatens to spill forth. This place is decidedly <i>not right</i>. His knees are bruised from his fall, but he manages to find the crater that shelters the heart. Ramiel slides down the walls of the pit and into the hallowed space. The alien light washes over him and results in a paradox of emotions, contentment and unease both in equal amounts.
<br><br><br><br></p><p id="titanname">Ramiel</p><p id="titanquote2"></p></p><br></div></div></center>