Okay @Guttersnipe, @Joshua Jones, @Jo Zebedee, @elvet, @Provincial, @jd73, @The Judge, @Toby Frost, @Guttersnipe, @sule, @pambaddeley, @AnyaKimlin, @IronTaurus, @tinkerdan, here is part 2.
Again, no obligation to read or avoid skimming. You will almost certainly find the same issues with this next 1,500 as the first, albeit with slightly more focus on the characters real world movements. Many, many thanks again for any feedback. Also happy for you to hold back to the 3rd and final post and summarise.
I shoulder my hysteria aside for a moment to concentrate on my physical senses. My first impressions are of coolness and confinement. This place has both temperature and dimension – and neither contradict; cold that is not simultaneously searing; a tangible surface that I can actually touch. Tactility: a startling sensation – it feels an age since I actually placed my fingers upon something, consciously at least.
My sensory endeavours broaden. I can feel my eyeballs pressing against my eyelids. They refuse to open, as if the skin has sealed over during the eons spent with them clammed shut. Despite this, I can still see a faint light; a corroded bronze glow, somewhere close by. With respect to smell, I detect a pungent, iatrical odour – unpleasant but benign. There is nothing to taste, and aurally, the shallow rumble of my own breathing is all I can hear, echoing around what is clearly a small space.
My attentions return to the one sense I can truly affect: touch. My legs are unresponsive, as are my hands, as if pinned by an iron veil. My head feels similarly restrained. I realise the surface I touched before lay behind me, my arms motionless at my sides. Instantly, I determine the veil is nothing more than gravity and I am prostrate. With the cognisance comes resolve and I rail against the force. Immediately, my straining fingers contact another surface, this time curved, hollow, and somehow damp. My head and feet make similar investigations and it is soon evident that I am contained with something: a chamber of some kind – a tomb?
But where might once have been panic, there is curious calm. Even inhumed, it is a predicament immeasurably less horrific than being in those pipes. Physically intact, motionless, and cool, with barely an echo of my prior suffering: it is comparative bliss. It is akin to hatching into a beautiful meadow after countless eons of natal imprisonment within solid rock, fathoms below ground.
The emancipative serenity persuades me to reach up once more to touch the curved top of this chamber; a material I now recognise as glass. With all my effort, I push…and the lid gives. My tomb has been opened, albeit by merely a fraction.
I hold the glass lid ajar – it is all I have the strength for – but am distracted by a rippling sensation over my skin. The tingling is closely followed by a drastic escalation in temperature, then a shortness of breath that prompts me to inhale deeply. There is something fell in the air: a toxicity inherent to the workings of this place. It is like a layer of ash enwoven into the air molecules themselves, or miniscule iron filings residual to the forge obeying the magnetic attraction of my respiratory system. Am I still in that place? The implication remains, but not the feeling.
Accompanying the contaminant are confounding sensations: dizziness, whimsy, and anomalous enlightenment. The heady mixture compels me to deliberate further on where I have been brought. As there can be nothing beyond the forge, perhaps I am between realms – an intermediate holding zone betwixt the levels? Limbo? But why?
The woozy merriment rakes a blackly comic concept from a redundant corner of my mind: perhaps eternal damnation does not work the way one might expect. Is there is a limit on just how many anathematized souls that place can hold within its walls, dimensionless or not? Eternity, by definition, is an exceptionally long time, and if that place services multiple civilisations simultaneously, there could be countless legion of the damned, ten miles high, threatening to flood the network. Does even a heinous foundry of that size and insidious construction require reset every few eons; the furnaces stoked, the coals replenished…, the pipes serviced. It is preposterous image: every inch of conduit within the manifold having to be flushed, cleaned, and tested by hordes of dutiful serfs in lurid overalls. And where must they park the dead and accursed while the system is reset? A holding vessel; an overflow tank.
My perverse amusement evaporates as the thought triggers metaphysical nausea once again. If my limbo persists only as long as it takes to reboot the network, then it means, undeniably, that I must ultimately return to the forge. Eternal is eternal after all, whether cyclic or seasonal. I am destined to repeat this torment, ad infinitum.
A shiver runs down my body. With my last intake of breath pressing against my ribs like a fist, I let go the glass lid, which clicks shut, and suckle on the crisp, clean air of the chamber once more. But the relief is physical alone.
Merciful Upholder, could I be more cursed? Being in a state of perpetual disintegration was a horror I had not thought it possible to surpass, but my torment thus far lies superseded by this new outrage: that my ever-so-fleeting respite be spent trying to guess which second of it will be the last before I am returned to that stone antechamber to burn anew. It is the ultimate in damnation.
In a panic, my hands survey the interior of this holding chamber. The material at my back is softer, more pliable than the glass roof. Could it be a trapdoor? Could those dreaded pipes be behind it, valved, waiting for the service cycle to be completed in order to open? Or does the foundry reside on the other side of the glass?
Is the answer in the anatomy of the construct? If there can be nothing lower than that place, then I must be above it and it must be beneath me now, at my back. The chains of events are clear: my remains were syringed from the manifold and injected here, into a man-shaped mould. Does remaining guarantee my fate? And, were an alternate course of action available, dare I take it?
Hope is a clown, but my rational mind cannot dismiss the possibility that I could willingly leave this obscurity of my own volition. The notion of choice, alone, seems alien, but my respite has stirred a conceptual manumission within me. I know, after all, that this glass case lifts upon touch. Subject to me possessing the requisite strength, it is entirely conceivable that greater effort could open it all the way.
Of course, with every possibility come myriad potential hazards. Accepting the pipes lay in wait behind me, could excessive movement cause the trapdoor to give way? What if, in my efforts to break free of this void, I inadvertently expedite my reclamation? And what might I find on the other side of this glass hatch? What if that which lay beyond the tomb is a worse fate – an insidious torture trap reserved solely for the seditious?
No, there can be nothing worse. I must advance. If, in my attempts to break free, I merely accelerate my inevitable return, then what have I lost?
A muffled noise outside clenches my adolescent mutiny, prompting my eyelids to finally unstitch. A dull brass light is cast into my synapses, flickering eerily, but is swiftly consigned to an aura surrounding a black silhouette that appears without warning, almost preceding the fell footsteps that conveyed it here.
I harden as stone, motionless, as the featureless head peers into my tomb. Just as quickly as it is there, however, it is gone again, to the sound of further footfalls, and something else besides – something discordant and crackly. It is like the breath of wind…or a whisper, perhaps: a voice.
Great Fountainhead. My ability to misplace whole strands of memory from my time in the forge continues to mystify, this element more than any other: for it is, indeed, a voice, and straight away, unmistakeably, I know to whom it belongs.
I know it from that place. The recollection engulfs me like an avalanche and bowls me straight back to that moment. I relapse into disquietude as I remember now that it was there during the whole ordeal, speaking to me throughout. That deathly location-less susurration, orbiting me. It was an alien tongue, words beyond language – unrecognisable sounds beneath texture, but with osmotic implication.
Receipt was unequivocal, yet I struggle now to remember the particulars of what I heard in decipherable terms. The wavelength of the divulgence was primal, instinctive. It spoke in broad brushstrokes of raw emotion that transcended the unintelligible gibberish I could hear. Instantly, I could be in no doubt as to why I had been delivered to that place. The guilt was sickening, the sense of hopelessness overwhelming.
It had questions of its own as well; cynical, rhetorical queries it derived pleasure from asking. Why had I not heeded the warnings? Was it callous ignorance that drove me to take that which must never be taken, or was it simply arrogant disregard for the wisdoms passed down by myriad generations? Did I understand that my residence in the inchoate kingdom was now forfeit as penalty for my disobedience; that I had renounced all birthright protections; that I was now forever condemned to scour the inside of the foundry pipes with my bone fragments?
Again, no obligation to read or avoid skimming. You will almost certainly find the same issues with this next 1,500 as the first, albeit with slightly more focus on the characters real world movements. Many, many thanks again for any feedback. Also happy for you to hold back to the 3rd and final post and summarise.
I shoulder my hysteria aside for a moment to concentrate on my physical senses. My first impressions are of coolness and confinement. This place has both temperature and dimension – and neither contradict; cold that is not simultaneously searing; a tangible surface that I can actually touch. Tactility: a startling sensation – it feels an age since I actually placed my fingers upon something, consciously at least.
My sensory endeavours broaden. I can feel my eyeballs pressing against my eyelids. They refuse to open, as if the skin has sealed over during the eons spent with them clammed shut. Despite this, I can still see a faint light; a corroded bronze glow, somewhere close by. With respect to smell, I detect a pungent, iatrical odour – unpleasant but benign. There is nothing to taste, and aurally, the shallow rumble of my own breathing is all I can hear, echoing around what is clearly a small space.
My attentions return to the one sense I can truly affect: touch. My legs are unresponsive, as are my hands, as if pinned by an iron veil. My head feels similarly restrained. I realise the surface I touched before lay behind me, my arms motionless at my sides. Instantly, I determine the veil is nothing more than gravity and I am prostrate. With the cognisance comes resolve and I rail against the force. Immediately, my straining fingers contact another surface, this time curved, hollow, and somehow damp. My head and feet make similar investigations and it is soon evident that I am contained with something: a chamber of some kind – a tomb?
But where might once have been panic, there is curious calm. Even inhumed, it is a predicament immeasurably less horrific than being in those pipes. Physically intact, motionless, and cool, with barely an echo of my prior suffering: it is comparative bliss. It is akin to hatching into a beautiful meadow after countless eons of natal imprisonment within solid rock, fathoms below ground.
The emancipative serenity persuades me to reach up once more to touch the curved top of this chamber; a material I now recognise as glass. With all my effort, I push…and the lid gives. My tomb has been opened, albeit by merely a fraction.
I hold the glass lid ajar – it is all I have the strength for – but am distracted by a rippling sensation over my skin. The tingling is closely followed by a drastic escalation in temperature, then a shortness of breath that prompts me to inhale deeply. There is something fell in the air: a toxicity inherent to the workings of this place. It is like a layer of ash enwoven into the air molecules themselves, or miniscule iron filings residual to the forge obeying the magnetic attraction of my respiratory system. Am I still in that place? The implication remains, but not the feeling.
Accompanying the contaminant are confounding sensations: dizziness, whimsy, and anomalous enlightenment. The heady mixture compels me to deliberate further on where I have been brought. As there can be nothing beyond the forge, perhaps I am between realms – an intermediate holding zone betwixt the levels? Limbo? But why?
The woozy merriment rakes a blackly comic concept from a redundant corner of my mind: perhaps eternal damnation does not work the way one might expect. Is there is a limit on just how many anathematized souls that place can hold within its walls, dimensionless or not? Eternity, by definition, is an exceptionally long time, and if that place services multiple civilisations simultaneously, there could be countless legion of the damned, ten miles high, threatening to flood the network. Does even a heinous foundry of that size and insidious construction require reset every few eons; the furnaces stoked, the coals replenished…, the pipes serviced. It is preposterous image: every inch of conduit within the manifold having to be flushed, cleaned, and tested by hordes of dutiful serfs in lurid overalls. And where must they park the dead and accursed while the system is reset? A holding vessel; an overflow tank.
My perverse amusement evaporates as the thought triggers metaphysical nausea once again. If my limbo persists only as long as it takes to reboot the network, then it means, undeniably, that I must ultimately return to the forge. Eternal is eternal after all, whether cyclic or seasonal. I am destined to repeat this torment, ad infinitum.
A shiver runs down my body. With my last intake of breath pressing against my ribs like a fist, I let go the glass lid, which clicks shut, and suckle on the crisp, clean air of the chamber once more. But the relief is physical alone.
Merciful Upholder, could I be more cursed? Being in a state of perpetual disintegration was a horror I had not thought it possible to surpass, but my torment thus far lies superseded by this new outrage: that my ever-so-fleeting respite be spent trying to guess which second of it will be the last before I am returned to that stone antechamber to burn anew. It is the ultimate in damnation.
In a panic, my hands survey the interior of this holding chamber. The material at my back is softer, more pliable than the glass roof. Could it be a trapdoor? Could those dreaded pipes be behind it, valved, waiting for the service cycle to be completed in order to open? Or does the foundry reside on the other side of the glass?
Is the answer in the anatomy of the construct? If there can be nothing lower than that place, then I must be above it and it must be beneath me now, at my back. The chains of events are clear: my remains were syringed from the manifold and injected here, into a man-shaped mould. Does remaining guarantee my fate? And, were an alternate course of action available, dare I take it?
Hope is a clown, but my rational mind cannot dismiss the possibility that I could willingly leave this obscurity of my own volition. The notion of choice, alone, seems alien, but my respite has stirred a conceptual manumission within me. I know, after all, that this glass case lifts upon touch. Subject to me possessing the requisite strength, it is entirely conceivable that greater effort could open it all the way.
Of course, with every possibility come myriad potential hazards. Accepting the pipes lay in wait behind me, could excessive movement cause the trapdoor to give way? What if, in my efforts to break free of this void, I inadvertently expedite my reclamation? And what might I find on the other side of this glass hatch? What if that which lay beyond the tomb is a worse fate – an insidious torture trap reserved solely for the seditious?
No, there can be nothing worse. I must advance. If, in my attempts to break free, I merely accelerate my inevitable return, then what have I lost?
A muffled noise outside clenches my adolescent mutiny, prompting my eyelids to finally unstitch. A dull brass light is cast into my synapses, flickering eerily, but is swiftly consigned to an aura surrounding a black silhouette that appears without warning, almost preceding the fell footsteps that conveyed it here.
I harden as stone, motionless, as the featureless head peers into my tomb. Just as quickly as it is there, however, it is gone again, to the sound of further footfalls, and something else besides – something discordant and crackly. It is like the breath of wind…or a whisper, perhaps: a voice.
Great Fountainhead. My ability to misplace whole strands of memory from my time in the forge continues to mystify, this element more than any other: for it is, indeed, a voice, and straight away, unmistakeably, I know to whom it belongs.
I know it from that place. The recollection engulfs me like an avalanche and bowls me straight back to that moment. I relapse into disquietude as I remember now that it was there during the whole ordeal, speaking to me throughout. That deathly location-less susurration, orbiting me. It was an alien tongue, words beyond language – unrecognisable sounds beneath texture, but with osmotic implication.
Receipt was unequivocal, yet I struggle now to remember the particulars of what I heard in decipherable terms. The wavelength of the divulgence was primal, instinctive. It spoke in broad brushstrokes of raw emotion that transcended the unintelligible gibberish I could hear. Instantly, I could be in no doubt as to why I had been delivered to that place. The guilt was sickening, the sense of hopelessness overwhelming.
It had questions of its own as well; cynical, rhetorical queries it derived pleasure from asking. Why had I not heeded the warnings? Was it callous ignorance that drove me to take that which must never be taken, or was it simply arrogant disregard for the wisdoms passed down by myriad generations? Did I understand that my residence in the inchoate kingdom was now forfeit as penalty for my disobedience; that I had renounced all birthright protections; that I was now forever condemned to scour the inside of the foundry pipes with my bone fragments?
