Asaris I: The Cavern

Slowly, haltingly... I set foot on the first step. Albeit ordinary stone stairs are underneath my feet, I feel my mind starting to flicker, beginning to tremble. Inside my head, a twitch comes up, scratching at the covering of my brain for the fraction of a second. Carefully, shyly... I blink and then gaze into the abyss below. A darkness of mesmerising presence unfolds just two fathoms beneath my knees, with words merely adequate to describe the imperviability emanated at the hands of it. The stairs I can still perceive, the stairs that are leading down into this obscurity, are arranged in a perfect orbit. Though I suddenly wish to postpone the moment of my departure, I know that the journey is afoot. There is no turning back from here. And there never will be one.

My second foot follows, I am beginning my caudal way. As I reach the tenth stair, the darkness consumes everything around me. However, I now hold a burning torch. Neither do I smell the scent of petrol or another combustible, nor do I sense the wooden handle in my clutch or remember the fact of taking a torch with me. Nevertheless, my feet continue to lead me down into limbo.

It almost feels as if the darkness was seething around me. While I am contemplating my body gradually walking down the stairs, I am unable to control my limbs. My left hand still clasps the torch's handle, as if it would convey an impression of security. My legs are still moving onward, sluggishly. Seemingly unwilling. Subliminal, a part of me is starting to perceive a noise.

A time lapse of wondrous insignificance passes as I am converging to the bottom. The dark abyss engulfs. As above, so below. Ever and anon, a stair crumbles beneath my feet. Fragments come adrift and abscond in split seconds. The air is enriched with the stench of oblivion. The process of breathing becomes more and more desperate as the circular staircase still proves to be endless and infinite.

I sense a difference. I stay put. The next step is wooden... rotten. A victim of vermin and time. The bottomless pit still fills me with fear, doubt, nostalgia. All the same... I also feel close to home.

A craze in the wall comes to my attention. Merely visible, it is glowing as bright as a thousand suns to my ee. As I tend to touch it with my right hand, it immediately falls into ruin and uncovers the fogged, gloomy entrance of a cavern.

With no possibility to continue my decurrent march, I carefully enter the cavern. At this moment,

my torch dies.

This place is home to the noise my subconsciousness has perceived an insignificant time lapse ago. This place is home to the feelings of being lost, found and well-tended. This place is home to...

...rain. This place is home to rain. A delicate drizzle; millions of exiguous drops at the expanse of a regular, normal one. As I sense their existing, I look up.

Naught.

What have I been expecting?

Again, the darkness is too unforgiving, narrow-textured and opaque. I feel enveloped. Enveloped in a veil of darkness. My torch is dead and I relinquish it. I neither feel nor hear it hitting the floor. Instead, the noise comes to the fore. Clocks. Hundreds of thousands of tiny clocks are ticking clockwise, ticking counterclockwise in the walls. Consonant, dissonant.

Consonant...

Dissonant...

Consonant... dissonant...

A distant drone of constantly varying intensity fulfils the cavern, floats in between the clocks, the cracks in the walls. Small, atomic quantities of dust escape. The walls... they are not natural. I sense a turmoil inside the fabric, aside from the clocks. My hand shall be my ee, I palpate the cave wall... an erratic, unknown, yet familiar structure among my fingers makes me cringe. The cave's walls are made of nothing but human skulls. Though I am standing in horror, I bathe in the perception of pressing my ear against the wall, becoming one with the dead and the clocks. And hence, I do.

The walls silently whisper to me, in a language yet unknown. Beyond the dead, beyond the clocks... I can hear the distant rushing of water, the rushing of a small, hesitant creek. In the cavern, suddenly, slowly falling drops of water resound.

Which being could create, inhabit a cavern like this, I wonder. While I am still lost in thought, I start to wander around again. My hand is my ee, palpating the cave wall. Fathom by fathom, I move forward. I sense a presence.

Beckoning, in front of me.

Endlessly, I palpate. Infinitely, I wander. Continuously, the clocks tick.

Consonant... dissonant... consonant... dissonant...

I stay put. The King is here. I can feel it. Fifteen fathoms away, engulfed by darkness like everything else, he sits upon his throne. A throne of nerves, decay, and wood. A throne of nerves, decay, and wood, with a recess holding his scythe. A scythe with millions of runes, faces and lives engraved on its black blade. A blade mirroring the mere terror that is the creature's face. The face I cannot discern, the face I cannot see through the darkness. The face I have seen before, seen for split seconds. The face apparently shaped by death itself in one of its darkest, sanguinariest hours. Teeth like skyscrapers. Eyes as red, as rogue as cankerous blood.

Consonant... dissonant... consonant... dissonant...

Its hands are claws, each possessing the size of a hamlet. Its feet are swathed in cerecloth and leather, buckles of silver and massive cords of hemp fixating the shape.

In front of me - the Ocean Drinker. The Hellkeeper. The Mist King.

Vigilant, desolate.