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Post by Apronia Silvanus on Jun 3, 2006 16:10:43 GMT
(continued from the Forest Must Be Alive!!!!)
After several hours of being marched deeper and deeper into the Forbidden Forest, Apronia stumbled over a root and a hoof in the small of her back threw her to her knees. She lifted her face out of the leaf mast of the forest floor, and raised her face to see an entire centaur herd gathered around the clearing in which she knelt. There were hundreds of them with all patterns of coats, all scowling fiercely at her. She shivered as a group of them parted, permitting four centaurs carrying a large litter to pass. The litter was placed in front of Apronia and the centaurs withdrew. The curtains on the conveyance slowly rose, and Apronia gasped and bowed her head respectfully as the wrinkled visage of a blind female centaur came into view. Her eyes were as milky-white as her mane, her coltish legs unformed and too weak to support her.
"Ah, so you know of the priestess class of the centaurs, young lady." the wizened centaur's voice was honeyed with age. "Come closer." Apronia crawled towards her on her knees, still not daring to look for fear of disrespect. A gnarled hand lifted her chin. "Come, child, I need your eyes for this." she snapped. Apronia opened her eyes, met the blind ones of the centaurs' priestess.
It was like Legilimency, except no mere mental sheilding could stop it. The breaching of her mind was gently but inexorable and Apronia groaned lowly as her body writhed in protest under transfixed eyes.
Relax, colt. I'll not harm you. she heard in her head, and began to steady her breathing containing her limbs as best she could. You do care for our people. I see truth in your actions. the old centaur acknowledged. She probed a little more, and then psychic pain overwhelmed Apronia. What is happening? the old centaur woman screeched. There is an alien presence invading this union!
(that's it, calling Der Waldgeist!)
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Post by Erich Aubry on Jun 12, 2006 2:21:08 GMT
One supposes that all people are governed by the same heart. The heart as an idea is a conflict. We who are at love with conflict. We who are frothing at the mouth for war.
You only see, I want you to feel it.
*
The centaur's mind opens first as a lens. Erich remembers his first experience with cameras and recalls being fascinated by their ability to distill the immediate present. She is a funnel and her voice pours out from the vertex, from the iris of her thoughts as light would pour. For those long years in all minds, all time, it was impossible to hold on to any specific moment. Flowers shuddering open, people shuddering open and new railways cutting down the distances all in the same dream of detachment. Erich flocks to this opening, this vanishing camouflage as if his will were still lost to him in the sea and is drawn from across the forest where he was watching Rainer's windows for signs of life. Subterfuge is everything. A consciousness can be made as a vault, if no light is allowed to seep out, none will penetrate. A lockbox of negatives.
The night Ethelion and Eithene made their slow walk back to the castle, Erich was counting the minds in the forest. Breathe Yes. Oh My Darling. Go. The forest's body was crooning in its sleep, drinking the far waters that would bring him home. They were burrowing and hot, thousands of little disturbances of emotion that lit the astral like a movie theatre after hours. Cleaning crews drifting in. One man is named Robert, he's carrying a broom and decides that he needs to punch out so he can see Helen before--- You can't allow yourself to become distracted, to drift out in to those waters. Too much light makes the baby blind. Erich has no idea who Helen is.
A photograph allows us to return. Any artifact is an anchor in time, and we travel this way, from anchor to harbor to city opening like a girl's legs in Bali. You do not know this girl yet though she is named Clare, after the saint. They are specific and immediate and we seek them out to locate ourselves in the forest, theatre and cardinal of fireworks. One boy, in another country to the north, is reading about the invisible man and wonders how he knows he has a body in the dark. Erich wants to tell him how.
So when the blind and wounded centaurs formed their gestalt, it exploded outward as lightning and nuclear flash. He was there for that too though Erich does not recall it exactly as genocide damages the nerves beyond repair. Candles melting in a stone field. I'm sorry. Your child. It was your child and my child too. I forget sometimes. I forgot again. And they aimed their Sight upwards, watching for the clarification of their heaven and were neons and halos and he found them quickly. They were calling the forest in to waking, asking for recovery, for the weaponry of nature to unfurl themselves as leaves and bacteria, viruses that hate magical blood. They turn and looked at him, with their one eye in the full bright moon and told him with their one collective roar to get out.
Her body is opening up the same way, her aura is a wingspan of open hands. Apronia is fluttering as an open book left on the kitchen counter. The centaur is reading and reading, her own language and dialogue appear inside the gamekeeper. They are talking and though he cannot make out the details, the old one is planning something. How could he not have seen her? The priestess is a cigarette in the dark, a lamp, an oil sun. There are two kinds of blindness and Erich is there and reaching out and thinking through. Picture me having you. Remembering you. We're both collected. See me seeing you. The centaur turns toward him then, her psychic self chuckling as time slows around them and she replies that she knew he'd come. That's when the walls begin to form around them. The idea of walls, diamond and impenetrable, circling all three of them. Containment. No sound escapes. No light gets out. So if you'll be quiet, I'll be quiet.
*
The mind is both, the camera and the photography, the record and mechanism of its own existence. Our only proof.
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Post by Apronia Silvanus on Jul 18, 2006 2:09:18 GMT
Apronia is awash inside two consciousnesses, lost, battered by waves of thought and memory so chaotic she cannot remain afloat. She remembers...
a bird calling over a peaceful glade as her hooves sink deliciously into the cool river mud
crash
a rocky beach, wind blowing through her blond hair, against her broad, flat naked chest as she ruffles the black hair of someone she should recognize
crash
cherry blossoms falling like snow
crash
colting season
crash
hesitant pink boylips against her own
crash
who am i? she thinks
crashcrashcrash
"STOP IT!" she screams, trying to cover ears she does not have in this mental prison.
In the distance, she can feel the centaur priestess facing off with Erich.
"You have no dominion here, fell spirit." she intones formally, but fueled with firey defiance. "Begone!" she flicks a dart of mental power; it strikes him hard and Erich falls to his knees.
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Post by Erich Aubry on Jul 18, 2006 3:08:21 GMT
Clench your fists only to remember that you have hands that will be fists again. That the body is no bottle under smoke or water. It is constant and given and maintains its shape. Erich remembers himself long enough to test for walls and finds them, multifaceted and reflective. He sees his own face everywhere, bleeding from the memories of bleeding and more than. Association by association. Other images are rising to the surface. The way he bled so thickly for Rainer who took his jaw away. His sister's first period.
But by then Erich is smashing his way through anything he can think on. He has multiple bodies, he has mist for thoughts.
I won't be held. He holds me. Stop that clutch, that embrace. What it felt like sinking in to a man, that destroying heat. Then you were dying a little on that plaid blanket--- interrupt. Crash?! Crash.
So burnt down so busted up. Everything falls to water and this is what he's trying to give her. That plummeting through space, that disintegration, that slipping between bricks and then lifting in to the air where you have no body and no mind to keep it.
I don't know. Don't come near me. Don't touch me. Reject. Deny. Pressed back like pressing back against a wall and letting your arms tire enough so he thinks he's won and then you---
Erich catches at the edge of his vision, Apronia, curled and covered in petals. They are not his petals but they look as if they could be blood here in this expression. Blood, he's bleeding in all the reflections and he hates them both for it.
Crash. "That four legged bitch."
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Post by Apronia Silvanus on Jul 18, 2006 3:41:49 GMT
Apronia is still lost in the other minds -but now another has joined-.
Kiss me, Erich. the darker boy pleads with her.
crash
Yes, priestess. says a reverent young sable centaur.
crash
tree roots ripple, animals scamper over the forest floor
crash
who am i? spirit, centaur forest? who AM I?!
dimly, she sees the centaur seizing Erich by the throat. "Now, Apronia!" cries the priestess. But Apronia is helplessly lost.
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Post by Erich Aubry on Jul 19, 2006 2:33:40 GMT
Thinking himself in to stone, in to nothing that breathes but beats. killyoukillyouillkillyouillkillkillyouyou youyou wasn't that what Rainer kept saying over and over that one time, again and again? Erich just needs to stay awake long enough to eat through her insides, take down those hideous walls of her thinking. That will be enough.
But, child, everything in nature has to die eventually. You know that don't you?
I won't.
Sometimes you don't have a choice. This is not his conversation, he's sure. Then Erich makes his body grow knives, jutting bones, anything to keep the hands off him. There are so many hands. Cutting razor. Barb. Lid of a tin can. Anything to make them stop touching him.
He sees in to her. Those shadowy amputees, that's how she thinks of man, that watch her by the river. From the trees. Those men that cave her brothers' chests in like overripe fruit. The afterworld fire because the world is over then and then after. So she calls it that. How couldn't it feel like her world was ending? Erich reminds her.
The way people pound the keys of pianos. He instructs the body in this, commands the nerves to compress, to bring the valves of veins to tiny shrieks. Chalk scratching on chalkboards. Broken bones. The missing teeth. He attacks her with the sensations, all multiplied, all recieved. A mind can be a single moment of pain.
Erich flings himself from her grip and thinks of her heart beating faster and faster and faster. Apronia does not get up. Apronia does not get up. You can't even see me, he tells her, the both of them. I'm going to put my hand through your head when I'm done with you. By the time he's done laughing, the walls are already turning in to snow.
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Post by Apronia Silvanus on Jul 19, 2006 3:00:33 GMT
Apronia sees the mental form of the priestess break apart in whisps, like smoke. The walls dissolve in crystalline showers of white. Apronia senses the vast power of the Forest that is still with her, plunges the heart of her mind into it, wears it like armor and uses it like a sword as she backhands Erich with psychic power strong enough to leave his head ringing a century ago.
She is still coated in Forest as she feels roots catching her, gently as wood can, as the world goes entirely black.
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Post by Erich Aubry on Jul 19, 2006 3:39:32 GMT
As soon as he's out, he's out. Erich still winces inwardly once he is bodiless and tears a tree down from sheer anger to crush her against the forest floor. Her psychic body is lighting up and he can't begin to answer why he never noticed her before. But he sees her here where the world is not made of her voice and the snake ropes of her memories. That bitch. The nerve. She still struggles underneath the tree, her body frail despite the breadth of her talents though they cannot help her now. I've seen what you can do, he begins softly, forming a body she will see with both her eyes and heart, and it isn't enough I'm afraid. You're average, my dear, and you've lost. Her assaults are small now, limp and vanishing against him even as they near the idea of Erich Aubry. He echoes through her until he is sure she knows.
Apronia is begining to wake nearby, still unaccustomed to the displacment of the mind. Erich stands and plants a foot firmly in the centaurs mane and demands with his call the her body lock, that her thoughts become shuttered and withheld. His will glides over her like a sheet, sticking where it falls and rebuilding the walls she made to keep him in. They will keep her in now. No light will leave her, no thought will touch another and she will never have another's inside her again. You won't be reading minds for a very long time, my girl. And he's turning toward Apronia and the centaur finds that she's alive, she's still whole and there was no tree, no foot in her hair. But what of this smog, this deafness?
"Do you really think the last boy hero of the western world could be so weak as to lose to you?" He says it outloud so she can hear.
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Post by Apronia Silvanus on Jul 19, 2006 3:52:43 GMT
The Forest surges through Apronia, using her brain as a focus. It is creating a net, a web, a sticky trap for the spirit. The molecules in branches, the ash in the soil...the human remains of Erich Aubrey, the Forest uses this as a kind of sympathetic magic to fool Erich's soul into believing it has substance once more.
come back to us! cry the infinitesimal pieces of a man's body, bring us to life! and although Erich knows it is a trap, this has little to do with intellect and everything to do with a soul-deep memory of having a body.
Apronia is left precious little of her mind at the moment. The majority is plotting and casting with the power of the Forest. All she can do it stumble through the trees, panicked and unable to spare a thought for the incapacitated priestess behind her. The other centaurs have fled from Erich, but they will soon be back, she tries to comfort her callousness. They will find her. But no one will find me.
And so she runs.
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Post by Erich Aubry on Jul 19, 2006 13:30:10 GMT
And for that moment he is moved and kept. But it is only for a moment but it is enough to show Erich now longer has exclusive control of the forest's immense magical force.
He shucks that old skin like a wet shirt and is part of the wind again before it hits the floor. A thousand small droplets of water.
This is what you amount to. The centaur priestess watches stunned from where she crouches, stares at her face in the reflection that pools at her feet. She does not recognize herself this way and loses what seem to be hours before the mirror of Erich's remains. Her many brave sons will find her this way before long.
((ooc: continued in Dragon Eggs, also in the forest.))
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