🕀Your Last Stale Breath🕀
Something shudders the world; the turning far-far-far-distant solar bodies in the system, the inexorable tug of the Father Moon shifting subtly enough to pull the echos of quakes to the surface of Weywot. Shaking the white off the corpses of structures; shimmering gray-green ash, the type of moldering decay that could only punch through some faults in the stonework, while leaving others unmarred. The movement travels up from the depths, from the cracked foundations of winding labyrinths, to the once polished tips of monestaris that touched high above the ground-level smog, bridging Weywot to the Sky via architectural means.
The shuddering continued, wracked the planet spasmodically, little seizures of motion ---
Something old at the bottom of the Bay cracked ---
The alleys in the Furrows groaned ---
The thin line that'd stretched from ground to ceiling where Weywot herself was entombed, widened, spread. The marks spiderlike, hairline, crumbling from the outside in. Another wax-paper seal torn, another brick loosed---
A scream--
Yellow-white eyes snapping open, blind after a thousand years, conscious but not aware. The palest of hands pressing to the seams where the not-light-not-gloom leaked in, she clawed, with cracked nails, with scarred fingers, at old lines -- old marks runnled rusty, brackish red on the inside. Pressing new fingerprint's over ones so old the texture was forever whorled into the stones.
And this time? This time something gave, the whole cylinder of sealing, all it's protectants, the magic that'd made her sleep ---
Shattered out, tumbled down, and Weywot came out in a dusty heap, looking something born of a volcano and shat into a holy space. Hacking, hacking, hacking dry, rough, angry as the tears that wouldn't even come enough to let her clean her face---
She didn't step free, she crawled, hands and knees, feeling infantile and weak. Crawling. Towards the distant light that called her, through the shuddering of her long dead word seizing back to near life, hiccoughing out of its coma induced state after a millenia. Weywot was on her knees by time she reached the first colorless archway, gazing out over scattered ruin, into a pinprick of light that she couldn't understand --- was this the last gasp of her vision post-entombment? Could she only see pinholes and static now?
But no, it was something else, the calling, the yearning, the light--
And as she reached out to it with all of herself -- it reached back -- and she fell --
When Weywot later woke, clawing the crust out of her vision, nursing a headache that felt like the worst cheir-wine night she'd ever had? She realized she wasn't *home* anymore. It was all still black, like a fire had touched its insides, steeple shaped, worship shaped.
And she didn't know where she'd landed, but she knew the shape of calling -- of needs sung on high as though anything above them would answer --- and Weywot laughed, crow-hoarse, more of a smokers caw than anything pleasant or songlike -- laughed as she stared over empty pews, high ceilings, endless rows of abandoned literature and painted filigree.
Weywot laughed---
WC: 507
