(Warning(s]: Graphic body horror]
Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake, as in days of old, the generations of long ago.
Was it not you who cut Rahab in pieces, who pierced the dragon?
- Isaiah 51:9
You consume fire in its breadth and so shall hell fire yield
to the turbulence you endure. Where God built his Church
upon sand did you construct yours upon sand. Devouring
the feeble rays of the sun, the evils and monstrosities of
the world paid no equal. This is not the sin of Icarus; this
is the vanity of man who believed himself greater than the
Lord, and so were you marked. Upon ten horns were the
blasphemies of your atrocities committed and upon seven
facets of the self were the sins carved irrevocably. For you
will be made to forget, plumed once in the feathery virtue
of St. Michael and told the secrets of the earth, whispered
into the depth of your heart when the place of one was taken,
his legacy gifted into the soul scorched anew. A sun burnt in
your chest, once, scalded away the frays of doubt and erased
them from mind and hearth. Strength knew you by name and
nobility was a blessing you could bear upon all by merest want
of action. But where is it? Who snuffed the very sun from the sky?
Words riddle his mind. It's a turbulence of thought, a cold heat that plunges rationale into a sear of pain. He had been dreaming. A lucidity, something surreal and real. It tastes of the warmth of a spring's breeze, a fragrance light and permeates the senses with an aching gentility. A hand touches him in this dream; cups the angular planes and strokes along facial hair, he committing it to memory. They are small, they are delicate, and no other sensation equals to him a greater breath of relief. Once he had doubted his worth to her, a tentative opening of a heart made chill. Silvern hair that had stuffed his senses with softness and fragrance during nights and days of intimacy and love and want. He had smiled and so did she. Paramour, wife, lover. For thousands of years they had lived in it, reveled and more.
He breathes. The air is not sweet and it is heavy and clings to a foul musk. Nostrils flare, and adrenaline seizes him. Something writhes in the shadows, and Stephen Strange starts awake, jaws gnashing and the click of fangs–No. A trembling seizes him, bitter and cold and desolate, devoid of warmth and sanctity. Awareness broadens, and scantily does his mind wonder if he has been entrapped with a demon, some old fade of a memory– Again. Skittering, moving with a serpentine independence, but something feels wrong.
"Clea–" His voice is a cruel rasp, a jagged serration against the pall of silence, Stephen gaping. The voice is not his own. The words are. He thought them, precognition, the barest interlude before they are spoken. By the Vishanti, he reels. His awareness awakens, and the tentacles move again, sucking and clinging and grasping like hands and fingers, broadening. The light is sick. It is wan and yellowed like the illness of a moon overwrought with a plague.
Where is she? The immediacy of his thoughts dart to her, obsess over her. Bestial cranium with horns flame to the beginnings of white, scintillating so rapidly to black that it breeds an ache that blossoms into pain. Flaring claret finally opens, acknowledging, a realization that brews poison and tonic in his breast. He thinks an ocean capsizes blood and poison and ink, observing in anger frozen in a wintery heat upon the hands that greet his vision, calloused and gnarled like bark, erosion scrambling the vanes of once human flesh. Talons grit the tips of his fingers, and these cannot be the hands that once held her.
Persecutions brim his lips and blame unfurls in mind, a sickness, a warbling accusation that screams his name and condemns him to hell and fire. They seek, claw, clamor, bestial deprivation that unfurls from the seams of sanity. Her voice had been a beautiful melody, a placation that brought solace from the sorrow. Stephen knows not what he has become, but knows how it came to be. The vanity of Icarus and wickedness of Adam are planted within the morrow of his bones and his mind plays a wicked tune, seeking, straining.
"How long do you think he'll have to remain here, Stark?" …Rogers? Captain America? Strain, strain, crane higher, blearily does he crave knowledge of its source; not of damnable omnipresence!
"…Do we really wanna answer that? SHIELD's got its hands full enough with just keeping him contained. A powerhouse like that–he has to remain sedated. Crap, even now they're wearing off." Stark. Colloquial, unrefined, a hellion's impulsive genius.
Weakness. Greater voices, the omnipotence of the gods and deities he had called upon were negated, silent. The flux and brandish of his sorcery is stifled, raining silence and suppression he cannot break. Higher planes, other realities, all that passed and an awareness unrivaled became nothingness and quiescence. War drums trilled in his chest and battle in his body derailed the Sorcerer Supreme.
"Where is she…" They start at his voice, a hovel in the place of once-elegance and power. Body keels, momentous weight a cavernous dissonance as he collapses, the tranquilization of cognitive scope and stultification of momentum reduces him to a crawling entity, talons digging into the pitched shriek of metal as they puncture through, hauling the morass of a humanoid reminiscence and the eldritch abomination it is affixed to. Rage flares, hot, something colder keening his chest, fangs grit hot and close.
A succession of thunks, a crawl bestial and primordial, a clawing loneliness filling his chest hot with hate and want and desire. Before strength gives way, before more sedation weakens and robs him, he will glower into where he knows they observe him like an animal.
Sounds choke from his chest, squeezing in agony as he maunders sickly for the words that will not come, moisture building in his eyes that sizzle from their own heat, wet and steaming from betrayal and persecution. It builds, volcanic, a bellow that would shake them to their very core for the one woman Stephen cared for when there was none else in the immediacy of clogged thoughts:
WHERE IS MY WIFE?!
Last thoughts: I would like to cordially welcome you to the first installment of The Alizarine King. The Alizarine King is a crossover, AU concept for Stephen Strange that explores the idea of what had become of him after he sold his soul and was beginning to succumb to these demonic powers. But, what if something else got old? What if the Old Gods and Elder Things of Lovecraftian horror found him and transformed him, realizing that the enormity of his power would pose a threat to them?
Essentially, these disconnected yet intertwined drabbles and one-shots hope to explore just that. abz-j-harding (her tumblr URL name, btw] has been working on the Alizarine Project (okay, that admittedly my own name for it] for the better part of a year now, and it's really something! I've only gotten into it a few months ago, but collaborating together on scenarios, headcanons, and situations, together we've created art and stories that are rapidly expanding into one helluva an AU. Maybe even enough to call it an AU? Who knows, but we promise you that this is just the beginning.~
~Peace, G.
