The halls of the Nemi were works of the strangest art, to say the least. Wrought from qantities of marble into mosaic floors. There were numerous stone doorways along the wall, each one holding a mosaic picture upon it. I would have called them beautiful, if not for the art which showed depictions of daemons 'playing' with mortals. Their games, however, in their grotesque fashions, were not something that most would enjoy or survive. The walls lacked much of the beauty of the doors, they were little more than flesh and bone, a thin transparent ooze leaking off of the meaty walls. I did my best to ignore and avoid the few times that it dripped down from the ceiling. The entire Hall was filled with light that lit the room utterly, leaving no shadow the eye could see, and yet there were no torches or glow globes. The room seemed to be entirely lit by free moving transient light that rolled in small ethereal wisps.
I do not recall walking out from the door to my chamber, I had merely pushed myself through the bleeding wounds in the piles of flesh and found myself standing out into the open hall. The mosaic upon my door was that of a skeleton. Its upper half was stripped of flesh and yet even in the image the flesh seem to twist and grow anew so at no two moments was the image ever the same. The skeleton seems to be crying out as if it had wished for death and it had been denied that simple peace. A cold chill ran down my spine as I looked into its eyes. There was a pain in them which could not be created by a normal artisan, it was as if a soul were trapped in the stones and it what was showing my the horror that it was going through. Above the skeletal figure was the image of She Who Thirsts or at least a depiction of the dark god, she was roaring at the pain. The laugh was one of absolute hysteria and as I looked into the dark prince's eyes I felt a wave of natural force that rolled down my spine and dropped like a smith's hammer upon the anvil at the pit of my stomach. I found it hard at first to look away as if it was drawing me in again, those hungering eyes wanting me to return. Turning away far more difficult than it should have been as I drove my blade across its image and began to walk the halls.
It felt as if I were walking a maze, the halls seemed to shift and turn with my every step. I could look behind myself a dozen times only to find each time that what I saw before was gone. Finding the way out of this dungeon would prove to be far harder than I had initially anticipated. The halls seemed empty though I could hear the sound of untold masses always around the next corner engaging in their excesses only to find nothing as I reached the intersection.
That is not to say that I saw nothing, for it was more than once that I had to dive back around a corner to avoid being seen by creatures of such hideous and seductive natures bound in perfect union. Most of them, to be brief, were humanoid with the mix of snake and crustacean. More than once I bore witness to demons that defied description in their utter maniacal forms. Still, they strain my will to recall. The dread and disgust that welled up from my feet and caught in my throat, is all I dare repeat of them. My search for a set of stairs was a little more than a reliance on luck, which was even more quickly proving to be folly.
In time, I gave up looking for a passage out of the Nemi, so lost was I, and began my search for that 'the shadow lost in darkness' whatever that actually meant. That was always the problem with my fellow kindred. So rarely do they speak in terms without metaphor that applied only to their our own understanding. There were many doors that depicted beings of Shadows and numerous other demons and xenos swaddled in fiery and hate-filled although felt as it fit the description of a shadow lost in darkness. Nevertheless,s I followed these doors hoping that they might lead me to the way I wish. In some respect, all that could be done was to wander and hope the door would find its way to me. In a land of desires, a hope seemed to be a fitting torch.
The prison seemed to be fighting me in all my attempts to break free. To keep track of where I had once been, I began to look at the many mosaics which lined the walls next to me to see if I would ever past the same one twice. Which proved fruitless. That was not to say that somewhere not similar, in fact, there were differences so insignificant that they were at times impossible to tell the difference between. There had been an endlessly vast hall for which every door depicted a single man pinned to a rock with a sword of great length. As I passed through the hallway I noted that the first sword had been a garish orange that hurt the eyes to look upon, by the time I had reached the end, however, the blade had been one of the most majestic dark blues that one's eyes might bear witness to and for all my time in this hall I cannot recall a single point where this ever repeating image had changed color in the slightest. At other halls, the doors were so vastly different to so much as to find a similarity between them would have been a challenge for even than the most pedantic of scribes to take note of and likely only after he had gone insane from the process.
As I continued in this labyrinthine subterranean network of paths and passages I found myself at a fork in the hall. One hall was really empty, many of its doorways were, in fact, blank as if to suggest that they were newer. The other side continued on the same, with the continual shifting prisons and their tortures. My mind told me to follow the older path as I reached a fork in the path, and began to wander down its way. I felt my blade and curiosity push at me, however, they urged me to go the other way. I found a slow dread being born in my mind, something was telling me to go back, just stay away, and yet I persisted believing well enough that in the warp that not all that one could not always rely on their senses for reality. I focused my mind for a moment if I were to find something that did want to be found or that others did not wish me to find. It made sense to look in the place I did not want to look.
The deeper I got the more I desired nothing more than to turn about, yet I walked the empty hall, keeping a tight grip on my blade lest I meet one of this prison's wondering wardens. The hall seemed to stretch on and on, with each and every step that I found myself looking back at the distance I had traveled, only to have been found it far shorter than I recalled walking. This did a great deal to stifle any sense of progress, though I continued to push on and on. That was until I reached the end of it all, where even the ethereal lights did not travel.
The final door of the hallway was barren in comparison to many of the other doors of the Nemi but it was not bare. It was a simple black plane with nothing more than a diamond in the center on it. A diamond which seemed to move unnaturally. It was a deep wondrous color that seemed to be shifting ever slowly. I loosened my grip and moved from a slow measured pace to something a bit quicker, moving enough that my footsteps should have echoed on the stone floor, however, produced no more sound than had I been a most precarious mouse scuttering across a church. As if I could not have been more than one wondering in a maze. If I could have called upon this at my will in my younger days, there was a number of troubles that I could have actually gotten away with. I shook the thought from my head after a moment of reminiscing, it was something to think about at another day. Having gotten closer to the stone door I saw what was actually moving on the diamond, or rather in it. It was not a solid image, but a liquid or moved like liquid floating without the barest sense of gravity. It was a deep purple for the moment and as I peered into it, I saw the barest sparkles of white light flash for moments so instant a dozen would pass in a blink. To the natural eye, they would have nearly been nearly impossible to actually see without focus in the dark. The liquid mass was beautiful as I watched the lights like a tiny candle with a short life blown out only to be replaced by billions more. The lifetimes of endless stars playing out before in a matter of moments. I thought of a little tiny ditty about them and gently began to hum the tune as I approached the door.
My hand gently graced the liquid Starlight. It was certainly a unique feeling, all about my hand was the coldest of voids, cold to the point that it was burning, and every other moment there were these brief moments of warmth to ward away the chill. "In the darkest night, the light may fade and yet it shall always find a way to be born anew," I whispered in musing in the thought of a poem I could write, only to find my voice distant and almost completely faded. While my interest had been captured by this mix of liquid starlight. I eventually drew away my hand cupping just a bit with me and pulling it from the abyss. Where it took the form of a simple orb in my hand, it seemed to shake and dance with the dulcet tones that I was humming. After a moment, I set it upon the floor to reclaim later and turned my attention back to the door which stood quietly in front of me, "are you the shadow hiding among the darkness? What by the throne of Terra itself are you holding?" A question for which the door was not very forthcoming, which in my service is more surprising than one might think.
After giving the stone a quick once-over, I gave a few rasps with the back of my hand and knuckles, not entirely sure what I was hoping for in response. The act proved unwise though as it had a hard and terrible touch like a cold fire. There was no sound to my action as if it had been strangled to death by uncaring hands. Pushing on the door proved more pain-inducing only to see it not budge. In annoyance, I braced my shoulder against the polished stone and began to push against the black mosaic door. The cold flame cutting through my shoulder like waves eroding a dune, yet I bit my lip and suffered. Getting ready to push in the door, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and begin to count. One, two, three, and a moment later the bulk of my weight rolled back and then slammed into the door like a sudden hammer fall. It did not so much as move. Again. One, two, three, I drew back all of my weight even taking a few steps back and then shoulder-charged back into the door. It shifted this time, just a bit. It was not enough to get my blade into the crack. I took a good few steps back, making sure that I kept my sight on where it had shifted. One, two, three, my weight slammed into the door with the force of the best charge that I could muster. Like a great frost the cold burrowed through my shoulder and stabbed like a knife through my blood and yet the stone began to move forward. Digging in my heel I slowly pushed the door open as the blood in my arm froze.
In there laid a vault of darkness, a single fractal of space for which light simply could not exist. The darkness slowly began to spill out across the floor turning the polished floors into nothing, consuming everything touched. It did not seem to belong in this realm, as anathema to understanding as this realm was, the darkness did not belong here. When it touched my skin I felt both terrified and comforted while its chill burned at my flesh, ignoring the feeling I looked into the cell. In the shadows rested a floating stone just like the one upon the door, one made of the night sky.
And end on a cliffhanger on what that is... XD But yeah another chapter. I hope you all liked it. I am currently looking for a beta if someone wants to offer. Lastly, thanks for the comments, fixerbacta and SandSasori.
Why not check out my other stories on my FF or FP of the same name.
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