I_M_M_O_R_T_U_O_S_S_U_M
Drip.
The rocking chair swayed back and forth, as if moved by unseen hands. In it sat a beautiful woman with violet hair, meticulously groomed and straightened. Her dress was a muted green, with an intricate white pattern running down the front.
Drip.
Her eyes, the color of a storm cloud, stared at Daniella, unseeing and flickering in the torchlight. There was something missing from them. They'd been robbed of their color and beauty, leaving them empty. Her full lips were barely parted in a whisper, frozen in time.
Drip.
Her forehead had been christened by a blade, the deep red cross a symbol of her devotion. Blood poured sluggishly down her neck from a deep slice, from ear to ear. Her hands lay limp and open on the arms of the chair, blood pooling in her wrists, and rolling off, drop by drop, onto the wood floor beneath.
Drip.
Daniella swallowed heavily, making no sound. She listened to the creaking chair and the falling blood, trying to accept the sound as proof that she was not still hallucinating. It was too real. She saw her own death in those eyes, as she had in the observatory at Belli Castle. Her heart seemed to stop, her hands turning cold as ice. Daniella closed her eyes, her trembling hand going to her own forehead, feeling the warm liquid streaming down her skin.
"Oh god... Oh god."
She turned away and clawed at her face, her mind trapped in a dark place, visions of death and fire flooding from its recesses. A black fog clouded her judgment and corroded her sanity, on the verge of seizing her consciousness completely. She babbled, barely coherent and unable to hear herself, lost completely in chaos and madness.
"I don't believe you. You're not me. You're not there. Get out, get out, get out."
She lunged forward, grasping for the corpse, fear and confusion her only reaction.
"GET OUT!"
She felt the wood and wicker chair beneath her fingers, shaking it violently and screaming. She did not feel the cold skin of the dead, and her eyes snapped open. The chair was vacant. Nobody there. A sickening horror in her stomach. This is it. You've gone insane. This place has finally won.
Daniella felt like a newborn child, unable to make sense of the world, her own senses no longer reliable. The line between paranoia and reality had become too blurred, and now she was stranded and helpless inside her own head, a prisoner to her own terrible nightmares. She could feel the pieces of her humanity falling away one by one, and it was the worst feeling she'd ever known, like a plague of locusts spreading out of her heart, infesting her brain. She ran her hands through her matted hair, trying to calm down.
"No. No, keep in control. Don't let them do this. I've come too far."
Daniella couldn't look away from the empty chair, imagined the apparition still there, tangible, staring. She didn't know what had brought on the terrifying delusion, but she had no doubt that the longer she was here, broken, alone and scared, the worse these episodes would become. She finally tore her eyes away from the rocking chair, looking fearfully around the room. In a fit of mania, she second-guessed everything she saw, worried that she would no longer be able to tell what was even real.
She was in a woman's bedchamber. Four torches on opposite walls bathed the room in a saturated orange glow. Furniture lined the room, the rocking chair in front of her, a large, sturdy dresser across from her, an off-white vanity to her left, a large bed with a decorative folding screen around it in the closest corner, and a tall closet in the opposite corner. On first glance, the room seemed relatively unremarkable, but the closer Daniella examined the room, the less natural it seemed. Faded stains marked the hardwood floor, dark reddish-brown in color. The two paintings that were hung in this room were crude and a little unnerving, one depicting a black man with a large, bloody wound in his stomach, the other depicting what appeared to be Belli Castle with a great hand reaching down from the sky and grasping it. The sheets and drapes of the elegant four-poster bed were missing, and clothes, books and paper were scattered across the floor. A wall of glass inexplicably cut the room into two halves, but near the center of this wall a large section of it was shattered, and sharp fragments littered the floor. The disarray in the chamber brought her back to the operating room, and she had the same feeling of unease that she'd had when she'd awoken there.
That malodorous smell was strong here, and Daniella was a little afraid of what she might find if she explored this place any further. An archway led out of the room on the other side of the glass pane, and she decided that she didn't want to stay here any longer than she had to, lest her mind start fabricating more frightening illusions. Carefully, she crossed to the broken glass wall and approached the jagged hole. She pulled in her limbs and ducked as she stepped through, the sharp glass alarmingly close on all sides. As she was stepping out, her left arm barely dragged across one of the edges, but it was enough to break her skin. She cursed herself for being careless, examining the blood welling up from the scratch on her wrist. It was just like... She immediately looked away, wishing she hadn't seen it.
The closer she got to the other side of the room, the more potent the smell became. Daniella couldn't place it, it was almost like a large amount of food had been allowed to spoil somewhere. It was rank, and she stopped breathing through her nose. She made her way toward the open archway, passing by the old vanity with its filthy mirror and approaching the tall, nondescript closet next to the archway. She stepped on a sheet of paper on the floor, and looked down. They were scattered all over, some bearing dark, smeared charcoal drawings of explicit sexual and religious imagery, others covered with the same kind of unintelligible scrawls as the walls in the other room. The rocking chair was still creaking, showing no sign of slowing, the loud noise slowly drilling a hole in her mind. She felt the blood rolling off her wrist, heard it hitting the wood floor.
Drip.
Her hands balled up and her heart began beating faster. She did not dare look behind her, certain she would see her own dead body sitting in the chair. She continued to head determinedly for the archway, but the smell was getting suffocating. She felt like she was going to be sick. It was an all-encompassing rancidness, and she was unable to stop a groan from escaping her. Whatever it was, it was coming from that closet, she knew it. Don't open it, she thought, trying to convince herself. You don't want to know. It was mere inches away. Something inside her fought against her instincts, and Daniella found that she could not resist looking inside. One hand on her nose, she reached out with the other and grabbed the closet's wooden handle with white knuckles. She hesitated, then pulled.
Drip.
The terrible smell hit her full force, and Daniella stumbled back. The open closet door revealed a wall of organic matter. It appeared to be a solid block of rotting flesh, with pockets of blood and pus scattered throughout. It was atrocious, something that should not have been. Daniella plastered herself against the glass wall behind her as she saw it starting to liquify and leak out the doorway and onto the floor. She saw hints of skulls and bones poking out of the disgusting ooze, and she retched, bending over and clutching at her throat. She finally forced herself to move, stumbling backward away from the spreading puddle of death, toward the opposite wall. She felt the vanity behind her and turned around, grasping the sides of the shelf beneath the dirty mirror. Dead eyes stared back.
Drip.
Daniella's breathing stopped, and her heart pounded in her ears. She saw her mortality in the mirror, a pale corpse wearing that green dress, streams of blood running down her forehead, gutted like a fish. The unfocused gray eyes stared blankly back at her, then began twitching, moving rapidly, as would the eyes of a person in a deep sleep. Daniella kept staring in abject horror, whimpering softly as reality left her, powerless to stop any of it. As the putrid mass flowed across the wood behind her, Daniella saw snaking black tendrils spreading out from the closet, slowly expanding onto the surrounding walls and floor, gaining form as they quickly grew into misshapen, webbed growths. Her nails scraped across the wood of the vanity.
Drip.
The room behind her was black and breathing, the cancer having spread to every wall. Daniella felt the corruption snaking up her legs, but could not move. Her hideous reflection's entire head was beginning to twitch unnaturally, and red veins were tracing erratic paths across her face, originating at the bloody cross. Its pale blue lips smiled at her, showing a set of black teeth, like Fendari's. Daniella felt oblivion coming on, struggling to stay conscious, to stay alive. The lips moved, and she heard a ghostly whisper in a foreign tongue, like the sound of the wind whistling through the brittle branches of a dead tree.
"Immortuos... sum..."
The darkness climbed her legs, like a million ants, enveloping her stomach, constricting her movement, her breathing. The phantasm in the mirror continued.
"Belli... sum..."
A buzzing sound, coming from inside her head, was growing louder. The twitching face in the mirror was spiderwebbed with a thousand rivers of fire.
"Tu... fui..."
Insanity and chaos. Daniella stared into hell. Death saturated the air she breathed. The swarm climbed her neck and covered her face, entering her mouth and eyes.
"...ego eris."
Daniella screamed at the top of her lungs, slamming her head into the mirror. It cracked. She did it again, and again, and again. She felt her wound reopen, and warm blood poured down her face. In an act of desperation, she grabbed the vanity by its sides and slammed it face-down onto the floor. She heard the mirror shatter, and all of the deafening sound stopped, replaced by total silence. Daniella fell back against the wall, sliding to the bottom, shaken to her core, incapable of the most basic functions. She looked out at the room through her tears, and it was clean and unchanged but for the ancient remains on the floor in front of her. The closet door hung open, small bones and skulls having spilled out onto the wooden floor. The smell of rot was no longer in the air. The deranged visions had left no trace of their existence. She was alone.
Daniella's nails dug into her palms as she cowered in the corner, looking at the fallen vanity beside her. It's impossible, she thought frantically, I smelled, heard, saw, and felt it. Everything was too real. I'm not imagining this. I'm not crazy. This is really happening. But though she latched onto this idea, trying desperately to justify it, she knew she didn't believe herself. She'd seen the same psychotic delusion in Fendari, believing in a lie he'd constructed, and she refused to do that to herself. There was only one alternative. The dark, bleak shadow of truth swept across her ravaged mind. She had been pushed over the edge. Everything that had happened to her here had stripped away her soul, leaving her cold and hopeless, and slowly, this apathy became a disease that had eaten away at her psyche until there was nothing left. Her friends were dead, her goal unreachable, and her future worse than death. It had become too much, and now it was too late to go back. It could only get worse. But why now, all of a sudden?
Maybe it's this place, she thought, recalling the strange feelings she'd been noticing ever since she opened that locked door. This wing of the mansion... it meant something to her. Deep down, she felt an indistinct resonance here. It had triggered something inside her. If she could get out, far away from here, maybe the hallucinations would stop. It was her only chance, and if she didn't do it soon... Daniella envisioned a hellish future, wandering the halls, haunted by vicious nightmares, her mind desecrated to the point of torpor, trapped in a waking coma. Her entire body shivered.
She lay against the wall for a moment longer, collecting herself, waiting to see if it was really over. The chair had stopped rocking. All was quiet. She stood up slowly, the motion making her suddenly lightheaded. She fought the dizziness, putting a hand up to her forehead, feeling the warm liquid and wiping it onto her hand. She'd lost a lot of blood, and now the wound was open again. She didn't know how long she could go like this. Pushing off the wall, she headed for the archway opposite her, not daring to glance at the vanity tipped over next to her. As she passed by the closet, she saw the darkened, ancient bones spilling out the doorway, and more piled inside. Though the mass of flesh and blood conjured from her subconscious had been terrifying, the reality, if it really was reality this time, was still unnerving. Had the person living here killed all these people? The skulls and bones were human in shape, but disproportionately small, and it brought to mind the tiny mummified corpses on the crosses in the other room.
Daniella stepped over them, feeling a small piece of glass dig into the sole of her bare foot and breathing in sharply. The pain was almost welcome, for she knew it to be real. Though her eyes and ears were deceitful, she could trust the pain not to lie to her, and keep her anchored in the physical world. She walked toward the archway, which led into a dark, oppressive stone hallway with an identical archway at the end. Daniella entered the hall, noticing that the archway at the end was surrounded by a pale blue halo. Comforting moonlight shone on the other side, and she stepped through into a spacious, vaulted chapel.
The chapel was not as big as the ballroom, but the architecture was beautiful. Stone arches lined the walls on both sides of her, creating enclosed hallways that ran the length of the room. Inside these arches were murals, all with that same crude, unfinished style that she had seen in the bedchamber. The paintings were of biblical events, some that Daniella recognized: The sermon on the mount, the last supper, Christ walking on water. In each one, Christ's face had been left unpainted, the dark stone showing through. High above her, a gaping hole had seemingly been punched through the roof, casting a circle of pale light in front of her. Ahead of her, an aisle led between two rows of pews, then a short stairway led up to a raised platform.
In the middle of this was a decorated wooden altar, adorned with fine cloth and beads that glimmered in the moonlight. On the altar were placed two tall candles in elegant holders, and still-burning incense that lent the air a pleasing aroma. On the ground around it was a dense circle of smaller candles, all lit and unmelted, as though they'd just been placed. Four pillars raised from the corners of the altar, and formed into a decorative canopy above it, like the roof of a cathedral. Atop this canopy was perched a single round pane of glass, rimmed by a gold border. Tall candelabra lined the walls behind the altar. The many burning flames created an intense yellow glow at the front of the chapel, and Daniella was drawn to it. The most impressive part, though, was the sculpture work behind the altar. A magnificent work of art, the great bronze sculpt depicted three soaring winged angels, palms turned up in supplication, flying around a crucifix high above on which Christ was hung. Behind the crucifix, an ornate circular rose window shone brightly, the radiant full moon visible through the glass. The window was set into the concave back wall, which consisted of tall, elegant arches and smaller sculptures of saints set into the walls above them.
Stricken by such beauty, Daniella began to walk faster toward the altar, wanting to feel the wood and the heat of the candles and know that it wasn't all just a resplendent illusion. As Daniella approached the altar, she noticed that there was a hollowed-out space in the front of it, near the bottom. She stared at it through the hanging beads, and she could see that four small cloth pouches were stored there, perhaps containing some kind of ceremonial substances... then she saw the inscription carved into the wood behind them. THE FOUR SACRED FLAMES OF THE ALCHEMICAL ELEMENTS SHINE THE WAY TO IMMORTALITY. MAY HE WHO USES THEM WITHOUT KNOWLEDGE BURN IN THE ETERNAL FIRE. More alchemy. Her family's only legacy, one she wanted nothing to do with. Ignoring it, she ascended the stairway to the platform, and stood in front of the altar. A profound serenity suddenly overcame her, though she could not begin to fathom why, and for a brief moment all her stress and fear melted away. She dragged her fingers across the dusty cloth atop it, sighing. It was substantive, absolute.
And wet.
She looked down at the cloth, seeing the dark stains slowly expanding across the material. What... Daniella lifted one end of the cloth, folding it over itself, feeling the all-too-familiar pit in her stomach. Puddles of blood seemed to be welling up from the wood, and voices whispered that it was the blood of countless sacrifices. Daniella knew the signs by now, she felt it all slipping away again, faster, more intensely than before. She wouldn't be able to hold on this time.
"No... please, god, not again. Help me. Help me!"
She implored the angelic observers, but they remained still and silent, reveling in her torment. A dark cloud passed in front of the moon.
Drip.
She heard the sound again, and covered her ears, trying to make it stop. Looking over her shoulder, she saw a shadow standing in the entranceway and retreated behind the altar, her breath coming hard and fast. She mumbled incoherently.
Drip.
The drop fell onto her cheek, and she touched it with her hand, unbelieving. Staring upward, she saw the colossal statue of Christ suspended far above her. Blood streamed down the bronze face from beneath the crown of thorns on his head. It trickled down the chin and fell in black beads.
Drip.
This one fell onto Daniella's chest, and she cried out, running out from underneath it. A sudden breath doused the candles in the candelabra behind her, leaving only the ones near the altar. Their light was shifting from yellow to a hostile red. Daniella cast a terrified glance toward the entrance, seeing the figure standing closer, in the middle of the aisle.
Drip.
Another sudden gust, and the rest of the candles went out, but for a single one in front of the altar. Darkness consumed Daniella, and she fell to the floor, sobbing. The sounds of writhing bodies came from every direction.
"No..."
Looking up, she saw the shadowy interloper standing over her, the silhouette that of a woman in a flowing dress. Daniella backed into the altar and curled up against it, whimpering and helpless. She knew who stood in front of her. She grabbed the only candle still lit, which glowed with an unnatural red light, and lifted it to the face with a shaking hand. She once again looked upon her death. The woman reached out with bleeding hands and grabbed Daniella by the shoulders, pulling her to her feet. Daniella couldn't will herself to resist. The apparition brought her dead face close, forcing Daniella to look into the empty, listless eyes. Blue lips expelled a cold breath, taking the last of the light from the world.
Daniella felt Leana's arms wrap around her, dragging her out of existence and into the dark abyss.