Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) Research Paper
~ M.J. Banks, ZFT
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is located at 7000 East Avenue, Livermore, CA. Borne in 1952; it originally was part of the UC Berkeley Radiation program in competition with military weapons programs near Los Alamos NM’s Manhattan Project. For purposes of growth and expansion, the naval air base of Livermore once reconfigured became a pivotal installation for radiation research in northern California. Of the lab’s principle successes during its formative years includes thermonuclear and fission magnetic confinement. At its point of establishment and operations LLNL resided within Alameda County unincorporated as a township, both then and now officially owned by the United States federal gov’t, but now is now an annexed portion of the greater Livermore metropolitan area, easily accessible by Interstate 580 in the beautiful hills and climate of central California.
For LLNL the approximate budget of LLNL is $1.5 Billion allocated for research and campus operations. Official programs of research and science include ignition technology, nuclear weapon deterrent safety security and reliability, advanced computational systems simulation, nonproliferation, applied science, defense and security planning, and energy sector research and engineering. Such onsite operations also included are information safeguards and security, facility operations, and a profuse environmental restoration program linked to the afore-mentioned energy program.
LLNL’s luminaries are Ernest O. Lawrence and Edward Teller the latter considered the father of the “H-Bomb” by his research and discovery. The latter, Lawrence, was the inventor in 1929 of the cyclotron, particles accelerator in which charged particles accelerate outwards from the center along a spiral path, held together in spiral trajectory by a static electromagnetic field and accelerated by variable radio frequencies and electric field containment. Teller, aided by his former student Herbert York, instituted four principle programs: Magnetic Fusion, Weapons Design, Basic Physics, and Weapons Diagnostics Research and Development, the latter became a prolific component of both LLNL and the most substantial counterpart at the time, Los Alamos Labs. From thenceforth Lawrence began a catchall approach to scholarly and attitudinal wherewithal he termed as “big science” quickly incorporated by York and others, which began the process of scientific discovery with aptitude, approaching tasks with a multifaceted plethora of specialists for each individual project, by including methodic specialists such as applied mathematicians, engineering technologists, chemists, and physicists.
In its existence, the LLNL has advanced its research and development through computation. Its founders, Lawrence and Teller, acknowledged and advanced the relevance of potential within computer sciences, particularly for the application of simulation technology. In days of old – when computers were immense and hefty they acquired for their applicable advances a UNIVAC computer, by far not the same as process-servers of today’s standards it was and is a primordial beast today’s students would call an advanced calculator the size of an industrial refrigerator. Thus began the trend of LLNL’s acquisition and utilization of quick and efficient supercomputers. This overtime has led to LLNL developing the world’s fastest cluster of supercomputers, with the computational power of 16 petaflops [16 thousand trillion calculations/second [16 quadrillion]] as of 2012, across an array of 1.6 Million processing cores, all to test and research LLNL’s original claim to fame, Nuclear Science.
Livermore’s focus has long focused on design concepts for weapons design, despite three failed nuclear tests, but perseverance toward adaptation and innovation lead to their first of many successful nuclear ventures. Due to their successes, the American military tasked LLNL to create a warhead for the US Navy. The missile named Polaris required a multitude of innovations rather than retrofitting size and design of trajectory weaponry. During the McCarthy era, the Livermore warheads stocked America’s nuclear arsenal, though most Livermore missile models no longer in use. As global nuclear fears began to subside, scientific directives of LLNL began changing focus from tactical nuclear application to strategic containment known as the Stockpile Stewardship Program. Practical approaches to security and nuclear material integrity arose while refraining from its use for nuclear testing, which initiated a steady program of monitoring, assessing, repairing, and warehousing nuclear materials as functional or decommissioned munitions, in the “Reliable Replacement Warhead Program.” The tasks within the security aspect included the many nuclear-disarmament protest groups that opposed the very existence of nuclear materials during occasional protests of storage and/or research sporadically organized over the past twenty years.
In regards to the development of nuclear materials, Livermore has taken interest to the properties of plutonium, its potential during its aging process, and its durability. LLNL research focuses around the complex crystalline structural densities of its alloys during the substance’s perfunctory simultaneous variable states, The overall goal of this process is to note the structural, electrical, and chemical properties of plutonium and supplemental alloys, to annotate those properties for the scientific community to use in the future maintenance of nuclear materials. “SuperBlock” is the name given to the LLNL research facility where uranium and plutonium research occurs, with the blessing of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Livermore labs conducts research plutonium tests involving device delivery engineering, detonation R&D, and laser physics. Plutonium used by the LLNL is not an onsite commodity so extremists cannot easily find it in their gift shop . As the NNSA relocated nuclear materials from all federal testing facilities the era of nuclear weaponry became an era of nuclear safety, and thusly did Livermore face this task.
LLNL attempts at this stage to maintain the ontological peace that the scientific community regularly endeavors to create, doing so in four focused disciplines. First of which is nonproliferation, the detection and prevention of resources, tech, and experts from spreading destruction. The second in the list is homeland defense, creating and displaying aptitude and capability in tandem with the DOD to seize and annul threats to civilian, citizen, and service allies. The third aspect is refinement of nonproliferation standards in the intelligence community then using technology to provide security and analyze threats imposed by enemies of the state. Fourthly, domestic-security, the measuring, making, and meting tech solutions to inhibit extremists and prevent catastrophe. Lastly is environmental and energy policy, the flourish of scientific wit and knowhow for the creation of energy and environmental solutions for today’s society. LLNL’s protection of energy and environmental sectors’ security is in effect an attempt to lessen the dangers of nuclear proliferation, securing nuclear armaments and collecting stray materials has been a task of Livermore Labs for the better part of sixty years, more recently developing improved state-of-the-art biological detection systems designed specifically for mobility and automation. These efforts occur to prevent threats in sciences such as, nuclear radiology, chemical, biological, munitions, and cyber security. .
LLNL is among all these things purveyors of advancements in physics, such as matter compression, optics, energy density, medical and biophysics, and nuclear particle acceleration. These forays into the comprehension of scientific ability will allow the future of science to evolve for the better, possibly allowing generations of scientists to discover the ‘big bang’ and unravel the mystery of dark energy, multiverses, Einstein’s “unified theory”, gathering extraordinary evidence for extraordinary theories, scouring the astral plane and finding cosmological proof.
“What really interests me is whether God had any choice in creating the world.”
~ Albert Einstein
Thus far, in only 60 years LLNL has achieved several breakthroughs in the fields of chemical engineering, nuclear chemistry, materials science, biology and bio-nanotechnology, carbon and climate conditions, energy, water and the environment, the national nuclear waste repository, micro and nanotechnology, lasers and optics, biotechnology, precision engineering, computer modeling and simulation, systems and decision science, sensors, imaging and communications. As well as, computing applications and research, integrated communications systems, cyber security, coal gasification, shale oil extraction, geothermal energy, energy cell research, solar energy, fusion, and oil shale processing technologies. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a massive dynamic in the state of human scientific existence, in metaphoric expression it is a beast. Its achievements in nuclear deterrence and military application alongside nuclear storage procedures have kept countless people from radiation poisoning. Their research and refinement of nuclear radiation laser containment is infamous and vital to the future of the field. Breakthroughs and accelerations in server clustering has constantly aided and abetted improvements in computer hardware proficient into trillions of computational calculations per second. With advances in genomics, biotechnology, and biological substance detection, including contributions to the entire sequencing of the human genome, aside their other technologies and systems for detecting nuclear, radiological, chemical, biological, and explosives.
Biological and medical, computing and communications, energy and environment, aerospace and transportation, life and leisure enhanced by the scientific advancements created by LLNL, were started by the vision of Lawrence and Teller. If they could only see what hope society is given, the progress of researches, the growth of sustainability measures, and the happiness their discoveries have helped to unfurl what has happened through technological progress.
29 November 2012
25 November 2012
Merlin 3:3 “Eulogy of the Scorned”
Merlin 3:3 “Eulogy of the Scorned”
A cullion man leans forward to haul a strong hemp rope, at its end Nikolas’s feet tied together, dragging him through the spring forest, unconscious and breathing with the birds singing and the trees budding, the warmth of day is clear and his body plows aside the soil thru the shadows of the season. The captor stops to breath and pause, temporarily abandoning fastness and looking at him then again resuming the task. At a tree deep within the forest there is a wooden cross, fashioned of a trunk and a stray strong stave branch lashed tightly to it, he binds Nikolas in preparation for a crucifixion, waiting for him to slake of slumber and awake in turmoil. His first discovery as he awakes is that his arms are extended and bound, secondly that he is not standing on the ground and tied beneath the arms and chest so that he may not rest by standing.
Nikolas: “Since we have not yet met I was wondering if you could tell me, your name.”
Kent: “I am Kent, of many things, that is your question?”
Nikolas: “No opposites have greater resentment.”
Kent: “Well then, I have a question for you, who pays your stipend?”
Nik: “I have none, else I could afford to be not here.”
Kent backhands him and begins to laugh, but Nikolas joins his contagious laughter until he does so alone, his captor does not, a statement of order or relation holding for certain phenomena that so far as is known is invariable under the given conditions.
Nik: “Come now, daren’t you take a jest?”
Kent: “You shall tell me your tenure or I’ll send pieces of you anon to the nearest village, in parcel, with your name on note, and repeatedly hence until there is no more of you to send.”
Nik: “You’ll have to get me to tell you first.”
Kent: “That shouldn’t be a problem; everyone speaks when vivisection supplants proper choice.”
Kent opens a sack on the soil of the forest earth, from it long iron nails and hammer, and he inspects the twine binding wrists and aims the point of a rusty nail at his palm and prepares the mallet.
Kent: “Well now, giving your name will get you an advantage, let’s have it.”
Nik: “Alas, no one knows. Thy angry fucker, I bet you are a charm with the ladies.”
Kent reaches-back with the hammer and drives the nail into Nick’s palm, pinning him to the stave, but he does not scream and at best assumptions does not cringe in the slightest.
Kent: “What kind of man does not wail for nine inch nails?”
Nik: “I had a headache once then I asked myself why my brow was full of pain and I realized that having pain was not, in my best interests.”
Nik’s head sways thru the revelation of pain, Kent drives further the nail into his left palm deeper than prior with an addled grace, the ropes and board’s timely squeak but Nick does not flinch, the captor halts to watch Nik’s eyes for a tear or his face for a fear and finds them not. He walks to his pile of nails and obtaining another he thrusts the right hand to the same effect, after each drive he looks to Nik who seems complacent, mindful of memories and dreaming while staring at the spring trees, repeatedly the hammer does what hammers do and the sound of anguish is vapid and vacant.
Nik: “I’m beginning to think we won’t be friends after this.”
Kent: “Surely you are valuable, and I have seen such focus with many drunkards. I may have to leave you as I do to those who cannot pay, but I will let you think on pain.”
Nik: “You’re not even going to buy me a drink first?”
Kent: “Amiable you can be, I have never returned captives to their loved ones, whole.”
Nik: “As I know to my cost.”
Kent: “Great minds think alike.”
A second stage of captive malady begins as Kent takes the hammer and smashes the side of Nik’s knee. After, Nik laughs at the kidnapper taunting him but showing the first signs of pain balanced with additional mockery, his knee receives another assault. Frustrated, the degenerate deviant drops the hammer and pulls his knife. Nick swallows his fear and rejects with ages of meditation the intense amount of pain delivered, his hands jostled over piercing nails, the arms poked and prodded, his face cut, and then unrequited the captor decides to exhaust resentment and pummel with fists. In time, Nik is black, blue, and battered to the extreme, having faded back and forth thereof consciousness several times, all the while not answering a single question but learning pertinent details about the tyrant, the symbol on his dagger, the cobbler’s mark on his boots, the buttons breadth upon his shirt to later measure his height. Kent’s fists are bruised and covered in blood from excessive attack, his sleeves rolled-up he wipes his hands on a wool cloth, in malfeasant embarrassment he takes his dagger and slices Nik’s neck up to down from jaw to collar.
Kent: “Tell me now and you might survive in hospice, if not I brain you, or perhaps just let you bloodless for the wolves.”
Merlin appears in the shadowy afternoon, hidden by an obfuscation spell and camouflage provided by the morrow light. In replacement of a wand, he carries a misericorde, a pointed but dull-edged dagger straight and narrow, which he uses to surprise Kent, pointing it shortly to his shoulder then immediately to his throat. As he tries to escape Merlin follows, he without relent the blade to Kent’s neck by drifting over the ground as a cloud attached.
Merlin: “You are a deranged fellow.”
Kent: “He was here when I got here.”
Nik: “That’s, absurdity, that clown…has serious issues.”
Merlin: “Are you dying old boy?”
Nik: “I’m…here, soon…yes.”
Merlin: “I’ll see you when you wake. Is it your turn?”
Kent: “Killing me will not find answers!”
Merlin: “No, but it shall make me joyous. Forbade I found you with an innocent, what over Midgard tasks you?”
Kent: “A man, patience above, a man pays me to kill who enter these woods; his feet like yours hate the ground!”
Merlin: “How say you, a man?”
Kent: “A man, by any seeds a mage, prithee let me live and I’ll show you him!”
Kent’s attention is subtly focused on his impersonal escape, while he cannot his eyes witness Nik’s wounds healing in the sunlight, the dried blood and the smell of death in the wind remains, but he is healing perfunctory and after the fact, the resurrection of pagan lore an immortal chore.
Kent: “A soldier of the shadows, by Surt’s rising, o mages sage leave me not to dying!”
Merlin swings his arm and hits Kent in the head with the handle of his dagger wand, immediately rendering him into unconsciousness. Nik stares at Kent and then to Merlin, sharing a silence before they begin laughing at tragedy itself.
Nik: “Merlin cut me loose.”
Merlin: “I should have to ask, is he the one we’re after?”
Nik: “Most indubitably he is, but now we’ve to find his fie benefice.”
Merlin: “We do indeed.”
Nik finds a clean rag and wipes away the dried blood from his vanished wounds, as Merlin looks thru Kent’s affects Nik ties his ankles and wrists together, he and Merlin stand over their prisoner waiting for him to awaken. Loth to waiting, Nik begins to slap Kent in the face but he does not wake.
Kent: “Hey, small misfortune gone, no harm is seen, you may release me.”
Nik: “Now is time for brevity, demons want their harlots back, and I’ll put you in the ground, tell me who finances your fiendish chore.”
Kent: “If I tell you I die?”
Merlin: “You die if you don’t.”
Kent: “Yonder ridge, maybe a day’s ride or walking three.”
Merlin: “Free his legs.”
With some reluctance and cue of eye Nik unties him, letting him stand only to push his back against a tree to retie his bonds. Heretofore walking the whiles and receptive to the stunning skies above them, hapless of the ruthless ken to barter for gold pieces ten, two horses above the fray. Erstwhile the day is long toward its even dusk as the tireless horses walk with Kent becoming weary and bewildered.
Merlin: “It is a wonderful day for a stroll, Kent.”
Nik: “Wonderful is an, excellent word.”
Kent: “I should stop walking.”
Nik: “Do you think he’s given us right directions, or planning his escape?”
Merlin: “Better to be on proper way then concern of him, but to that point, Kent, what put you on your class warfare or do you truly have a master?”
Kent: “You only call it class warfare, when we fight back.”
Merlin: “Were you going to work for your keep?”
Kent: “I shouldn’t have to…”
Merlin: “From the middle caste, making naïve youths and entitling doles, you can’t recognize enterprise to appreciate it, can you?”
Kent: “Let me rest and I’ll try to understand what you’re saying.”
Merlin: “I want to make the top while the sun is up, see the sunset over the valley, if weary lie and be dragged to the top, the horse and I’ll do all the work.”
Still they sally forth on the inclined road to the low hills and near peak their felonious prisoner stumbles and fumbles, falling twice, the second of such he lets the horse drag him only to be infuriated and bring himself to his feet after fighting to undertake the pace of the steeds. There has been a silence proffering resentment to the roles of captors reversed, but a new emotive bodes display, for at sunset they are at summit and pause for glory.
Nik: “If they knew what all had once known.”
Merlin: “Where would it have gone if we had not?”
Kent: “Sometimes memories are all we have.”
Nik: “Shut it, clodpoll.”
Merlin: “His words are free.”
Kent: “You’re not the only one who has read that book.”
Merlin: “What book?”
Kent: “Sino’s Ordbook, it’s from the first pages, ‘where it goes if had we not’; ‘sometimes memories are all we have?’; ‘a tale of survival of revenge doth entice and ensue?’ tell me you’ve read it over coincidence?”
Nik: “I’ll tell you a tale…look at the road you just traveled and imagine being dragged up here, now look down the other side and imagine being drug behind the horses, scaring them so they don’t stop until they reach the base.”
Kent: “Quite an agony scene as you tell it.”
Nik: “That’s what’ll happen if he or I don’t get a good night’s sleep.”
Merlin stares without the sounds of reality in his thoughts, the prisoner checks his feet as Nik gathers wood and kindling for fire, but the rustling does not register conference and acknowledgement, be known it to him as the sunset hides itself beneath a horizon of trees. In a tangent of malaise his eyes do not send their sight to his mind as shadow sweeps the valley so does sorrow dash his memories, confused they watch dewfall with the rising night sky behind them as they surmise what holds his quandary and sheds yet remorseful mercy still on his heart.
A cullion man leans forward to haul a strong hemp rope, at its end Nikolas’s feet tied together, dragging him through the spring forest, unconscious and breathing with the birds singing and the trees budding, the warmth of day is clear and his body plows aside the soil thru the shadows of the season. The captor stops to breath and pause, temporarily abandoning fastness and looking at him then again resuming the task. At a tree deep within the forest there is a wooden cross, fashioned of a trunk and a stray strong stave branch lashed tightly to it, he binds Nikolas in preparation for a crucifixion, waiting for him to slake of slumber and awake in turmoil. His first discovery as he awakes is that his arms are extended and bound, secondly that he is not standing on the ground and tied beneath the arms and chest so that he may not rest by standing.
Nikolas: “Since we have not yet met I was wondering if you could tell me, your name.”
Kent: “I am Kent, of many things, that is your question?”
Nikolas: “No opposites have greater resentment.”
Kent: “Well then, I have a question for you, who pays your stipend?”
Nik: “I have none, else I could afford to be not here.”
Kent backhands him and begins to laugh, but Nikolas joins his contagious laughter until he does so alone, his captor does not, a statement of order or relation holding for certain phenomena that so far as is known is invariable under the given conditions.
Nik: “Come now, daren’t you take a jest?”
Kent: “You shall tell me your tenure or I’ll send pieces of you anon to the nearest village, in parcel, with your name on note, and repeatedly hence until there is no more of you to send.”
Nik: “You’ll have to get me to tell you first.”
Kent: “That shouldn’t be a problem; everyone speaks when vivisection supplants proper choice.”
Kent opens a sack on the soil of the forest earth, from it long iron nails and hammer, and he inspects the twine binding wrists and aims the point of a rusty nail at his palm and prepares the mallet.
Kent: “Well now, giving your name will get you an advantage, let’s have it.”
Nik: “Alas, no one knows. Thy angry fucker, I bet you are a charm with the ladies.”
Kent reaches-back with the hammer and drives the nail into Nick’s palm, pinning him to the stave, but he does not scream and at best assumptions does not cringe in the slightest.
Kent: “What kind of man does not wail for nine inch nails?”
Nik: “I had a headache once then I asked myself why my brow was full of pain and I realized that having pain was not, in my best interests.”
Nik’s head sways thru the revelation of pain, Kent drives further the nail into his left palm deeper than prior with an addled grace, the ropes and board’s timely squeak but Nick does not flinch, the captor halts to watch Nik’s eyes for a tear or his face for a fear and finds them not. He walks to his pile of nails and obtaining another he thrusts the right hand to the same effect, after each drive he looks to Nik who seems complacent, mindful of memories and dreaming while staring at the spring trees, repeatedly the hammer does what hammers do and the sound of anguish is vapid and vacant.
Nik: “I’m beginning to think we won’t be friends after this.”
Kent: “Surely you are valuable, and I have seen such focus with many drunkards. I may have to leave you as I do to those who cannot pay, but I will let you think on pain.”
Nik: “You’re not even going to buy me a drink first?”
Kent: “Amiable you can be, I have never returned captives to their loved ones, whole.”
Nik: “As I know to my cost.”
Kent: “Great minds think alike.”
A second stage of captive malady begins as Kent takes the hammer and smashes the side of Nik’s knee. After, Nik laughs at the kidnapper taunting him but showing the first signs of pain balanced with additional mockery, his knee receives another assault. Frustrated, the degenerate deviant drops the hammer and pulls his knife. Nick swallows his fear and rejects with ages of meditation the intense amount of pain delivered, his hands jostled over piercing nails, the arms poked and prodded, his face cut, and then unrequited the captor decides to exhaust resentment and pummel with fists. In time, Nik is black, blue, and battered to the extreme, having faded back and forth thereof consciousness several times, all the while not answering a single question but learning pertinent details about the tyrant, the symbol on his dagger, the cobbler’s mark on his boots, the buttons breadth upon his shirt to later measure his height. Kent’s fists are bruised and covered in blood from excessive attack, his sleeves rolled-up he wipes his hands on a wool cloth, in malfeasant embarrassment he takes his dagger and slices Nik’s neck up to down from jaw to collar.
Kent: “Tell me now and you might survive in hospice, if not I brain you, or perhaps just let you bloodless for the wolves.”
Merlin appears in the shadowy afternoon, hidden by an obfuscation spell and camouflage provided by the morrow light. In replacement of a wand, he carries a misericorde, a pointed but dull-edged dagger straight and narrow, which he uses to surprise Kent, pointing it shortly to his shoulder then immediately to his throat. As he tries to escape Merlin follows, he without relent the blade to Kent’s neck by drifting over the ground as a cloud attached.
Merlin: “You are a deranged fellow.”
Kent: “He was here when I got here.”
Nik: “That’s, absurdity, that clown…has serious issues.”
Merlin: “Are you dying old boy?”
Nik: “I’m…here, soon…yes.”
Merlin: “I’ll see you when you wake. Is it your turn?”
Kent: “Killing me will not find answers!”
Merlin: “No, but it shall make me joyous. Forbade I found you with an innocent, what over Midgard tasks you?”
Kent: “A man, patience above, a man pays me to kill who enter these woods; his feet like yours hate the ground!”
Merlin: “How say you, a man?”
Kent: “A man, by any seeds a mage, prithee let me live and I’ll show you him!”
Kent’s attention is subtly focused on his impersonal escape, while he cannot his eyes witness Nik’s wounds healing in the sunlight, the dried blood and the smell of death in the wind remains, but he is healing perfunctory and after the fact, the resurrection of pagan lore an immortal chore.
Kent: “A soldier of the shadows, by Surt’s rising, o mages sage leave me not to dying!”
Merlin swings his arm and hits Kent in the head with the handle of his dagger wand, immediately rendering him into unconsciousness. Nik stares at Kent and then to Merlin, sharing a silence before they begin laughing at tragedy itself.
Nik: “Merlin cut me loose.”
Merlin: “I should have to ask, is he the one we’re after?”
Nik: “Most indubitably he is, but now we’ve to find his fie benefice.”
Merlin: “We do indeed.”
Nik finds a clean rag and wipes away the dried blood from his vanished wounds, as Merlin looks thru Kent’s affects Nik ties his ankles and wrists together, he and Merlin stand over their prisoner waiting for him to awaken. Loth to waiting, Nik begins to slap Kent in the face but he does not wake.
Kent: “Hey, small misfortune gone, no harm is seen, you may release me.”
Nik: “Now is time for brevity, demons want their harlots back, and I’ll put you in the ground, tell me who finances your fiendish chore.”
Kent: “If I tell you I die?”
Merlin: “You die if you don’t.”
Kent: “Yonder ridge, maybe a day’s ride or walking three.”
Merlin: “Free his legs.”
With some reluctance and cue of eye Nik unties him, letting him stand only to push his back against a tree to retie his bonds. Heretofore walking the whiles and receptive to the stunning skies above them, hapless of the ruthless ken to barter for gold pieces ten, two horses above the fray. Erstwhile the day is long toward its even dusk as the tireless horses walk with Kent becoming weary and bewildered.
Merlin: “It is a wonderful day for a stroll, Kent.”
Nik: “Wonderful is an, excellent word.”
Kent: “I should stop walking.”
Nik: “Do you think he’s given us right directions, or planning his escape?”
Merlin: “Better to be on proper way then concern of him, but to that point, Kent, what put you on your class warfare or do you truly have a master?”
Kent: “You only call it class warfare, when we fight back.”
Merlin: “Were you going to work for your keep?”
Kent: “I shouldn’t have to…”
Merlin: “From the middle caste, making naïve youths and entitling doles, you can’t recognize enterprise to appreciate it, can you?”
Kent: “Let me rest and I’ll try to understand what you’re saying.”
Merlin: “I want to make the top while the sun is up, see the sunset over the valley, if weary lie and be dragged to the top, the horse and I’ll do all the work.”
Still they sally forth on the inclined road to the low hills and near peak their felonious prisoner stumbles and fumbles, falling twice, the second of such he lets the horse drag him only to be infuriated and bring himself to his feet after fighting to undertake the pace of the steeds. There has been a silence proffering resentment to the roles of captors reversed, but a new emotive bodes display, for at sunset they are at summit and pause for glory.
Nik: “If they knew what all had once known.”
Merlin: “Where would it have gone if we had not?”
Kent: “Sometimes memories are all we have.”
Nik: “Shut it, clodpoll.”
Merlin: “His words are free.”
Kent: “You’re not the only one who has read that book.”
Merlin: “What book?”
Kent: “Sino’s Ordbook, it’s from the first pages, ‘where it goes if had we not’; ‘sometimes memories are all we have?’; ‘a tale of survival of revenge doth entice and ensue?’ tell me you’ve read it over coincidence?”
Nik: “I’ll tell you a tale…look at the road you just traveled and imagine being dragged up here, now look down the other side and imagine being drug behind the horses, scaring them so they don’t stop until they reach the base.”
Kent: “Quite an agony scene as you tell it.”
Nik: “That’s what’ll happen if he or I don’t get a good night’s sleep.”
Merlin stares without the sounds of reality in his thoughts, the prisoner checks his feet as Nik gathers wood and kindling for fire, but the rustling does not register conference and acknowledgement, be known it to him as the sunset hides itself beneath a horizon of trees. In a tangent of malaise his eyes do not send their sight to his mind as shadow sweeps the valley so does sorrow dash his memories, confused they watch dewfall with the rising night sky behind them as they surmise what holds his quandary and sheds yet remorseful mercy still on his heart.
nondisclosure-disagreement
PJ Media » ObamaCare’s Muslim Exemption:
May 11, 2012 - 12:00 am
"Equal protection"? Muslims are exempted from the mandate because insurance is haraam.
May 11, 2012 - 12:00 am
"Equal protection"? Muslims are exempted from the mandate because insurance is haraam.
Laws almost always create unanticipated consequences. This is certainly likely to be the case when politicians bend over backwards to accommodate the currents of political correctness.
ObamaCare uses the Social Security language of the Internal Revenue Code to determine who is eligible for “religious conscience” objection to the insurance mandate. Specifically, the law provides exemptions for adherents of “recognized religious sects” that are “conscientiously opposed” to accepting benefits from any insurance, public or private.
As a consequence of this provision, Muslims may claim a religious exemption that is denied Christians and Jews. Since Islam believes insurance is haraam (forbidden) and likens insurance to gambling, the religion is excluded from requirements, mandates, or penalties set forth in the bill. Others who fall into this category are the Amish, American Indians, and Christian Scientists. Although the U.S. Constitution grants all Americans equal protection of the law, some Americans are more equal than others.
ObamaCare is specifically written not to apply equally to everyone. It is in most respects a law intended to discriminate — what some might call an extended Jim Crow law. If this seems exaggerated, consider: Jim Crow laws were based on racial discrimination, while ObamaCare is predicated on religious discrimination. Government acted based on a preconceived and arbitrary understanding of what is right.
For example, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee Max Baucus indicated that the purpose of ObamaCare is as much about redistributing income as it is about reforming health care. This is an application of government’s iron fist, putting income distribution and religious discrimination in the hands of Washington bureaucrats.
By any reasonable standard, ObamaCare (and the Congress that enacted it) is completely unfettered from the Constitution. If logic — Washington logic — accommodates Sharia’s prohibition against gambling and hence insurance, Christians and Jews should claim that the state’s ability to expropriate property under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, thereby legitimating an exemption for these groups as well.
Muslims are given exemptions from law everyone else must follow. What has actually been enacted is a wedge between Muslims and Christians and Jews. Americans are pitted against Americans, Christian against Muslim, the Torah against the Koran.
In a curious way the privilege granted Muslims and denied to most others translates into what Muslims call “dhimmitude,” or the taxing of non-Muslims in exchange for the acceptance of their presence. Intentionally or not, ObamaCare allows for the establishment of this practice and Sharia dictates in the United States. Conversely, if a Christian refuses to pay for required health care insurance, liens can be placed against assets and hard prison time could accompany noncompliance. Non-Muslims are, in effect, paying a tax to subsidize Muslims.
This is precisely the issue ObamaCare has insinuated into the national health care debate. Whether one accepts the proposition, cross-subsidization is built into the law: the young are coerced into underwriting the elderly and non-Muslims are being coerced into subsidizing Muslims. Taking from Peter to give to Paul usually pleases Paul. But the question of fairness remains, as does the “equal protection” clause in the Constitution. Ultimately the public will ask why some should be favored to the exclusion of others.
It is certainly odd that the U.S. circa 2012 has become Animal Farm, with privilege granted to some and not others. Equal protection is now simply one of those clichés honored more in the breach than in practice. There may be many reasons for opposing ObamaCare, but none is more important than the illogic of differential treatment.
In the 1960s, civil rights legislation attempted to redress the wrongs of the past by arguing race should neither be a preference nor a handicap. As I see it, this is not only a fair standard, but a distinctly American standard. By offering privilege to some and denying it to others, contemporary legislators have embraced the Orwellian perversion that is fundamentally incompatible with our traditions, notwithstanding moments when aberrational behavior was in the ascendancy.
By arguing the Muslim view that insurance is haraam, legislators open themselves to the thin edge of the wedge. What is likely to be next? Are there other concerns Muslims consider inappropriate because of the demands of Sharia? At what point does this form of “soft extortion” end? The answers are not apparent; neither is there justification for an Animal Farm scenario that defies equal treatment before the law.
ObamaCare uses the Social Security language of the Internal Revenue Code to determine who is eligible for “religious conscience” objection to the insurance mandate. Specifically, the law provides exemptions for adherents of “recognized religious sects” that are “conscientiously opposed” to accepting benefits from any insurance, public or private.
As a consequence of this provision, Muslims may claim a religious exemption that is denied Christians and Jews. Since Islam believes insurance is haraam (forbidden) and likens insurance to gambling, the religion is excluded from requirements, mandates, or penalties set forth in the bill. Others who fall into this category are the Amish, American Indians, and Christian Scientists. Although the U.S. Constitution grants all Americans equal protection of the law, some Americans are more equal than others.
ObamaCare is specifically written not to apply equally to everyone. It is in most respects a law intended to discriminate — what some might call an extended Jim Crow law. If this seems exaggerated, consider: Jim Crow laws were based on racial discrimination, while ObamaCare is predicated on religious discrimination. Government acted based on a preconceived and arbitrary understanding of what is right.
For example, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee Max Baucus indicated that the purpose of ObamaCare is as much about redistributing income as it is about reforming health care. This is an application of government’s iron fist, putting income distribution and religious discrimination in the hands of Washington bureaucrats.
By any reasonable standard, ObamaCare (and the Congress that enacted it) is completely unfettered from the Constitution. If logic — Washington logic — accommodates Sharia’s prohibition against gambling and hence insurance, Christians and Jews should claim that the state’s ability to expropriate property under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, thereby legitimating an exemption for these groups as well.
Muslims are given exemptions from law everyone else must follow. What has actually been enacted is a wedge between Muslims and Christians and Jews. Americans are pitted against Americans, Christian against Muslim, the Torah against the Koran.
In a curious way the privilege granted Muslims and denied to most others translates into what Muslims call “dhimmitude,” or the taxing of non-Muslims in exchange for the acceptance of their presence. Intentionally or not, ObamaCare allows for the establishment of this practice and Sharia dictates in the United States. Conversely, if a Christian refuses to pay for required health care insurance, liens can be placed against assets and hard prison time could accompany noncompliance. Non-Muslims are, in effect, paying a tax to subsidize Muslims.
This is precisely the issue ObamaCare has insinuated into the national health care debate. Whether one accepts the proposition, cross-subsidization is built into the law: the young are coerced into underwriting the elderly and non-Muslims are being coerced into subsidizing Muslims. Taking from Peter to give to Paul usually pleases Paul. But the question of fairness remains, as does the “equal protection” clause in the Constitution. Ultimately the public will ask why some should be favored to the exclusion of others.
It is certainly odd that the U.S. circa 2012 has become Animal Farm, with privilege granted to some and not others. Equal protection is now simply one of those clichés honored more in the breach than in practice. There may be many reasons for opposing ObamaCare, but none is more important than the illogic of differential treatment.
In the 1960s, civil rights legislation attempted to redress the wrongs of the past by arguing race should neither be a preference nor a handicap. As I see it, this is not only a fair standard, but a distinctly American standard. By offering privilege to some and denying it to others, contemporary legislators have embraced the Orwellian perversion that is fundamentally incompatible with our traditions, notwithstanding moments when aberrational behavior was in the ascendancy.
By arguing the Muslim view that insurance is haraam, legislators open themselves to the thin edge of the wedge. What is likely to be next? Are there other concerns Muslims consider inappropriate because of the demands of Sharia? At what point does this form of “soft extortion” end? The answers are not apparent; neither is there justification for an Animal Farm scenario that defies equal treatment before the law.
17 November 2012
Merlin 3:2 “Heir Apparent”
Merlin 3:2 “Heir Apparent”
The ides of winter, unto the story the same as any other bleak season, fate metes the summer drought to ail all the people, thereon next thus winter cold and callous. There a handsome kulak that bore six daughters to the same woman, each time hoping for a boy but knowing a girl is twice as smart and half as strong. Between the age of his third and fourth offspring he adopted four daughters other when his neighbors could not live thru fever and fugue. Three weeks before or after any of these children’s birthday he died alas of a portly angered heart some years of past, and the very saintly mother had gone of age and ills the like in this bitter cold, leaving ten daughters dour and solemn. Starving and young the young daughters now flee as refugees, parting with only relics to barter, they go with lamps hoping to find better obliges in a town or city, carrying light to bear through the darkness.
By teeming odds five of them liberal and five conservative, five are fools and depart without excessive fuel as the brighter left with small containers replete, and while the suitors they seek are for the time beyond discovery. They nap in places and sleep in others by familiar caves and famous mills abandoned for the season of cold spring, they to find haven or husband to return. At noon of darkness, one of the sisters cries into the air.
Halldora: “Look, a man approaches, seek him.”
They all stand on their feet and array the lamps alight, with worry and ambition the youngest pleads to the prepared.
Nauma: “Give you all to us fuels, for our lanterns are thirsty.”
The man on horse not only rides, but also increases pace to avoid conversation by his predisposed discretion. The eldest young woman peering thru the night turns back and speaks her message.
Soma: “Unless prevention works with ours to yours, go you all instead to men who sell lantern oil, and buy your own.”
In the morn, the road before them reveals their path splitting to two. Soon approached a disconcerting separation occurs as the disadvantaged sisters indeed go to buy fuel, while they are separated a man comes to the wiser sisters holding lanterns in the evening, with him they travail and soon all five are comforted intimately simultaneously to the man from the night. They are content with each of their decisions as known behind the door of the man with five new wives, but the reckless five sisters become scared in their waywardly path, arguing and discomforted they decide to turn aback and find their wiser sisters. Disheveled and tired they find the man’s farm by the coldest hour of morning, they make to his home and knock on his door.
Nauma: “Lord o lord, let us into warmth.”
Leonin: “Verily I may tell you this, you are strangers, so awaken you all, because you know neither the date nor hour!”
Then a traveling man of commercial things, a neighbor of Leonin keeping nearby his servants readily, and shows them his prowess and small fortune in goods. Over the following hours, they travel in the bleak weather and soon to his hacienda, where all things in sight are his belongings. By tyranny this now unbeknownst includes the five sisters who he claims as his wives, to the first wife he gives five chores, to the second and third wives gives two chores, and to the fourth and fifth he gives one chore. Things he thinks befit and as much to his liking, and about his lesser deeds does he commit in his home.
The wiser sisters are most unfortunate for the home does not belong to Leonin, and soon do they realize that for a night of warmth they are now again laborers of peasantry. Hence, for deed, they each carry with on the day that is this day, things to sell at a market shop and Leonin carries two things just as they carry two things. Of his sales, he takes a bag of coins, going forth, and digs elsewhere in the earth, hiding his money from his dullard overlord. After a time the lord of the servants comes and speaks of trivial news with and within the town and unto the many gathers Leonin and the five sisters, who on arrival notice their separated five sisters lavished but chattel of the regent named Roald.
Leonin: “Landlord, five peasants came to me from your land, lo, you have five to sisters these.”
Roald: “Good on you, fair servant and loyal, with little wealth you have been truest, I must and will recognize you on many titles, enter into the joy of marriage.”
Boy: “Lord, you gave me two chores, lo; I have conquered over two tasks.”
Roald: “Well are you, good boy and true, for on little supplies you have been truest, I will call you stronger of that which can be strongest. Pass with joy of the lord.”
A man who has taken no peasants comes, somber and solemn to the point of ambiguity, quiet and curt his very presence draws silence, his hair long and dark, his eyes intensely focused and narrow, the embroidery plain and the colors dark.
Sino: “Lord…I want that you are a severe man, you pick where you have not planted, and you gather together what you have never spread …and I dreading went, and hid your missing peasants in the earth, look, you perceive my words to be thin.”
Roald: “Evil servant and slow, learn that I pick where I plant not – and gather together where I pour not out? To that end, it behooved you to take my money to the men who take wagers. When I came, I received what is mine with usury, so take away from him the peasant. Give it to a man who has ten, for to every man that has me shall give, and he shall increase, but from him that hasn’t, or if I think he has, I will take it away from him, and discard you an unprofitable servant into utter darkness. They’ll lament, and grind their teeth, when Midgard’s son meets his maker and all his Valkyrie with him, as he watches them siege his soul, and all ilk should watch his coffin, and he’ll depart them apart.”
Lord Roald walks, away from Sino, moving between him and the comfortable slave girls, the guards on the right, the folk on the left. Roald sits on a public throne and drinks wine before returning Sino’s debate.
Sino: “Like a shepherd departs sheep from offspring, your slaves on the right and your serfs on the left.”
Roald: “Another wretch for the gods, who wishes be old on rite, gather to the gods, that they are blessed – in my kingdom – you hold denizen the realm given to you, for the makings of empire, I’ve hungered, and made quarry. I’ve thirsted as all young men do and fell into that well, roofless and made prisoner, naked… and hid, (kisses a slave girl who is reticent and reluctant) silk, (touches the silk of a reticent slave girl’s clothes) and pleasure. …I was in prison, and fate visited me, it was a place men should answer Odin ‘lord, seeing your hungry creations, entertaining ye, thirsting, and yet we give our captors drink?’ – and for the homeless, we housed armies, or vulnerable in battle we covered them, or wounded, or captured, we came to the gods?”
Roald stands and slowly walks in prideful prowess toward Sino, whose eyes become slightly darker.
Roald: “Believe you me, if you did to my weakest slave, you did to me, then Odin would tell the youthful to leave, cursed, to hellfire, made for Loki and his Valkyrie, -- hungry, gave me no food, thirsty, you gave no water, abandoned, you gave not harbor, naked, you gave no clothes, wounded, and captured, you gave no sign. Then and they should answer to me! Moreover, should say ‘Lord, tell us when we are hungry, thirsty, orphaned, naked, wounded, imprisoned, how can we serve you more?’
Sino begins to darken with power, dark brightness, presenting an evil within the eyes. The darkness of his vision is the sound of heavy emanation, the wight of ominous burden does not tax the flit of fearful feet, there is alarm rife to all militia beset in a darkened world of misery and remorse.
Sino: “Truly I say to you, how long you did not do one of those things, lest, neither you did for me, all shall perish in everlasting torment. I will judge the men to live forever.”
Soldiers distant part, the ones tasked to protect Roald and keep Sino in custody die from poison in the air, their stomachs twisting in pain, their muscles wrenching for bones to reclaim, their minds going insane. The dark radiance is paralytic and soon the violet magic flares an aura of lightning with tendrils into the air that soon Sino’s hand of death places upon the regent’s vision and soon thusly his face, turning his mind to fire and his blood to dirt. Roald bleeds from his eyes, nose, and mouth and then falls to the ground, Sino of evil transgressions quickly remits his powers and surveys the panicked townsfolk rushing from sight, but the slaved girls scantily clad in the intemperate cool with clothes of nearly infernal summer humbly approaching with their arms at their side, unabatedly drawn to power.
The ides of winter, unto the story the same as any other bleak season, fate metes the summer drought to ail all the people, thereon next thus winter cold and callous. There a handsome kulak that bore six daughters to the same woman, each time hoping for a boy but knowing a girl is twice as smart and half as strong. Between the age of his third and fourth offspring he adopted four daughters other when his neighbors could not live thru fever and fugue. Three weeks before or after any of these children’s birthday he died alas of a portly angered heart some years of past, and the very saintly mother had gone of age and ills the like in this bitter cold, leaving ten daughters dour and solemn. Starving and young the young daughters now flee as refugees, parting with only relics to barter, they go with lamps hoping to find better obliges in a town or city, carrying light to bear through the darkness.
By teeming odds five of them liberal and five conservative, five are fools and depart without excessive fuel as the brighter left with small containers replete, and while the suitors they seek are for the time beyond discovery. They nap in places and sleep in others by familiar caves and famous mills abandoned for the season of cold spring, they to find haven or husband to return. At noon of darkness, one of the sisters cries into the air.
Halldora: “Look, a man approaches, seek him.”
They all stand on their feet and array the lamps alight, with worry and ambition the youngest pleads to the prepared.
Nauma: “Give you all to us fuels, for our lanterns are thirsty.”
The man on horse not only rides, but also increases pace to avoid conversation by his predisposed discretion. The eldest young woman peering thru the night turns back and speaks her message.
Soma: “Unless prevention works with ours to yours, go you all instead to men who sell lantern oil, and buy your own.”
In the morn, the road before them reveals their path splitting to two. Soon approached a disconcerting separation occurs as the disadvantaged sisters indeed go to buy fuel, while they are separated a man comes to the wiser sisters holding lanterns in the evening, with him they travail and soon all five are comforted intimately simultaneously to the man from the night. They are content with each of their decisions as known behind the door of the man with five new wives, but the reckless five sisters become scared in their waywardly path, arguing and discomforted they decide to turn aback and find their wiser sisters. Disheveled and tired they find the man’s farm by the coldest hour of morning, they make to his home and knock on his door.
Nauma: “Lord o lord, let us into warmth.”
Leonin: “Verily I may tell you this, you are strangers, so awaken you all, because you know neither the date nor hour!”
Then a traveling man of commercial things, a neighbor of Leonin keeping nearby his servants readily, and shows them his prowess and small fortune in goods. Over the following hours, they travel in the bleak weather and soon to his hacienda, where all things in sight are his belongings. By tyranny this now unbeknownst includes the five sisters who he claims as his wives, to the first wife he gives five chores, to the second and third wives gives two chores, and to the fourth and fifth he gives one chore. Things he thinks befit and as much to his liking, and about his lesser deeds does he commit in his home.
The wiser sisters are most unfortunate for the home does not belong to Leonin, and soon do they realize that for a night of warmth they are now again laborers of peasantry. Hence, for deed, they each carry with on the day that is this day, things to sell at a market shop and Leonin carries two things just as they carry two things. Of his sales, he takes a bag of coins, going forth, and digs elsewhere in the earth, hiding his money from his dullard overlord. After a time the lord of the servants comes and speaks of trivial news with and within the town and unto the many gathers Leonin and the five sisters, who on arrival notice their separated five sisters lavished but chattel of the regent named Roald.
Leonin: “Landlord, five peasants came to me from your land, lo, you have five to sisters these.”
Roald: “Good on you, fair servant and loyal, with little wealth you have been truest, I must and will recognize you on many titles, enter into the joy of marriage.”
Boy: “Lord, you gave me two chores, lo; I have conquered over two tasks.”
Roald: “Well are you, good boy and true, for on little supplies you have been truest, I will call you stronger of that which can be strongest. Pass with joy of the lord.”
A man who has taken no peasants comes, somber and solemn to the point of ambiguity, quiet and curt his very presence draws silence, his hair long and dark, his eyes intensely focused and narrow, the embroidery plain and the colors dark.
Sino: “Lord…I want that you are a severe man, you pick where you have not planted, and you gather together what you have never spread …and I dreading went, and hid your missing peasants in the earth, look, you perceive my words to be thin.”
Roald: “Evil servant and slow, learn that I pick where I plant not – and gather together where I pour not out? To that end, it behooved you to take my money to the men who take wagers. When I came, I received what is mine with usury, so take away from him the peasant. Give it to a man who has ten, for to every man that has me shall give, and he shall increase, but from him that hasn’t, or if I think he has, I will take it away from him, and discard you an unprofitable servant into utter darkness. They’ll lament, and grind their teeth, when Midgard’s son meets his maker and all his Valkyrie with him, as he watches them siege his soul, and all ilk should watch his coffin, and he’ll depart them apart.”
Lord Roald walks, away from Sino, moving between him and the comfortable slave girls, the guards on the right, the folk on the left. Roald sits on a public throne and drinks wine before returning Sino’s debate.
Sino: “Like a shepherd departs sheep from offspring, your slaves on the right and your serfs on the left.”
Roald: “Another wretch for the gods, who wishes be old on rite, gather to the gods, that they are blessed – in my kingdom – you hold denizen the realm given to you, for the makings of empire, I’ve hungered, and made quarry. I’ve thirsted as all young men do and fell into that well, roofless and made prisoner, naked… and hid, (kisses a slave girl who is reticent and reluctant) silk, (touches the silk of a reticent slave girl’s clothes) and pleasure. …I was in prison, and fate visited me, it was a place men should answer Odin ‘lord, seeing your hungry creations, entertaining ye, thirsting, and yet we give our captors drink?’ – and for the homeless, we housed armies, or vulnerable in battle we covered them, or wounded, or captured, we came to the gods?”
Roald stands and slowly walks in prideful prowess toward Sino, whose eyes become slightly darker.
Roald: “Believe you me, if you did to my weakest slave, you did to me, then Odin would tell the youthful to leave, cursed, to hellfire, made for Loki and his Valkyrie, -- hungry, gave me no food, thirsty, you gave no water, abandoned, you gave not harbor, naked, you gave no clothes, wounded, and captured, you gave no sign. Then and they should answer to me! Moreover, should say ‘Lord, tell us when we are hungry, thirsty, orphaned, naked, wounded, imprisoned, how can we serve you more?’
Sino begins to darken with power, dark brightness, presenting an evil within the eyes. The darkness of his vision is the sound of heavy emanation, the wight of ominous burden does not tax the flit of fearful feet, there is alarm rife to all militia beset in a darkened world of misery and remorse.
Sino: “Truly I say to you, how long you did not do one of those things, lest, neither you did for me, all shall perish in everlasting torment. I will judge the men to live forever.”
Soldiers distant part, the ones tasked to protect Roald and keep Sino in custody die from poison in the air, their stomachs twisting in pain, their muscles wrenching for bones to reclaim, their minds going insane. The dark radiance is paralytic and soon the violet magic flares an aura of lightning with tendrils into the air that soon Sino’s hand of death places upon the regent’s vision and soon thusly his face, turning his mind to fire and his blood to dirt. Roald bleeds from his eyes, nose, and mouth and then falls to the ground, Sino of evil transgressions quickly remits his powers and surveys the panicked townsfolk rushing from sight, but the slaved girls scantily clad in the intemperate cool with clothes of nearly infernal summer humbly approaching with their arms at their side, unabatedly drawn to power.
15 November 2012
Nature Always Wins
If Every Food Stamp Recipient Voted For Obama, It Would Account For 75% Of His Total | CNS News: If all 47 million food stamp recipients voted for President Obama, it would account for 75.4 percent of Obama's 62.3 million votes.
► I think it is important to note: 1/6 (300,000,000 Citizens) = 16%. Only 62M eccentric-extremists chose to reelect Obama, I can't be broken by his incumbency any more than when I realized he wasn't who I chose in 2008. Mirth, 5/6 of Americans didn't elect doublespeak. ►
► I think it is important to note: 1/6 (300,000,000 Citizens) = 16%. Only 62M eccentric-extremists chose to reelect Obama, I can't be broken by his incumbency any more than when I realized he wasn't who I chose in 2008. Mirth, 5/6 of Americans didn't elect doublespeak. ►
11 November 2012
Merlin 3:1 Doggerel
Merlin 3:1 “Doggerel”
Thrice warned have ye now been, but what it has warned of learning has not thy seemed in many moons. A realm disingenuous hiding in emotion against the logic of a family newly born, where creation dies and conformity wills its jest on the weak and opaque, a sacrifice made of armor and the scales weighted to the silent eyes of corruption. Killing wind and less where dire consequence manipulates faith and foundation as both poison and prosperity, for the hearts and minds are both friend and foe. Go were told and go ye shall, duly to the discourse will, and here of past our reckon made of tales, whence one became three, thence of three that fell as one, alas, lest no heed to another caution, as thine eyes pass-over these words, learned be, a stitch in time saves nine.
Thrice warned have ye now been, but what it has warned of learning has not thy seemed in many moons. A realm disingenuous hiding in emotion against the logic of a family newly born, where creation dies and conformity wills its jest on the weak and opaque, a sacrifice made of armor and the scales weighted to the silent eyes of corruption. Killing wind and less where dire consequence manipulates faith and foundation as both poison and prosperity, for the hearts and minds are both friend and foe. Go were told and go ye shall, duly to the discourse will, and here of past our reckon made of tales, whence one became three, thence of three that fell as one, alas, lest no heed to another caution, as thine eyes pass-over these words, learned be, a stitch in time saves nine.
10 November 2012
Merlin 2:41 “Ghost of Perdition”
Merlin 2:41 “Ghost of Perdition”
A boot kicks Lynn in her stomach, she takes anger and umbrage as she sends her other sharp hand after Merlin’s heart under and thru his chest, a hand grasps her back and throws her to the solid wall of mystic fog, her feet above the ground she falls rapt by her new foe’s equanimity and stilled by fear. The assistance to Merlin comes in the form of the traveler with the same scar on many faces, his skin a healthy yellow in the shade, his hair the color of dark oak, his eyes the color favorite to the beholder. Lynn crawls in terror and disconcertion, backwards from the man, her hands in the dirt with her feet shuffling of chaotic disorder, he reaches down to her and lifts her by the cloth of her shoulder, and with his other hand he chokes her against the cloud wall.
Lynn: “No, master, I am unseen, it was not me.”
The terror in her eyes shows thru tears and longing, the stranger clenches her throat for silence, as he looks to Merlin, on the ground bleeding, but breathing. Her master looks back to her, silent intimidation and intimate fear, her feet do not touch the dirt.
Stranger: “Irreverent child! So many steps you now cannot take…”
Lynn: “I was…”
The stranger with great strength pulls and swiftly pushes her into the barrier once more.
Stranger: “Was, is what you’re going to be, you were, nothing I cannot erase! Take her from my sight, find her vital breath or take her soul to the realm of instincts into the abode of stillness.”
The cloud connected spell begins to fade, in the distance the sound of Troy and Alerion slowly falling maladroitly and Ana coughing water. As the fog lessens, further she looks as if recently pulled from a river. Three Valkyries approach and take her into their custody, the stranger surveys the scene then walks to Merlin, when close he tosses him a flask fill with the mead of poetry. Nickolas walks wearing a robe given to him by one of the Valkyrie.
Stranger: “On this merry day, greetings and salutations, Niccolo, how it is nice of you to join us.”
Nickolas drops to both knees and bows before resting on his ankles, upon realizing who has spoken thus.
Merlin: “Do you know each other?”
Stranger: “We’re practically cousins, family at times.”
Strangely unawares ostentation, Nick sees Ana and rushes to her. Merlin returns the flask to the man and tries to stand, he does so with sounds of pain and so the flask makes its way again to him, helped to rise by the stranger. Return to conference with them, Ana and Troy.
Stranger: “You should heal nicely with that in you.”
Nick: “I think it’s safe to say we’re in the clear, Merlin.”
Merlin: “…and to whom do I oblige the pleasure?”
Stranger: “My name is Loki, and I only ask you to remember my name.”
Merlin: “That can be arranged.”
Loki: “Well played by you all. I’m surprised you made it this far with such young magic.”
Merlin: “What in fie was her plan?”
Loki: “Bribing the people with their stolen money, employing the use of force, deception and fear, an inner core of conspiratorial power, it was about taxing a realm and having serfs, it was always about the money.”
Ana: “What did they want with Nickolas?”
Loki: “She was going to eat him; they would’ve turned his body into drops of blood and sold them around the nine worlds, then ate him when they willed.”
A sign of discomfiture is awash on Nick’s face, the unbecoming levity or pertness especially in respect to grave or sacred matters, bothers him with arrogance and embarrassment.
Loki: “We’re battling bad Valkyrie, you’ll probably be seeing a lot more demons, if you know how to contact me, during trouble you may, but don’t cross your fingers.”
Nick: “He says that, but it’s another of his tricks, he shan’t show.”
Loki: “How untrue, it was I that was your double when your beleaguered friend here battled the termagant, watched you stroll to the ghoul thru a horde of ghastly souls of war, following the witches three, helping you on your way so the nightlady could warn you. Helping at the river of glass, and here and there, a few cursed wands along the way, the dryads, I watched, but I had to be sure. A shame you broke the bridge of glass tho, perhaps one day, another.”
Merlin: “You had to be sure?”
Loki: “I needed to catch her in felony; I can’t just go around catching angels that are not mine.”
Ana: “What do you mean, ‘not yours’?”
Loki: “You know her as Lynn, but her name is Mist, a handmaiden Valkyrie of the Allfather, the Asagrim, shifty eyed spear shaker, visitor of the hanged, and the war-merry raven god that recently conquered the Vanir.”
Merlin: “We were washed down a mountainside!”
Loki: “…I heard specifically what had occurred, and I want to thank you.”
The sky is still grey, the light is still day, and a glow radiates from just beyond the Valkyries tormenting with Lynn. The glow attracts attention but causes not alarm. Troy cautious still ready to bounce into the sky and flee the Valkyries who bring a cloth-bounded baby to Loki and rests the tike in his hands. The child has sharp teeth and nascent wings but seems complicit in innocence.
Loki: “They are so cute when they’re young.”
Loki: “This is Mist, and she has now been reborn, notice the cherub wings, the man of snakes was born Ophiuchus, brother to the one you faced moons ago, he was having problems with fidelity, snake, liar, he no doubt was looking for Lynn when he found you and I, or I pretending to be you.”
Ana: “So you can be invisible?”
Loki: “I can be no more invisible than a mirror, I see all at the edge of darkness. Here Merlin, help me, hold the cherub, I have a gift for you, wait here.”
Loki walks towards the Valkyries while waving his hand, when he meets them they fly into the sky as he disappears by fading into nothingness as the sun breaks thru the clouds, shining on the path. Merlin shouts into the air confused and perturbed, cursing and quipping, as this adventure ends. The realm without impost grows its enterprises, for the commerce and commitments, the tithe and tide of illegal war, to ask of people and pray of faith, the system of survival, power to the purpose and liberty only for life. The gods, watching over immortality, without the ghost of perdition but not alone, thru the speaking darkness giving advice from vengeance and the lessons of dying, follows death in the hearts of warriors, never wreak nor rede until the beautiful disasters of Midgard are full upon the main, unabashedly arisen, like luring confidence. Importune prophecy rises of hope and the victor shall take the spoils, goals of summoning evil to find new masters play second to unmaking them.
A boot kicks Lynn in her stomach, she takes anger and umbrage as she sends her other sharp hand after Merlin’s heart under and thru his chest, a hand grasps her back and throws her to the solid wall of mystic fog, her feet above the ground she falls rapt by her new foe’s equanimity and stilled by fear. The assistance to Merlin comes in the form of the traveler with the same scar on many faces, his skin a healthy yellow in the shade, his hair the color of dark oak, his eyes the color favorite to the beholder. Lynn crawls in terror and disconcertion, backwards from the man, her hands in the dirt with her feet shuffling of chaotic disorder, he reaches down to her and lifts her by the cloth of her shoulder, and with his other hand he chokes her against the cloud wall.
Lynn: “No, master, I am unseen, it was not me.”
The terror in her eyes shows thru tears and longing, the stranger clenches her throat for silence, as he looks to Merlin, on the ground bleeding, but breathing. Her master looks back to her, silent intimidation and intimate fear, her feet do not touch the dirt.
Stranger: “Irreverent child! So many steps you now cannot take…”
Lynn: “I was…”
The stranger with great strength pulls and swiftly pushes her into the barrier once more.
Stranger: “Was, is what you’re going to be, you were, nothing I cannot erase! Take her from my sight, find her vital breath or take her soul to the realm of instincts into the abode of stillness.”
The cloud connected spell begins to fade, in the distance the sound of Troy and Alerion slowly falling maladroitly and Ana coughing water. As the fog lessens, further she looks as if recently pulled from a river. Three Valkyries approach and take her into their custody, the stranger surveys the scene then walks to Merlin, when close he tosses him a flask fill with the mead of poetry. Nickolas walks wearing a robe given to him by one of the Valkyrie.
Stranger: “On this merry day, greetings and salutations, Niccolo, how it is nice of you to join us.”
Nickolas drops to both knees and bows before resting on his ankles, upon realizing who has spoken thus.
Merlin: “Do you know each other?”
Stranger: “We’re practically cousins, family at times.”
Strangely unawares ostentation, Nick sees Ana and rushes to her. Merlin returns the flask to the man and tries to stand, he does so with sounds of pain and so the flask makes its way again to him, helped to rise by the stranger. Return to conference with them, Ana and Troy.
Stranger: “You should heal nicely with that in you.”
Nick: “I think it’s safe to say we’re in the clear, Merlin.”
Merlin: “…and to whom do I oblige the pleasure?”
Stranger: “My name is Loki, and I only ask you to remember my name.”
Merlin: “That can be arranged.”
Loki: “Well played by you all. I’m surprised you made it this far with such young magic.”
Merlin: “What in fie was her plan?”
Loki: “Bribing the people with their stolen money, employing the use of force, deception and fear, an inner core of conspiratorial power, it was about taxing a realm and having serfs, it was always about the money.”
Ana: “What did they want with Nickolas?”
Loki: “She was going to eat him; they would’ve turned his body into drops of blood and sold them around the nine worlds, then ate him when they willed.”
A sign of discomfiture is awash on Nick’s face, the unbecoming levity or pertness especially in respect to grave or sacred matters, bothers him with arrogance and embarrassment.
Loki: “We’re battling bad Valkyrie, you’ll probably be seeing a lot more demons, if you know how to contact me, during trouble you may, but don’t cross your fingers.”
Nick: “He says that, but it’s another of his tricks, he shan’t show.”
Loki: “How untrue, it was I that was your double when your beleaguered friend here battled the termagant, watched you stroll to the ghoul thru a horde of ghastly souls of war, following the witches three, helping you on your way so the nightlady could warn you. Helping at the river of glass, and here and there, a few cursed wands along the way, the dryads, I watched, but I had to be sure. A shame you broke the bridge of glass tho, perhaps one day, another.”
Merlin: “You had to be sure?”
Loki: “I needed to catch her in felony; I can’t just go around catching angels that are not mine.”
Ana: “What do you mean, ‘not yours’?”
Loki: “You know her as Lynn, but her name is Mist, a handmaiden Valkyrie of the Allfather, the Asagrim, shifty eyed spear shaker, visitor of the hanged, and the war-merry raven god that recently conquered the Vanir.”
Merlin: “We were washed down a mountainside!”
Loki: “…I heard specifically what had occurred, and I want to thank you.”
The sky is still grey, the light is still day, and a glow radiates from just beyond the Valkyries tormenting with Lynn. The glow attracts attention but causes not alarm. Troy cautious still ready to bounce into the sky and flee the Valkyries who bring a cloth-bounded baby to Loki and rests the tike in his hands. The child has sharp teeth and nascent wings but seems complicit in innocence.
Loki: “They are so cute when they’re young.”
Loki: “This is Mist, and she has now been reborn, notice the cherub wings, the man of snakes was born Ophiuchus, brother to the one you faced moons ago, he was having problems with fidelity, snake, liar, he no doubt was looking for Lynn when he found you and I, or I pretending to be you.”
Ana: “So you can be invisible?”
Loki: “I can be no more invisible than a mirror, I see all at the edge of darkness. Here Merlin, help me, hold the cherub, I have a gift for you, wait here.”
Loki walks towards the Valkyries while waving his hand, when he meets them they fly into the sky as he disappears by fading into nothingness as the sun breaks thru the clouds, shining on the path. Merlin shouts into the air confused and perturbed, cursing and quipping, as this adventure ends. The realm without impost grows its enterprises, for the commerce and commitments, the tithe and tide of illegal war, to ask of people and pray of faith, the system of survival, power to the purpose and liberty only for life. The gods, watching over immortality, without the ghost of perdition but not alone, thru the speaking darkness giving advice from vengeance and the lessons of dying, follows death in the hearts of warriors, never wreak nor rede until the beautiful disasters of Midgard are full upon the main, unabashedly arisen, like luring confidence. Importune prophecy rises of hope and the victor shall take the spoils, goals of summoning evil to find new masters play second to unmaking them.
09 November 2012
Merlin 2:40 “The Grand Conjuration”
Merlin 2:40 “The Grand Conjuration”
Troy walks while picking up dead snakes in the violent aftermath with his sword and drops them into a bag, his sacrosanct phoenix wanders eating the replete of deceased reptiles in a grazing trend with twilight as its guide. Ana and Nick walk from the trees, she, straitening her hair and tying it behind her head, and he, straitening his trousers and tying his cord belt shirtless.
Nick: “I don’t suppose you have a tunic in your saddle?”
Troy: “I do, I don’t suppose you have any herbs?”
Ana: “We need to find Merlin, and learn how to end this foolish war.”
Nick: “That’s simple, a man will raise his child from birth to fight what he believes is evil, a coward will wait till the child is grown then teach it to fight his petty battles for him, when they dance we cut the strings and bury the master of puppets.”
Ana: “I want to carry your children.”
Nick: “You don’t mean now?”
Merlin: “That sounds like something kismet for later!”
Merlin shouts from the distance of morrow, stepping over the scorn foliage of scorned jungle, taking caution not to singe his cloak.
Ana: “My wars lead with suffering and fire.”
Merlin: “I can see that.”
Troy: “How many guards are down there, what’s the attack plan?”
Merlin: “Those caves are empty, and we’re not going down there.”
Nick: “How pray tell empty?”
Merlin: “Those caves lead to Muspelheim, they are always empty, and if they’re not, be somewhere else. By the by, what happened here, and where is Quinn?”
Ana: “He left when the horses didst, whence snakes came.”
Merlin: “Then we shall have meat without him.”
Merlin turns behind himself and holding his hand to the landscape summons a wind that pushes fallen flyleaf and debris into a gathered pile, he pulls a branch and scrapes it across his hand, with sparks of metallic arcs the branch quickly ignites as if his hand were sharp steel and the tree bark were flint. Troy disembowels the serpents, one by one, by a sliding knife slice and strips their skins before laying them on the burning branches. The wayfarers, all, sit with daggers and contentious desires to seek the third witch and garner dominion.
Merlin: “I want to travel to Myrkwood, to stay with the men of colors. It is a warmer kingdom thence, and by spring we can cross the range of Lyfja, and down to Jarnvidur.”
Ana: “Good, we can visit Menglod, maybe visit close to Vanaheim.”
Nick: “Ljossalfheim is nearby it; perhaps Troy could visit the Huldru folk.”
Merlin: “The more respites, the better.”
Troy: “To finish rapacious enemies like threshing scythe, be it cardinal sin or common crime, the freedom to learn where only learning is free, clashes to clashes, rust to rust.”
Merlin: “Invective, but it is tantamount to impetus, complacency for oneself creates ashes and dust. Come now, we shall make anon wayfaring, so I can see a man about a horse.”
They begin their walk leaving the jungle and entering the perennial forest, but before the pines as their feet cross the grass the skies return to grey as the shortened day by season clings to the earth whilst carrying the clouds. The rain falls thin and fog grows over many things, the tired leaves and cold weeds, the road tho damp is without mud and remains simple, rutted tracks of wagons and the silent steps that have passed over time to make a wide single lane aside an aching chilly forest. The fog grows strong and surrounds them along their journey, the road behind them is hidden over a stone’s throw, afore them solid obstruction of vision, lost in a circle of clouds on the ground the wind ne’er blowing. Soon the fog keeps them from seeing each other leaving them connected by only sound, Troy rides through the lowly clouded skies meeting with the rain.
An opprobrious magic lists in the air, Ana and Nick wander at arm’s length but are separated by nefarious deception, as he calls to her and she to him their voices are muddled, perceived to come from places they are not, they wander and separate further. Troy cannot see well in the fog and Alerion decides to make a landing before concurrence, but they cannot. On brace of a phoenix, he looks over saddle’s edge to an open circling cover of mist, but before he can make landing the fog covers the enclosure, together he and phoenix crash on the cloud and slowly he walks across the clouds in the expansive presence of obstruction. The grounded cloud act as billows keeping them atop unable to find the ground, the phoenix laughs giddy and plays on pillows of overcloud as he insists Alerion behave silently.
Nick kneels to bind the laces of his boots then stands ready to fight, as he wanders feeling invisible and silent, the fog joins the regions of vision between Merlin and himself. It begins to solidify in obfuscation around them. Nickolas feels the high contrast cloud wall, rough and like sand, he looks dismayed to Merlin.
Merlin closes his eyes as he stands waiting and summoning emotive strength, witting the sudden fog slowly closing. Ana prepares in the like, her hand holds a fire that does not kindle well in the moisture of air, her clothes damp and her throat readily filling of water vapor. Their foe wanders the mist, while in the clearing Merlin and Nickolas wait incontrovertible, Merlin curiously, Nick haplessly inspecting the boundary, cool and solid, coarse and dense soon of solidity with the texture of stone. Merlin aversely waits for tyranny with apprehension. Ana’s fiery hands alight begin to sparsely flake shards of glass and flickering powder. Above, Troy loosely draws an arrow and holds it by the phoenix’s eyes, Alerion shakes flippancy in shudder and the arrow begins to burn, Troy lets the arrow into the fallen firmament to mark the ground for safe landing, absurdly it sinks with a smoldering whisper.
Into the arena of fog enters the domain incarnate the queen of tres brujas, Lynn, the priestess of the mist. The smoke on the ground parts for her as she paces the harkening vapor, hands of smoke grab Nick and tear him through a wall of endless needles as she commands the steam to quell all fires created by intrigue magic. The fog lifts Nick, forcing him to twist and fight, pulling him through the paused deluge, perforating and shredding him, pushing fingers thru him as the smoky mist consumes him, smoke rolling over his shoulders as his skin emaciates and blood begins to slowly roll until finally consuming him until he vanishes.
Merlin: “Come out you, I've seen your ways, show yourself, better than what
you make believe.”
Lynn: “Turn back Merlin and I will let you live.”
Merlin: “Could I have this dance?”
Lynn: “Terrible business, this elation, none can penetrate the groundling clouds.”
Merlin approaches her but she quickly becomes dissipating smoke fading in the air, as he approaches her previous position to inspect, she is elsewhere.
Lynn: “I am not like the others.”
Merlin: “Heavy is the heart that stands solidly on hallowed ground beneath an empty moon.”
Lynn: “The situation is now on the brink of its last, the alabaster bastard and the southern girl can leave if you do, I hold no quarrel with our kind.”
Merlin: “Kind is not a word I would imply of you.”
Lynn: “Admittedly, though a humble modest and bewildered reverential of upcoming magic, in fear I would necessitate to silence their reprimands, or any better worse.”
Imminence into battle hex, with great power and aggressive stance, strong shoulders and hands forward, Merlin produces an electric storm, woefully determined, her radiant magic diffuses his assault with a slow wind of dark magic. Insulted with reinvigorated sincerity he slowly paces with white eyes and bright lines over his skin, carrying a reed that glows with vengeful synergy. He blows its powdery contents into the air, he throws many branches of lightning to her again but this time as they arch thru the falling ashes they multiply in force and breadth, striking and killing several of her henchmen that were approaching him invisibly, camouflaged by cloud. She laughs maniacally but aversive, determined but recursively, she discretely walks backward from Merlin who again paces, guarding his time and biding his thoughts of solemnity.
Merlin: “It seems we have the war of the storms.”
Lynn: “Your inability to steal keeps you from providing aid, you won’t take my compromise, and your friends will die.”
Merlin: “If they’re not already dead.”
Lynn: “Indeed, wickedly astute, but I shall not be stopped.”
Merlin: “The compromise is only mine, and you expect me to abandon my family, I am no use to you.”
Lynn disappears again by turning herself to smoke and thinning into the air, reappearing behind him and waiting patiently for him to turn, when he does she is negative to his onset magic, whereas her skin glows with dark and evil radiance, her eyes blackened and dull, with the wrinkles of her skin unaffected and human. When he turns, she puts her hands on his throat, she drives him to the solid wall of their war and squeezes tighter still, causing him to fall of desperate merciless pain, shaking him again not releasing his neck.
Attrition, thunder and breeze of colliding storms, an old wind turning over the pale side of the sky beneath the constant lightning, the thunder echoes following every silence.
Troy walks while picking up dead snakes in the violent aftermath with his sword and drops them into a bag, his sacrosanct phoenix wanders eating the replete of deceased reptiles in a grazing trend with twilight as its guide. Ana and Nick walk from the trees, she, straitening her hair and tying it behind her head, and he, straitening his trousers and tying his cord belt shirtless.
Nick: “I don’t suppose you have a tunic in your saddle?”
Troy: “I do, I don’t suppose you have any herbs?”
Ana: “We need to find Merlin, and learn how to end this foolish war.”
Nick: “That’s simple, a man will raise his child from birth to fight what he believes is evil, a coward will wait till the child is grown then teach it to fight his petty battles for him, when they dance we cut the strings and bury the master of puppets.”
Ana: “I want to carry your children.”
Nick: “You don’t mean now?”
Merlin: “That sounds like something kismet for later!”
Merlin shouts from the distance of morrow, stepping over the scorn foliage of scorned jungle, taking caution not to singe his cloak.
Ana: “My wars lead with suffering and fire.”
Merlin: “I can see that.”
Troy: “How many guards are down there, what’s the attack plan?”
Merlin: “Those caves are empty, and we’re not going down there.”
Nick: “How pray tell empty?”
Merlin: “Those caves lead to Muspelheim, they are always empty, and if they’re not, be somewhere else. By the by, what happened here, and where is Quinn?”
Ana: “He left when the horses didst, whence snakes came.”
Merlin: “Then we shall have meat without him.”
Merlin turns behind himself and holding his hand to the landscape summons a wind that pushes fallen flyleaf and debris into a gathered pile, he pulls a branch and scrapes it across his hand, with sparks of metallic arcs the branch quickly ignites as if his hand were sharp steel and the tree bark were flint. Troy disembowels the serpents, one by one, by a sliding knife slice and strips their skins before laying them on the burning branches. The wayfarers, all, sit with daggers and contentious desires to seek the third witch and garner dominion.
Merlin: “I want to travel to Myrkwood, to stay with the men of colors. It is a warmer kingdom thence, and by spring we can cross the range of Lyfja, and down to Jarnvidur.”
Ana: “Good, we can visit Menglod, maybe visit close to Vanaheim.”
Nick: “Ljossalfheim is nearby it; perhaps Troy could visit the Huldru folk.”
Merlin: “The more respites, the better.”
Troy: “To finish rapacious enemies like threshing scythe, be it cardinal sin or common crime, the freedom to learn where only learning is free, clashes to clashes, rust to rust.”
Merlin: “Invective, but it is tantamount to impetus, complacency for oneself creates ashes and dust. Come now, we shall make anon wayfaring, so I can see a man about a horse.”
They begin their walk leaving the jungle and entering the perennial forest, but before the pines as their feet cross the grass the skies return to grey as the shortened day by season clings to the earth whilst carrying the clouds. The rain falls thin and fog grows over many things, the tired leaves and cold weeds, the road tho damp is without mud and remains simple, rutted tracks of wagons and the silent steps that have passed over time to make a wide single lane aside an aching chilly forest. The fog grows strong and surrounds them along their journey, the road behind them is hidden over a stone’s throw, afore them solid obstruction of vision, lost in a circle of clouds on the ground the wind ne’er blowing. Soon the fog keeps them from seeing each other leaving them connected by only sound, Troy rides through the lowly clouded skies meeting with the rain.
An opprobrious magic lists in the air, Ana and Nick wander at arm’s length but are separated by nefarious deception, as he calls to her and she to him their voices are muddled, perceived to come from places they are not, they wander and separate further. Troy cannot see well in the fog and Alerion decides to make a landing before concurrence, but they cannot. On brace of a phoenix, he looks over saddle’s edge to an open circling cover of mist, but before he can make landing the fog covers the enclosure, together he and phoenix crash on the cloud and slowly he walks across the clouds in the expansive presence of obstruction. The grounded cloud act as billows keeping them atop unable to find the ground, the phoenix laughs giddy and plays on pillows of overcloud as he insists Alerion behave silently.
Nick kneels to bind the laces of his boots then stands ready to fight, as he wanders feeling invisible and silent, the fog joins the regions of vision between Merlin and himself. It begins to solidify in obfuscation around them. Nickolas feels the high contrast cloud wall, rough and like sand, he looks dismayed to Merlin.
Merlin closes his eyes as he stands waiting and summoning emotive strength, witting the sudden fog slowly closing. Ana prepares in the like, her hand holds a fire that does not kindle well in the moisture of air, her clothes damp and her throat readily filling of water vapor. Their foe wanders the mist, while in the clearing Merlin and Nickolas wait incontrovertible, Merlin curiously, Nick haplessly inspecting the boundary, cool and solid, coarse and dense soon of solidity with the texture of stone. Merlin aversely waits for tyranny with apprehension. Ana’s fiery hands alight begin to sparsely flake shards of glass and flickering powder. Above, Troy loosely draws an arrow and holds it by the phoenix’s eyes, Alerion shakes flippancy in shudder and the arrow begins to burn, Troy lets the arrow into the fallen firmament to mark the ground for safe landing, absurdly it sinks with a smoldering whisper.
Into the arena of fog enters the domain incarnate the queen of tres brujas, Lynn, the priestess of the mist. The smoke on the ground parts for her as she paces the harkening vapor, hands of smoke grab Nick and tear him through a wall of endless needles as she commands the steam to quell all fires created by intrigue magic. The fog lifts Nick, forcing him to twist and fight, pulling him through the paused deluge, perforating and shredding him, pushing fingers thru him as the smoky mist consumes him, smoke rolling over his shoulders as his skin emaciates and blood begins to slowly roll until finally consuming him until he vanishes.
Merlin: “Come out you, I've seen your ways, show yourself, better than what
you make believe.”
Lynn: “Turn back Merlin and I will let you live.”
Merlin: “Could I have this dance?”
Lynn: “Terrible business, this elation, none can penetrate the groundling clouds.”
Merlin approaches her but she quickly becomes dissipating smoke fading in the air, as he approaches her previous position to inspect, she is elsewhere.
Lynn: “I am not like the others.”
Merlin: “Heavy is the heart that stands solidly on hallowed ground beneath an empty moon.”
Lynn: “The situation is now on the brink of its last, the alabaster bastard and the southern girl can leave if you do, I hold no quarrel with our kind.”
Merlin: “Kind is not a word I would imply of you.”
Lynn: “Admittedly, though a humble modest and bewildered reverential of upcoming magic, in fear I would necessitate to silence their reprimands, or any better worse.”
Imminence into battle hex, with great power and aggressive stance, strong shoulders and hands forward, Merlin produces an electric storm, woefully determined, her radiant magic diffuses his assault with a slow wind of dark magic. Insulted with reinvigorated sincerity he slowly paces with white eyes and bright lines over his skin, carrying a reed that glows with vengeful synergy. He blows its powdery contents into the air, he throws many branches of lightning to her again but this time as they arch thru the falling ashes they multiply in force and breadth, striking and killing several of her henchmen that were approaching him invisibly, camouflaged by cloud. She laughs maniacally but aversive, determined but recursively, she discretely walks backward from Merlin who again paces, guarding his time and biding his thoughts of solemnity.
Merlin: “It seems we have the war of the storms.”
Lynn: “Your inability to steal keeps you from providing aid, you won’t take my compromise, and your friends will die.”
Merlin: “If they’re not already dead.”
Lynn: “Indeed, wickedly astute, but I shall not be stopped.”
Merlin: “The compromise is only mine, and you expect me to abandon my family, I am no use to you.”
Lynn disappears again by turning herself to smoke and thinning into the air, reappearing behind him and waiting patiently for him to turn, when he does she is negative to his onset magic, whereas her skin glows with dark and evil radiance, her eyes blackened and dull, with the wrinkles of her skin unaffected and human. When he turns, she puts her hands on his throat, she drives him to the solid wall of their war and squeezes tighter still, causing him to fall of desperate merciless pain, shaking him again not releasing his neck.
Attrition, thunder and breeze of colliding storms, an old wind turning over the pale side of the sky beneath the constant lightning, the thunder echoes following every silence.
Merlin 2:39 “Seduction of Fire”
Merlin 2:39 “Seduction of Fire”
Troy sits on his phoenix staring at the tall and narrow canyon. In its depth light disappears into darkness, to its opening it is a gravel road yet also plateaus over more mountainside. There is a pool of sinew and blood thick as mud, red with shattered bones and bodily eschewed, from it Nickolas resides and reprises the immortal temple of his life, succor to being heathen he is not breathing for there is no air below the layers of fallen earth and shards of slate granite from which up he rises. His hand seems to reach through the claret, climbing into mortality, it appears his face without eyes painted in pooling sanguine repose lest rot and rue, defying the light that surmounts death, through the blood he is not arising, but born he is of blood, leaving no trace on the ground but himself.
Troy: “It’s like a bad dream, isn’t it?”
Nick: “What do you mean?”
Troy: “It is a death like yours.”
Nick: “There are too many words, I blame poetry, and the devil is in the details, the subtle, devastating, details.”
Troy: “Here, we’ll find you fabric later.”
Troy throws Nickolas a long leather coat to the small boulder beside him. Therein Nickolas begins to adorn the thing, testing the length of its sleeves, not noticing his pocketbook on the ground with a knife in it. The air is intemperate warm and the thunderous night unabated.
Nick: “Sorcerer with great monster before temptations of empires, do you not know that I am a man of the cloth?”
Troy: “There is a knife making mark in your book.”
Nick: “Fie, go you with thence beside thyself, fixedly, turn thy head from hence, your true words I do remember habitude like garb.”
Troy: “Have you learned something today we need to talk?”
Nick: (*spinning about) “Where is Ana?”
Troy: “Her sign is weak, but can be found.”
Nick: “Take me to her.”
Troy: “Do you think it wild I can always find the woman you love?”
Nick: “Do you know where she is?”
Troy: “I do.”
Nick: “…and I don’t.”
Alerion is cool to the quite without obvious emotions as the two ride the phoenix now nearly fully grown this autumn of humble indignities, after passing a band of minstrels celebrating Samhain prematurely drinking and drunken before arriving at the trade post’s autumnal festivities. Entrepreneurs, businesspersons, alchemists and artists who invent things that free from material want, freeing minds with strong central responsibility to wear helmets with horns and make mirth, and in the guise of celebration not a rank among them. In honor of mordant efforts of ancients to end evil spirits, they practice axinomancy, throwing axes to tell the future. In tradition, wives paint the faces of their men by smashing berries on his face, then holding his alecup for him to drink, only once, in jolly jest for times the best.
When they land Troy is not allowed to leave Alerion, but he is brought food and drink and told to stray from homes and crops of harvest. Nick begins thru the fort looking for his lover but she finds him soon and first, she staunchly walks to him and slaps his face, as the outdoorsmen groan in mockery he puts his arm around her bodice.
Ana: “Where have you been?”
Nick: “I was looking for you.”
Ana: “You could have leapt from the mountain.”
Troy: “He did!”
As the crowd laughs she waves to a wench carrying a straw-woven basket of berries and ale, she smashes his face with blue berry crush, pours drink down his throat, and then kisses him whilst wrapping herself around him inside his robe.
Ana: “Should we play here?”
Merlin: “No, get thee to a nunnery!”
As the crowd laughs, again the trysts depart. At dawn, Merlin wakes them after waking Troy, walking over the bodies drunken in the street, the remnants of casks and empty wooden smoking pipes ere and empty, their breath fog in the cold morn air as Merlin reveals to them what he hast learnt.
Merlin: “Good morrow, the mystery of our age is truth.”
Ana: “One man's trash is another man's treasure.”
Merlin: “It is indeed, they colloquy of a radical imperious environs in the caves named Colorinth, six leagues hard ride from here to the west, with weather so warm it has jungles even in the deep winter.”
Ana: “The kenning rose with the torch?”
Merlin: “The same, factional, obstinate, and incorrigible, it was with many tales of fright yesterevening.”
Troy: “Egregious environs pious, doubtlessly.”
Merlin: “They spoke of men with obsidian eyes; that is hence where we go.”
Nick: “Our lives have a charming luster.”
Merlin: (standing) “The tyrants decide, design and object, merely to condescend and apologize, without the wits of difference. Eat something so as we can depart.”
Merlin walks to the kettle, receives boiled eggs and a bird’s leg offered to him, then a tea of pennyroyal. Horses hooves clod slowly in the woods, and feet of men no more than twenty, approaching the trader village, the washed leather of the mountain mercenaries and their counterparts bearing the tattoo of the broken rose on their arm and matching inked thorns on their arms and faces. They take warrant to being unlawful posse as they search for a specific person, checking those who resemble wayfarers present, a man with a hat like Merlin’s, a woman whose hair is the colors Ana.
Ana: “Should I play the breeches part?”
Merlin: “We need to go, do you think you could fly, that way for a while, perchance bait them astray?”
Troy: “Bridges to nowhere always rot.”
Nick: “We’re going that way, try to make a grand exit, we’ll see you soon.”
Troy grasps his white hands on saddle horn, an oil paint residue smears from his fingertips, his stoic black boot bends the rung of the partial rope ladder hung beneath his rigging, the rust shakes from the bracing frame of Alerion, their heads raise to see the dawn and the traitors on the lawn. He looks down his nose and its wings stretch and close to open on the sunrise, appraising rest then lifting best to beat against the abjured winds of change. Over walls and stalls, a single spiral grows into a wingspan consuming the bounty hunters’ view of periphery, knocking some from steeds whilst stopping them from deeds, trackers apace to the lure and verity as Merlin eschews bon vivant.
Spoken to the consequence of nature as they travail is a warming climate, not for of smoke or of fire, but a lack thereof making the fertile verdant forest a spot of burgeoning growth, refuses to reject the daylight, at night the heavens gracefully wave like rivers of clouds between the stars and the increasingly flourishing vegetation, where even hanging lodestones are lost. In the eve, as is told, the sky fills with singing light and by morning the growth of vines and chutes of reed begin to daunt the location, soon in travels, the vines grow larger and hang from trees that do not grow where cold winds have summers.
Deep in the hidden jungle is the decay of a mountain, its peak whittled by castle architects, eroded by the rivers coursing from the heat below its icy summit melting and cutting stone, a river flows to a window behind a waterfall, candles, and some essential furniture and a bed of shade and rose petals. The floor granite and smooth and cornered at the walls and at the flat ceiling over a steaming bath cut into the floor near the cushion, the room is empty and silent, like the many halls abound the silence is tired and alone.
In the tropical nature Merlin dismounts his horse and checks his saddle as he parlays.
Merlin: “I had meant to tell you… I’ll be entering alone.”
Nick: “Why on Asgard would you do that?”
Merlin: “Wait outside.”
As a snake catches Nick’s attention, it crawls quickly to Ana. He immediately draws his dagger and throws it into the mouthtail. By now Merlin is gone without a footprint and another snake slithers passed them and the horses, soon many snakes are crawling thru the grasses and as most incline their passes it nonetheless scares the steeds beyond the reeds. As the equines bolt Nick tries to stop them but is bucked and thrown is he with a dulled torch to a tree, Ana spins the torch in her hand and sets it aflame then hands it to him.
Ana: “Kill anything that moves.”
Nick: “What’s happening?”
Ana: “Snakes are blind and hunt by smell and a vision of heat, something wicked this way comes.”
Ophiuchus: (to Ana) “Make right something here, I verily haven’t fie about you, ne’er I have, ne’er I will, but you sir, any day you live is yet time to kill.”
Nick: “If you only knew.”
Nick rushes to Ophiuchus with torch in hand, unbeknownst of the many snakes approaching Ana, the slithering soon establish waves that are utterly inimical to clerical rank and file, and this time they do not flee, hissing and attacking with eyes of glassy black oblivion to crack the sky with gleam. As swords clash her fire spreads as a violent rash against them and daisies, the clouded days of autumn trap humidity and humility into the jungle, the plants dry beneath her feet and soon small serpents make their retreat from the fire that scorns, greater than the thorns larger snakes crawl meticulously more perfidious and clever. The fire is modern signal for Troy and phoenix Alerion to make landing, Troy stops one of the larger snakes with an arrow from on high, but the largest of snakes approach. It curves and sleeks while fighters trade blows and strive to stay alive by twisting limbs and various throws, violent beyond repetition and dangerously beyond malady.
The massive snake crawls for Ana so long that when Nick trips backwards over it, he turns and hacks at what he believes is a reptile much smaller than it truly is, in fact his hack and sever does not even register in the mind of the massive serpent tail. Alerion, quick to feast a festal peckish beak, falls and fights for death to rights, the creature slithering in the ashes coiling and toiling with survival. Troy shuffles as best he can to stay hidden, but as Ophiuchus is breaking Nick’s leg while sitting on the ground, he spots Troy in the distance. He breaks Nick’s back with a boot between the shoulders. He claws into the earth to stop Ophiuchus, his legs not working, his vision fading to black. Troy lets loose an arrow from whitish fingertips and porcelain bow, which travels ever fast into Ophiuchus’ one good eye,
Ophiuchus begins to mock the white archer because he can still see very clearly the silhouettes of a body’s heat, a different color to him, one that tinges of mystery and reserved unrelenting temperatures.
Ophiuchus: “Oh, why, give me my eyes, rivers of blood for my eyes, alas the darkness!”
Ana delves into waves of radiant heat to push the large scaly fiends from herself, which at fury turns to forefront fire. She attempts to stay near Alerion’s power but it leads her erratically to and fro as it hunts serpents in the sand and ash without tethered knowledge that she follows it. Nickolas is awakened by the mere thought of loss and death as Ophiuchus continues to take a marching step between moments of pause in misdirection, luring Troy closer to his grasp.
Ophiuchus: “A realm for my eyes, you took my sight, and I cannot see, come close archer, seek these hands and I will show you wretch.”
As Troy looks upon his foe, he gets dangerously close and Ophiuchus leans and vaults to grasp him, the launch of an instinctual snake.
Nick: “He can see you!”
Nick dives in competition, gusting into Ophiuchus’ side and sacking him cleanly off his feet and to the ground, a heavy battle to Nick’s advantage resumes to ensue. Ophiuchus in desperation for escape grabs the body of a colossal snake in command by thought and is dragged to provisional safety from Nick as he searches the ground for his sword in the ground-fires of dusk. While Nick unsatisfied with losing looks he screams unable to find his nemesis before delivering a cut of fate, but Ophiuchus is near Troy again, ready to confront without aversion.
Ophiuchus: “Give me your heart to keep me alive.”
Alerion leaps between Ophiuchus and its master Troy, as Nick takes Troy from immediate danger the phoenix howls in Ophiuchus’ face, so close he can only sense a familiar face of intense fire. He dives beneath the phoenix between its legs as it curls its head beneath itself, then tries to sit on the serpent man but misses. Ophiuchus runs into Ana’s back in his escape, knocking her onto the ground to her dismay, the snakes are still in thought to attack her fire and in her passionate fears she reaches to the clouded stars. A fountain of liquid fire pours from her hands in all directions for only a moment, and then her hands slam at the ground to her sides, an angry ripple of fire turns everything in her magic’s path to the ashes of the wake.
Troy dashes the occasional surviving snake with his scimitar as Ana approaches him, they gaze their eyes over the mess, then look for Nick. He is in full pursuit of Ophiuchus, as he gets close a large snake bites his ankle causing him to trip and tumble but with a trusty blade quickly decapitates the snake and rolls to his feet in nearly fluid motion. Coming close to the mountain Ophiuchus charges with avid desire and dives into a dark cave, head first and out of sight. The phoenix side steps infrontof the cave blocking Nick from entering, refusing to part with him by letting him enter the darkness of the earth, explaining to him in the form of short belittling squawks. Nick loth returns to Troy and Ana after having a short discussion with the bird of resurrection, with his shirt nearly lost to tatters arriving to Ana standing between three trees on fire, he takes Ana in his arms as they share deep affection and fall to the ground for the other.
Merlin walks the dark caves, smooth to the touch, rough to the senses. He holds his hand into the air and to the tunnel afore him, from his skin a collection of ringed tattoos and scars on his bones glow a pale blue yonder into the darkness, when the wind blows it makes his incandescence gleam, to the air of warmth he follows. The tunnel floor has graphite dust and abandoned cobwebs, the darkness forms a bond with the silence of the deep, no surprises effect the mystery of exploration, pure sensation drifts in the air, the pique of love and the lust of affection, breathing are the battle wounds of memories and dreaming are the harlot tunes of mystery. For as Merlin approaches the antechamber with the waterfall wall Etain bathes in a pool of wonderful light as Lynn carries like smoke across her bath and unto the curtain of aqua.
Lynn: “You will destroy Merlin, shame him or kill him, can you do as such?”
Etain: “All men require not magic but merely desire to see things burn.”
In the reflection of shadows in blind darkness a light assumes a glow behind a door’s curtain from below it into tunneling darkness. Merlin ends his radiance to peer into the depth, the floor beneath his feet becomes smooth and level and closer still he hears the falling water. Etain rises salaciously from the water and enters her robe, to the couch she rests and pans the pages of a forgotten book when she hears the curtain make only the slightest move in the air because of his peeking fingertips.
Merlin makes his entrance steadfast, poignant to direct approach he breathes containing a racing heart, the room fills with fire as if she is the heart of a dragon, filling the room with flame until immersing Merlin to immolation. He pulls apart the air afore himself like opening a stage curtain as heavy fire momentously collapses to the walls, with steel thunder he divides the fire and continues walking, her hand reaches upward and summons a flaming rose with black stem, a flaming orchid, with it held high in the palm of her hand it begins to burn and cinder. He glides with winded pace like apparition in night and takes her to the roving floor of golden pedals, like kindling they ignite causing the room again to fill with fire pushing out the window of rain.
In divine heresy a pointless miracle of loving hearts and dark tranquility, blind shadows in their blood in a lost forest, but near dawn Merlin awakens and sees her sleeping, he kisses her brow and a thin layer of wind magic covers her skin, feeding incineration as she continues dreaming with her soul afire. He leaves her a note and drinks red wine that he finds is not wine at all, it is blood. For such he decides to leave a pedal resting on its red surface. Putting on his robe he walks thru the waterfall, his clothes soak and seeming blurry thru the water he disappears.
Troy sits on his phoenix staring at the tall and narrow canyon. In its depth light disappears into darkness, to its opening it is a gravel road yet also plateaus over more mountainside. There is a pool of sinew and blood thick as mud, red with shattered bones and bodily eschewed, from it Nickolas resides and reprises the immortal temple of his life, succor to being heathen he is not breathing for there is no air below the layers of fallen earth and shards of slate granite from which up he rises. His hand seems to reach through the claret, climbing into mortality, it appears his face without eyes painted in pooling sanguine repose lest rot and rue, defying the light that surmounts death, through the blood he is not arising, but born he is of blood, leaving no trace on the ground but himself.
Troy: “It’s like a bad dream, isn’t it?”
Nick: “What do you mean?”
Troy: “It is a death like yours.”
Nick: “There are too many words, I blame poetry, and the devil is in the details, the subtle, devastating, details.”
Troy: “Here, we’ll find you fabric later.”
Troy throws Nickolas a long leather coat to the small boulder beside him. Therein Nickolas begins to adorn the thing, testing the length of its sleeves, not noticing his pocketbook on the ground with a knife in it. The air is intemperate warm and the thunderous night unabated.
Nick: “Sorcerer with great monster before temptations of empires, do you not know that I am a man of the cloth?”
Troy: “There is a knife making mark in your book.”
Nick: “Fie, go you with thence beside thyself, fixedly, turn thy head from hence, your true words I do remember habitude like garb.”
Troy: “Have you learned something today we need to talk?”
Nick: (*spinning about) “Where is Ana?”
Troy: “Her sign is weak, but can be found.”
Nick: “Take me to her.”
Troy: “Do you think it wild I can always find the woman you love?”
Nick: “Do you know where she is?”
Troy: “I do.”
Nick: “…and I don’t.”
Alerion is cool to the quite without obvious emotions as the two ride the phoenix now nearly fully grown this autumn of humble indignities, after passing a band of minstrels celebrating Samhain prematurely drinking and drunken before arriving at the trade post’s autumnal festivities. Entrepreneurs, businesspersons, alchemists and artists who invent things that free from material want, freeing minds with strong central responsibility to wear helmets with horns and make mirth, and in the guise of celebration not a rank among them. In honor of mordant efforts of ancients to end evil spirits, they practice axinomancy, throwing axes to tell the future. In tradition, wives paint the faces of their men by smashing berries on his face, then holding his alecup for him to drink, only once, in jolly jest for times the best.
When they land Troy is not allowed to leave Alerion, but he is brought food and drink and told to stray from homes and crops of harvest. Nick begins thru the fort looking for his lover but she finds him soon and first, she staunchly walks to him and slaps his face, as the outdoorsmen groan in mockery he puts his arm around her bodice.
Ana: “Where have you been?”
Nick: “I was looking for you.”
Ana: “You could have leapt from the mountain.”
Troy: “He did!”
As the crowd laughs she waves to a wench carrying a straw-woven basket of berries and ale, she smashes his face with blue berry crush, pours drink down his throat, and then kisses him whilst wrapping herself around him inside his robe.
Ana: “Should we play here?”
Merlin: “No, get thee to a nunnery!”
As the crowd laughs, again the trysts depart. At dawn, Merlin wakes them after waking Troy, walking over the bodies drunken in the street, the remnants of casks and empty wooden smoking pipes ere and empty, their breath fog in the cold morn air as Merlin reveals to them what he hast learnt.
Merlin: “Good morrow, the mystery of our age is truth.”
Ana: “One man's trash is another man's treasure.”
Merlin: “It is indeed, they colloquy of a radical imperious environs in the caves named Colorinth, six leagues hard ride from here to the west, with weather so warm it has jungles even in the deep winter.”
Ana: “The kenning rose with the torch?”
Merlin: “The same, factional, obstinate, and incorrigible, it was with many tales of fright yesterevening.”
Troy: “Egregious environs pious, doubtlessly.”
Merlin: “They spoke of men with obsidian eyes; that is hence where we go.”
Nick: “Our lives have a charming luster.”
Merlin: (standing) “The tyrants decide, design and object, merely to condescend and apologize, without the wits of difference. Eat something so as we can depart.”
Merlin walks to the kettle, receives boiled eggs and a bird’s leg offered to him, then a tea of pennyroyal. Horses hooves clod slowly in the woods, and feet of men no more than twenty, approaching the trader village, the washed leather of the mountain mercenaries and their counterparts bearing the tattoo of the broken rose on their arm and matching inked thorns on their arms and faces. They take warrant to being unlawful posse as they search for a specific person, checking those who resemble wayfarers present, a man with a hat like Merlin’s, a woman whose hair is the colors Ana.
Ana: “Should I play the breeches part?”
Merlin: “We need to go, do you think you could fly, that way for a while, perchance bait them astray?”
Troy: “Bridges to nowhere always rot.”
Nick: “We’re going that way, try to make a grand exit, we’ll see you soon.”
Troy grasps his white hands on saddle horn, an oil paint residue smears from his fingertips, his stoic black boot bends the rung of the partial rope ladder hung beneath his rigging, the rust shakes from the bracing frame of Alerion, their heads raise to see the dawn and the traitors on the lawn. He looks down his nose and its wings stretch and close to open on the sunrise, appraising rest then lifting best to beat against the abjured winds of change. Over walls and stalls, a single spiral grows into a wingspan consuming the bounty hunters’ view of periphery, knocking some from steeds whilst stopping them from deeds, trackers apace to the lure and verity as Merlin eschews bon vivant.
Spoken to the consequence of nature as they travail is a warming climate, not for of smoke or of fire, but a lack thereof making the fertile verdant forest a spot of burgeoning growth, refuses to reject the daylight, at night the heavens gracefully wave like rivers of clouds between the stars and the increasingly flourishing vegetation, where even hanging lodestones are lost. In the eve, as is told, the sky fills with singing light and by morning the growth of vines and chutes of reed begin to daunt the location, soon in travels, the vines grow larger and hang from trees that do not grow where cold winds have summers.
Deep in the hidden jungle is the decay of a mountain, its peak whittled by castle architects, eroded by the rivers coursing from the heat below its icy summit melting and cutting stone, a river flows to a window behind a waterfall, candles, and some essential furniture and a bed of shade and rose petals. The floor granite and smooth and cornered at the walls and at the flat ceiling over a steaming bath cut into the floor near the cushion, the room is empty and silent, like the many halls abound the silence is tired and alone.
In the tropical nature Merlin dismounts his horse and checks his saddle as he parlays.
Merlin: “I had meant to tell you… I’ll be entering alone.”
Nick: “Why on Asgard would you do that?”
Merlin: “Wait outside.”
As a snake catches Nick’s attention, it crawls quickly to Ana. He immediately draws his dagger and throws it into the mouthtail. By now Merlin is gone without a footprint and another snake slithers passed them and the horses, soon many snakes are crawling thru the grasses and as most incline their passes it nonetheless scares the steeds beyond the reeds. As the equines bolt Nick tries to stop them but is bucked and thrown is he with a dulled torch to a tree, Ana spins the torch in her hand and sets it aflame then hands it to him.
Ana: “Kill anything that moves.”
Nick: “What’s happening?”
Ana: “Snakes are blind and hunt by smell and a vision of heat, something wicked this way comes.”
Ophiuchus: (to Ana) “Make right something here, I verily haven’t fie about you, ne’er I have, ne’er I will, but you sir, any day you live is yet time to kill.”
Nick: “If you only knew.”
Nick rushes to Ophiuchus with torch in hand, unbeknownst of the many snakes approaching Ana, the slithering soon establish waves that are utterly inimical to clerical rank and file, and this time they do not flee, hissing and attacking with eyes of glassy black oblivion to crack the sky with gleam. As swords clash her fire spreads as a violent rash against them and daisies, the clouded days of autumn trap humidity and humility into the jungle, the plants dry beneath her feet and soon small serpents make their retreat from the fire that scorns, greater than the thorns larger snakes crawl meticulously more perfidious and clever. The fire is modern signal for Troy and phoenix Alerion to make landing, Troy stops one of the larger snakes with an arrow from on high, but the largest of snakes approach. It curves and sleeks while fighters trade blows and strive to stay alive by twisting limbs and various throws, violent beyond repetition and dangerously beyond malady.
The massive snake crawls for Ana so long that when Nick trips backwards over it, he turns and hacks at what he believes is a reptile much smaller than it truly is, in fact his hack and sever does not even register in the mind of the massive serpent tail. Alerion, quick to feast a festal peckish beak, falls and fights for death to rights, the creature slithering in the ashes coiling and toiling with survival. Troy shuffles as best he can to stay hidden, but as Ophiuchus is breaking Nick’s leg while sitting on the ground, he spots Troy in the distance. He breaks Nick’s back with a boot between the shoulders. He claws into the earth to stop Ophiuchus, his legs not working, his vision fading to black. Troy lets loose an arrow from whitish fingertips and porcelain bow, which travels ever fast into Ophiuchus’ one good eye,
Ophiuchus begins to mock the white archer because he can still see very clearly the silhouettes of a body’s heat, a different color to him, one that tinges of mystery and reserved unrelenting temperatures.
Ophiuchus: “Oh, why, give me my eyes, rivers of blood for my eyes, alas the darkness!”
Ana delves into waves of radiant heat to push the large scaly fiends from herself, which at fury turns to forefront fire. She attempts to stay near Alerion’s power but it leads her erratically to and fro as it hunts serpents in the sand and ash without tethered knowledge that she follows it. Nickolas is awakened by the mere thought of loss and death as Ophiuchus continues to take a marching step between moments of pause in misdirection, luring Troy closer to his grasp.
Ophiuchus: “A realm for my eyes, you took my sight, and I cannot see, come close archer, seek these hands and I will show you wretch.”
As Troy looks upon his foe, he gets dangerously close and Ophiuchus leans and vaults to grasp him, the launch of an instinctual snake.
Nick: “He can see you!”
Nick dives in competition, gusting into Ophiuchus’ side and sacking him cleanly off his feet and to the ground, a heavy battle to Nick’s advantage resumes to ensue. Ophiuchus in desperation for escape grabs the body of a colossal snake in command by thought and is dragged to provisional safety from Nick as he searches the ground for his sword in the ground-fires of dusk. While Nick unsatisfied with losing looks he screams unable to find his nemesis before delivering a cut of fate, but Ophiuchus is near Troy again, ready to confront without aversion.
Ophiuchus: “Give me your heart to keep me alive.”
Alerion leaps between Ophiuchus and its master Troy, as Nick takes Troy from immediate danger the phoenix howls in Ophiuchus’ face, so close he can only sense a familiar face of intense fire. He dives beneath the phoenix between its legs as it curls its head beneath itself, then tries to sit on the serpent man but misses. Ophiuchus runs into Ana’s back in his escape, knocking her onto the ground to her dismay, the snakes are still in thought to attack her fire and in her passionate fears she reaches to the clouded stars. A fountain of liquid fire pours from her hands in all directions for only a moment, and then her hands slam at the ground to her sides, an angry ripple of fire turns everything in her magic’s path to the ashes of the wake.
Troy dashes the occasional surviving snake with his scimitar as Ana approaches him, they gaze their eyes over the mess, then look for Nick. He is in full pursuit of Ophiuchus, as he gets close a large snake bites his ankle causing him to trip and tumble but with a trusty blade quickly decapitates the snake and rolls to his feet in nearly fluid motion. Coming close to the mountain Ophiuchus charges with avid desire and dives into a dark cave, head first and out of sight. The phoenix side steps infrontof the cave blocking Nick from entering, refusing to part with him by letting him enter the darkness of the earth, explaining to him in the form of short belittling squawks. Nick loth returns to Troy and Ana after having a short discussion with the bird of resurrection, with his shirt nearly lost to tatters arriving to Ana standing between three trees on fire, he takes Ana in his arms as they share deep affection and fall to the ground for the other.
Merlin walks the dark caves, smooth to the touch, rough to the senses. He holds his hand into the air and to the tunnel afore him, from his skin a collection of ringed tattoos and scars on his bones glow a pale blue yonder into the darkness, when the wind blows it makes his incandescence gleam, to the air of warmth he follows. The tunnel floor has graphite dust and abandoned cobwebs, the darkness forms a bond with the silence of the deep, no surprises effect the mystery of exploration, pure sensation drifts in the air, the pique of love and the lust of affection, breathing are the battle wounds of memories and dreaming are the harlot tunes of mystery. For as Merlin approaches the antechamber with the waterfall wall Etain bathes in a pool of wonderful light as Lynn carries like smoke across her bath and unto the curtain of aqua.
Lynn: “You will destroy Merlin, shame him or kill him, can you do as such?”
Etain: “All men require not magic but merely desire to see things burn.”
In the reflection of shadows in blind darkness a light assumes a glow behind a door’s curtain from below it into tunneling darkness. Merlin ends his radiance to peer into the depth, the floor beneath his feet becomes smooth and level and closer still he hears the falling water. Etain rises salaciously from the water and enters her robe, to the couch she rests and pans the pages of a forgotten book when she hears the curtain make only the slightest move in the air because of his peeking fingertips.
Merlin makes his entrance steadfast, poignant to direct approach he breathes containing a racing heart, the room fills with fire as if she is the heart of a dragon, filling the room with flame until immersing Merlin to immolation. He pulls apart the air afore himself like opening a stage curtain as heavy fire momentously collapses to the walls, with steel thunder he divides the fire and continues walking, her hand reaches upward and summons a flaming rose with black stem, a flaming orchid, with it held high in the palm of her hand it begins to burn and cinder. He glides with winded pace like apparition in night and takes her to the roving floor of golden pedals, like kindling they ignite causing the room again to fill with fire pushing out the window of rain.
In divine heresy a pointless miracle of loving hearts and dark tranquility, blind shadows in their blood in a lost forest, but near dawn Merlin awakens and sees her sleeping, he kisses her brow and a thin layer of wind magic covers her skin, feeding incineration as she continues dreaming with her soul afire. He leaves her a note and drinks red wine that he finds is not wine at all, it is blood. For such he decides to leave a pedal resting on its red surface. Putting on his robe he walks thru the waterfall, his clothes soak and seeming blurry thru the water he disappears.
Merlin 2:38 “Wasted Sacrifice”
Merlin 2:38 “Wasted Sacrifice”
By dint of apterous leap the growingly tenuous descent, his clothes drying and fluttering, as his perfect posture with featherless arms abroad vastly, his eyes closed and back arched he dreams of what he can see. In sooth, he has made theft of a golden dagger, as he falls he holds his arms like wings then takes it from his shirt, afore the ground he points the dagger at his chest.
Nick: “Revelation, here I come falling, oh grave, where is thy victory her voice resides.”
Increments later, he liquefies thru impact, chthonic and regilding. The wind carries Lynn as a slow fog over broken stone and idle ground, to the narrow canyon floor of stones and pebbles she appears from smoke before the storms of the mind in the crevasse deeply of relaxation and meditations, she humbly waits as a secularist heir, amazed she cannot classify the pool of blood and battered rags. Prediction cannot balance unequal paths, for as she waits the grand phoenix carefully enters the craggy corridor with gusts of wind and apprehensions. Her survival is choosing the safest concept of distance different to her revealed existence, so as it lands, she walks into the fog and hides spying disposed.
Troy focuses on the displayed venerable suicide to find triviality, as Nickolas focuses on memories to find his pain. He elevates his mind to abandon emotion, consuming manna to regain life. As he imagines where the wind begins, Lynn revels in the power of such magic for a spirit in the nothingness and shadows. She moves toward the young rider whose skin seethes the oil of edelweiss petals and resembles leather. Hiding from her discovery, she steps in silence thru the air to avoid the phoenix of sun-tinged steel and coal-covered soot with feathers protruding of equity design. Her hand reaches forth to corrupt the guise of him, but her powers are worthless while hiding in cloud, she tries a hex correct to fill his blood with allergy but he is impervious to her magic while she is hiding herself in his presence. Alerion hears a pebble roll and turns to howl a fear annulled, what bit of Lynn is visage forth retreats in form of mist.
The burning woods long below the mountainside satiate after the fires contributed to the collapse of the city of glass, partial whence the deluge and survival requires floating thru melted ice. Merlin wrestles the descending currents and blocks of ice among the flotsam of a broken bastion as Ana screams, lashing with wroth, outraged by drowning as she searches desperately for any kindling to burn beneath the water in the flood on the face of the mountain, to make air from boiling water with her fire. Verging and fighting the collapsing palace are the other bodies, many dead, in the current. Fire to ice essence, Ana is sitting in a charred wooden royal throne reclined and floating down river, nearby Merlin on his back floating feet first downstream.
Ana: “Are you dead yet Merlin?”
Merlin: “I am hearing. Where are the others?”
Ana: “Help me Merlin, I cannot swim.”
Merlin rolls on his side, then his stomach, he begins to crawl across the river as if it were a drawn rug.
Ana: “How do you do that?”
Merlin: “Air floats above water.”
Merlin guides and drags the broken throne to the riverbank where they exit and respite while discarding the makeshift raft with burns that resemble her handprints. Bloody clothes taint the river red, farther along the banks other men climb to shore from the current, some are allies and one is Quinn, some are foes and some are running for desertion. Between there are battles in the forest unscathed where leaf are falling aside the forest scorn by definitive line of immolation.
As Quinn walks to Merlin one of Halle’s reckless minions takes a young hostage of soldier, he moves from sight to hunted allay immediately upon hearing his name.
Kaian: “Where is Quinn? Where is he? Tell me or I’ll send this boy to a place far worse than this!”
Ana: “Would you believe us if we told you and let the boy go?”
Merlin: “Would you tell us why you want him?”
Kaian: “Want? Detest! He ruined a safe haven, he, would make us work, he, ruined everything, we would only take from others if we would not make, as we needed their ability, to give our time until dreams become reality, what, would a wealthy man know of sacrifice!?”
Merlin: “I’m sorry this is how you feel.”
Quinn behind kills Kaian with an arrow to the heart, he releases the blade from the hostage’s neck, he feels the arrowhead barely protruding from his chest, and the blood smears on his fingertips as he struggles to pull it forward thru himself, tho he lastly cannot. The hostage takes his dagger and finishes him.
Merlin: “Was that for practice?”
Quinn: “That was on principle.”
Merlin: “There are other ways to negotiate.”
Hostage: “You can’t negotiate with slavers and murderers.”
As Kaian falls Ana opens her arms to hug the former hostage.
Quinn: “The more things change, the more they stay the same. Ana dear, bring the boy to me.”
Quinn begins to rustle thru his drenched attire until revealing a pouch of coins, he hands it to the shaking youth. As he speaks, he begins untying belt and bandoleer, dropping his various weapons and scabbards to the ground.
Quinn: “Take those funds to the nearest town, keep them, but tell the first soldier you see that Quinn is alive, and I’m somewhere in the north woods, haste hence.”
The squire begins to run into the forest as Quinn pulls open his coat to examine his shoulder, finding nothing wrong he begins to remove his leather armor, heavy and soaked it falls to the ground piling upon itself.
Quinn: “We’re going to need horses.”
He walks to the river then kneels and begins to drink with his hand the cold water of a wintry mountain, eventually dunking his wetted hair to soak it again and wash his face before shaking his head.
Merlin: “What is your plan now, o wise and wet one?”
Quinn: “We cross this river. There is a redoubt not far anon.”
Ana: “Easy for ability, and harder still for you, I’m starting to reckon the captor was correct.”
Quinn: “It’s a barter town, a trading post by the militias after the plague; from there we’ll find a lead or follow a dunce minion of your favorite foe.”
By dint of apterous leap the growingly tenuous descent, his clothes drying and fluttering, as his perfect posture with featherless arms abroad vastly, his eyes closed and back arched he dreams of what he can see. In sooth, he has made theft of a golden dagger, as he falls he holds his arms like wings then takes it from his shirt, afore the ground he points the dagger at his chest.
Nick: “Revelation, here I come falling, oh grave, where is thy victory her voice resides.”
Increments later, he liquefies thru impact, chthonic and regilding. The wind carries Lynn as a slow fog over broken stone and idle ground, to the narrow canyon floor of stones and pebbles she appears from smoke before the storms of the mind in the crevasse deeply of relaxation and meditations, she humbly waits as a secularist heir, amazed she cannot classify the pool of blood and battered rags. Prediction cannot balance unequal paths, for as she waits the grand phoenix carefully enters the craggy corridor with gusts of wind and apprehensions. Her survival is choosing the safest concept of distance different to her revealed existence, so as it lands, she walks into the fog and hides spying disposed.
Troy focuses on the displayed venerable suicide to find triviality, as Nickolas focuses on memories to find his pain. He elevates his mind to abandon emotion, consuming manna to regain life. As he imagines where the wind begins, Lynn revels in the power of such magic for a spirit in the nothingness and shadows. She moves toward the young rider whose skin seethes the oil of edelweiss petals and resembles leather. Hiding from her discovery, she steps in silence thru the air to avoid the phoenix of sun-tinged steel and coal-covered soot with feathers protruding of equity design. Her hand reaches forth to corrupt the guise of him, but her powers are worthless while hiding in cloud, she tries a hex correct to fill his blood with allergy but he is impervious to her magic while she is hiding herself in his presence. Alerion hears a pebble roll and turns to howl a fear annulled, what bit of Lynn is visage forth retreats in form of mist.
The burning woods long below the mountainside satiate after the fires contributed to the collapse of the city of glass, partial whence the deluge and survival requires floating thru melted ice. Merlin wrestles the descending currents and blocks of ice among the flotsam of a broken bastion as Ana screams, lashing with wroth, outraged by drowning as she searches desperately for any kindling to burn beneath the water in the flood on the face of the mountain, to make air from boiling water with her fire. Verging and fighting the collapsing palace are the other bodies, many dead, in the current. Fire to ice essence, Ana is sitting in a charred wooden royal throne reclined and floating down river, nearby Merlin on his back floating feet first downstream.
Ana: “Are you dead yet Merlin?”
Merlin: “I am hearing. Where are the others?”
Ana: “Help me Merlin, I cannot swim.”
Merlin rolls on his side, then his stomach, he begins to crawl across the river as if it were a drawn rug.
Ana: “How do you do that?”
Merlin: “Air floats above water.”
Merlin guides and drags the broken throne to the riverbank where they exit and respite while discarding the makeshift raft with burns that resemble her handprints. Bloody clothes taint the river red, farther along the banks other men climb to shore from the current, some are allies and one is Quinn, some are foes and some are running for desertion. Between there are battles in the forest unscathed where leaf are falling aside the forest scorn by definitive line of immolation.
As Quinn walks to Merlin one of Halle’s reckless minions takes a young hostage of soldier, he moves from sight to hunted allay immediately upon hearing his name.
Kaian: “Where is Quinn? Where is he? Tell me or I’ll send this boy to a place far worse than this!”
Ana: “Would you believe us if we told you and let the boy go?”
Merlin: “Would you tell us why you want him?”
Kaian: “Want? Detest! He ruined a safe haven, he, would make us work, he, ruined everything, we would only take from others if we would not make, as we needed their ability, to give our time until dreams become reality, what, would a wealthy man know of sacrifice!?”
Merlin: “I’m sorry this is how you feel.”
Quinn behind kills Kaian with an arrow to the heart, he releases the blade from the hostage’s neck, he feels the arrowhead barely protruding from his chest, and the blood smears on his fingertips as he struggles to pull it forward thru himself, tho he lastly cannot. The hostage takes his dagger and finishes him.
Merlin: “Was that for practice?”
Quinn: “That was on principle.”
Merlin: “There are other ways to negotiate.”
Hostage: “You can’t negotiate with slavers and murderers.”
As Kaian falls Ana opens her arms to hug the former hostage.
Quinn: “The more things change, the more they stay the same. Ana dear, bring the boy to me.”
Quinn begins to rustle thru his drenched attire until revealing a pouch of coins, he hands it to the shaking youth. As he speaks, he begins untying belt and bandoleer, dropping his various weapons and scabbards to the ground.
Quinn: “Take those funds to the nearest town, keep them, but tell the first soldier you see that Quinn is alive, and I’m somewhere in the north woods, haste hence.”
The squire begins to run into the forest as Quinn pulls open his coat to examine his shoulder, finding nothing wrong he begins to remove his leather armor, heavy and soaked it falls to the ground piling upon itself.
Quinn: “We’re going to need horses.”
He walks to the river then kneels and begins to drink with his hand the cold water of a wintry mountain, eventually dunking his wetted hair to soak it again and wash his face before shaking his head.
Merlin: “What is your plan now, o wise and wet one?”
Quinn: “We cross this river. There is a redoubt not far anon.”
Ana: “Easy for ability, and harder still for you, I’m starting to reckon the captor was correct.”
Quinn: “It’s a barter town, a trading post by the militias after the plague; from there we’ll find a lead or follow a dunce minion of your favorite foe.”
Merlin 2:37 “As the Palaces Burn”
Merlin 2:37 “As the Palaces Burn”
Halls of terror and resolution mark no masquerade of ill repute and indigent awakening, ere soliloquy and recompense in half of host and tother conscripted, in the swell of bloodshed is the aching act of war. The fires of fugue and fury cast shadows on shining and thawing walls, silhouettes display but there are none to see them, for every warrior hunts and every wounded kills. The boisterous escape the brig to join the fracas and in tumult ravage the palace with perfidy, wherein they attack Halle. She morally wounds them all in grasp of time without alteration. Grabbing chests to freeze their hearts, wielding the nightmare blade whose wounds spread blood like ice flow and frostbite that spreads across their skin, evincing power and deferent allegiances.
To task the facilities of man of fear and fret began, what makes to gauge what shall divulge how the universe parses fragile demands, an immortal forester evades the demon of the snakes and a serpent of the ice within a frozen bastion of fires a lantern on an oblique mountain.
Nickolas: “I met a friend of yours; we cut him down in the street.”
Ophiuchus: “You are so easily conjectured at each undertaking.”
Nickolas: “Then fed him to small children.”
Ophiuchus: “I would have done the same.”
Nickolas: “I suppose you eat your young oftener?”
Ophiuchus: “Novelty and circumstance receiving and assimilated impress.”
Nickolas: “Lest to lay in hesitation and the further score indemnity behind solemnity.”
The roaming viper is longer than Nickolas is tall, it springs toward him and latches it fangs into him, one-fang spews venom to the floor having completely pierced his leg, from it the venom smokes with an air of sulfur as the second fang injects poison into his arteries. Nickolas trapped in sound mind and solemn armor, pinned beneath the heart of the viperid, takes a dagger from his belt and stabs beneath the scale its stomach causing it to relent and retract position. Ophiuchus’ share of the barter mended, improvidence at last the vice betrayed in humbling behest he slowly paces towards Nickolas dying while sharpening his scimitar, but the immortal resumes and rulls from decapitation. Soonest scare thru shadows to duel, cashiered and divested equipage manifest, the serpent having only its armored scales climbs through the rafters in haunt of Nickolas as the fractures begin to seep with smoke.
A predator hiding in the garret above harassed heathen, fostering prosperity but feigning wisdom, violence rattles outside the quarters, bestowment of reprisal and conduct early where the lunatic procures liberation. Nickolas hurls a dagger at Ophiuchus, it strikes him in the eye and summons a groan of discomfiture showing a split-tongue, but he does not fall nor stagger, only ardor as he pulls the blade from his skull.
Nickolas: “I am eye…”
Ophiuchus: “There are degrees of consanguinity.”
Nickolas: “I’m not hiding; I’m just indecent - if you could come back in a few minutes?”
Ophiuchus: “Stay there, you’re scaring me.”
Tones of frail levity met with the serpentine’s spite, sedition, and hisses within words. It is here that is elsewhere and else that is whilst, Merlin despairingly struggles beneath the magic Halle has cast to him, wires of mosaic fire binding him to the floor weave netting empowered by stormy skies that seem the same in dawn as dusk. Darkly bleak clouds of melancholic consternation, the castle foundation cracks again duly penetrated by a sacrament flame with full authority.
Latent despair of acclimation deposed by deposit pitiful, costumed is death by the sound of silence grotesque in disguise, malevolent deeds without words in servant quarters afterward and straightly, servitude of effectual convenience hardly notices, however obvious christening of sabotage. Stone with bracing masonry with effacing carpentry with lacing ice is razing of white quartz, the bastion is in disrepair and war is in fatal fury.
Ana is anxious to continue foiling with fire, increasingly desperate to climb the stairs of stories to take her into the clearing of the mountaintop. Her steps no longer tap on the hardened surface of the palatial glacial abode, for as the fortress of ice begins to melt her steps dangerously slip, all so as Halle approaches with a collection of personal guards mainly of higher ranks.
Halle: “Good, you are finally here; swallow these fires, heaven forbid, not the guest I seek.”
Ana: “The child in the darkness shall be feared by those in the light.”
Halle: “Than you shall die trying, kill her!”
The soldiers do not draw armed swords, to their disadvantage, Ana takes the first by his neck and scorches his throat closed before throwing him to the ground and drawing his sword in the process, with it she stabs the second and swings it at a third. Halle walks passed her with melting waters returning to a state of ice beneath her feet with patience and providence abound the tarried and tethered. Ana wills her blade to glow and steam the air, an enemy blade clashes with it but collides and bonds with the molten steel, she then opportune kicks her opponent down the stairs causing collisions with his comrades as they all tumble and fall. With a flick of her wrist, their uniforms begin to burn causing them to roll thru what puddled water they can gather as the heat melts the steps anew causing them to slip and stumble in pursuit, for her fires do not last while in contest with the magic Halle has summoned to retain the ice.
Merlin wrests riving bond of spiritual magic power, each coin is melting individual pools and the electrified wires that hold him tear and twist his certain imposition, his chest is bound and breaths are shallow as the glowing ice of night and the darkened clouds of sky are taken from him.
As the light begins to fade in his eyes he looks above, along the floor atop his head is a window, in the grey overcast flies Troy atop phoenix Alerion distantly seemingly a flicker no bigger than a match-head. As the coins melt and sink into the ice so does Merlin. The water pools around him and conducts the electricity thru his skin and bones. In constant agonizing impudicity, coetaneous the coins melt thru the floor, and the water nearly drowning him begins to drain. His tested strength wanes for manna and sorts of lair, as the empirical cylindrical coins drop to the floor below him as anguish crushes his burning bones and nerves still bound by the nexus of electrical light, his magic wind of rejection causes the cracking floor to shatter beneath him.
Merlin falls through the second floor because it is thin from the fires of the basin, two levels down the coins become disheveled and the hex breached, landing on his shoulder he convulses and immediately spews water among the soldiers fighting while the fallen die. A storm brews to howl over bastion and within it thunder, the aggression of symbiotes destroying the keep. Blades and sheaths in different spires, with differing fires the walls begin to rarefy as floors dilute, lumbering foes with fatal throws the evil throes intend to trade blows or die locked in accord.
Upstairs Nickolas scours for a skewer or a sword, but finds them nary. He swifts to the door for escape, yet finds it naught and guarded by the giant viper, Ophiuchus most deranged begins to throw and overturn tables and furniture to find Nickolas, albeit ice blocks prey from Ophiuchus’ black forked tongue he prowls and stalks, yet to the phoenix Alerion the secrets of ice are null. Both Troy and Alerion see the palace as a crippled lantern with bodies and blood, but near the serpentine warrior priest is the massive demonic viper, which to a phoenix piques pangs of insatiable hunger.
The huge fiery bird lands on the balcony outside the quarters where Nick fights Ophiuchus, Nick swings a board smashing what had remained of a stabbed eye, but dark foe veritably manumit verily in absentia dementia grabs him and then a whip and begins hanging Nick by his throat from the rafter. The orange phoenix with cold blue feathers that look like steel scales of its own smashes thru the door with its head, although oversized inasmuch unable to enter is undeterred, deciding to use its beak to frenetically tear the doorway until it large enough to pass.
The wind roars passed the outer breeches, but it shall not hold long hence soon to fail from fires burning amenities and bodies, once thru the door Alerion ravages the room to savage the viper, availing Nick and causing his nemesis to escape the isentropic tussle. Escaped and in a room of relics Nick quickly takes a pose in the fashion faux of armored busts, hoping that the glowing walls dare not reveal him, but the rouse falls short and just is he, ere aptly fallen to the grasp of gauntlet and pierce of spear. Whence juxtapose he takes a dagger not only from his hand but off the belt, Ophiuchus lifts Nickolas to throw him on a rack of swords and hoped to have tossed, doth Nick tear into him as an earnest wolf until dropped and climbing down with teeth of knives. Labor foe plenty by way for many laboring as the clangor of vicious battling in the nearby wings enters the hallway, before Nick can finish Ophiuchus he runs to avoid the dozen men, to hunt them as they come to their leader’s aid.
Another tremor trembles the fortress, the shattered ice resembles precise diamonds clearly glittering beautiful, melting in places as fractures reflect thru the transparent walls, as eyes find reflection in watery surfaces, panes broken where picture windows have leapt, the cold torrent of encircling air is the only chance the city of ice has of avoiding erasure. The forest fire is to the foothills, the blazing empire churns the hallways into earns, and a phoenix born in flames rattles in a room with a balcony wall. Smooth knives of jagged broken glass, tinted windows destroyed and concise shards cover the floor, the snake in its path to destruction wrecking much of the obstacles in its course, having the opportunity to consume. Forthcoming attack improves upon the phoenix as its desire to consume what rages beneath the snake’s surface quickly evolves into the death of a serpent. Troy, avian cavalryman, also reveals his unintentional hiding place beneath the surface of miscellaneous debris. Nickolas in his escapade has chosen to reenter the room where Alerion and Troy consume the dead snake. He enters the door to see only the snake’s head and thinks it still alive, so he throws his sword point into its skull, causing the avian and rider to laugh at his expense.
As the minions attack mercenaries, Merlin stands and takes a sword, with it he walks exiting the room stabbing and slicing the wounded foes trying to grab his legs and dying at his feet. With his magic of the wind and the flames that won’t rescind, he is dry in little time and damaged clothes, he searches for Halle and finds her, she turns to suppose him following but with the wind he gusts a burning drapery afore himself. Again, after many footsteps, she turns to presume that he follows, but his windy conjuration hides him within flames, thrice of more she turns to surmise him closely in pursuit, yet this time his presence of fire is unsuitable as disguise and as she draws a blade to cut him he throws fire with wind at her in his defense. It does not scorn her nor postpone his predicament
Merlin: “You will never have Albion.”
Halle: “So much sooth lost and replaced with lies."
Above them the floors have filled with water caused from the heat of the winds of the burning countryside, under such great pressures the ceiling collapses bringing with it walls and diluvium torrent as low-burning fires slake from the draining flow. A wall of ice has fallen and filled with water trapping her like a fish in a glass. She pounds her fists contemporaneous on the clear ice causing a low sound to thunder the foundation and shake the walls.
Merlin: “I hunger for the hungered, slay for the slain, hunt for the hunted.”
He takes brief steps to her icy prison, his hand on the surface brushes a silted layer of rime, which grows increasingly deferent to her magic, and her face resembles anger and nonplus.
Merlin: “I …sleep for the sleeping, fall for the fallen; I wake, for thee, awakened.”
She stares knowing that trapped is she in ice or water, for if she does else but as to hold her breath, she will surely sink and drown. Tho if she freezes time the ice for her becomes air and she thusly will drift to the surface or sink to its depths, because one is without alter, she is to choose the latter. With temporal sands still hidden in Merlin’s moral fabric syncopated with time, but not outside it, as thru his eyes Halle seems to turn to black smoke within the dark blue primal caisson, elements to quintessence the water becomes her air as she rises from her climes. As Merlin blinks a second time, she is absent.
Naught for noting, the mountain warms, the dark ice within narrow foundations beneath the darkness begins to melt. Where ice remains Halle soon regains her grip on fluidic time, pulling herself to the surface and climbing unencumbered by frigidity, the high winds in the twilight of the thunder god put whiles near the doting mountain peak, thereby stands her sister witch Lynn, in fascination watching Halle climb from the smoke without aid.
Interred by dilemma Nickolas searches for Ana, she duly searching for him, passing the symbols melted from archways, barely able to notice whom amongst themselves suffers as they frantically scour, opaque regularity consumes sight as firelight blights every thawing surface. As for Merlin, with an incantation lightning becomes a volatile and painful restraint for malefactors and brigands as the water recedes from his footsteps.
From the dark magic brews a blizzard, under new lenticular snow the palace of ice likewise in frozen degrees begins to tear from the mountainside, stretching dark lightning with damage of fire and ice, Nickolas turns to see the edifice torn from him and with great melancholy and dour he falls on his knees and weeps.
The phoenix and Troy fly from the crashing castle as if it were a broken branch, while the pawns of white crystal ice endeavor to cull the remaining bright fires within the walls of the mind, body and souls of the great mages in good form. Eventful as they notice Nick and attack him, including the draugur created by the termagant Ophiuchus, as he torments he thinks he sees people at the distant edge of the scorched forest whom are no more than memory and lament cast into his watery eyes. Possessed by the fire the torrential snow-bounded sky, covering the ground with the scenery of winter, he turns and slaughters almost twenty men. In facing the new draugur he wastes no time cutting open his chest and wresting the darkly radiant heart before his foe can fall empty and dead again.
He stares at the heart covered in black oil as it piques thru him disgust and bleak repose, he takes the dark crystal ball from the floor, contemplative absolutism deigns to the furies of revenge and isolated disinterest, until he hears a woman scream, which to his hearing triggers hopes that it is Ana. Very alas, it is Lynn, one slippery flight of stairs above him, screaming of her detestation and disapprobation. As she notices his face ascend the stairs her feet turn to smoke that carries her into the shadows, he leaps the trickling water of the icy stairs to the floor and follows with his fervent might, through this he finds a single set of stairs hard and cold by the new winds whistling through the decimated walls. The summit of steps climbs to near the peak, an opening without door leads to the roof that merges with mountain. There stands Lynn speaking of plot and problems to Halle who listens while wringing her shawl of water before redressing, beneath storm the palace shatters again, smoke rising from-through the waters, she stands at the edge.
Nick charges for the witching sisters but Ophiuchus catches him and holds steadfast, the termagant is soaked, his serpentine face is blue from cold and his fingers are close to black with frostbite gained by climbing the sheer face of ice and destruction.
Lynn: “Likening prized knowledge, knowing what you know you lunge for me?”
Nickolas: “My life will end with your death.”
Lynn: “Drown will drinkers of the endless bottom waters.”
Ophiuchus: “It may be better to eat him.”
Lynn: “You come to me, stable boy, without bearing tithe or gift, I shall have to take your heart, stretch his chest.”
Nick struggles ineffectively as his shoulders stretch toward each other behind himself to the point of pain, but in this action, the dark orb reveals itself to be buried within his vestments, she pauses the racking by a wave of her hand and takes it from him, she then kisses him and insomuch distastes and disgusts him.
Nick: “Go show your serfs how insolvent you are.”
Lynn: “Throw him from the mountain.”
Nick: “Reckon me, o thee, beseech mine motive upon heathens, save me from this false and faithless vassal.”
Nicks words are effortless and feigned as he removes himself from captivity by breaking Ophiuchus’ knee, then arm, then back.
Nick: “My ardor yet you cast me? Why sorrow because of you, her sister? Sing and shine, grant me pardon, or lesser decrees, where I seek my own bounty, were it not bliss, wherefore is end of your grasp, I will be elated in ennobled earth.”
Halle: “Prithee let me end him nigh?”
Lynn: “I wit that but too well. If you are forever, then you will not end.”
Halle draws her dagger that glows with the light of the orb. Nick runs for the mountain edge and dives into the canyon ravine at the edge of the bluff. Halle sheathes her blade and the sisters walk to the edge and watch him fall deep darkness, far descending into a storm of madness. A hush over them comes swift as he enters the low weather and back hastens them as their garments flutter in the wind.
Ophiuchus: “I’d not like to do that again.”
Halle: “…but you have made great chaos despite them.”
Fraught with discommendation Halle and wounded Ophiuchus exeunt, as the witch of the fog, Lynn, leaves the mountaintop pursuant of Nickolas.
Halls of terror and resolution mark no masquerade of ill repute and indigent awakening, ere soliloquy and recompense in half of host and tother conscripted, in the swell of bloodshed is the aching act of war. The fires of fugue and fury cast shadows on shining and thawing walls, silhouettes display but there are none to see them, for every warrior hunts and every wounded kills. The boisterous escape the brig to join the fracas and in tumult ravage the palace with perfidy, wherein they attack Halle. She morally wounds them all in grasp of time without alteration. Grabbing chests to freeze their hearts, wielding the nightmare blade whose wounds spread blood like ice flow and frostbite that spreads across their skin, evincing power and deferent allegiances.
To task the facilities of man of fear and fret began, what makes to gauge what shall divulge how the universe parses fragile demands, an immortal forester evades the demon of the snakes and a serpent of the ice within a frozen bastion of fires a lantern on an oblique mountain.
Nickolas: “I met a friend of yours; we cut him down in the street.”
Ophiuchus: “You are so easily conjectured at each undertaking.”
Nickolas: “Then fed him to small children.”
Ophiuchus: “I would have done the same.”
Nickolas: “I suppose you eat your young oftener?”
Ophiuchus: “Novelty and circumstance receiving and assimilated impress.”
Nickolas: “Lest to lay in hesitation and the further score indemnity behind solemnity.”
The roaming viper is longer than Nickolas is tall, it springs toward him and latches it fangs into him, one-fang spews venom to the floor having completely pierced his leg, from it the venom smokes with an air of sulfur as the second fang injects poison into his arteries. Nickolas trapped in sound mind and solemn armor, pinned beneath the heart of the viperid, takes a dagger from his belt and stabs beneath the scale its stomach causing it to relent and retract position. Ophiuchus’ share of the barter mended, improvidence at last the vice betrayed in humbling behest he slowly paces towards Nickolas dying while sharpening his scimitar, but the immortal resumes and rulls from decapitation. Soonest scare thru shadows to duel, cashiered and divested equipage manifest, the serpent having only its armored scales climbs through the rafters in haunt of Nickolas as the fractures begin to seep with smoke.
A predator hiding in the garret above harassed heathen, fostering prosperity but feigning wisdom, violence rattles outside the quarters, bestowment of reprisal and conduct early where the lunatic procures liberation. Nickolas hurls a dagger at Ophiuchus, it strikes him in the eye and summons a groan of discomfiture showing a split-tongue, but he does not fall nor stagger, only ardor as he pulls the blade from his skull.
Nickolas: “I am eye…”
Ophiuchus: “There are degrees of consanguinity.”
Nickolas: “I’m not hiding; I’m just indecent - if you could come back in a few minutes?”
Ophiuchus: “Stay there, you’re scaring me.”
Tones of frail levity met with the serpentine’s spite, sedition, and hisses within words. It is here that is elsewhere and else that is whilst, Merlin despairingly struggles beneath the magic Halle has cast to him, wires of mosaic fire binding him to the floor weave netting empowered by stormy skies that seem the same in dawn as dusk. Darkly bleak clouds of melancholic consternation, the castle foundation cracks again duly penetrated by a sacrament flame with full authority.
Latent despair of acclimation deposed by deposit pitiful, costumed is death by the sound of silence grotesque in disguise, malevolent deeds without words in servant quarters afterward and straightly, servitude of effectual convenience hardly notices, however obvious christening of sabotage. Stone with bracing masonry with effacing carpentry with lacing ice is razing of white quartz, the bastion is in disrepair and war is in fatal fury.
Ana is anxious to continue foiling with fire, increasingly desperate to climb the stairs of stories to take her into the clearing of the mountaintop. Her steps no longer tap on the hardened surface of the palatial glacial abode, for as the fortress of ice begins to melt her steps dangerously slip, all so as Halle approaches with a collection of personal guards mainly of higher ranks.
Halle: “Good, you are finally here; swallow these fires, heaven forbid, not the guest I seek.”
Ana: “The child in the darkness shall be feared by those in the light.”
Halle: “Than you shall die trying, kill her!”
The soldiers do not draw armed swords, to their disadvantage, Ana takes the first by his neck and scorches his throat closed before throwing him to the ground and drawing his sword in the process, with it she stabs the second and swings it at a third. Halle walks passed her with melting waters returning to a state of ice beneath her feet with patience and providence abound the tarried and tethered. Ana wills her blade to glow and steam the air, an enemy blade clashes with it but collides and bonds with the molten steel, she then opportune kicks her opponent down the stairs causing collisions with his comrades as they all tumble and fall. With a flick of her wrist, their uniforms begin to burn causing them to roll thru what puddled water they can gather as the heat melts the steps anew causing them to slip and stumble in pursuit, for her fires do not last while in contest with the magic Halle has summoned to retain the ice.
Merlin wrests riving bond of spiritual magic power, each coin is melting individual pools and the electrified wires that hold him tear and twist his certain imposition, his chest is bound and breaths are shallow as the glowing ice of night and the darkened clouds of sky are taken from him.
As the light begins to fade in his eyes he looks above, along the floor atop his head is a window, in the grey overcast flies Troy atop phoenix Alerion distantly seemingly a flicker no bigger than a match-head. As the coins melt and sink into the ice so does Merlin. The water pools around him and conducts the electricity thru his skin and bones. In constant agonizing impudicity, coetaneous the coins melt thru the floor, and the water nearly drowning him begins to drain. His tested strength wanes for manna and sorts of lair, as the empirical cylindrical coins drop to the floor below him as anguish crushes his burning bones and nerves still bound by the nexus of electrical light, his magic wind of rejection causes the cracking floor to shatter beneath him.
Merlin falls through the second floor because it is thin from the fires of the basin, two levels down the coins become disheveled and the hex breached, landing on his shoulder he convulses and immediately spews water among the soldiers fighting while the fallen die. A storm brews to howl over bastion and within it thunder, the aggression of symbiotes destroying the keep. Blades and sheaths in different spires, with differing fires the walls begin to rarefy as floors dilute, lumbering foes with fatal throws the evil throes intend to trade blows or die locked in accord.
Upstairs Nickolas scours for a skewer or a sword, but finds them nary. He swifts to the door for escape, yet finds it naught and guarded by the giant viper, Ophiuchus most deranged begins to throw and overturn tables and furniture to find Nickolas, albeit ice blocks prey from Ophiuchus’ black forked tongue he prowls and stalks, yet to the phoenix Alerion the secrets of ice are null. Both Troy and Alerion see the palace as a crippled lantern with bodies and blood, but near the serpentine warrior priest is the massive demonic viper, which to a phoenix piques pangs of insatiable hunger.
The huge fiery bird lands on the balcony outside the quarters where Nick fights Ophiuchus, Nick swings a board smashing what had remained of a stabbed eye, but dark foe veritably manumit verily in absentia dementia grabs him and then a whip and begins hanging Nick by his throat from the rafter. The orange phoenix with cold blue feathers that look like steel scales of its own smashes thru the door with its head, although oversized inasmuch unable to enter is undeterred, deciding to use its beak to frenetically tear the doorway until it large enough to pass.
The wind roars passed the outer breeches, but it shall not hold long hence soon to fail from fires burning amenities and bodies, once thru the door Alerion ravages the room to savage the viper, availing Nick and causing his nemesis to escape the isentropic tussle. Escaped and in a room of relics Nick quickly takes a pose in the fashion faux of armored busts, hoping that the glowing walls dare not reveal him, but the rouse falls short and just is he, ere aptly fallen to the grasp of gauntlet and pierce of spear. Whence juxtapose he takes a dagger not only from his hand but off the belt, Ophiuchus lifts Nickolas to throw him on a rack of swords and hoped to have tossed, doth Nick tear into him as an earnest wolf until dropped and climbing down with teeth of knives. Labor foe plenty by way for many laboring as the clangor of vicious battling in the nearby wings enters the hallway, before Nick can finish Ophiuchus he runs to avoid the dozen men, to hunt them as they come to their leader’s aid.
Another tremor trembles the fortress, the shattered ice resembles precise diamonds clearly glittering beautiful, melting in places as fractures reflect thru the transparent walls, as eyes find reflection in watery surfaces, panes broken where picture windows have leapt, the cold torrent of encircling air is the only chance the city of ice has of avoiding erasure. The forest fire is to the foothills, the blazing empire churns the hallways into earns, and a phoenix born in flames rattles in a room with a balcony wall. Smooth knives of jagged broken glass, tinted windows destroyed and concise shards cover the floor, the snake in its path to destruction wrecking much of the obstacles in its course, having the opportunity to consume. Forthcoming attack improves upon the phoenix as its desire to consume what rages beneath the snake’s surface quickly evolves into the death of a serpent. Troy, avian cavalryman, also reveals his unintentional hiding place beneath the surface of miscellaneous debris. Nickolas in his escapade has chosen to reenter the room where Alerion and Troy consume the dead snake. He enters the door to see only the snake’s head and thinks it still alive, so he throws his sword point into its skull, causing the avian and rider to laugh at his expense.
As the minions attack mercenaries, Merlin stands and takes a sword, with it he walks exiting the room stabbing and slicing the wounded foes trying to grab his legs and dying at his feet. With his magic of the wind and the flames that won’t rescind, he is dry in little time and damaged clothes, he searches for Halle and finds her, she turns to suppose him following but with the wind he gusts a burning drapery afore himself. Again, after many footsteps, she turns to presume that he follows, but his windy conjuration hides him within flames, thrice of more she turns to surmise him closely in pursuit, yet this time his presence of fire is unsuitable as disguise and as she draws a blade to cut him he throws fire with wind at her in his defense. It does not scorn her nor postpone his predicament
Merlin: “You will never have Albion.”
Halle: “So much sooth lost and replaced with lies."
Above them the floors have filled with water caused from the heat of the winds of the burning countryside, under such great pressures the ceiling collapses bringing with it walls and diluvium torrent as low-burning fires slake from the draining flow. A wall of ice has fallen and filled with water trapping her like a fish in a glass. She pounds her fists contemporaneous on the clear ice causing a low sound to thunder the foundation and shake the walls.
Merlin: “I hunger for the hungered, slay for the slain, hunt for the hunted.”
He takes brief steps to her icy prison, his hand on the surface brushes a silted layer of rime, which grows increasingly deferent to her magic, and her face resembles anger and nonplus.
Merlin: “I …sleep for the sleeping, fall for the fallen; I wake, for thee, awakened.”
She stares knowing that trapped is she in ice or water, for if she does else but as to hold her breath, she will surely sink and drown. Tho if she freezes time the ice for her becomes air and she thusly will drift to the surface or sink to its depths, because one is without alter, she is to choose the latter. With temporal sands still hidden in Merlin’s moral fabric syncopated with time, but not outside it, as thru his eyes Halle seems to turn to black smoke within the dark blue primal caisson, elements to quintessence the water becomes her air as she rises from her climes. As Merlin blinks a second time, she is absent.
Naught for noting, the mountain warms, the dark ice within narrow foundations beneath the darkness begins to melt. Where ice remains Halle soon regains her grip on fluidic time, pulling herself to the surface and climbing unencumbered by frigidity, the high winds in the twilight of the thunder god put whiles near the doting mountain peak, thereby stands her sister witch Lynn, in fascination watching Halle climb from the smoke without aid.
Interred by dilemma Nickolas searches for Ana, she duly searching for him, passing the symbols melted from archways, barely able to notice whom amongst themselves suffers as they frantically scour, opaque regularity consumes sight as firelight blights every thawing surface. As for Merlin, with an incantation lightning becomes a volatile and painful restraint for malefactors and brigands as the water recedes from his footsteps.
From the dark magic brews a blizzard, under new lenticular snow the palace of ice likewise in frozen degrees begins to tear from the mountainside, stretching dark lightning with damage of fire and ice, Nickolas turns to see the edifice torn from him and with great melancholy and dour he falls on his knees and weeps.
The phoenix and Troy fly from the crashing castle as if it were a broken branch, while the pawns of white crystal ice endeavor to cull the remaining bright fires within the walls of the mind, body and souls of the great mages in good form. Eventful as they notice Nick and attack him, including the draugur created by the termagant Ophiuchus, as he torments he thinks he sees people at the distant edge of the scorched forest whom are no more than memory and lament cast into his watery eyes. Possessed by the fire the torrential snow-bounded sky, covering the ground with the scenery of winter, he turns and slaughters almost twenty men. In facing the new draugur he wastes no time cutting open his chest and wresting the darkly radiant heart before his foe can fall empty and dead again.
He stares at the heart covered in black oil as it piques thru him disgust and bleak repose, he takes the dark crystal ball from the floor, contemplative absolutism deigns to the furies of revenge and isolated disinterest, until he hears a woman scream, which to his hearing triggers hopes that it is Ana. Very alas, it is Lynn, one slippery flight of stairs above him, screaming of her detestation and disapprobation. As she notices his face ascend the stairs her feet turn to smoke that carries her into the shadows, he leaps the trickling water of the icy stairs to the floor and follows with his fervent might, through this he finds a single set of stairs hard and cold by the new winds whistling through the decimated walls. The summit of steps climbs to near the peak, an opening without door leads to the roof that merges with mountain. There stands Lynn speaking of plot and problems to Halle who listens while wringing her shawl of water before redressing, beneath storm the palace shatters again, smoke rising from-through the waters, she stands at the edge.
Nick charges for the witching sisters but Ophiuchus catches him and holds steadfast, the termagant is soaked, his serpentine face is blue from cold and his fingers are close to black with frostbite gained by climbing the sheer face of ice and destruction.
Lynn: “Likening prized knowledge, knowing what you know you lunge for me?”
Nickolas: “My life will end with your death.”
Lynn: “Drown will drinkers of the endless bottom waters.”
Ophiuchus: “It may be better to eat him.”
Lynn: “You come to me, stable boy, without bearing tithe or gift, I shall have to take your heart, stretch his chest.”
Nick struggles ineffectively as his shoulders stretch toward each other behind himself to the point of pain, but in this action, the dark orb reveals itself to be buried within his vestments, she pauses the racking by a wave of her hand and takes it from him, she then kisses him and insomuch distastes and disgusts him.
Nick: “Go show your serfs how insolvent you are.”
Lynn: “Throw him from the mountain.”
Nick: “Reckon me, o thee, beseech mine motive upon heathens, save me from this false and faithless vassal.”
Nicks words are effortless and feigned as he removes himself from captivity by breaking Ophiuchus’ knee, then arm, then back.
Nick: “My ardor yet you cast me? Why sorrow because of you, her sister? Sing and shine, grant me pardon, or lesser decrees, where I seek my own bounty, were it not bliss, wherefore is end of your grasp, I will be elated in ennobled earth.”
Halle: “Prithee let me end him nigh?”
Lynn: “I wit that but too well. If you are forever, then you will not end.”
Halle draws her dagger that glows with the light of the orb. Nick runs for the mountain edge and dives into the canyon ravine at the edge of the bluff. Halle sheathes her blade and the sisters walk to the edge and watch him fall deep darkness, far descending into a storm of madness. A hush over them comes swift as he enters the low weather and back hastens them as their garments flutter in the wind.
Ophiuchus: “I’d not like to do that again.”
Halle: “…but you have made great chaos despite them.”
Fraught with discommendation Halle and wounded Ophiuchus exeunt, as the witch of the fog, Lynn, leaves the mountaintop pursuant of Nickolas.
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