Merlin 3:40 “Benign Neglect”

Merlin 3:40 “Benign Neglect”

The mountain never moves as travelers approach it, a disordered catalog of truculent storms over the mountains reaching a summit that marks edge to a frozen stone sea of tossing granite waves and foreboding passage for many miles eventually landing in distant valley westward of the elven territory.

While in furtive confines elsewhere, Sino attends the haughty ideation paramountcy, lackadaisical syllogism, and penumbra rankled by intestate ubieties, duties inimical of tormented souls, in fact the same he attends to human prisoners, each attached to slanted crucifixes, strapped for experimentation of potions and spells, notions and nails, on and into the skin and eyes.

Sino: A spectacle, for your demise comes in the mind, as your eyes will see as release will sooth, screams and mine will not, tell me inclusively your pains and you mayhap live into a new dawning age of wisdom.

Save for the allusions of convocations the telling reverts to Merlin. White skies become angry and fill the lands below with clear waters and daylight, slowly piling to the sky in a fog that soon covers visible lands. Walk Merlin and a sordid troop morbid, marching in roving macabre in journey with the many not alive as much as and nor to be dead. A bleak meadow and a narrow path, guards take the wagon to a broader reception as they spend an hour in outright swamp. The utmost in foremost the primary ambivalence to travel with nights as days and days as night, without foisted fabric carapace. Persecuted by true light, sully their secretive reputations by pausing to stare at the light of breaking clouds at the summit’s edge, leaving Merlin and Ana to console and carol their cajole there candid.

Ana: Why does your coven bear the moniker ‘Crimson’ the color?
Lord Crimson: The lands beyond the peak are an unforgiving jagged fuck of a walk for many hectares, from the Vildhjarta Sea to Blackwater Park. The surface is very rough and once given to trolls, so roughly hewn that the only smooth parts are beneath the streams. A myth told to refugees and intruders that this entire mountain is the heart of a slain god once most high.
Ana: And crimson would that be.
Lord Crimson: Perhaps, but the story goes deeper.

Crimson spoke having seen a soldier approach, and speaks with a smile.

Crimson: Put us at stern alarm until the traitors’ capture, they are to enter destruction.
Mencius: Excellent sir Crimson, you have been announced and may enter the same.
Crimson: Very good, and the informants are to be denied entrance.
Mencius: Sir, there have been none for many passing weeks; we feel the traitors may have, exploited them, sir. Only the chattels remain.
Crimson: I have thirst; bring me one, flaxen perchance, and bring her a chair of wheels.

Crimson extends his hand for Merlin and Ana to enter the tunnel of torches.

Lord Crimson: No, the name Crimson comes by a more assured history, there were scribes many ages ago that devoted themselves to mapping the thorny doom we call home, every granite spike and eroded lull, some very many ages ago when it was still called Blackwater Mountain.

The chair of wheels arrives, wicker and tall, spindly and small.

Merlin: To which is become the park town you and I call Savanton.
Ana: Ah.
Lord Crimson: Those cartographers set themselves to carving stone atop the mountain for an outpost, which is where we are taking you.
(Merlin/Ana): Why?
Lord Crimson: Manners and secrets and how we plan to keep them, and we choose to go to depths the air is to thin or to vile for someone expecting. It is little worrisome and more chilled, but you both are of fire and should weather it or not. The mapmakers soon witnessed a vast war; it was, where from the valley several legions tried to scale the wretched side swiftly in secret, only to find slaughter by dragons or apt and antique ravenous beasts. From their post atop the stone, they watched the massacre and in a passage my kind finds dearly, called the color of blood to be crimson many times without different descriptor.
Merlin: How nice to keep us above the caverns.
Lord Crimson: I thought you would enjoy the nostalgia, the last place those humans ever saw before they died.
Ana: How did they die?
Lord Crimson: They tunneled into the mountain and found us of course, had we known they came from above nay below we might have aged them, but would not have done good, they had many years, like these doors.

Old oaken doors of iron lattice and steel posts woven between each hefty plank, made to keep many things out, or in, creaking open to reveal almost the second half of the day still hiding behind the mountain, and the solid splashes of once molten stone for a great distance.

Crimson: When the rains are from the south this room is dry, and on the rare event from the deserts, close the shutters.
Merlin: If they do not at first break, whence was last anyone residing here?
Crimson: The room has only had a single set of owners as I have told you. In this hall, there is a large bell should she start to give or need ye both a thing. I will be… nearby, until the day fully closes, enjoy the view, Merlin, Ana.

The tower to one side gives a clearing fog revealing a mountainside regal court in the face of the mountain only visible by weak moonlight, to the north the rugged ground leading to a radiant desert glowing red with the sunset at its center. For all her woes, alchemy within her blood mends and heals from the power and sight of a sunset desert glow.

~ @mjbanks