21st of Spring, 512 AV
The Sea Gates
The Sea Gates
Ulric forced his way to the bristle of gates, trudging over briny rocks pocked by the crust of limpets. They’d eroded, since last he’d ventured this way. The molten coals of his eyes delving over tangled cables, basely vaunting dikes of sundry jetsam, scouring them with a cursory appraisal, limned by a dredging grief. Taking in the gray faces, daubed by the vagaries of tempest, he swept by them like sordid chaff. “Pity," he grunted. “Pity, that they should’ve perished for such a vapid reason as power.”
Heavily, encased by layers of plate, leather, and scale, he tamed those unruly gazes, the fevered clasp of eyes over his enormity, swelling leonine over the debris of sundered dreams. He’d walk to the clank of chains, figuratively hushed yet even then, blaring over the rattle of carts, jouncing under leaden, burlap-wrapped burdens. His coals pried at their traces, seeing the cracks in the leather, the dull patina of neglect hung over unkempt mules. He kept his maul near, if only from custom.
They’d not remember his face, surely. That defiler, debased and cowled by the deceit of penitence. There he’d howled at the thunder, like a jut of bedrock before the jaws of the crows’ augury, as his flesh sloughed away. They’d given him life, forced him under fiery crucible, and now he judged. There was a tug of his jaw, short, spiky hair jerked by the gusts. The shorn seldom regret, or they’d surely perish under the lurching of their vanity. That gulf of ashes, clung by shreds of starkest reason. Those legions of moths ordained to flap, in suicidal banality, around the flicker of a flame. The splay of bare, glistening ribs under grisly snares of corpses. Then, the redly gleaming shreds of skin clung by maggots. These form the lay of scales.
From above, his ragged cadre of crows unfurled their wings, flayed their gristly, mocking way to the spires. They cackled, lifted tawdry.
Xhyvas' priest halted, looking around for the tang of veracity that was his hunger, then shambled away. There was a gleaning of vague, yet somber prophecy. These rocks were sepulchral. Those crenels, the myriad passages immolated by tarnish and corroding decay, harshly pitted by the nebulous, murmuring betrayal of despair, scarified into a mockery of prior majesty.
The squalor oppressed him.
Before him, tugging at rubble as grit clung to sweaty shelves of brow, loomed a parcel of knights, many stripped to a surfeit of skin, others hung by fragments of armor. Hastily, he conjured up a grimace, shirking from the impulse to call for thunder. They tease, he scowled, spying flecks of rust on a ringmail skirt. The sparing of oil, and this menial degradation, spoke plainly. They suffer.
Tepidly, he stared back at the sea. The jet tides, flung by the flumed crests of waves crashing over stony strand. The furl of his arms was glacial, folding over plated chest, gauntlets creaking. That inky, luxuriant cloak swelled around his slabs of shoulder, clasped by the inlay of silver inside carved, fluted bone as he grimly probed over the flutter of jaded pennants, the indolent rolling of lateen-rigged masts, lowering to hulls clung by barnacles over a blanket of tar. What d’you say when your towers are trembled, your ramparts breached? Why, you’re bereft, aren’t you? There’s only tranquility leaking away, leached by power beyond paltry disposal. They’ve subjugated you, these gods of yours. They jape with your souls. They’ve crumpled you, and for what? Their groaning, gormless climax of implacable ascendancy? That profaning tumescence of infernal, putrefying power, brutally manifesting in the curtains of their reign. They’ve yoked you, d’you see? The jarring gravel of a chuckle erupted from his chest. The throngs of sailors, artisans, and lost mendicants pressed in on him, blankly rupturing in their disregard. I presaged this end, and I cautioned all who’d listen.
Though residing in infamy, he jostled them with the veracity of his glare, trying to invoke understanding from discord. “Xhyvas, look over their misery,” he murmured, fervent in his desire to jerk away this fetid mantle, to restore what’d crumbled. “Take up my cause, and show them the way.”
