[twwm] gold blood: soulsong intro - polaris
It was night when I came to my senses again, having laid down and allowed my mind to rest while my body was unable. Curled by my fireplace, I stand and stretch, the lantern on my back clinking gently against the branch of driftwood that rests in my fur.
There is a rumble in the vicinity around me, and suddenly I taste something in my throat - taste isn't the right word. I am swept over by a tidal wave of sensory emotion, hit and rushed under the surf. An uncanny vibration sweeps through the floor below me, shaking me to the core of my form, filling me with a terror I don't quite understand.
I curl back into myself, fear overtaking my mind, and all of a sudden:
I am languidly swimming in the pool of water that sits silent, an untapped crystal goblet below the reflection of a starry sky. My legs stretch out in front of me, gently paddling through the water, ripples disturbing what had been fresh and unchanged, a glassy hand-mirror in the grasp of some gentlewoman once.
There is a moment where I am confused about how I was pulled here, brought to be in this place that I used to detest. If I turn my head up to the sky, will it give me answers about the calling in my chest?
Looking back into the water, I rest gently before diving below the surface suddenly, in an impulsive twist of my body, splitting the waters and causing a splash behind me.
There is a world I have not noticed yet below the boundary of my bubbled in dome, the gentle flute of humming, singing Esks becoming muted as I dove deeper and deeper. The hoofbeats on the beach fall away, whinnies and neighs dropping into the background, replaced by the dripping of a singular splat of water...
I push down into the water, still clear, just darkened. My eyes sweep the walls of this infinite well, tracing simple seams and cracks of glowing, bubbling energy. A bright gold glimmering, the veins of the Conservatory. All sound had disappeared from my world now, left behind in the jet-wash wake of my impulsive grab for the bottom of the lake.
I follow the pulsing of gold leaf, driven by something I could not see. It leads me to a small hole in the dirt wall of my lake, the water staying outside of it. It kept itself separate from this new doorway, whereas the golden glowing veins swept inward, towards the artery of the Conservatory.
An uncertain tapping comes from beyond the mouth of the doorway, the dripping of water hitting silenced shrouds of leaves far within. I listen closely, the only sound in my world the forgotten drops of water that called me forward. I enter the doorway, swimming quickly. Suddenly, reverent energy grows around me, a holy silence hushing the dripping water to a dulled hum.
I am caught in the rosary cobweb of silence around me, entangled in beaded whispers that sweep me along, the current becoming stronger and stronger as I pass through it. There is no escaping now, wherever the water wants me, it would take me.
The gold in the veins on the walls raced along with me as I twirl myself, caught in a riptide in a suffocating dark tunnel. Sound comes back to my world after a few moments, the sermon of birds in the morning after the night has gone oh-so-gently to its death at the hands of the sunlight.
There is a word for it, I know, the silent grasping and scrabbling of my heart for the world outside my traveling compartment. The current begins to weaken as I struggle, evidently panicking as I imagine the tunnel tightening around my form, a corset non-conforming and crushing me instead.
With the imagined hurt of tunnel walls, I collapse in onto myself, curling again, hoping to become an impenetrable ball of guilt, grief, my bad emotions keeping the heralding and baying of pain at bay. The current grows ever louder as it summons and swirls me away into depths unknown, the glowing veins and whorls in the walls of the well dimming, fading into a inky midnight blue that pools into the gold.
It is like watching a poison spread through the leaves of a plant, infecting the capillaries as it crept through, a shadowy predator. The tunnel darkens, widens, and I am able to swim again. I uncurl into the now cruelly cold water, and force my way forward, battling the warring current as it held me back. Blue glitters in the corners of my eyes, and lapis lazuli arteries spiderweb through my vision in kaleidoscopic mandalas, leading me to an exit as light glows ahead.
There is the metallic taste once again gripping the throat I imagine I still have as light grows in front of me, blinding, washing away the darkness of those bruise-blue veins. I push and pull at the water ahead of me, desperate to escape the confines of my cage-like well, and I emerge.
Finally, I am where the sound of the dripping water echoed from, but there is no source. No river-head, no waterfall, nothing to indicate noise exists in this space. I turn my head above, and the walls are intricately carved and inlaid with bronze, crawling their way above me with diamonds and rectangles, squares and triangles. Ferns sprout from every available surface, and mosses accompany them, tiptoeing behind, courtiers to a monarch.
I look all around the room, the warmth and darkness enfolding me like yeasty bread dough. The tunnel-well that suffocated me and brought me here had disappeared, the pool where I emerged now empty and silent like the rest of this place. There is now another tunnel ahead of me, where the ferns have swept themselves away and are ready to welcome me in.