Here is the idea...I am currently obsessed with Runes. The idea for this piece is to draw a random rune and create a fictional storyline from my impression about that sigil. It's like a narrative poem based off dreams, ideas, impressions and runic mythology. Each stanza is inspired by a rune mentioned in the previous stanza, cept the first which starts from the void. I have no idea were this story will go. The runes are telling it. I am just the voice. Stanza One - The Void
I opened my eyes and reflexively pulled in a deep, gasping breath. The air was different, foul and heavy. But my lungs didn't rupture as I pulled in the first breath of a new world. The gaseous stretch of the air choked my throat, but a soft familiar sound hissed through the air. It reached me as a steady sound with a hint of aggression -- waves, ocean waves! The horizon stretching before me seems endless. It holds all the colors, spirals and swirls of a Van Gogh piece. Swirls of gas curl, unfurls and crumple in thick bands and claw across the sky with the grace of Orient Dragons.
I gasped, choking slightly on the sea water still lodged in my throat. "Eh...I...I am I on...Jupiter?"
How could that be? My last memory before I opened my eyes was the ever pressing ocean. A blue ocean churning with white waves. I looking at an ocean now, but it blood red...with overtones of green and blue. The whitecaps frothed purple. I am standing on a wooden pier. How could wood exist on Jupiter? There is no oxygen for trees to grow...and there isn't any solid surfaces. Just bands upon bands of turbulent
atmosphere, and yet here I stand on a pier, dripping with salt water that cannot be native to this planet.
I sink down onto the wood, testing its solidity. Another anomaly catches my eye, and I withdraw in pain. It is a flash of light suspended in the sky, a beacon shimmering with white blue fire, and than a soft dim washes over the disk of light. The semi darkness fades, the light flares back to life. It is as if the light is spinning. Pulsating.
My mind grasps the name of this anomaly. I had certainly never seen it on Earth, but I liked to think myself an amateur astronomer. That's a Pulsar. The flickering corpse of a dead star. A corpse...like me.
I shake my head, sobbed and wrench myself away from the blinding corridor of light. Something snaps, and the dock is littered with the sounds of tiny patters. The light dims and when I open my eyes I am shocked to find that pearls are falling from my neck, tiny shimmering relics from an ocean that overwhelmed me. Vainly I grasp as them, the white shimmers bounce once or twice and tumble into the ruby waves.
But I managed to grasp a stray few. One of the beads nestled in the palm of my hand is charred with a strange, black symbol. I knew this symbol and it confirmed my death.
Stanza Two - Eihwaz
It was a rune; a sigil of a language whose meaning was lost to most. The 13th rune, Eihwaz. The Yew Tree. The
Death Rune.
But I sighed in relief as I looked down at the tiny sign. Of course...I am dead. How else could I be here? The ocean
had not overwhelmed me, it killed me. But no tears sprung to my eyes, no flashes of my former existence surfaced. I could not recall much to keep my pinioned to that existence. I was transformed into something else entirely, a blank slate.
I turned round on the ghostly pier and was numbly shocked to find a mass of mist shrouded and, and towering from the land was a vast, gnarled tree, with prickly leaves and vivid red berries coloring its towering crown. A yew tree. These poisonous and majestic trees lived steadfastly for hundreds of years, their berries were highly toxic and their supple wood excellent for honed longbows. Long ago, these grim trees were commonly planted in graveyards. It was whispered that the souls of the dead could easily become trapped in the tangled branches of the yew. It makes perfect since for me awaken here.
I clutched the tattered remains of my gown to my flesh...I am so cold now...and shuffled across the pier and toward the immense roots of the yew. As I approach I note that oddly enough the yew seems to be spinning...its roots were crawling through the ground and pulling the tree into a sort of revolving axis. The wood creaked and howled as the tree moved, the needles shivered, causing me to shutter at the haunting sound in turn.
I steeped carefully past the shifting roots, and upward the mossy, gnarled bole of the tree. The hand I laid on the bark was far paler than it had been in life, but it bore the same black painted fingernails.
Than, in a rush ; images, tears, screams and waves broke me. I remembered. All the events that these eyes have ever witnessed. Each triumph, each tragedy, each love, each loss. It had been a string of sorrows that lead me to a forgotten beach on the Gulf Coast. Tragedy, loss and misfortune that caused me to dress in my most beautiful clothing, fill a backpack with books and rocks. Let the weight of words and stone drag me to the depths of the ocean.
I sank down against the shifting tree and wept. The soil was alien like everything else, a rusted Martian red. Dried blood red. But I supposed the tree of Death should grow a ground fertilized by blood. I dug my pale hand into the soil and let it fall through my fingers, blood powder stained my palm. But the powdery stains weren't in a random pattern, they traced a new sigil against my dead flesh.
- Posted using the awesomeness of Salazar Slytherin!
(up next, Berkanan, the Goddess. Otho - the heritage, and Keno, the lighthouse.)
