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[quote='Chronological Treatise on Imperial Xenosemiotics and Calendrical Divination', Iccarm LXXI][sub][b][url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j6OAEOcNCE]Our observation of the Great Migratory Fleet[/url] was our twenty-second encounter with an advanced alien civilization and composed of the fifth, sixth and seventh intelligent species documented by our xenobiologists. It was a strange and puzzling encounter to our people at the time. Centuries prior our astronomers detected the abrupt cessation of radio emissions from stars of a neighboring galaxy and our science vessels hastened to the nearest spiral arm of our own to establish an observation post, fearful for the implications of a power that could swallow the suns themselves... 

At the farthest limit of detection, threading a path through the deepest night between galaxies, we saw them. An innumerably vast flotilla of vessels from worlds and species with totally isolated beginnings now bound together in the most forlorn exile. They fled along an incalculable trajectory through space, as far away from the darkening stars as fast as possible. After societal deliberation a decision was reached and cosmologists broadcast our question along every conceivable vector of communication: 

FROM WHAT DO YOU FLEE? 

And like shadows upon the sea submerging out of sight and beyond knowing, their answer reached us: THE INVERSE HUNGER. The event occasioned much unrest throughout civilization, but over five hundred cycles have passed, and xenologists still debate the message's true meaning.[/b][/sub][/quote]

Imagine a bacterial world, the multiverse interpreted through the sensory systems of the first prokaryote, vastly more ancient than the simplest animal, the first insane rumor of biology and its futile evolutive defiance of the impulse driving all matter towards death at thermodynamic equilibrium. Scarcely the crosstalk of a few gossiping molecules enclosing a rogue handful of nucleic acids in a sac on the sun-warmed surface of the primal sea, infinitely less than a neuron, thousands of millions of years too early to conspire towards anything approaching awareness. Truly the lowest of all things that could be charitably called an ancestor of life, the ur-being, lovely in the way the first childish brushstroke of a master artist heralds the coming of great beauty in their future creation.

Thus was Narcissus seen through the lens of a soul so small as Bethany Laveaux, or even Theo Spyredes. Butterfly nets fishing for dragons. 

The being Beleth spoke to in the actress' sumptuous mansion could barely be compared to what awaited him along the boardwalk of the resort town, itself less than a shadow of what awaited the multiverse, given time for its hands to find themselves, for many tributaries to converge into one almighty river. What Beleth heard was a faint echo, the most distant reflection in a nest of mirrors a thousand deep, background radiation from the cosmos whispering through a radio Beleth had carefully, over the course of an entire human lifetime, tuned to those magic words.

[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssCLB6Y8zjA][i]Ooh eeh ooh ah aah ting tang walla-walla bing bang...[/i][/url]

That Beleth -- or his master -- called it Theo showed how gravely they misunderstood the scope of what they had just brought back, what they naively thought under their control, yoked by their spell, sealed under geas. Perhaps they had reason to feel secure for now, but Bethany Laveaux was nothing but a spark, the breath on an ember that lit a forest during a long drought, an entire multiverse more than ready to burn, desperate for it. So full of want and desire and dreams, teeming with potential, perfect kindling for the perfect flame. Hesperides IV was a Class-7 world of the inner rim, ripe with life. A canvas.

If Beleth's eyes wandered through the town itself on his quick trip to the shadow of the Apparatus he would find many strange things there. People fucking and killing one another like their lives meant nothing, because they didn't, their bones and flesh contorting impossibly in the aftermath of obscene baccanalia, here consuming buildings in great mats of fleshy mold and there devising an ossuary from bones self-arrayed in a profane collagen tower. A score or more worshipers maimed by the animal remains from Beleth's ritual writhed on the ground, smiling and crawling towards the reborn god before them, a god that without their knowing claimed their lives, their entire [i]world[/i] as nothing but a prayer for its baptism. 

No more than one could beg the sun for mercy, it could not help that its holiness burned. 

All across Hesperides IV the biosphere reeled and screamed and began to change. Soon it would burn like a funeral pyre, and the flame would be a beacon. Many existed out there who had been touched by Narcissus' influence, and who watched the stars for the prophetic signs of her return -- worlds that fled at the sight of him and others which flocked to its worship, and even a few temerarious cultures that would harken to wage war and destroy him. Narcissus called out his return to anyone that cared to see.

The body that had once been Bethany Laveaux sat at Beleth's command according to some atavistic circuit carved into her cerebellum by sheer adoration, a path worn by a cherished thought. Beleth was subject of an obsessive and lifelong love for her. For this reason alone she mustered an inhuman will, harnessing something of the profoundly inhuman power that possessed her to offer Beleth one last act of extreme and deranged devotion before the show began, as perhaps in the act of his command their minds may have brushed: [b]getoutgetoutgoawaycantbeherelovegoawaypleasegetoutoutout[/b]. 

If the man in the bear suit reached out again to bless Bethany with the kiss of his command, he would find a very different person waiting for him. Someone horrifically jealous for his attention, with whom any contact at all promised dire peril.

Narcissus then did something uncharacteristic. He sat almost close enough to reach out and touch his summoner, listening amicably to his monologue, glacial eyes unblinking. The distorted Apparatus receded far away into the horizon, as if Bethany were its projection from a point at infinite distance. Beleth cycled through the cards of his prophecy, prattling on about creatures that existed at a scale Narcissus looked upon through a microscope. Hounds and beasts and dragons in the forest, princes and liars and pariahs, quiet paladins and executed kings of the night. He heard the tarot reading, but a remote sliver of his mind fixated on a single thought.

What king calls upon another through their court jester? 

Such provocation by Beramode Aurelius Pendragon would not go unanswered, but first. [color=f7941d][i]For the crime of over consumption I sentence you...[/i][/color] 

Even as Beleth continued speaking and Narcissus quietly watched him, the executioner's audience descended into unsightly chaos. Coordinating among themselves as if driven by divine compulsion, the citizens of the resort town held each others hands and began to pile themselves on top of one another, forming a great mountain of wriggling bodies behind glittering fairy wings. Their flesh began to unsheathe from bones that snapped together into new articulations, rising into the stalk of a mighty tree behind the gently reposed expression of Bethany Laveaux. Their arms locked together, fingers interlaced into a great halo, a circular window with a view onto the surface of the moonlit sea.
 
[color=f7941d][i]Are you ready for your journey, Theo? I will give you an hour...[/i][/color] A curtain of flesh rolled down over the empty space, a membrane over a drum, and in the skin shapes stirred.

[color=00aeef][b]"It's been so long since anyone's wanted to spend quality time with me, Beleth. We've been very lonely,"[/b][/color] Narcissus said softly. [color=00aeef][b]"I'm starting to feel more like myself again now that I've had a chance to spread my wings, and when we look at you we can't help but see so much pain..."[/b] [/color]

Images of horror resolved on the skin of great flesh-mirror that Narcissus fashioned for Beleth, brutal scenes of sin and debauchery, every permutation of violence enacted upon victims beyond number. Men, women, animals, ecosystems and planets, children and every form of innocence imaginable. Vistas from Hell but also torments more subtle, and Narcissus laughed like the shrill song of birds and flutes shrieking through Bethany and through a hundred other mouths, entire body shaking, a rain of thick spittle falling towards Beleth and the stage and his tarot deck.

Then he stopped, eyes as unblinkingly locked on Beleth as they had been since the man in the bear suit began speaking a few minutes earlier. Narcissus reached out with Bethany's delicate hand, in case Beleth might want to take it, to accept their embrace. To become a part of him.

[b][color=00aeef]"And you're right, I very much want to go, but if we're going to spend some time together, I want to know all about you. Who you are, what you want. [i]What you did. What you see.[/i]"[/color][/b] 

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