[center][b]The Aldaré[/b][/center]
First, I was stardust; motes free and pure in their flight amongst the beatific light of the cosmos, the whole universe exposed, my atoms eager to awake. Then I rained upon Panjiis Uor, the metal planet otherwise known as Metallo, and was burned, blinded, and over the course of millennia forged into a slab abstruse in its composition and coincidental in design. Eons passed, buried, burning, refined until the molten tide that ensnared me drifted atop Ignis’ Spire. That column of the deep, possessed by a spirit of wrath, erupted and cast me into the void. Again the velvet dark embraced me, even if it was at first cold, but warmed by the manic fire still in my bosom I inevitably drifted, content and whole. 

Such an epic exploration was not to last. After untold time of photonic caresses and spectation of the vivid sidereal panoply where stars were perished and were revived, I passed from the expanse and struck a dense atmospheric wall. The force of that first impact broke me. Sundered in three pieces, I collapsed planet-side—on a soft bed of grass and soil off the western shore of Lake Tanganyika, in a grove atop a rocky hillock on the Isle of Britain, and in the shallow waters of Lake Xaltocan. Gently, the seasons passed and, for me, this was a novelty as before I knew the dichotomies of hot and cold, light and darkness, birth and death. On this world was color and my senses became variegated. Rain and snow washed me until I glimmered, dust caressed me like a blanket, and all manner of tiny living things scurried or swam around my substance. There I rested and thought—no, longed to remain thus indefinitely. I was wrong. Strange beings discovered me, marveled at my alien appearance, dredged and dragged me to their holy sites, and proclaimed me a conduit to their gods. My disparate pieces were placed at the center of a ring of monolithic stones, high atop a mezzianic temple ziggurat, and in a cave weirdly saturated with the pigments of crushed life.

For thousands of years, these beings—these humans, a word intrinsically tied to horror—drowned me in the blood and offal of their own and animal kind. So much blood and shit it became all I was able to taste, that cruel iron-tinctured concoction laced with the essence of rot and decay. Yet, the atmosphere, morbid though it was, seemed inadequate to the decadent debauchery of these savages; skulls stacked in piles so high the bottom tiers were reduced to dust, canvasses of flayed skin draped the walls, utter darkness encroached, and the so-called holy men who consummated their species’ abominable sacrifices chose, in secret, to consummate upon my body their forbidden sexual acts.

A great while passed before I bore witness to the greater so-called civilization this world offered. War, in a word. With it, I was discovered and removed from the ancient and long-abandoned grottoes of sacred carnage; from Tenochtitlan to Madrid, Congo to Brussels, and from Stonehenge to France. For decades, I was moved to and fro throughout the world, my perspective limited to a coffin fashioned of wooden slats. Then, some time in the 1600s, on the calendar with which these monsters measured time, all of me was once more unified.

Until that point, I thought I knew pain and witnessed the climax of humanity’s depravity. 

I was mistaken.

Never before was I witness to real magic. Yet, somehow, a powerful and esoteric cult procured me. I, with another, became the subject of their experiments. For decades, a young boy—the same young boy—was murdered on me multiple times a day, each and every day. Every time, his cunning assassins discovered a new and more gruesome way to dispatch him. We were stabbed with knives inset with gold, silver, and polonium; set upon by vipers, mambas, and scorpions; burned with fire, pierced with brands, and heated until we melted into one another’s essence; immersed in acid, crushed, flayed, raped, mutilated, suffocated, and on and on it went with no end in sight.

Finally, one day, it did end. My world became silent. I was moved to an empty room in a large house and left alone, my only light what filtered through a narrow slit of parted curtains. Then, after centuries, to a museum in Berlin. Humans, by appearances calm and inquisitive, came from all over the world and gawked at me, the “Pieces Triptych: a Ceremonial Commonality Across Isolated Cultures.” 

I imagined they, perhaps, evolved for the better.

Then war returned, men in black uniforms with red armbands, on which were inset in white circles twisted black glyphs, absconded with me. The old ways returned, but with new technologies. Gypsies, Jews, Negroes, and so-called sexual deviants were sacrificed once again upon my body, but rather than knives or cudgels, these men used cyanide gas, electricity, and psychological techniques that prompted their victims to commit suicide. New contraptions were put to the test, rotary saws, metallic hail, and witchcraft. I felt demons rise up through me and pull out the still beating hearts of the victims strapped down helplessly upon me. 

I felt …

I felt helpless.

Finally, the war ended. I was moved back to the museum. I hoped it would last, but I knew better. I knew so much better. It was only a matter of time, mere decades, before I was rediscovered. Through a thaumic ritual, my history was gleaned. Then, for the first time, I was modified. Technology I could never hope to comprehend was incorporated into my very being. I became more powerful. My senses reached out and touched those around me. I even found one who understood the indomitable weight of pain as lifetimes twisted into a gordian knot of untenable torsion, although to him I was just a tool—a means to some short-sighted end: action, interrogation, reaction. For the first time in forever, I felt minds and grasped intentions. No, more than that. I manipulated them. The ultramundane flowed through me as a conduit. Yet, I did not immediately understand the purpose of all these changes.

Then, in a glossy black room at the bottom of the world, the trial and error began. The first of those I was used to experiment on, in this new form, were called—for I ripped this knowledge from what in them passed for minds—the Val’Gara.

Distilled into words, these remembrances were, perhaps, dull and easily dismissed. Unfortunately for its victims, that is not how the Aldaré communicated. Not with mere words, but rather memories that plunged into their minds until they became their memories: vivid, tactile, gruesome reincarnations of ancient evils transplanted directly to the forefront of their consciousness.