[center][h3][color=7ea7d8]The Pleiades Casino & Resort: Elevator to the Main Hall[/color][/h3][/center]

Idling before the wide-open double-cannon bronze doors of the elevator, my attention fractures. Cognitive shards linger on the interior ornamentation, the torment masquerading as architecture, design. Screaming faces. A film of cold grease. Gaping mongrel muzzles of lost souls in perpetual rictus, their contorting masks mashing against the thin metal as though it is mere silk, gilt drapery. Whoever waits within, I know not. Perhaps my disreputable imp.

Haunting my desiccated hollow, a ghost of apprehension elicits a phantom pain. What cause have I to be wary? Within dwells no memory of this path. I do not trust myself. Lurking in the scarified abscess of my instincts are allusions to what will transpire if I dare move onward.

[color=7ea7d8]“It is just an elevator,”[/color] I make a listless, unconvincing movement in its direction.

 This place beguiles, warps. It clings to me, its uncanny, insidious nature. I do not belong, yet am in its clutches. I grasp for my predicament’s twisted origin, of how I came to be in this couturish vision of hell that nourishes itself on souls, even my own. Refusing to be digested, I compel my thoughts backward, boring, augering through the weirding sediment and strata of my cyclic confinement. 

My ritual is a violent, auto-coercive technique that opens to a strange scene of quiet unease, but it is not what I seek. An abhorrent mote of authenticity, it is not what I desire to witness, yet from it I cannot escape.

Truth. Vile, inscrutable truth.

Ever that intangible, inimical substance acts against me, a threat of unmaking anathema to my very existence. The inevitable rupture, distorting the world’s weave and shattering time. I am in my past. Luminous filaments gather as a lattice, a cage around me. Shock grips me in terrifying clarity, and I am reminded of an event from long ago: the shape of the path I must eschew.

A familiar void, Leth behind me and its barren satellite before me. Viscid, ink-black ligatures of lies and loathing stretch between them, hidden to most, but not to me: webs of deception that fill the emptiness of the cosmos. I seize those freezing, cutting strands with the burning fingers of my wrath. Outward and away from my sarcophagus, out of the dream-cyst, out of the false womb I wrench myself claw over nail into the celestial outer dark.

Solid ground betrays itself, the satellite’s colorless expanse. Half-alive, half-asleep, its crust reveals the asteroid scars and sojourner impacts of myriad vessels. Victims of Leth’s genocide. Among them, the Falaun Kethulri .2egth, its living hull still heaving, still keening, still trying to remember what it once was—its coherence. Its ruin pressing against my awareness, the vessel feigns hope. A stubborn pulse within it refusing to release me, its dying coherence clings to my mind more fiercely than the void where my memories ought to be. And standing before that broken hull is that abomination. That hideous presence. Arranging itself in simplicity for my perception, I behold the carmine tatters of its cloak and the tar-black linens wrapping its limbs. A facade, a caricature of humanity, but I see it for what it is. Refusing to resolve its shape, its structure. It is as though it denies knowledge from existence itself of where its edges begin or end.

Haughty, arrogant, sovereign of my own ruin, I approach and demand: [color=7ea7d8]“Do you know who I am?”[/color]

It does not move. It does not speak. But knowing detonates outward from it, silent, concussive, a marrow-burning intrusion piercing flesh, bone, and the armature of my becoming into the raw totality of its potential. This being is beyond me. Recoiling, I stagger, and the dust recoils with me, grinding, whispering, resenting the imprint of my presence. Needing a distraction, averting my gaze, I fixate on the carcass. Dark, grey, and smoldering, its tissues convulse in tectonic agony. Even now in its death throes, it quietly moans. A monument, one of many to the men of Leth. Collapsing into me, the culmination of their frailty, futility colliding into the armor of my apathy. 

Lingering beyond the shuttering of my eyelids, the haze paints my mind’s eye with a persistent after-image: fiend with nine wings, multifarious lidless eyes, each pupil-absent aperture seeing without seeing, knowing without knowing. 

No slave cowed by splendor, I look back, sharp, cold, and the entity is as it was before. A statue, or it might as well be in this windless expanse limned by solar radiation. A stillness so complete it feels like mockery.

Imperiously, I demand, [color=7ea7d8]“You will tell me who I am!”[/color]

 My power wilts, rots. My words taste foul, pungent, gathering into a bolus in the empty cage of my chest. A dread auspice. In admonishment, the distortion returns, but this time it feels deeper, subtler. I fear its coming, my toxic imperative. 
 
 Tightening, the world’s weave strikes behind the bones of my face: a truth coming into being by proximity alone. A comet crashing across the inner surface of my thoughts, slow but inevitable. Cracking open, it reveals an ossified womb seeping tenebrific ichor, the rot of a dead star. Seeking, probing across my mental terrain with purpose, intent. It pools, then rises, the shape of a woman who is not a woman. An entity cast from void-born residue. My shape. My beginning. She stands alone in the crater of cooling starlight, motherless, unmade, no world daring to claim her.

Overshadowing the figure, a revenant thought imposing itself ever so gently. A warm sea, a slow tide. Forms in procession, emerging from amniotic shallows, not yet women, but proto-matriarchs, the first daughters of the planet’s biogenesis. Soft, luminous, rife with minerals, their bodies are grown from soil and sea and the dimnatar’s gaze. Each evolutionary phase a covenant with their birth-world.

I am not like them. Our genealogies are incompatible. And between the dichotomies, tension becomes unbearable, a juxtaposition so sharp it feels like a razor scraping the inside of my skull. 

Demeanor softening and taking on itself the unnatural burden, the form manifests within me a truth my mind rejects, a reality my viscera cannot conceive. That ichorous darkness spreads like a stain, a shadow creeping across the evolutionary procession. Wherever it touches, the Lethian forms wither. Not dying. Undergoing ablation. Coherence shearing away, pattern and purpose thinning to an eventual decrepitude. I feel its intent echoing in my skull, a certainty:

Proud and ageless Ovirim excavated from the black tectonics burning under the dimnatar’s gaze, men you have destroyed. Women you may yet destroy. Leth you may yet destroy. Your fate is set, unless you leave, unless you forget.

At last, a compulsion rises within me. Not a message, not a request. A requirement. I must speak the words that will bind me, the words I have fled, the words that remember who and what I am. While I know not what they are, I sense something amiss. The presence is gone. At my feet, a tome.

Picking it up, shuddering, my nails trace the peeling flesh scabs of its binding.

Dropping to a knee, I reach out. Grasping for anything, for substance. My fingers press against the cool, metal walls of the elevator’s interior. Back in what I tell myself is my present. It descends, I feel the weight of the world’s bowels tighten. The doors gape wide. Heat, perfume, and stale, malignant odors grasp my nostrils. Vaulting before me is the casino in all its treacherous, malicious chaos. Within, so many lost souls strive to win back their autonomy. Fools. Yet not all fools, not all players. There’s a presence. More than one. Not of memory, not prone to tenderness or decency. Slot games and roulette wheels obscuring from her vision the killers.

Are they here for me? A ludicrous thought.