[center][h3]A Temple in Celwezc[/h3][/center]
Equidistant from the walls and nearer to the stairs is a round stone table without the excess of ornamentation. Small and aloof in the vault’s center, it stands as a blunt, upward-flaring half-pillar. From it, the walls recoil. To it, she is drawn: by its spectral green and sinuous patina, by its pallid veins that veer and arc lividly throughout—all reflecting against her rapt attention. Entities at odds, all: her, it, the babbling eydolins. Breaths rapid, throaty, she wades through the current, the verve, the animus of connectivity. It feels loathsome, the space’s tightness as it presses against her and everything else in the dim cacophony. 

[i]Constance of wisdom, by unburning light, avert and force form on the nameless of night,[/i] her soul declaims a line of the ancient litany.

To that stone zoar of seclusion, Eokadya approaches. On it, she places her lantern. From it, she takes wax daubs and with them stops her ears. Each movement she makes is slow, smooth, and reverent. To her relief, the babble vaguely mutes to an intensity less maddening but nevertheless present. Next, her fingertips alight on two small, clear discs. Pressing them upon her eyes, she douses the lantern and sees in spite of the immaculate darkness. 

A shudder swells from the root of her spine and ascends throughout her body, like the motif of a branching tree. For all at once the place is cold. It would be dark, it [i]should[/i] be dark. Yet she sees it all, in a way. As one drowning beneath a moonlight-pierced nebula of algae, she wades through the vibrating outlines of entities without name, or face, or memory, and wills them away from her flesh.

Wordless, she approaches the shelf. She traces it with her finger, the jade screams of its occupants vibrating just beyond reach. Two paces, and she pauses, then kneels low enough that her cincture’s excess coils on the dirt floor—once, twice. Inexorable, fate extends her arm and her grasp retrieves an eydolin to her bosom. Its dyad sits on the mantelshelf of the physician, a good man. A man who has done better by the farmers of Celwecz than elusive occult words and dubious herbal concoctions ever could. He knows much of how they feel, and in the stillness of his den he engages in a dialectic of sorts—he and some fictitious antagonist.

Firm in the grasp of both hands, now, she wrestles the doll upward, and brings its faceless, trembling tongue to her mouth’s embrace. A silhouette of jade and rage, it unleashes successive bursts of spiritual lightning. Yet armored in the tools of her trade, she feels no injury, no harm. It is impotent. Mouth open, she extends her tongue. They press together, a kiss of reverence, of revulsion. Its tongue adheres to her own, buds latching to buds. All at once, she collapses, the eydolin mounting her face. Its tongue moves, seeks, and twitches. And so too moves her own. She feels the shape of the words, the taste of them. Giving in to the sinuously gliding, arching, and mutating spasms, she drowns in the eldritch spittle of forbidden knowledge. Without comprehending the words, her tongue shapes them, and with that shaping comes a type of ghastly memory. There, in the den with the physician. Watching him with hateful eyes, she can see his lips move, but not hear him. Yet she can read those lips. 

Eokadya reads suffering, reads joy, reads the portent of turmoil.

Some time later, she comes to. The doll, off her face. Then lantern burning once more, she sees it is back in its place. Not by her hand, yet these things—they never move, she is certain. A dissonance, a horror. She drives the incongruity from her mind. Her place is up in the world of light, and, balancing ceremony with haste, toward that she flees.