GhostOfHeraclitus fan club archive

From There goes the neighborhood...

Deep past the vast steel door, down the corridor lined in obdurium, across a narrow bridge spanning a chasm there is a stair. It is a long stair, hewn from diorite, by the Stonelords of old, and it looks today as it may have done back in those halcyon days, save for flickering electric lights. They are alien there, wrong, unwelcome, not for their modernity, for what does stone care of human ages, but because any light would seem alien in this place. Alien and weak, as it beats ineffectually against the darkness.

Past many steps, at the bottom of the endless stair, is another corridor. Stone again, but the work of the Stonelords has been reinforced by modern hands, and concrete and steel cross-beams strengthen the ancient masonry. The corridor is lined with doors--elaborate things, of steel and circuit, and adamant and rune. They, too, look alien, but not weak. Not weak at all. Past one of these doors there is darkness. But inside the darkness there is a small patch of something that isn't darkness, not quite. Not completely. Darkness that, somehow, remembers the light and an open sky.

It's so feeble a thing, so lacking in substance, that hardly any room would hold it. It would slip past most walls, through locks and wards, like they weren't even there. But the walls of this room admitted no crack, and the door had no locks. No wards. Once closed, the door would remain closed. An oubliette that permitted no escape. But massive though the walls might be, and pitiless though the door may be, a thought--a single thought, is still past their reach.

So the thought emerged from the darkness that wasn't quite darkness, and whisped past the walls and the doors, it left the hidden and terrible guards of this place behind, heedless of its passage, it crossed the chasm, and left through the massive steel door. Then, stealth and caution thrown to the winds, the thought raced, for it had a purpose, it had a goal, it had a target.

A thousand miles away, Kobalstromo awoke with a start from uneasy dreams. He was unsure what he dreamed of. Dark upon dark. A closed place, away from the sun, hidden from the sky. And words. Two of them. I remember.