Manifestation
A sound so raw, so profoundly desolate, it stops your breath.
It starts as a distant keen, a whisper of agony on the wind, but it grows louder with each passing second, swelling into a wail that seems to come from everywhere at once. It is the sound of a heart breaking, amplified to a cosmic scale. It is the sound of all the world's sorrows distilled into a single, unbearable note.
It consumes the air, consumes you, vibrating in your chest, in your teeth, in the very marrow of your bones. It is a sound that demands a response, that begs for an end, for a release that will not come. An the abyss slowly shows you what lies beyond, moonlight spilling in from a void ceiling, onto the slick mess of her - of it?
Of a mass of tangled red that writhes like thousands of worms.
She pulses with a heartbeat you cannot hear, and you watch as she moves toward you, a gnarled black hand reaching like burned wood, fingers splayed out toward you as she sobs.
She is so much larger up close.
Her form is a grotesque tapestry of suffering, nothing like the woman that had been described to you - This was hysteria incarnate, something brutal and vile, and it is now that the most important, most emphasized rule of meeting her forces itself to the front of your thoughts:
You must come to her kindly. You must not fear her, must not scorn her, must not see her as a monster, but as a woman in distress.
And instead, you had tried to run from her, at the mere sounds of her wails.
You realize, now, what you have made yourself to her.
It starts as a distant keen, a whisper of agony on the wind, but it grows louder with each passing second, swelling into a wail that seems to come from everywhere at once. It is the sound of a heart breaking, amplified to a cosmic scale. It is the sound of all the world's sorrows distilled into a single, unbearable note.
It consumes the air, consumes you, vibrating in your chest, in your teeth, in the very marrow of your bones. It is a sound that demands a response, that begs for an end, for a release that will not come. An the abyss slowly shows you what lies beyond, moonlight spilling in from a void ceiling, onto the slick mess of her - of it?
Of a mass of tangled red that writhes like thousands of worms.
She pulses with a heartbeat you cannot hear, and you watch as she moves toward you, a gnarled black hand reaching like burned wood, fingers splayed out toward you as she sobs.
She is so much larger up close.
Her form is a grotesque tapestry of suffering, nothing like the woman that had been described to you - This was hysteria incarnate, something brutal and vile, and it is now that the most important, most emphasized rule of meeting her forces itself to the front of your thoughts:
You must come to her kindly. You must not fear her, must not scorn her, must not see her as a monster, but as a woman in distress.
And instead, you had tried to run from her, at the mere sounds of her wails.
You realize, now, what you have made yourself to her.