City of Light:Zared:Fever Dream
A note on all this for interested viewers. I'm writing this as part of National Novel Writing Month so there's no editing going on just yet.
Zared stood on the cliff's edge overlooking the silver city, it was night and it's streets were alive with fire and machines; light raced through the pathways painting an impossible portrait of luminescence. At the center of it all a vast black pyramid reached up into the sky the prayers of millions of the faithful shining out of it's peak and bringing the words to the Creator and his Angels. Surrounded on all edges by a churning sea of darkness and impossibility there were few silver slivers of travel that the machines with their fiery trails roared in on. He watched people emerge from the sparkling temples full of faith and victory or chastised by the priests and acolytes within. Their god was embodied by fortune here, both the kind won and lost and the fate the brought people together in love and violence. High above it all he could smell progress and desperation; sex, paper and chemicals traded in a holy trinity behind the shining, glimmering, facade of this church to the divine machine.
Suddenly he felt everything lurch to the left, the world swinging on an axis and the night changing to day. The fires that burned in the streets of that City of Lights flew wildly into him and began to course through his body bringing a painful stinging to his limbs. His fingers burned and legs ached as the muscle tightened and spasmed knocking him from his feet, laying him out on the cold rock surface of that covered the Earth here. He was in an alleyway between two ruined buildings and staring up at an impossibly black night sky. Small rocks stuck into the skin on his back and the side of his face, suddenly everything inside him was fighting to get free and his began vomiting gouts of colour and light as the world twisted again.
He was sitting in a dark wood paneled room that smelled of age and dust, the chair was wood and hard against him while his knees hit the underside of the table and sent the brownish liquid sloshing in their glasses. There was a man across the table staring at him.
“I don't believe we've met before friend. How did you get here?” His voice was rough and full of phlegm. “Are you a fellow of the College? It's been a while and certainly my memory may have slipped.”
Zared opened his mouth to reply but the sounds that came out weren't his open, rather it was a rattling chatter of the dead men that had tried to drown him in his own fire at Coopers. The man's weathered face grew taunt and his eyes narrowed.
“How did you learn to speak like Them?” He asked pushing away from the table.
Before he could react the man had moved with a swirl of his coat and was pressing something up against his face; it was cold and it out of the corner of his eye he could see the word DEATH hover over it. The man's hand was shaking slightly and he was muttering something over and over again Zared had never heard the language before, his agitation reached a peak and the word changed to FIRE.
It was then that everything turned again and with the same sickening wrench he found himself in the dark staring up a vast stone column to metal disk which spun rocking crazily on the pivot. Around the room floated luminous figures with wings stretched tight over metal pinions and cold blue eyes that flared in the darkness, they clattered and whirled in the darkness and he heard in the whirling of their gears the symphony of the cosmos. Slowly the scene before him faded from view, and this time there was no sickness, just the realization that he was staring at the ceiling in Cerial's prayer room, and Osie was aiming a weapon at him.
Zared stood on the cliff's edge overlooking the silver city, it was night and it's streets were alive with fire and machines; light raced through the pathways painting an impossible portrait of luminescence. At the center of it all a vast black pyramid reached up into the sky the prayers of millions of the faithful shining out of it's peak and bringing the words to the Creator and his Angels. Surrounded on all edges by a churning sea of darkness and impossibility there were few silver slivers of travel that the machines with their fiery trails roared in on. He watched people emerge from the sparkling temples full of faith and victory or chastised by the priests and acolytes within. Their god was embodied by fortune here, both the kind won and lost and the fate the brought people together in love and violence. High above it all he could smell progress and desperation; sex, paper and chemicals traded in a holy trinity behind the shining, glimmering, facade of this church to the divine machine.
Suddenly he felt everything lurch to the left, the world swinging on an axis and the night changing to day. The fires that burned in the streets of that City of Lights flew wildly into him and began to course through his body bringing a painful stinging to his limbs. His fingers burned and legs ached as the muscle tightened and spasmed knocking him from his feet, laying him out on the cold rock surface of that covered the Earth here. He was in an alleyway between two ruined buildings and staring up at an impossibly black night sky. Small rocks stuck into the skin on his back and the side of his face, suddenly everything inside him was fighting to get free and his began vomiting gouts of colour and light as the world twisted again.
He was sitting in a dark wood paneled room that smelled of age and dust, the chair was wood and hard against him while his knees hit the underside of the table and sent the brownish liquid sloshing in their glasses. There was a man across the table staring at him.
“I don't believe we've met before friend. How did you get here?” His voice was rough and full of phlegm. “Are you a fellow of the College? It's been a while and certainly my memory may have slipped.”
Zared opened his mouth to reply but the sounds that came out weren't his open, rather it was a rattling chatter of the dead men that had tried to drown him in his own fire at Coopers. The man's weathered face grew taunt and his eyes narrowed.
“How did you learn to speak like Them?” He asked pushing away from the table.
Before he could react the man had moved with a swirl of his coat and was pressing something up against his face; it was cold and it out of the corner of his eye he could see the word DEATH hover over it. The man's hand was shaking slightly and he was muttering something over and over again Zared had never heard the language before, his agitation reached a peak and the word changed to FIRE.
It was then that everything turned again and with the same sickening wrench he found himself in the dark staring up a vast stone column to metal disk which spun rocking crazily on the pivot. Around the room floated luminous figures with wings stretched tight over metal pinions and cold blue eyes that flared in the darkness, they clattered and whirled in the darkness and he heard in the whirling of their gears the symphony of the cosmos. Slowly the scene before him faded from view, and this time there was no sickness, just the realization that he was staring at the ceiling in Cerial's prayer room, and Osie was aiming a weapon at him.