Into the Tides [Six]-4

After many revisions, 3 times it was published and returned to draft... this is the final version of [Six]-4.

"I'm suffering, I'm bleeding, on my knees...
Who's going to save me?
Suffering, bleeding.
Save me from this pit of frailty." -Skillet, Fingernails

I stare into the eye of the colossus through the telescope, still unable to grasp the size no matter the distance. I can't tell the shape, I can't tell the strength and I can't find any information that could assist me in how to take a course of action. Is it too late? Is it too soon? The only way I can find to confront the beast would be to throw myself down the rifle's barrel and strike blindly. Haelstrom city sits in a state I'm still not sure I can live with and whether the gargantuan mass was summoned to protect the city from me or lure me back I do not know. It intimidates without end but is there anything I can do? There is but I am weak. I am weak and it will kill me. It will torture me. It keeps me from ever experiencing her again and I desperately want the strength to destroy it.

I collapse to the floor on the deck of the ship, which still rocks in the thick tan sea and try to put some of the pieces together. My  actions in Haelstrom are why half of me lies in imprisonment... why I had to take the offer of the headless horse... why I had to become the Red Eyed Wolf who now stands on this deck of greying ivory... Will the inverted decadence of what time may show to have been a "climax" of all my minus opus. A well-earned infamy some might say.

It may pain or destroy me... but I must confront this lest it do worse should I run and survive.
As you look into my eyes I can only hope you understand no matter the outcome I can't walk away.

I've been hearing another voice in my head since I before was given the shining bone...
He's become more cryptic since I left the false asylum and I try to keep him out of my mind.
He whispers when I'm awake but now he screams in my dreams. The wolf won't tell me who he is,
saying to me, "He lives until proven guilty... that's all you need to know."

-We stumble through the broken streets, facial wraps and modified respirator masks cover our faces, just searching for something. Heavy clothing makes things difficult but is necessary. I look deep into your eyes through the lenses, I cannot see your mouth but I know you are smiling. Under my mask I do the same and just from your eyes, yet again I just know that you know. I turn and look ahead and we move onwards... Everything is broken and torn yet another makes it almost bearable. Almost... 
But no, but no, but no but no but no but no but No... you violated the sealed environment that kept all the filth out, and in doing so crumbled to a pile of dust before my eyes. Your eyes still stare at me, blue from atop the pile. And just from your eyes... I can tell you're not smiling anymore."
 I take a deep breath and sit up in bed... opening my eyes and staring at the ebony wood of my quarters to find it was but a dream. Just a dream, just a dream. I stumble out of my cabin, walking in a way resembling more death than life and stare at the ebony planks that make up the deck... many now stained with the blood that drips from my feet.

Making my way to the side of the ship I stare over ivory hull to find that this one man crew has forgotten to drop anchor and may have drifted off course into a fog. It's too dark to tell and I lack the hope to illuminate my residence... The shining bone has grown dim. It just seems like every time I ride the tide I sink a few fathoms more... or is that just the nature of the ocean I now sail without ports? I fight the changes in location when I can but this plane seems to possess meta-physical properties that prevent it from forming a cohesive and constant existence. My entrance into this plane should have been a calamity that shook every cell of my existence but I was eased in through the grey fog by...
No... now is not the time to direct blame. Hers is an existence that does not deserve my spite. I cannot even tell if survival is what I should aim for anymore as it's lost behind much of the screaming and writhing that has shredded my vocal chords, crippling my communication. I can tell you all "Goodbye" all I want but until that day comes it would never be true. All whispers in my head... Voices of the left behind...
The dark fog approaches, hiding in the black of the night sky...
I am lost at sea and although my boat is afloat, there is no compass, there is no wind, there are no sails, and there are no oars. Taking this away could just bring to a worse plane of existence. Chains that bind dig so deep that when I heal they embed themselves within my skin... there is no lock and no key. Just chains and a foundation that is well rooted under the ground. A tug in any direction from one of these chains and I'd be pulled overboard... no way back up to the ship.
I am a captive audience to the antics of the black fog as it taunts me. The fog particles move together densely to form vague shapes, many animate and some moving closer and closer to me. When they form from the fog it never seems as if the total volume diminishes... as if the total mass of this fog is too great to be constrained by such rules. A serpentine specter grew closer and seemed to direct its attention to me. At this my eyes grew wide and my mind was suddenly filled with insight... Insight that filled me with a set of holes that drained my resolve and I dare say my sanity even further. A different darkness, toxic.
This was not a result of my meddlings in Haelstrom... this was something older... something stronger... something that had lied in waiting and had always watched me... something that if it willed it, it could take this place from whatever nature, god, or sentience controls it... twist the knife in my side further and make the blade branch off and burrow until it finds my heart and pierces it. As my heart turned black it would look into my eyes and dissolve me. It doesn't want me anywhere else.


"Cleric's fog will recede before your eyes.
So long to this wretched form.
Them's grey eyes on the subway.
Long before you were born,
you were always to be a dagger floating
Straight to their heart."- The Shins, 'Rifle's Spiral.'

Liar.

Red Eyed Wolf [Six]-3

"Lift the mattress off the floor.
Walk the cramps off,
Go meander in the cold.
 Hail to your dark skin,
hiding the fact you're dead again...
Underneath the power lines seeking shade..."
-The Shins "Caring is Creepy"

What is the purpose of tears if pain conveys through sound? Because the worst pain is silent.
 Does she watch me even now as the grassy plain outside mocks me? Mocks my fate, mocks my future? I can hear its whispers while dark grey skies above do nothing but confuse with their psychic  cacophony of feelings, lies, fragments and obsessions unfed. It speaks of the hands I've forced, the decisions I've made that will follow me for years and the times when I questioned the safety of my own actions upon my sanity...
What can I say or do to prove anything to her... the mistress of my fate? I am a convict now. I ran and through my cowardice I now suffer. The shining bone in my pocket provides a light and a window in the darkness but that can't suppress the dread.
I am sorry for the hands I've forced, the decisions I've made. All in the shadow of the silent mocking and the misinterpretation. Bonds broken and bridges burned, all for a false hope of peace and quiet. The ones about to be hung that I've cut free, the ones with their own hidden clockwork hearts and the ones half blind from birth all stand up in my memory. A shining distraction that could have led to hope that when true clairvoyance reveals the pitiful chance of any gears emerging from the mucky oozing clockwork fitting in any other machine... Some will live to become nothing more than pillars of salt, and others may die to become bumps on the road to nowhere.
My own corpse lies on the doorstep ripped apart and leaking wasted potential through a hole in its forehead.

The lack of a sun outside... the feeling of festering within your own skin are all signs of a creeping demise. Survival my only option no matter the cost as now all ends will justify the means. I don't even know if I can try to make this dream a paradise anymore. In the reflection of the dark upon the shining bone I can see the refracted image of the headless horse who visited me in the rare sleep. Its cauterized neck turns to me and spasms, a rain of crimson mist spraying through the reflection in front of of me. As it hangs in the air the mist curls into the shape of a man... an image suddenly split into two halves vertically down the middle. One half forms an open cage iron maiden, the other the skin of a wolf in the steppes with an eye of brighter red. My only hope of escape. I scream as my mind is ripped apart by my own claws, splitting my cell through a mental Mitosis.The mutt claws through the nightmare, while the convict watches and cries. The hound hits the ground running while the suspect is re-absorbed by the darkness. The Wolf heads for the sea while the innocent lays dying.

Until my strife ends I am the Red Eyed Wolf.
The Convict shall waste away in this false Asylum.
A left rib and tooth torn from my body torn from my body, infused with the energy of the shining bone to become a vessel, my wolf in rest as the boat forms from the translucent waters. A sanctuary formed from pain. Just a way to try to ease some of it away.

"I'm everything you've wanted.
I am the one that's haunting you.
I hold the lies inside of you that stare back at you.

There's nothing left to lose.
There's nothing left to prove.
Surrender your love, 
It's all you can do."
- Skillet "Savior"

Signal - A Luster Sidestory

It was dark. It was warm. Blister's eyes hurt but he didn't care, he was safe and he was occupied. The box was his solace from the world outside, filling his brain with a strange form of nostalgia and dulling the stress his life had provided him. His left bicep was beginning to fester with flies, his right foot couldn't be felt, and a large patch of his bushy black hair had been torn out a few minutes before but the box was more important than all of this. Despite the cord connected to the box in connection chaining Blister to the wall, the rectangular prism felt like no prison. The colorful lights showed him places he longed for more than the refuse he had made his house from. The voices from the box drowned out the screaming he heard outside. Out of six sides... only one fed him in vision while the luring sound echoed throughout the white walled building. Like everyone his mind was broken, the pieces that made up his life before lost in a sea of the shards belonging to others and yet something in his brain knew...THIS. Filthy hands gripping the box, one could see almost all of this in his face alone." Come on down to burger town, of burger joints we have the crown!" "Do you need to find someone special?" "Call now to buy 1 get 2 free!" He was fine until the nursing home advertisement. At the description of the place he started shaking, mumbling to himself, and groping the screen more than before. The TV rested in his lap as he took his hands off the screen and made fists with both, trying to decide how to feel. Blister slapped the screen with the palm of his right hand a few times while screaming something inaudible even in what I can get of the security footage... 2 minutes later he smashed his face through the small television and passed away from either electrocution or internal bleeding. Blister died trying to reach paradise.

-Skunk

Thorns

I sicken those who love you,
I destroy the seeds you sow.

I curse the ground you walk on,
I burn the leaves you grow.

I keep you awake at night,
I make your true flaws show.

I hide success in places,
where you would never go.

I make you do the things
that you swore you'd never do.

I have always been here,
buried deep inside of you.

Ignore me if you must.
Hide in what you believe.

But you'll have to learn to live with me,
because I will never leave.

I am that thorn lodged deep within your spine.

I am everything that keeps you from really being "fine".

No-one will believe you.
No matter how hard you try.

Say you feel it all you like,
all they see is a lie.

Zeal - A Luster Sidestory

"Daggers, Daggers, holy signs around me show me the way... Joseph... I shall walk and they shall ascend..."

The ramblings never seem to cease from Benedict, pious as he is to what he endures and sees, he is the least stable.

"Johnathan and Joanna... Christine and Michelangelo... God I shalt bring them to the light of true God for acceptance into paradise as the time on earth of the pure man hath gone. And he said the corrupted shall stay forth... Natural consequences as natural as they come..."

For a despised, feared, and determined child of The Church of the Fallen Son, being the least stable might be a.. God- send... to allow you see more than others would and even possibly remove what remains of your concept of remorse. But for outsiders it just makes things even worse...

"Give an innocent fire or food and you save him for a day... send an innocent to Jesus and you save him for eternity!"

He walks, searching for those who do not deserve to live on this "raptured" earth to bring to God...  His beliefs move what would otherwise be a broken husk of a human mind forward through the fittingly broken world he now inhabits...

"Heretics are but parasites upon the crust of this plane. They must be driven to know their place, the cleansing fires of hell hunger for their filth!"

The robes, the dirt, the dust, the beard, the collar, the frayed, burnt, and pissed on spineless leaf of papers barely describable as the bible... and the tightly gripped deadly crossbow that shines in some places and in others is caked in rust.

"One day... you'll be here lord... one day... you'll come and show all these calves in chains their fiery end. We shall make veal from what remains..."

All it amounts to a man without fear...
A man with a weapon...
A man to fear...
A man with a reason...
A man without reason...
An executioner in this world gone mad...
An inhabitant of his own asylum...
Father Benedict.

-Troje

Coming Soon: Luster, my first long form project.
Edit: This still isn't done, and I don't know when the hell it would ever be. It's a story about an island where people started going crazy and how the different groups interacted, with the main character "Skunk", a woman who believes a plastic skunk mask is her face, being the narrator as she provides medical care for a three other similarly crazy people who help each other stay alive.