Turn left
You turn left, driving a silver-spiked palm into the rough wall for purchase, leaning and lurching like a sleepwalker- one leg grotesquely swollen, as if silver is the gout in it, angular grains and crystalline shards silting the heavy joints, the other withered on its bone, tender. You fumble upwards, up the corridor until pale slats of light relieve a little of the darkness.
The murder in your heart, the black-and-silver venom, wonders at the dust. As you go further, you see signs of habitation like insects trapped in amber- a guardroom with a narrow slit window low above ground, wooden table furred with dust, a tin cup upturned and veiled with the same, some substance rotten to formlessness strewn on a pewter plate. Only a thin channel is free of dust- blurred here and there where its maker has misstepped, veered inches off the path and into the dead palace.
The need for vengeance dries as dust heaps in great fistfuls over it, becoming a dry canker in your centre. You walk on, nearly frantic now as you search for any sign of your imprisoners, your tormentors. The men and women who made you silver. Orbs and beads of it track through the air at your melted ear, humming.
Nobody. You penetrate upwards into long corridors lined with tapestries, brushing a dull hunting scene once, an image of a man-headed swan another time, just to see the dust fly up. Empty hallways looking seized in a minute when time had rolled over them- as if a thousand years had passed just as the washerwoman stood back from their tubs, leaving them dry and dust-stained. Nobody home. Nobody to kill with your silver.
The vacancy of the rooms, the long corridors of empty chambers, echoes only snatches of the desolation in you. You pour yourself into the hunt, and all you find is a thin red thread, a shade lighter than crimson, caught on a rougher patch of wood near a doorjamb near one of the servants’ entrances. You leave it. It seems like a monument, a testament to some truth you cannot quite rasp with your poor silver-holed head.
What will you do?
Written by ouroboros666 on 26 July 2016
The end (for now)