The Dark Verse

What’s in a name?

Excerpt:

An amount of seasons befell me that I could not count before I became free. And surely it was an amount less than I would have thought, for time lingered awfully slow within the cool, decrepit cell of my prison holding. I did not mark the days and I did not note the moon when it could be seen. My thoughts and my pain were the only troubles I ever had dealings with, and I rather disliked both of them. I was not a complex man, especially during this time, and spent almost all of it in one of two disturbing states.

The first state: Hooded guards would take me once every seven days and bind me to a floor beneath the open sky while the sun singed the flesh of my back, arms, and legs. On each day thereafter, I would be strapped to a concrete table in the depths of where my holding lay. Indescribably, the hooded guards would pour hot water upon my burn wounds, inflicting a pain greater than anything that denied death as they plagued upon my essence with no apparent motive. And on the days following that, I would be flogged several times. They would have continued on beyond a handful of lashes, but my dead flesh freed much too generously and sickeningly under each strike. If I could have ended the butchery under any circumstances, I would have done so gladly.

The second state: During those moments of my pitiful refuge, I would lie quite still, tucked against the wall of my cell, playing imaginary music to the rhythm of splashing water made by my fingers slapping upon small puddles. The action calmed and distracted my thoughts, allowing me to soak in the sorry scrap of my life left to live. I would have rather done other activities, but any other movement would have horribly ravaged my wreckage of a body and caused excruciating pain.

 19: Names: Unsonselvitzsol [16:13m]: Download

Face your demons.

Excerpt:

My sister and I happened upon the variable of existence by chance. It might have been the way we walked in ghostly indifference under the setting sun’s light, or perhaps it was the way we stared disjointedly across the endless horizon. Nevertheless, we arrived. Like a layer resting between all things, it rested in connection to all that was known, though it did not know it and nor did anything else in its contact. There were legends and cults in connection to such things, but they did not convey or understand the complexities of their childish assumptions. Full worlds were transparently placed upon one another, existing separately, yet silently interacting. One of those worlds was our own, and the other, the one we horribly wandered upon, was an incomprehensible place I called the variable of existence—the world where everything was the same except the beastly beings that inhabited it and sinisterly endowed upon our world a spiritual, yet unholy attribution of grace. Maybe the variable of existence was meant to be there as part of an unfathomable balance, or a rudder for a wayward vessel, but once I laid my eyes upon it, it was to me but a mysterious infection, incurable and eternal.

 18: Normal Faces [11:16m]: Download