Encounterlogs
Ruprechts Odd Encounter Sr Lorenzo 250409
Ruprecht's journey begins ominously in a hospital room, where he has injected himself with a powerful dose of ketamine, setting the stage for a surreal exploration of his subconscious. The room, a sterile and impersonal space, contrasts sharply with the vivid, hallucinogenic landscape that unfolds in Ruprecht's mind—a sprawling, infinite library that serves as the battleground for his mission to extract hidden intelligence from the depths of his psyche. This library, with its endless rows of books spiraling upward and a dome of flickering stars, is not just a collection of memories but a living, breathing entity that resists Ruprecht's intrusion. The environment is rife with symbolic imagery: the pages made of flesh, the ink pulsating with life, and the whispers in different tongues, all of which lead him toward the center of this maze, where Marlow, the subject of his mind heist, hangs suspended and disfigured.
As Ruprecht delves deeper into the dream, the narrative takes on a more visceral and intense tone. He encounters Marlow, a martyr-like figure, whose mind holds the key he seeks, but accessing it demands a confrontation with the grotesque and the surreal. The dream's resistance grows stronger, manifesting in the physical decay of Ruprecht's body and the challenging, mutating landscape that becomes increasingly hostile. Despite the torturous path and the psychic assault on his senses, Ruprecht's determination—or perhaps obsession—drives him forward. The climax of his journey is both ghastly and revelatory, as he physically and metaphorically consumes Marlow's essence, absorbing the coveted knowledge but at a significant cost. His transformation is complete, marked by a symbolic rebirth; he emerges younger, yet irrevocably altered, a stark personification of the aphorism "knowledge comes with a price."
The ordeal concludes with Ruprecht returning to reality, lying in a pool of his own blood, surrounded by the clinical indifference of the hospital setting. The stark contrast between the vivid, nightmarish quest for truth and the mundane, fluorescent-lit room underscores the profound isolation and transformation Ruprecht has undergone. The physical scars may heal, but the psychic wounds and the truths unearthed from the depths of his subconscious will forever change him. As he lapses back into unconsciousness, the realization that his blood—now purely sanguine—serves as a powerful symbol of his ordeal: a journey through darkness to reclaim a part of himself, leaving him forever altered in its wake.
(Ruprecht's odd encounter(SRLorenzo):SRLorenzo)
[Thu Apr 3 2025]
In hospital room 2
This room is sparsely furnished, the sanitary white walls a perfect match
to the linoleum floor and the thin hospital sheets on the gurney that serves
as a bed. A small television mounted in the upper corner of the room is set
at a low volume, and a thin curtain bisects the room in an effort to afford
privacy to the occupant on the other side.
It is night, about 59F(15C) degrees, and there are a few thin white clouds in the sky. There is a first quarter moon.
(Your target and their allies have been tasked with stealing a vital piece of intelligence from a subject by delving into their mind with dream invading to try to tease out the secret.
)
Ruprecht stares with a slackened jaw at the IV bag as it sloooowly creeeps down the mainline in shoved into his collar. He'd spiked it heavily with pharma-grade ketamine just under an hour ago. The blackened marks on his face look similar to what would be on a corpse freshly beaten to death, spidery black webs worked across his entire expression. He clicks his tongue every once in a while... five minutes, exactly. A living clock.
The dream bleeds in slowly, like ink into water.
The world stabilizes in pieces: soft light through warped glass, the scent of damp paper and burned ozone. The mind of Subject 043 doesnt take the shape of a battlefield or fortress. No, it is a library. Towering. Endless. Impossible.
Rows of books spiral upward like a cathedral of memory, vanishing into a sky that is not sky at all, just a dome of static, flickering stars blinking in and out like bad signal. The walls groan when no one speaks. Dust drifts on the air, but never lands.
Footsteps echo, someone, maybe, or someone elses. The floor underfoot is wood, old, stained with shapes that might be ink, or might be blood. Somewhere, a grandfather clock ticks without rhythm, sounding out time in uneven intervals. Tick tick tickticktick pause.
Everything smells like some died masked with too much perfume.
To the right, a table of half-opened journals lies under a green-glass lamp that never flickers. The words move on the pages, writing themselves, unwriting, rewriting, names, dates, places in languages that feel familiar and yet never existed.
A whispered voice speaks from nowhere: You were not meant to see this.
The air tastes of copper.
Further in, the shelves begin to curve, spiraling inward toward a center point. Books give way to folders, folders to files, files to flesh. Pages sewn from skin, spines made of bone, inked in a language that pulses when read. The shelves lean now, as if resisting the trespass.
And beneath it all: a hum. Low. Vibrating. Like a frequency felt bone deep, deeper than hearing. It calls. It warns.
On a distant wall, photographs line the bricks. Faces blurred by motion or memory. All of them smiling. All of them missing eyes.
One of the books opens itself.
The sound is wet.
A staircase of bent metal and melted stone descends beneath it, leading to a chamber carved from raw thought. The air here buzzes with psychic pressure, like the moment before a scream. Paint peels from the nonexistent walls. Gravity wavers.
At the center: Marlow. Or whats left of him.
He hangs suspended, ribs like open wings, eyes stained in black, mouth sealed shut by rusted staples. Thought still leaks from him: viscous, silver, and faintly glowing into the basin beneath. His mind is open. Cracked. Weeping.
Whispers crawl across the chamber, repeating the same phrase in different tongues. Only one is correct. The phrase is here, buried like a key in the flesh of a god.
But time here is fracturing.
The books are screaming now, each voice a different version of the truth. The spiral tightens. The dome above begins to bleed stars. The air turns to static.
And behind the sealed mouth of Marlow, one eye blinks.
Slow.
Knowing.
The dream bleeds in slowly, like ink into water.
The world stabilizes in pieces: soft light through warped glass, the scent of damp paper and burned ozone. The mind of Subject 043 doesnt take the shape of a battlefield or fortress. No, it is a library. Towering. Endless. Impossible.
Rows of books spiral upward like a cathedral of memory, vanishing into a sky that is not sky at all, just a dome of static, flickering stars blinking in and out like bad signal. The walls groan when no one speaks. Dust drifts on the air, but never lands.
Footsteps echo, Ruprecht's, maybe, or someone elses. The floor underfoot is wood, old, stained with shapes that might be ink, or might be blood. Somewhere, a grandfather clock ticks without rhythm, sounding out time in uneven intervals. Tick... tick... tickticktick... pause.
Everything smells like some died masked with too much perfume.
To the right, a table of half-opened journals lies under a green-glass lamp that never flickers. The words move on the pages, writing themselves, unwriting, rewriting, names, dates, places in languages that feel familiar and yet never existed.
A whispered voice speaks from nowhere: You were not meant to see this.
The air tastes of copper.
Further in, the shelves begin to curve, spiraling inward toward a center point. Books give way to folders, folders to files, files to flesh. Pages sewn from skin, spines made of bone, inked in a language that pulses when read. The shelves lean now, as if resisting the trespass.
And beneath it all: a hum. Low. Vibrating. Like a frequency felt bone deep, deeper than hearing. It calls. It warns.
On a distant wall, photographs line the bricks. Faces blurred by motion or memory. All of them smiling. All of them missing eyes.
One of the books opens itself.
The sound is wet.
A staircase of bent metal and melted stone descends beneath it, leading to a chamber carved from raw thought. The air here buzzes with psychic pressure, like the moment before a scream. Paint peels from the nonexistent walls. Gravity wavers.
At the center: Marlow. Or whats left of him.
He hangs suspended, ribs like open wings, eyes stained in black, mouth sealed shut by rusted staples. Thought still leaks from him: viscous, silver, and faintly glowing into the basin beneath. His mind is open. Cracked. Weeping.
Whispers crawl across the chamber, repeating the same phrase in different tongues. Only one is correct. The phrase is here, buried like a key in the flesh of a god.
But time here is fracturing.
The books are screaming now, each voice a different version of the truth. The spiral tightens. The dome above begins to bleed stars. The air turns to static.
And behind the sealed mouth of Marlow, one eye blinks.
Slow.
Knowing.
Oh boy, it's time for the K-hole, huh?! This isn't the normal kaleidoscopic transcendence that Ruprecht knows and loves. A library, instead -- not too uncommon. The endless infinity of the bookshelves seems to convince him that this, in and of itself, is simply an extension of his self imposed tranquilizer overdose. That clock really starts to piss him off. He's calculating in difficult increments of five minutes, and that DAMNED ticker continuously ruins his consistency. "Yeah?" He replies to the whisper with a laggard slur. "It won't be the firssst tiime I've heard it like thaaat..." Those books. Those special, meaty books. He knows books like those. Or, rather, once knew -- and can't remember. He begins wheeling his IV through the dream, limping along as if his back were broken. Eyes flip to the photographs. That's familiar to him too. This entire situation is culminating into some sickening deja vu for our wanderer. He tries to pause, tries to read -- to study, to drink deep from the rivers of knowledge once drenched in blood.
But it can't last. He knows there's more. Maybe -- just maybe, he'll get a chance to study later. Down those stairs he goes, CLUNK CLUNK CLUNKing the IV pole the whole way. He doesn't falter. He doesn't gasp. His eyes bug wider than one of those fucked up goldfish they sell at the specialty store.
It's beautiful to him. Stylish. Metaphorical. He mutters something incoherent, destination clear. "Give... g..."
Hoarse rasps turn into a desperate rage. "GIVE IT TO ME!"
Ruprecht holds out a single hand like a wraith in the mist, trying to get closer to the martyr. He's bad off... sort've like a crippled old man.
The dream responds like flesh reacting to flame.
Ruprecht's voice: slurred, shuddering, demanding, echoes with a resonance that makes the very walls quiver. Not echo, not reverberation, but memory. The dream remembers this voice. It doesnt like it.
The lights above the spiral staircase blink once, then die entirely. What remains is ambient, oily, sourced from nowhere. The darkness is not empty. It watches.
As Ruprecht descends, dragging the IV pole like a scepter of his own addiction, the world bends to accommodate him. The steps stretch and contract in unnatural rhythm, each CLUNK of the pole triggering a ripple in the floor, as if the dream is breathing around him.
The psychic pressure increases. His skin begins to itch, not from irritation, but from the sensation of being read. The books up top are silent now. Listening. Judging.
The chamber below unfolds like a wound.
Marlow remains suspended, weeping silver thought into the basin, a slow-drip lobotomy. Flowers wilt at Ruprecht's approach, petals curling like dying tongues. The air here no longer smells death, it smells like static. Like burnt circuitry and old paper. Like ozone bleeding into brain fluid.
His scream: "GIVE IT TO ME!" tears the silence open like damp cloth.
And something gives.
The basin erupts, not violently, but with a gentle, bubbling surge. Like champagne overflowing. The silver thought sloshes upward, twisting mid-air into a single thread that coils like a serpent, alive and resentful.
It slithers around someone IV pole, slick and pulsing, binding it like a parasitic vine. The line between medicine and memory collapses.
A whisper returns: not distant this time, not omnipresent. It's inside his head. Inside his blood.
"The phrase is buried in bone. You must drink. You must drown. You must not wake."
The thread tightens. Then: pierces.
A needle that was never there injects itself through the dream and directly into his arm. The liquid is not cold. It is ecstatic. Fire and ice, all at once. Time becomes soft around the edges.
The world ripples. The mirrored surface of the basin reforms into a smooth silver plain. On it, etched not by hand, but by thought, is a phrase. It shifts and writhes in alien tongues. Some letters bleed. Others scream. But one... one holds steady.
Three words. Seven syllables.
They shine.
And as Ruprecht stares, the ceiling above him peels back like paper. The stars pour in. Not from the sky, but from underneath.
The dream is collapsing now. Or shedding.
Pages begin to tear from the books above. They fall like snowflakes. One sticks to Ruprecht's chest. A photograph. One of the eyeless ones from the wall. Except this one... this one has his face.
And it's smiling.
Wide. Too wide.
The IV pulses again.
The dream responds like flesh reacting to flame.
Ruprecht's voice: slurred, shuddering, demanding, echoes with a resonance that makes the very walls quiver. Not echo, not reverberation, but memory. The dream remembers this voice. It doesnt like it.
The lights above the spiral staircase blink once, then die entirely. What remains is ambient, oily, sourced from nowhere. The darkness is not empty. It watches.
As Ruprecht descends, dragging the IV pole like a scepter of his own addiction, the world bends to accommodate him. The steps stretch and contract in unnatural rhythm, each CLUNK of the pole triggering a ripple in the floor, as if the dream is breathing around him.
The psychic pressure increases. His skin begins to itch, not from irritation, but from the sensation of being read. The books up top are silent now. Listening. Judging.
The chamber below unfolds like a wound.
Marlow remains suspended, weeping silver thought into the basin, a slow-drip lobotomy. Flowers wilt at Ruprecht's approach, petals curling like dying tongues. The air here no longer smells death, it smells like static. Like burnt circuitry and old paper. Like ozone bleeding into brain fluid.
His scream: "GIVE IT TO ME!" tears the silence open like damp cloth.
And something gives.
The basin erupts, not violently, but with a gentle, bubbling surge. Like champagne overflowing. The silver thought sloshes upward, twisting mid-air into a single thread that coils like a serpent, alive and resentful.
It slithers around Ruprecht's IV pole, slick and pulsing, binding it like a parasitic vine. The line between medicine and memory collapses.
A whisper returns: not distant this time, not omnipresent. It's inside his head. Inside his blood.
"The phrase is buried in bone. You must drink. You must drown. You must not wake."
The thread tightens. Then: pierces.
A needle that was never there injects itself through the dream and directly into his arm. The liquid is not cold. It is ecstatic. Fire and ice, all at once. Time becomes soft around the edges.
The world ripples. The mirrored surface of the basin reforms into a smooth silver plain. On it, etched not by hand, but by thought, is a phrase. It shifts and writhes in alien tongues. Some letters bleed. Others scream. But one... one holds steady.
Three words. Seven syllables.
They shine.
And as Ruprecht stares, the ceiling above him peels back like paper. The stars pour in. Not from the sky, but from underneath.
The dream is collapsing now. Or shedding.
Pages begin to tear from the books above. They fall like snowflakes. One sticks to Ruprecht's chest. A photograph. One of the eyeless ones from the wall. Except this one... this one has his face.
And it's smiling.
Wide. Too wide.
The IV pulses again.
This scape responds like flesh reacting to flame.
Ruprecht's voice: slurred, shuddering, demanding, echoes with a resonance that makes the very walls quiver. Not echo, not reverberation, but memory. The dream remembers this voice. It doesnt like it.
The lights above the spiral staircase blink once, then die entirely. What remains is ambient, oily, sourced from nowhere. The darkness is not empty. It watches.
As Ruprecht descends, dragging the IV pole like a scepter of his own addiction, the world bends to accommodate him. The steps stretch and contract in unnatural rhythm, each CLUNK of the pole triggering a ripple in the floor, as if the dream is breathing around him.
The psychic pressure increases. His skin begins to itch, not from irritation, but from the sensation of being read. The books up top are silent now. Listening. Judging.
The chamber below unfolds like a wound.
Marlow remains suspended, weeping silver thought into the basin, a slow-drip lobotomy. Flowers wilt at Ruprecht's approach, petals curling like dying tongues. The air here no longer smells death, it smells like static. Like burnt circuitry and old paper. Like ozone bleeding into brain fluid.
His scream: "GIVE IT TO ME!" tears the silence open like damp cloth.
And something gives.
The basin erupts, not violently, but with a gentle, bubbling surge. Like champagne overflowing. The silver thought sloshes upward, twisting mid-air into a single thread that coils like a serpent, alive and resentful.
It slithers around Ruprecht's IV pole, slick and pulsing, binding it like a parasitic vine. The line between medicine and memory collapses.
A whisper returns: not distant this time, not omnipresent. It's inside his head. Inside his blood.
"The phrase is buried in bone. You must drink. You must drown. You must not wake."
The thread tightens. Then: pierces.
A needle that was never there injects itself through the dream and directly into his arm. The liquid is not cold. It is ecstatic. Fire and ice, all at once. Time becomes soft around the edges.
The world ripples. The mirrored surface of the basin reforms into a smooth silver plain. On it, etched not by hand, but by thought, is a phrase. It shifts and writhes in alien tongues. Some letters bleed. Others scream. But one... one holds steady.
Three words. Seven syllables.
They shine.
And as Ruprecht stares, the ceiling above him peels back like paper. The stars pour in. Not from the sky, but from underneath.
The dream is collapsing now. Or shedding.
Pages begin to tear from the books above. They fall like snowflakes. One sticks to Ruprecht's chest. A photograph. One of the eyeless ones from the wall. Except this one... this one has his face.
And it's smiling.
Wide. Too wide.
The IV pulses again.
Ruprecht loses sight of his goals for but a moment, watching the stars that disappear from a falsified sky in awestruck fascination. He scratches at the broken, bruised flesh of his face, nails digging through rotting skin. Sickening trenches follow every attempt to make the feeling stop, but no blood follows. Even as he mutilates himself, he tries to get closer. To take what he would call his own, by force, even as a cripple. He disregards the watchers. Ignores the judgements. Not through only apathy -- sloth, but pride and denial. He fears the cost, but doesn't ask of price. His eyes scatter left to right as he tries to piece together the dyslexic snake, to steal the apple from this wretched Eden at last. After so many attempts, each different -- he's sure this is it. The photograph gets balled up and tossed into his mouth without so much as a glance. As if he knew. He chews with those bleeding teeth while they wiggle like cheap implants from a second-rate pimp. Drink... drown, but not wake up?
Not if he can help it. He'd rather fall through the bottom of the sky's abyss, than be swallowed by this shivering womb of turmoil.
He exhales a deep -- deep breath. All the air in his lungs. Just as when he's being choked down on. Rather than air, smog coils from his nose in a seemingly endless plume of sulfuric gunsmoke. It congeals like clotting ichor rather than a true gas, forming a 'pad' in front of him. Like a cloud. He steps up...
But he's losing it. Losing his control of that madness. The fleeting assurance of providence proves difficult to keep close.
It's a struggle to focus... noise, sight, pain -- fear. He is, drowning. But he'd not breathe this wretched water down. Not all of it. He came for something specific.
The smoke forms into a jagged staircase that follows up toward that idol of half-life. He aims to elevate himself. To look that monstrosity eye to eye.
Ruprecht ascends, each step more agonizing than the last... but he's getting closer. Right? That hand's still held out, as if to touch his fellow's face.
Each step tears at him.
The smoke beneath his feet hisses, hardening into slick obsidian edges that crack with each movement. The staircase spirals: not toward heaven, but into something stranger, suspended above nothing, below everything. The falsified sky continues peeling back, revealing a lattice of bones and mirrors, where constellations blink like eldritch horrors observing.
Every movement draws out more of the sulfur-smog from his lungs, until the air itself grows thick and hostile. The scent is blinding, gunpowder, bile, metal left too long in the sun. His teeth grind through the photographs pulp still caught between molars, the image dissolving into a bitter paste of memory and meat. It tastes like smoked-fish dipped in funeral ash.
The snake-word above twists, resisting him. Letters slither, rearranging, trying to mislead, to mock, to deny. But one sequence: burned in the back of his mind, wont move. It stays. Unblinking. A truth.
Below, the basin has overflowed. Silver thought coats the walls. It writhes now, panicked. It knows hes close.
That outstretched hand, half-formed, half-forgotten, beckons from the idols fractured face. Eyes like broken glass. Smile like a crack in stone.
As he nears the summit, the dream convulses. A final challenge, or a warning.
The air thins. The stairs moan.
The phrase glows: Sanctum, devours, the faithful.
Ruprecht doesn't even look at his bare feet as they're shredded beyond repair. He'd simply stepped away from that IV, and the hose seems to extend just a little further with his every step like an elastic band lodged in his vein. He bleeds with every step, flesh grinding away with each ascension. "I have." He croaks, retching up a pile of bloody bile just like earlier in the day. This time, more black than red. He's worsening. Visibly aging. Forty by now, no doubt -- hair beginning to fall from the crown of his head, wrinkles forming beneath sleeplessly dead eyes. "No. ." Another blot of shit flies from his throat, this time towards the martyr's open wounds like a propelled projectile of spite. "FAITH!"
He has no respect for sanctums, either. Sanctuary makes everything harder for his kind. A tenuous line to toe, ever a burden. He'd bring it all down if he could. The suffering of that living corpse brings him joy no chemical could. Another step sees him rolling his ankle, falling to knees that pop like bubble wrap. Sixty, now, and worse off than anyone else his 'age' could ever be.
"Your mind."
"GIVE IT TO ME!" A snarled demand, one breath forcefully taken to allow its completion. The price of speech.
He isn't trying to take the offerings. He'd consider that a trap. He's planning on reaching right into that fractured skull.
And squeezing.
The idol does not recoil.
The body, half-mummified, half-formed, sags in its cruciform suspension, leaking thought like oil through cracked porcelain skin. The flowers around its head shrivel further as bile strikes the wounds, hissing as it sinks in, like acid meeting open nerve. Steam rises. The dream shudders.
The hose attached to Ruprecht arm quivers, taut and glistening, pulsing with each heartbeat. It drags behind him like a leash or lifeline, extending impossibly, connecting him still to that place above, to the IV: his tether to reality, or delusion. But reality has started to mean less.
The staircase groans beneath his weight, not with strain, but resistance. As though it recognizes what climbs it and wants to unmake itself. Every edge cuts. The smoke thickens. And now the letters above twist once more, desperate, yet they cannot unseat the phrase. Sanctum devours the faithful. It burns brighter now, etched into the domes collapsing skin like scripture defiled.
someone At the summit, his shadow casts itself across the martyrs body. The hand still reaches, trembling. Not in supplication. In invitation. In inevitability.
The skull splits, not from decay, but to receive. A soft seam opens down the center, the bone parting like pages soaked in blood. Within, thought churns: a memory-core, pulsing with whispers and names long dead.
He reaches.
The hose convulses. The dream screams.
Now what bleeds, bleeds real.
The idol does not recoil.
The body, half-mummified, half-formed, sags in its cruciform suspension, leaking thought like oil through cracked porcelain skin. The flowers around its head shrivel further as bile strikes the wounds, hissing as it sinks in, like acid meeting open nerve. Steam rises. The dream shudders.
The hose attached to Ruprecht arm quivers, taut and glistening, pulsing with each heartbeat. It drags behind him like a leash or lifeline, extending impossibly, connecting him still to that place above, to the IV: his tether to reality, or delusion. But reality has started to mean less.
The staircase groans beneath his weight, not with strain, but resistance. As though it recognizes what climbs it and wants to unmake itself. Every edge cuts. The smoke thickens. And now the letters above twist once more, desperate, yet they cannot unseat the phrase. Sanctum devours the faithful. It burns brighter now, etched into the domes collapsing skin like scripture defiled.
someone At the summit, his shadow casts itself across the martyrs body. The hand still reaches, trembling. Not in supplication. In invitation. In inevitability.
The skull splits, not from decay, but to receive. A soft seam opens down the center, the bone parting like pages soaked in blood. Within, thought churns: a memory-core, pulsing with whispers and names long dead.
He reaches.
The hose convulses. The dream screams.
Now what bleeds, bleeds real.
The idol does not recoil.
The body, half-mummified, half-formed, sags in its cruciform suspension, leaking thought like oil through cracked porcelain skin. The flowers around its head shrivel further as bile strikes the wounds, hissing as it sinks in, like acid meeting open nerve. Steam rises. The dream shudders.
The hose attached to Ruprecht arm quivers, taut and glistening, pulsing with each heartbeat. It drags behind him like a leash or lifeline, extending impossibly, connecting him still to that place above, to the IV: his tether to reality, or delusion. But reality has started to mean less.
The staircase groans beneath his weight, not with strain, but resistance. As though it recognizes what climbs it and wants to unmake itself. Every edge cuts. The smoke thickens. And now the letters above twist once more, desperate, yet they cannot unseat the phrase. Sanctum devours the faithful. It burns brighter now, etched into the domes collapsing skin like scripture defiled.
At the summit, his shadow casts itself across the martyrs body. The hand still reaches, trembling. Not in supplication. In invitation. In inevitability.
The skull splits, not from decay, but to receive. A soft seam opens down the center, the bone parting like pages soaked in blood. Within, thought churns: a memory-core, pulsing with whispers and names long dead.
He reaches.
The hose convulses. The dream screams.
Now what bleeds, bleeds real.
Ruprecht twists, shoves -- rips. Mashes that man's head into a fine jelly, like he's actively performing a Chinese swirly-do abortion. His body quivers as it all comes clean, bit by bit... little by little. When he finally withdraws that wrist from the base of the primary bowl, that skull, he pours a handful of the pink ichor straight into his own mouth. The hand isn't taken. He'd offer no solace to this creature. Share no humanity. Instead, he makes a fork of his bloody fingers. Moves to shove them into the sockets of the martyr's eyes. "It's mine, Marlow. Let it. Go." Feeling doesn't seem to hit him so clearly as the answers. He'd forget his pain, if he could -- to make room for all this special data... but it's much too important. Fuel for the fire that awakes from dead eyes. He trembles like a ticking bomb. No words follow.
But youth seems to. His wounds begin to flow a pure scarlet red. The black, no longer.
The skull caves inward like softened fruit beneath Ruprecht force. Bone cracks. Thought leaks. Pink and silver mix in thick rivulets, bubbling around his wrist as the martyrs mind-matter gives way with pitiful slurps. Each twist releases another burst of psychic static, like old radio waves screaming into the void.
The moment he draws back, the basin shudders. Ripples race across its surface, echoing his movements. The ichor in his palm gleams: veined with memory, thick with soulweight. When it hits his tongue, it doesnt taste. It instructs.
Coordinates. Names. Faces long erased. Rituals buried beneath blood and lies.
The martyr jerks once as the bloody fork of fingers stabs into its ruined sockets. Its spine coils, vertebrae snapping one by one like cracking knuckles. No resistance now. Just the wet sound of compliance.
Its mine Let it. Go.
The idol obeys.
From its hollowed eyes, something floods out: lightless, dense, encoded. It rushes through his arms, into his chest, into his skull. No pain. Just rewriting. The library above vanishes in flames. The walls peel. The stairs snap.
The basin glows with a red hue: not borrowed, earned.
The dream cannot contain him.
Ruprecht skin tightens. His muscles firm. Color returns. Red, living red.
And somewhere, deep in the marrow of that unraveling world: A lock clicks open.
Ruprecht dies. In this world, at least. He's young again, a fresh faced twenty-two in looks, but that black heart of his? Just stops at once. It's a representation of ego death made physical. He's becoming a new man. Perhaps what's left of this corpse will take Marlow's place in this psychic rapture, but he's free. Free at last. Truth. Is his.
Or at least, as much of it as he has time to drink from. The connection between the two continues to surge in an off-colored dichotomy. Martyr et Monster. One consuming the other. He imagines a yin yang, one twisted -- a shape on one side, an apple on another. Kallisti.
The IV snaps from his throat, whiplashing what seems like seven miles back to the bag, only to dangle impotently. Drip. Drip.
His eyes, then, become holes. Inky, black, abyss. Churning and roiling with smoke. Fire's end. Nothing, and everything.
He's at peace with himself.
The chamber silences, reverent.
No alarms, no rupture: only stillness, as though the dream itself holds its breath to witness what cannot be undone.
Where flesh once trembled, a new body stands. The blood is real, warm and vital, but the heart no longer ticks. Not here. Not in this realm. Youth is a mask. The engine within, a furnace without need for pulse, glows in silence. Ego, obliterated. Desire, distilled. What remains is function shaped like man.
The corpse of Marlow curls inward like burnt parchment. Thought collapses into smoke. Whats left sinks into the basin: absorbed, archived, irrelevant. That identity has been taken, hollowed, worn like a robe, then discarded.
Above, the books ignite in orderly sequence, one by one, blazing words into embers. They curl in the air like falling leaves, ash-lettered and empty.
The IV tubing retracts violently, a serpent withdrawing into its den. The line flails once, lifeless, and dangles in surrender. Its liquid, no longer needed, drips in quiet defeat.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
The blackness in Ruprecht eyes churns, no longer metaphor but mechanism. Abyss upon abyss. Starless skies twisting in endless descent. Not dead. Not dreaming.
Changed. The dream shatters like stained glass. And he wakes in the real. Clean. Whole. Truth intact.
Ruprecht looks down at his hands, wordless. Chews on his broken teeth, noting their sturdiness. The IV isn't in his neck when he comes back to reality. Likewise, he isn't on his feet, but face-first in a pool of his own blood on tile. The EMTs are surely swarming him like vultures by now.
But as he fades into the normality of his overdose, and consciousness lapses again, he realizes something. Something worth smiling for.
That blood on the floor is purely sanguine.
As Ruprecht delves deeper into the dream, the narrative takes on a more visceral and intense tone. He encounters Marlow, a martyr-like figure, whose mind holds the key he seeks, but accessing it demands a confrontation with the grotesque and the surreal. The dream's resistance grows stronger, manifesting in the physical decay of Ruprecht's body and the challenging, mutating landscape that becomes increasingly hostile. Despite the torturous path and the psychic assault on his senses, Ruprecht's determination—or perhaps obsession—drives him forward. The climax of his journey is both ghastly and revelatory, as he physically and metaphorically consumes Marlow's essence, absorbing the coveted knowledge but at a significant cost. His transformation is complete, marked by a symbolic rebirth; he emerges younger, yet irrevocably altered, a stark personification of the aphorism "knowledge comes with a price."
The ordeal concludes with Ruprecht returning to reality, lying in a pool of his own blood, surrounded by the clinical indifference of the hospital setting. The stark contrast between the vivid, nightmarish quest for truth and the mundane, fluorescent-lit room underscores the profound isolation and transformation Ruprecht has undergone. The physical scars may heal, but the psychic wounds and the truths unearthed from the depths of his subconscious will forever change him. As he lapses back into unconsciousness, the realization that his blood—now purely sanguine—serves as a powerful symbol of his ordeal: a journey through darkness to reclaim a part of himself, leaving him forever altered in its wake.
(Ruprecht's odd encounter(SRLorenzo):SRLorenzo)
[Thu Apr 3 2025]
In hospital room 2
This room is sparsely furnished, the sanitary white walls a perfect match
to the linoleum floor and the thin hospital sheets on the gurney that serves
as a bed. A small television mounted in the upper corner of the room is set
at a low volume, and a thin curtain bisects the room in an effort to afford
privacy to the occupant on the other side.
It is night, about 59F(15C) degrees, and there are a few thin white clouds in the sky. There is a first quarter moon.
(Your target and their allies have been tasked with stealing a vital piece of intelligence from a subject by delving into their mind with dream invading to try to tease out the secret.
)
Ruprecht stares with a slackened jaw at the IV bag as it sloooowly creeeps down the mainline in shoved into his collar. He'd spiked it heavily with pharma-grade ketamine just under an hour ago. The blackened marks on his face look similar to what would be on a corpse freshly beaten to death, spidery black webs worked across his entire expression. He clicks his tongue every once in a while... five minutes, exactly. A living clock.
The dream bleeds in slowly, like ink into water.
The world stabilizes in pieces: soft light through warped glass, the scent of damp paper and burned ozone. The mind of Subject 043 doesnt take the shape of a battlefield or fortress. No, it is a library. Towering. Endless. Impossible.
Rows of books spiral upward like a cathedral of memory, vanishing into a sky that is not sky at all, just a dome of static, flickering stars blinking in and out like bad signal. The walls groan when no one speaks. Dust drifts on the air, but never lands.
Footsteps echo, someone, maybe, or someone elses. The floor underfoot is wood, old, stained with shapes that might be ink, or might be blood. Somewhere, a grandfather clock ticks without rhythm, sounding out time in uneven intervals. Tick tick tickticktick pause.
Everything smells like some died masked with too much perfume.
To the right, a table of half-opened journals lies under a green-glass lamp that never flickers. The words move on the pages, writing themselves, unwriting, rewriting, names, dates, places in languages that feel familiar and yet never existed.
A whispered voice speaks from nowhere: You were not meant to see this.
The air tastes of copper.
Further in, the shelves begin to curve, spiraling inward toward a center point. Books give way to folders, folders to files, files to flesh. Pages sewn from skin, spines made of bone, inked in a language that pulses when read. The shelves lean now, as if resisting the trespass.
And beneath it all: a hum. Low. Vibrating. Like a frequency felt bone deep, deeper than hearing. It calls. It warns.
On a distant wall, photographs line the bricks. Faces blurred by motion or memory. All of them smiling. All of them missing eyes.
One of the books opens itself.
The sound is wet.
A staircase of bent metal and melted stone descends beneath it, leading to a chamber carved from raw thought. The air here buzzes with psychic pressure, like the moment before a scream. Paint peels from the nonexistent walls. Gravity wavers.
At the center: Marlow. Or whats left of him.
He hangs suspended, ribs like open wings, eyes stained in black, mouth sealed shut by rusted staples. Thought still leaks from him: viscous, silver, and faintly glowing into the basin beneath. His mind is open. Cracked. Weeping.
Whispers crawl across the chamber, repeating the same phrase in different tongues. Only one is correct. The phrase is here, buried like a key in the flesh of a god.
But time here is fracturing.
The books are screaming now, each voice a different version of the truth. The spiral tightens. The dome above begins to bleed stars. The air turns to static.
And behind the sealed mouth of Marlow, one eye blinks.
Slow.
Knowing.
The dream bleeds in slowly, like ink into water.
The world stabilizes in pieces: soft light through warped glass, the scent of damp paper and burned ozone. The mind of Subject 043 doesnt take the shape of a battlefield or fortress. No, it is a library. Towering. Endless. Impossible.
Rows of books spiral upward like a cathedral of memory, vanishing into a sky that is not sky at all, just a dome of static, flickering stars blinking in and out like bad signal. The walls groan when no one speaks. Dust drifts on the air, but never lands.
Footsteps echo, Ruprecht's, maybe, or someone elses. The floor underfoot is wood, old, stained with shapes that might be ink, or might be blood. Somewhere, a grandfather clock ticks without rhythm, sounding out time in uneven intervals. Tick... tick... tickticktick... pause.
Everything smells like some died masked with too much perfume.
To the right, a table of half-opened journals lies under a green-glass lamp that never flickers. The words move on the pages, writing themselves, unwriting, rewriting, names, dates, places in languages that feel familiar and yet never existed.
A whispered voice speaks from nowhere: You were not meant to see this.
The air tastes of copper.
Further in, the shelves begin to curve, spiraling inward toward a center point. Books give way to folders, folders to files, files to flesh. Pages sewn from skin, spines made of bone, inked in a language that pulses when read. The shelves lean now, as if resisting the trespass.
And beneath it all: a hum. Low. Vibrating. Like a frequency felt bone deep, deeper than hearing. It calls. It warns.
On a distant wall, photographs line the bricks. Faces blurred by motion or memory. All of them smiling. All of them missing eyes.
One of the books opens itself.
The sound is wet.
A staircase of bent metal and melted stone descends beneath it, leading to a chamber carved from raw thought. The air here buzzes with psychic pressure, like the moment before a scream. Paint peels from the nonexistent walls. Gravity wavers.
At the center: Marlow. Or whats left of him.
He hangs suspended, ribs like open wings, eyes stained in black, mouth sealed shut by rusted staples. Thought still leaks from him: viscous, silver, and faintly glowing into the basin beneath. His mind is open. Cracked. Weeping.
Whispers crawl across the chamber, repeating the same phrase in different tongues. Only one is correct. The phrase is here, buried like a key in the flesh of a god.
But time here is fracturing.
The books are screaming now, each voice a different version of the truth. The spiral tightens. The dome above begins to bleed stars. The air turns to static.
And behind the sealed mouth of Marlow, one eye blinks.
Slow.
Knowing.
Oh boy, it's time for the K-hole, huh?! This isn't the normal kaleidoscopic transcendence that Ruprecht knows and loves. A library, instead -- not too uncommon. The endless infinity of the bookshelves seems to convince him that this, in and of itself, is simply an extension of his self imposed tranquilizer overdose. That clock really starts to piss him off. He's calculating in difficult increments of five minutes, and that DAMNED ticker continuously ruins his consistency. "Yeah?" He replies to the whisper with a laggard slur. "It won't be the firssst tiime I've heard it like thaaat..." Those books. Those special, meaty books. He knows books like those. Or, rather, once knew -- and can't remember. He begins wheeling his IV through the dream, limping along as if his back were broken. Eyes flip to the photographs. That's familiar to him too. This entire situation is culminating into some sickening deja vu for our wanderer. He tries to pause, tries to read -- to study, to drink deep from the rivers of knowledge once drenched in blood.
But it can't last. He knows there's more. Maybe -- just maybe, he'll get a chance to study later. Down those stairs he goes, CLUNK CLUNK CLUNKing the IV pole the whole way. He doesn't falter. He doesn't gasp. His eyes bug wider than one of those fucked up goldfish they sell at the specialty store.
It's beautiful to him. Stylish. Metaphorical. He mutters something incoherent, destination clear. "Give... g..."
Hoarse rasps turn into a desperate rage. "GIVE IT TO ME!"
Ruprecht holds out a single hand like a wraith in the mist, trying to get closer to the martyr. He's bad off... sort've like a crippled old man.
The dream responds like flesh reacting to flame.
Ruprecht's voice: slurred, shuddering, demanding, echoes with a resonance that makes the very walls quiver. Not echo, not reverberation, but memory. The dream remembers this voice. It doesnt like it.
The lights above the spiral staircase blink once, then die entirely. What remains is ambient, oily, sourced from nowhere. The darkness is not empty. It watches.
As Ruprecht descends, dragging the IV pole like a scepter of his own addiction, the world bends to accommodate him. The steps stretch and contract in unnatural rhythm, each CLUNK of the pole triggering a ripple in the floor, as if the dream is breathing around him.
The psychic pressure increases. His skin begins to itch, not from irritation, but from the sensation of being read. The books up top are silent now. Listening. Judging.
The chamber below unfolds like a wound.
Marlow remains suspended, weeping silver thought into the basin, a slow-drip lobotomy. Flowers wilt at Ruprecht's approach, petals curling like dying tongues. The air here no longer smells death, it smells like static. Like burnt circuitry and old paper. Like ozone bleeding into brain fluid.
His scream: "GIVE IT TO ME!" tears the silence open like damp cloth.
And something gives.
The basin erupts, not violently, but with a gentle, bubbling surge. Like champagne overflowing. The silver thought sloshes upward, twisting mid-air into a single thread that coils like a serpent, alive and resentful.
It slithers around someone IV pole, slick and pulsing, binding it like a parasitic vine. The line between medicine and memory collapses.
A whisper returns: not distant this time, not omnipresent. It's inside his head. Inside his blood.
"The phrase is buried in bone. You must drink. You must drown. You must not wake."
The thread tightens. Then: pierces.
A needle that was never there injects itself through the dream and directly into his arm. The liquid is not cold. It is ecstatic. Fire and ice, all at once. Time becomes soft around the edges.
The world ripples. The mirrored surface of the basin reforms into a smooth silver plain. On it, etched not by hand, but by thought, is a phrase. It shifts and writhes in alien tongues. Some letters bleed. Others scream. But one... one holds steady.
Three words. Seven syllables.
They shine.
And as Ruprecht stares, the ceiling above him peels back like paper. The stars pour in. Not from the sky, but from underneath.
The dream is collapsing now. Or shedding.
Pages begin to tear from the books above. They fall like snowflakes. One sticks to Ruprecht's chest. A photograph. One of the eyeless ones from the wall. Except this one... this one has his face.
And it's smiling.
Wide. Too wide.
The IV pulses again.
The dream responds like flesh reacting to flame.
Ruprecht's voice: slurred, shuddering, demanding, echoes with a resonance that makes the very walls quiver. Not echo, not reverberation, but memory. The dream remembers this voice. It doesnt like it.
The lights above the spiral staircase blink once, then die entirely. What remains is ambient, oily, sourced from nowhere. The darkness is not empty. It watches.
As Ruprecht descends, dragging the IV pole like a scepter of his own addiction, the world bends to accommodate him. The steps stretch and contract in unnatural rhythm, each CLUNK of the pole triggering a ripple in the floor, as if the dream is breathing around him.
The psychic pressure increases. His skin begins to itch, not from irritation, but from the sensation of being read. The books up top are silent now. Listening. Judging.
The chamber below unfolds like a wound.
Marlow remains suspended, weeping silver thought into the basin, a slow-drip lobotomy. Flowers wilt at Ruprecht's approach, petals curling like dying tongues. The air here no longer smells death, it smells like static. Like burnt circuitry and old paper. Like ozone bleeding into brain fluid.
His scream: "GIVE IT TO ME!" tears the silence open like damp cloth.
And something gives.
The basin erupts, not violently, but with a gentle, bubbling surge. Like champagne overflowing. The silver thought sloshes upward, twisting mid-air into a single thread that coils like a serpent, alive and resentful.
It slithers around Ruprecht's IV pole, slick and pulsing, binding it like a parasitic vine. The line between medicine and memory collapses.
A whisper returns: not distant this time, not omnipresent. It's inside his head. Inside his blood.
"The phrase is buried in bone. You must drink. You must drown. You must not wake."
The thread tightens. Then: pierces.
A needle that was never there injects itself through the dream and directly into his arm. The liquid is not cold. It is ecstatic. Fire and ice, all at once. Time becomes soft around the edges.
The world ripples. The mirrored surface of the basin reforms into a smooth silver plain. On it, etched not by hand, but by thought, is a phrase. It shifts and writhes in alien tongues. Some letters bleed. Others scream. But one... one holds steady.
Three words. Seven syllables.
They shine.
And as Ruprecht stares, the ceiling above him peels back like paper. The stars pour in. Not from the sky, but from underneath.
The dream is collapsing now. Or shedding.
Pages begin to tear from the books above. They fall like snowflakes. One sticks to Ruprecht's chest. A photograph. One of the eyeless ones from the wall. Except this one... this one has his face.
And it's smiling.
Wide. Too wide.
The IV pulses again.
This scape responds like flesh reacting to flame.
Ruprecht's voice: slurred, shuddering, demanding, echoes with a resonance that makes the very walls quiver. Not echo, not reverberation, but memory. The dream remembers this voice. It doesnt like it.
The lights above the spiral staircase blink once, then die entirely. What remains is ambient, oily, sourced from nowhere. The darkness is not empty. It watches.
As Ruprecht descends, dragging the IV pole like a scepter of his own addiction, the world bends to accommodate him. The steps stretch and contract in unnatural rhythm, each CLUNK of the pole triggering a ripple in the floor, as if the dream is breathing around him.
The psychic pressure increases. His skin begins to itch, not from irritation, but from the sensation of being read. The books up top are silent now. Listening. Judging.
The chamber below unfolds like a wound.
Marlow remains suspended, weeping silver thought into the basin, a slow-drip lobotomy. Flowers wilt at Ruprecht's approach, petals curling like dying tongues. The air here no longer smells death, it smells like static. Like burnt circuitry and old paper. Like ozone bleeding into brain fluid.
His scream: "GIVE IT TO ME!" tears the silence open like damp cloth.
And something gives.
The basin erupts, not violently, but with a gentle, bubbling surge. Like champagne overflowing. The silver thought sloshes upward, twisting mid-air into a single thread that coils like a serpent, alive and resentful.
It slithers around Ruprecht's IV pole, slick and pulsing, binding it like a parasitic vine. The line between medicine and memory collapses.
A whisper returns: not distant this time, not omnipresent. It's inside his head. Inside his blood.
"The phrase is buried in bone. You must drink. You must drown. You must not wake."
The thread tightens. Then: pierces.
A needle that was never there injects itself through the dream and directly into his arm. The liquid is not cold. It is ecstatic. Fire and ice, all at once. Time becomes soft around the edges.
The world ripples. The mirrored surface of the basin reforms into a smooth silver plain. On it, etched not by hand, but by thought, is a phrase. It shifts and writhes in alien tongues. Some letters bleed. Others scream. But one... one holds steady.
Three words. Seven syllables.
They shine.
And as Ruprecht stares, the ceiling above him peels back like paper. The stars pour in. Not from the sky, but from underneath.
The dream is collapsing now. Or shedding.
Pages begin to tear from the books above. They fall like snowflakes. One sticks to Ruprecht's chest. A photograph. One of the eyeless ones from the wall. Except this one... this one has his face.
And it's smiling.
Wide. Too wide.
The IV pulses again.
Ruprecht loses sight of his goals for but a moment, watching the stars that disappear from a falsified sky in awestruck fascination. He scratches at the broken, bruised flesh of his face, nails digging through rotting skin. Sickening trenches follow every attempt to make the feeling stop, but no blood follows. Even as he mutilates himself, he tries to get closer. To take what he would call his own, by force, even as a cripple. He disregards the watchers. Ignores the judgements. Not through only apathy -- sloth, but pride and denial. He fears the cost, but doesn't ask of price. His eyes scatter left to right as he tries to piece together the dyslexic snake, to steal the apple from this wretched Eden at last. After so many attempts, each different -- he's sure this is it. The photograph gets balled up and tossed into his mouth without so much as a glance. As if he knew. He chews with those bleeding teeth while they wiggle like cheap implants from a second-rate pimp. Drink... drown, but not wake up?
Not if he can help it. He'd rather fall through the bottom of the sky's abyss, than be swallowed by this shivering womb of turmoil.
He exhales a deep -- deep breath. All the air in his lungs. Just as when he's being choked down on. Rather than air, smog coils from his nose in a seemingly endless plume of sulfuric gunsmoke. It congeals like clotting ichor rather than a true gas, forming a 'pad' in front of him. Like a cloud. He steps up...
But he's losing it. Losing his control of that madness. The fleeting assurance of providence proves difficult to keep close.
It's a struggle to focus... noise, sight, pain -- fear. He is, drowning. But he'd not breathe this wretched water down. Not all of it. He came for something specific.
The smoke forms into a jagged staircase that follows up toward that idol of half-life. He aims to elevate himself. To look that monstrosity eye to eye.
Ruprecht ascends, each step more agonizing than the last... but he's getting closer. Right? That hand's still held out, as if to touch his fellow's face.
Each step tears at him.
The smoke beneath his feet hisses, hardening into slick obsidian edges that crack with each movement. The staircase spirals: not toward heaven, but into something stranger, suspended above nothing, below everything. The falsified sky continues peeling back, revealing a lattice of bones and mirrors, where constellations blink like eldritch horrors observing.
Every movement draws out more of the sulfur-smog from his lungs, until the air itself grows thick and hostile. The scent is blinding, gunpowder, bile, metal left too long in the sun. His teeth grind through the photographs pulp still caught between molars, the image dissolving into a bitter paste of memory and meat. It tastes like smoked-fish dipped in funeral ash.
The snake-word above twists, resisting him. Letters slither, rearranging, trying to mislead, to mock, to deny. But one sequence: burned in the back of his mind, wont move. It stays. Unblinking. A truth.
Below, the basin has overflowed. Silver thought coats the walls. It writhes now, panicked. It knows hes close.
That outstretched hand, half-formed, half-forgotten, beckons from the idols fractured face. Eyes like broken glass. Smile like a crack in stone.
As he nears the summit, the dream convulses. A final challenge, or a warning.
The air thins. The stairs moan.
The phrase glows: Sanctum, devours, the faithful.
Ruprecht doesn't even look at his bare feet as they're shredded beyond repair. He'd simply stepped away from that IV, and the hose seems to extend just a little further with his every step like an elastic band lodged in his vein. He bleeds with every step, flesh grinding away with each ascension. "I have." He croaks, retching up a pile of bloody bile just like earlier in the day. This time, more black than red. He's worsening. Visibly aging. Forty by now, no doubt -- hair beginning to fall from the crown of his head, wrinkles forming beneath sleeplessly dead eyes. "No. ." Another blot of shit flies from his throat, this time towards the martyr's open wounds like a propelled projectile of spite. "FAITH!"
He has no respect for sanctums, either. Sanctuary makes everything harder for his kind. A tenuous line to toe, ever a burden. He'd bring it all down if he could. The suffering of that living corpse brings him joy no chemical could. Another step sees him rolling his ankle, falling to knees that pop like bubble wrap. Sixty, now, and worse off than anyone else his 'age' could ever be.
"Your mind."
"GIVE IT TO ME!" A snarled demand, one breath forcefully taken to allow its completion. The price of speech.
He isn't trying to take the offerings. He'd consider that a trap. He's planning on reaching right into that fractured skull.
And squeezing.
The idol does not recoil.
The body, half-mummified, half-formed, sags in its cruciform suspension, leaking thought like oil through cracked porcelain skin. The flowers around its head shrivel further as bile strikes the wounds, hissing as it sinks in, like acid meeting open nerve. Steam rises. The dream shudders.
The hose attached to Ruprecht arm quivers, taut and glistening, pulsing with each heartbeat. It drags behind him like a leash or lifeline, extending impossibly, connecting him still to that place above, to the IV: his tether to reality, or delusion. But reality has started to mean less.
The staircase groans beneath his weight, not with strain, but resistance. As though it recognizes what climbs it and wants to unmake itself. Every edge cuts. The smoke thickens. And now the letters above twist once more, desperate, yet they cannot unseat the phrase. Sanctum devours the faithful. It burns brighter now, etched into the domes collapsing skin like scripture defiled.
someone At the summit, his shadow casts itself across the martyrs body. The hand still reaches, trembling. Not in supplication. In invitation. In inevitability.
The skull splits, not from decay, but to receive. A soft seam opens down the center, the bone parting like pages soaked in blood. Within, thought churns: a memory-core, pulsing with whispers and names long dead.
He reaches.
The hose convulses. The dream screams.
Now what bleeds, bleeds real.
The idol does not recoil.
The body, half-mummified, half-formed, sags in its cruciform suspension, leaking thought like oil through cracked porcelain skin. The flowers around its head shrivel further as bile strikes the wounds, hissing as it sinks in, like acid meeting open nerve. Steam rises. The dream shudders.
The hose attached to Ruprecht arm quivers, taut and glistening, pulsing with each heartbeat. It drags behind him like a leash or lifeline, extending impossibly, connecting him still to that place above, to the IV: his tether to reality, or delusion. But reality has started to mean less.
The staircase groans beneath his weight, not with strain, but resistance. As though it recognizes what climbs it and wants to unmake itself. Every edge cuts. The smoke thickens. And now the letters above twist once more, desperate, yet they cannot unseat the phrase. Sanctum devours the faithful. It burns brighter now, etched into the domes collapsing skin like scripture defiled.
someone At the summit, his shadow casts itself across the martyrs body. The hand still reaches, trembling. Not in supplication. In invitation. In inevitability.
The skull splits, not from decay, but to receive. A soft seam opens down the center, the bone parting like pages soaked in blood. Within, thought churns: a memory-core, pulsing with whispers and names long dead.
He reaches.
The hose convulses. The dream screams.
Now what bleeds, bleeds real.
The idol does not recoil.
The body, half-mummified, half-formed, sags in its cruciform suspension, leaking thought like oil through cracked porcelain skin. The flowers around its head shrivel further as bile strikes the wounds, hissing as it sinks in, like acid meeting open nerve. Steam rises. The dream shudders.
The hose attached to Ruprecht arm quivers, taut and glistening, pulsing with each heartbeat. It drags behind him like a leash or lifeline, extending impossibly, connecting him still to that place above, to the IV: his tether to reality, or delusion. But reality has started to mean less.
The staircase groans beneath his weight, not with strain, but resistance. As though it recognizes what climbs it and wants to unmake itself. Every edge cuts. The smoke thickens. And now the letters above twist once more, desperate, yet they cannot unseat the phrase. Sanctum devours the faithful. It burns brighter now, etched into the domes collapsing skin like scripture defiled.
At the summit, his shadow casts itself across the martyrs body. The hand still reaches, trembling. Not in supplication. In invitation. In inevitability.
The skull splits, not from decay, but to receive. A soft seam opens down the center, the bone parting like pages soaked in blood. Within, thought churns: a memory-core, pulsing with whispers and names long dead.
He reaches.
The hose convulses. The dream screams.
Now what bleeds, bleeds real.
Ruprecht twists, shoves -- rips. Mashes that man's head into a fine jelly, like he's actively performing a Chinese swirly-do abortion. His body quivers as it all comes clean, bit by bit... little by little. When he finally withdraws that wrist from the base of the primary bowl, that skull, he pours a handful of the pink ichor straight into his own mouth. The hand isn't taken. He'd offer no solace to this creature. Share no humanity. Instead, he makes a fork of his bloody fingers. Moves to shove them into the sockets of the martyr's eyes. "It's mine, Marlow. Let it. Go." Feeling doesn't seem to hit him so clearly as the answers. He'd forget his pain, if he could -- to make room for all this special data... but it's much too important. Fuel for the fire that awakes from dead eyes. He trembles like a ticking bomb. No words follow.
But youth seems to. His wounds begin to flow a pure scarlet red. The black, no longer.
The skull caves inward like softened fruit beneath Ruprecht force. Bone cracks. Thought leaks. Pink and silver mix in thick rivulets, bubbling around his wrist as the martyrs mind-matter gives way with pitiful slurps. Each twist releases another burst of psychic static, like old radio waves screaming into the void.
The moment he draws back, the basin shudders. Ripples race across its surface, echoing his movements. The ichor in his palm gleams: veined with memory, thick with soulweight. When it hits his tongue, it doesnt taste. It instructs.
Coordinates. Names. Faces long erased. Rituals buried beneath blood and lies.
The martyr jerks once as the bloody fork of fingers stabs into its ruined sockets. Its spine coils, vertebrae snapping one by one like cracking knuckles. No resistance now. Just the wet sound of compliance.
Its mine Let it. Go.
The idol obeys.
From its hollowed eyes, something floods out: lightless, dense, encoded. It rushes through his arms, into his chest, into his skull. No pain. Just rewriting. The library above vanishes in flames. The walls peel. The stairs snap.
The basin glows with a red hue: not borrowed, earned.
The dream cannot contain him.
Ruprecht skin tightens. His muscles firm. Color returns. Red, living red.
And somewhere, deep in the marrow of that unraveling world: A lock clicks open.
Ruprecht dies. In this world, at least. He's young again, a fresh faced twenty-two in looks, but that black heart of his? Just stops at once. It's a representation of ego death made physical. He's becoming a new man. Perhaps what's left of this corpse will take Marlow's place in this psychic rapture, but he's free. Free at last. Truth. Is his.
Or at least, as much of it as he has time to drink from. The connection between the two continues to surge in an off-colored dichotomy. Martyr et Monster. One consuming the other. He imagines a yin yang, one twisted -- a shape on one side, an apple on another. Kallisti.
The IV snaps from his throat, whiplashing what seems like seven miles back to the bag, only to dangle impotently. Drip. Drip.
His eyes, then, become holes. Inky, black, abyss. Churning and roiling with smoke. Fire's end. Nothing, and everything.
He's at peace with himself.
The chamber silences, reverent.
No alarms, no rupture: only stillness, as though the dream itself holds its breath to witness what cannot be undone.
Where flesh once trembled, a new body stands. The blood is real, warm and vital, but the heart no longer ticks. Not here. Not in this realm. Youth is a mask. The engine within, a furnace without need for pulse, glows in silence. Ego, obliterated. Desire, distilled. What remains is function shaped like man.
The corpse of Marlow curls inward like burnt parchment. Thought collapses into smoke. Whats left sinks into the basin: absorbed, archived, irrelevant. That identity has been taken, hollowed, worn like a robe, then discarded.
Above, the books ignite in orderly sequence, one by one, blazing words into embers. They curl in the air like falling leaves, ash-lettered and empty.
The IV tubing retracts violently, a serpent withdrawing into its den. The line flails once, lifeless, and dangles in surrender. Its liquid, no longer needed, drips in quiet defeat.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
The blackness in Ruprecht eyes churns, no longer metaphor but mechanism. Abyss upon abyss. Starless skies twisting in endless descent. Not dead. Not dreaming.
Changed. The dream shatters like stained glass. And he wakes in the real. Clean. Whole. Truth intact.
Ruprecht looks down at his hands, wordless. Chews on his broken teeth, noting their sturdiness. The IV isn't in his neck when he comes back to reality. Likewise, he isn't on his feet, but face-first in a pool of his own blood on tile. The EMTs are surely swarming him like vultures by now.
But as he fades into the normality of his overdose, and consciousness lapses again, he realizes something. Something worth smiling for.
That blood on the floor is purely sanguine.