Umbrage

She was a beautiful woman to behold, a full body curved with rich sensuality and generous proportions that she mockingly clad in the sleek, sharp cut of a scholar’s suit.

Her psychomask, black and carved with blue, imitated rather than disguised her serendipitous features.

But to look in her eyes was to render all that impotent. You felt your heart shiver in sympathetic loss.

“It’s universal, I assure you,” Her smoky voice hisses in quiet conversation. “We all suffer it. Most of us have the strength to bear it long enough to succumb to the dark first. But I’ve seen enough to believe that it is all around, inevitable really. It’s a pressure, constantly whispering in our ear. I don’t know what it is saying, but I’ve been trying to catch it, to trace that echo.”

Picking up a thick, dark green tome, she flips through pages dense with precise prose. “I’ve kept account of all the mutterings and stutterings that struck me as relevant, and I’m close to piecing together something…”

Through the mask’s eyeholes, she wields two wells of black misery with serious intent as she speaks.

“Towers of doubt and glass, I know, I hear. I don’t care. I’m not doing this because of what they think. I’m doing this to save everyone from this umbrage. Everyone.”

[Afterlives - "Ever The Optimist"]

The Red Marks

sharp, sharp

swear on your heart

sharp, sharp

never be apart

sharp, sharp

hides in the dark

sharp, sharp

leaves a red mark

[An oral tradition shared by the children of Apparatus, rooted in "the Red Marks", a series of unusually brutal murders during the early history of Apparatus]

MAUDLIN ROSE ~ Brazil

Balcony Life

“I’ve got an idea for a new weapon.”

The callused fingers paused, hovering over a slim, quietly singing string. As he spoke, a wispy curl of smoke escaped from Daen’s mouth. His fair eyes were quietly staring out, far out, past the stolid block of east Apparatus, where humble residential palaces of dull-colors stacks eating into the skyline were mashed together, a series of crumbling walls in which Lacuni were born and died, Guild-ridden and subconsciously aware of the darkness closing in, a fingermark at a time. But Daen was seeing past that, into the darkness, past the world of Apparatus and into some heaven far off, beyond the territory of the sunless.

His fingers starting moving again, slowly sauntering back and forth, traversing wires stretched taut. This particular breed of wireplayer was a thrice-player; the three extensions of differing lengths resembled a distorted y. Daen played the other neck with a fingerstick, drawing out a haunting note that wavered into dissolution, joining the evanescent wraith born from Daen’s lips.

A few feet away, Ere was relaxing into a reading cushion, briefly sampling Daen’s pipe. He glanced at Daen, unfettered curtain of pale hair veiling his sharp gaze.

“And the design’s based on what?” Ere asked, quietly whispering out a dancing line in smoke. The hushed atmosphere was an unspoken agreement. This balcony was where Ere’s grandfather, Aptel, had died of bloodfrost, and Ere often came up to read and watch the city. Daen was free to smoke here, unlike in the rest of Heath Ephemera.

“It’s based on killing Skleros particularly hard to kill.” Ere was nonplussed by Daen’s intentionally worthless answer.

“I just about could start back on the book again.” A few moments of silence as Daen bit back more sarcasm. “You brought it up, remember. A few seconds ago, Daen. Were you just looking to wild interrupt me?”

“The nail drivers.”

“Oh.”

Daen stopped playing and put his teeth around his wrist. Ere frowned.

“Oh, quit your fuming, you clencher. You don’t need to elaborate, I get the gist of it.”

Daen scraped out a particularly unpleasant note that made Ere wince.

“Have you no mercy?”

Daen stopped and cocked an eyebrow at Ere.

“Shall I go on?” Daen asked, and Ere scowled at his broad grin.

“We all lost our hearts
Trying to feel good.”

[Persons & Machinery - UNKLE feat. Autolux]

Moonlight Sculptures

“Am I sculptured now?”

[HAN$EL]

The Escalatine & The Cenoform

Their bodies were never found. But their discovery, to this day, continues to haunt the historians and engineers of our city, and they live on in our people’s memories, if not in our harrowings:

“When the Escalatine rose, there seemed to have been nothing as beautiful or monumental in the history of Apparatus. The massive lift hollow was an ovoid monolith suspended above a crowded collective of hundreds, their shared breath held. Up, the city lights were mute and streaked reflections in the dull sheen of the lightweight, pliable metal making up the bulk of the Escalatine. The carriage where the two pilots hid was barely visible, an angular structure clinging to the bottom of what seemed like a sentient, metal creature, some kind of titanic Skleros waiting, looming over the gathered. Standing on a balcony on the upper levels of the Arcane Tower, chilled by the unfamiliar rush of the high air, a gut-wrenching, bleak sense of palpable dread grew in me, and I found myself wishing that this was all a harrowing, that I would wake up and shake off the encroaching terror.”

The Enforcement engineers continue, pointlessly, to speculate as to specifically what went wrong, the cause, but everyone present saw with their own eyes the monstrous downfall of the Escalatine.

“…from my vantage, the chaos below was a swarming of feeling bodies, but, when i first managed to tear my eyes away from the unbearable spectacle above, i saw below that a majority of the onlookers present were simply awestruck in dumbfounded terror. We all witnessed it; the seeming coagulation of darkness, a sense of what was once empty space being filled with a malevolence, and the malpsyche that violated our minds.”

There is no doubt that the Cenoform was the largest recorded Skleros in the history of Apparatus. As a threat to the population, it was negligible; it had no apparent appendages or weapons. It didn’t need any.

“Those who had never seen a Skleros before were rendered completely paralyzed. It was serpentine, a massive coil that never ended, simply wound upon itself hundreds of times, its myriad length unfathomable and the weave and warp of the thing’s movement was irresistible to behold and damaging to the sanity of all present. I couldn’t look away, even as it began to enfold the Escalatine…”

No one in the city of Apparatus has ever attempted to penetrate the hollow void above our dwelling ever again. Flight is not to be our domain, not here in Apparatus.

“Oh, and you watch as the animals lay themselves down at your feet a thousand bared teeth a thousand bowed heads…“

[Bloodhail - HAVE A NICE LIFE]

The Beginning

A proper introduction soon to come.

“Ashes drift to wounded sky, disperse before my eye;
They shine brightly in the night, their light mark the grave with fire…“

[Forsaken - A Whisper To Nothing]