The River

[Godslayer Jillian]

Cradle has inspired me to post one of my stories.
Not my best work, and it's a little long, but bear with me:

The River
Diary of a Sentient
I have always found the idea of the annual Purple Bath Festival to be sacrilege.
I was taught to believe that bathing in the blood of the mountain would purify my body, but how can we bathe ourselves when our dear mountain is bleeding?
“Why do we have to purify ourselves every year at the festival if there’s already blood running through our veins daily?” I used to ask this question often when I was a kid.
The closest thing to a reasonable answer I got was “Is your blood purple?”
I cut the back of my right forearm when I was nineteen years old just to be sure it wasn’t. I still have the scar and bear it proudly to show everyone I’m not happy without answers.
I have tried to walk up the river to find the source of the valley’s wound, but the militia has an outpost at the banks of the river a couple of leagues north of the town. Further from the north of the outpost is a no-man’s land where even the militia won’t dare venture.
I have tried to convince them that an expedition to the north is crucial for the understanding of our dear valley; I had even tried to bribe them. But soldiers don’t get far in rank unless they stand impervious to temptations and relinquish all residue of the pointless sin of curiosity.
I conformed myself for years to study what I had at hand:
The blood of the mother mountain seemed to have no nutritional values. The cleansing must be entirely spiritual.
As high as I can climb the walls of the valley, I can never see the skirts of the mother mountain where the river begins due to a sharp curve in the valley.
The texture of the mountain’s blood doesn’t resemble Sentient’s blood as much as wild animals’ blood.
The Purple Bath always falls on the same day. Its annual cycle doesn’t follow a natural calendar – It doesn’t follow lunar changes; it doesn’t happen at the peak of a season; it doesn’t come with an atmospheric phenomenon – but it strictly follows our calendar.
I have accrued this information with half a decade of study. After years of abhorring the Festival, it has become an important date to me, all in the name of knowledge. People do not condone my research on such a delicate subject. But just as they believe my questioning dogmatic laws, which are as immutable as the rising of the sun, to be sacrilege, I, along with some colleagues, believe it to be a direct offense to our mother mountain not to know her.

Three and a half years later
I have committed a blasphemy!
Following my regards of the mountain’s blood, I began transfusions into small rodents. The little fellows seemed livelier and stronger than before.
I couldn’t find a way to be closer to Mother and not take advantage of it. I made a full-blood transfusion unto myself.
The results were unbelievable; the effects immediate.
My physical body felt as young as twenty years earlier. Any vestige of fat I had on my body burned quickly in the quick metabolism that followed the transfusion. The scar in my forearm was vanished. All the years of neglect I condemned my body to suffer in my exercising the brain were compensated in the next half-day, which made me feel famished.
But my hypothesis was nevertheless disproved.
I was expecting a close connection with Mother. I was hoping my soul became an appendix of hers. I was awaiting a feeling of connection with the river, a harmony of sentience between itself and myself.
Alas! I felt nothing ethereal in my soul.
But I was too fascinated with my own body. Despite my disappointment of not growing a sixth sense, I was more than charmed with the doubling, nay! The tripling of my other five senses.
On the next Festival, I stored as much Blood as I could and implemented the same transfusion to THREE other colleagues of mine.
We all committed an unpardonable blasphemy, and my only regret is not having done it before.

Three months later, during the Purple Bath Festival
The days were passing by, and the Festival was every time closer to happening. I could not conduct my experiments without mountain’s blood, and my reserves were low. The only reason I didn’t present the gift of transfusion to another Sentient was that I didn’t have enough blood.
I woke up before the dawn of the Festival, not because I was over-anxious, but because something didn’t smell right, quite literally.
I have had the privilege of experiencing the Festival with my higher senses once before. The metallic tinge of the mountains blood is acrid to my nose, a smell I have grown tolerance to.
But this day, there was a sweeter, coppery smell in the air.
I got up, and followed the smell to the source which I correctly predicted was the river. I found my three colleagues and several people already on the banks of the river.
The water seemed already purple in the lack of sunlight. But as the dawn progressed, the river was tinted magenta, then crimson, and finally scarlet.
People began to ponder if they should get in the water or wait for further instructions for an elder.
Some people, including myself, tasted the river. It had a lighter feeling, but it tasted the same, if not a little sweeter.
Many Sentients found it enough assurance to continue their celebration.
My colleague Regen voiced to me the particularity of the fact that no soldier was around. The only day we see the militia come to town from their outposts and forts is on this day with no exception.
Being gifted with the quality of patience, I saw finally an opportunity that was rejected to me almost a decade ago.
We packed some essentials for an expedition: vials, rope, blankets, rations of food, water plenty, and a knife each.
After a considerable fraction of my life, I once more had hopes of traveling north.

The Purple Festival: evening.
There is no road to the post, which makes a relatively short distance the effort of half a day’s travel.
We were not surprised, although we were puzzled, to find the outpost completely deserted.
We decided to rest here this day and continue our journey tomorrow.
At the setting of the sun, we could still hear the celebration going on to the south. Derleth proposed a mockery toast.
“In the name of ignorance and avoidance of a new and unprecedented event.” He said, and opened a very welcomed bottle of wine none of us had thought to bring along. We all drank and decided to dance along the faded sounds of the Festival mingled with the music of the forest.

The day after the festival
We awoke early next day. Or, more specifically, Erlene decided to wake us all. She had found a cellar with hard liquors in the outpost’s basement. After the fun we had last night, we decided to empty some of our water-skins and fill them with the sweet spirits that presented themselves before us.
We walked for hours until sunset.
The sunsets in town are always breaths-taking: empyreal hues of otherwise impossible colors, the clouds making love to the mountains, and the river, crystalline, purple, or even red, cutting its way across the evergreen forest of the lower valley.
But it’s not the same here. There are no beautiful pines. The trees almost look bald, with only a branch every now and then; enough for it to forbid the view of the sky and the rest of the forest several meters away, but not enough to hide among the greenery the grizzly barks of the foliage.
We couldn’t see the beauty of the forest because of these damned trees.
There were no clearings big enough for a camp, and the trees grew oppressing near the river, so we had to sleep an uncomfortable distance from one another.
I could see Erlene’s tent, and she could see mine; but, despite being at earshot from Dereth and Regen, I could see no sign of them.

[Godslayer Jillian]

Second day of expedition: near midnight
Mother, help us, poor lost souls in a vast chaos of green and gray.
This morning, we were woken up by Regen’s shouting.
He was calling Derleth’s name over and over again, with no answer. We decided to wait for him for some minutes, in case he had just gone to answer a natural calling, and broke our fast in the meanwhile.
But after he hadn’t come by this time, we began looking for him. Our search radio was short, but broad enough to have come upon him if he had gotten lost.
At midday, we decided to go further north. If he had decided to go back, he needed only follow the river. If he had decided, by a bizarre idea, to continue north without us, we would find him sooner or later.
The forest has been obscenely quiet. The pine forests of the lower valley and the flanks of our city are full with diverse flora and fauna. Here, there is only vegetation, and no more than a score of species of it. No other sound but ours and the river’s was heard. Not even a breeze.
The river hadn’t lost its color.
Derleth hadn’t been found. We were experiencing a new feeling: a combination of abandonment, a sentiment of worry for our dear friend; images of terrible possibilities kept swarming on my head.
No Sentient I have known has traveled this far from the valley, but we hear terrible stories from soldiers above the walls. Tales that might have enticed our imaginations and flavored our dreams have grown a tangibility I would have never thought real.
Creatures both real and unreal crawled in my mind, making me startle by the cracking of my own steps.
I baptized this feeling as Fear.
Fear slowly gave way to rendition at the same pace as the sun gave way to the night.
Light droplets fell from the sky; not enough to wash the red tint off the river, but enough to make us begin to look for shelter.
The river has enough gullies to have eroded several caves in its path, and we found one big enough for us three to rest inside.
I cannot help but feel melancholy. The Festival seems paradise after being so far away from it.
I’m sure the festival is still going on; the children playing and swimming in the river, the people feasting on their best meat and spices, drinking nothing but fermented river water from the same year’s Festival.
I cannot help but keep worrying about Derleth. What in his sane mind would make him leave us?
I cannot help but feel lost. The trees are grey, as so is the sky this evening.
And I cannot help but feel the fatigue winning over my head.


Last Day
Someone help me forget. Someone restore back my ignorance; someone take me away from this cursed, horrid valley!
Dawn had not broken the darkness of the horizon yet. On my dreamless sleep, I was conscious of a tapping, as of droplets of water falling unto a stone slab.
The tapping was soothing, even when it became a barely audible splash. But then the sound became more noticeable in the dead silence of the before-dawn.
It was disturbing. It was perturbing. It didn’t stop harassing me!
I woke up to find the source of the so small, yet so unhinging sound.
In the darkness, I couldn’t see further than my own nose, and began to feel around the cave. Crawling in leaden obscurity, in the last seconds before light, my hand found a puddle.
I smelled something coppery in the air. It reminded me of the river back home, but this was denser. The liquid was obscure in the lack of light.
I neared my hand to my tongue to taste the fluid smeared on it, when the sun came up enough to allow colors to be. It was blood!
I jerked myself back from the puddle and shook my hand to free myself of the crimson myrrh that flowed into life once.
Regen awoke immediately at my sudden movements.
Almost at the same time, after I conquered my original shock and Regen shook of his fatigue, we witnessed the most macabre, bloodcurdling; revolting sight the world could be capable of engendering.
Our beautiful Erlene: dead!
Her body had been desecrated in the most evil imaginations possible.
She had been thrust into the back wall of the cave; her shape a nightmarish mockery of a crucified victim. Her body was lying naked in the air, tilted forward, with her forearms and legs inlayed into the stone as if she were a part of it.
She appeared to have grown out of the stone by her hips; hints of her pubic hair on the base of her fusion with the stone.
Her hair was laid down, but her face… merciful gods! Her face had been defiled!
Her eyes had been gouged out. Blood ran like tears along her face, into her chin, and down to the pool of blood below her.
Her face showed utter suffering. I cannot imagine who could have done this to her without us waking.
Her jaw was wide open, more so than a human jaw can open without being dislocated; much more so.
Regen tried to avoid the urge of retching to no avail.
Before myself following such a natural response, I noticed the reason of her over-elongated jaw: Inside her mouth, there was the hilt of her own knife pointing upwards!
Whoever committed such a heinous sin had broken her jaw just so that he could puncture the top of her mouth with her own blade up to the brain.
This demon had either killed her in this method, or had arranged her position post-mortem to send us a direct threat. And for her poor soul, I do hope it’s the latter one!
After instinctively vetoing the option of screaming, less our demon comes after us, I instinctively employed the mode of sobbing.
We were like cattle waiting to be killed. We sobbed until we hysterically laughed, and cried again; the body of our gone friend rotting before us, watching over us with her hollow eyes.
I bared her visage no more and dared venture out. Regen followed me and implored me to follow the river south, but a sudden clamor made us lose the rationality we had developed after hours in the stench of the cave.
We ran up north, away from the noise, and not a minute later, we saw an atrocious second vision.
Up above, in-between two trees, there was our friend Derleth, tied by his hands into another mockery crucifixion to the tops of the gargantuan fauna.
He was naked, and although he was too far above to see him in detail, I was sure his eyes were hollowed out.
I went to my knees and cursed the skies, while Regen didn’t hesitate into running back south.
Regen was too far away to see him, but his scream could not have been more clear had it been next to my ears.
And it was not a shout of pain. No! It was a howl forged in its entirety by fear.
I began running perpendicular to the river, up a hill.
I could feel evil all around me.
My muscles were aching, but my fear didn’t allow me a moment’s rest, and I thank my life to it.
But after ending running up the hill, while running down from it, I was this hill was shaped by a bend of the river.
I was running straight to the cursed river, crimson as ever.
My reluctance to near the damned river conflicted my momentum and tripped me over, making me roll off the cliff and fall into the crafter of my loathing.
Coming out of the water, I noticed I was not the only Sentient in the water, although I was the only living being in it.
Hundreds of Soldiers tagged along myself in the occupation of the once sacred river of our city, all of them with hollowed out eyes and with broken jaws or no jaws at all.
Gazing upriver, I saw scores of huts in the banks of the river. Reptile humanoids, almost Saurian, prowled around the hut village, murdering several soldiers still alive (I saw that gouging the eyes of their victims was an act preceding death), draining the blood off them into the river, and throwing to the river piles of bodies of Sentients which were crowding the rudimentary streets.
I felt something breathing down at me, and rightly, one of the saurian beings was a breath away from me.
Its eyes showed no twinkle of a soul, and his face showed no feelings. I would have thought Death staring at your eyes would have been more intimidating. The thing didn’t stop seeing me as overgrowth needing to be weeded out.
His face bared a scar of a recent battle, still oozing its plasma: purple blood.

[roserougesang]

.............................................THAT WAS BRILLIANT! *hands over a trophy*
I'm guessing that inspired by Lovecraft? (I noticed one of the people was named Derleth)
Oscar Wilde Jr, I appoint you another title, Lovecraft Jr
If that's not your best work, I can't wait for more!
Looking forward to more stories

[Lady Victoria Pareesis]

Not your best?
That's not your best?
*jaw on the floor* But it's far beyond mine!
It's just brilliant! I've never been so captivated by a horror story since I've lost my anthology of the magazine "Weird Tales"!
Please, give us some more!
Get published! Do something, but now, I need more! More! Mooooore!!!

[cradle]

Don't hurt yourself there victoria.

I like it...it's good.

[emeraldlonewoulf]

Excellent. That is a better short story than I've read in a while. More, Please?

[Don't Look Behind You]

I must also say that it was very good.
You seem to be a natural at what I can never manage: making it short but still complete. I loved the whole structure...it really seemed "profesional" so yeah...publish it or something.

The story was indeed captivating (if there is such a word), I would though have liked to have some more hints at what these creatures are supposed to symbolize or mean.

[Godslayer Jillian]

That was what I did on the first pilot of the story, but I decided to leave it open for interpretation
For example, you know the saurian beings had purple blood, which may mean their blood was that the river's blood was their spilled blood.
But why was it spilled?
Obviously it's not a war, for the massacre only happened in the same period every year.
Maybe a yearly raid?

[HumanePain]

...i wish i could write like you. The post-mortem description of Erlene in the cave was photographic. The way you lead the reader into the feeling that someone is intentionally evil with "but it strictly follows our calendar." takes advantage of the reader's imagination. Your story was so good on so many levels that i would just be taking up pages and pages, so i will just stop and say: bravo!

[Magpie_Tendencies]

[b]Jillian{/b], I'm really impressed. You have some real talent and I love how certain sentences have the same beginnings; "I cannot, I cannot, I cannot", "Someone help, Someone restore, Someone take". It seems very poetic.

I would love to know more about the background of the story (the mountain's blood and such) too.

I hope that you keep writing because your writings are excellent.

[roserougesang]

The story's gets better everytime you read it, not that it wasn't brilliant in the first place.

Gnet needs more stories like this

[BlackButterfly]

Very well constructed, fantastic imagery, and it flows so well. Jillian, you're a brilliant writer!

I look forward to seeing you published as well; considering your skill level at this age, you may become another Wilde, Lovecraft, Rice, or Poe!