Hexenbox - now complete! 🇬🇧 (🇩🇪 translation in progress)

Chapter 4 - Things of the Silent Lords

Only later, it comes to her that for a myriad of people, this strange and utterly inhuman rush of things would have been a death sentence. It's not for her. She has seen all the chaos maelstrom twice, such a long time back, a world and a lifetime away. And maybe it followed her, and maybe it didn't, but now fate—or whatever God-shitten sequence of events this is—is here, and you know what? It doesn't come to her as a big surprise.

She backs out, turns, and runs. Down the aisle with the towering bookshelves, where the table lamps still throw their grimy white light, down the many steps of the elaborate staircase, and over the wide wooden floor at ground level. Down to where it still smells of wax and of the rain outside. Runs as good as she can with her leg still in clamps, and while behind her—behind!—a wave of things moves and writhes and finally comes after her, a tsunami of objects and artifacts screeching while moving and combining into some kind of shapes, shapes maybe like the ones on the painting above the altar, just minus the crowns and maybe somewhat cruder, more brutal. She doesn't turn around to look. But behind—behind!—they screech and wail like the cars outside that darn-ridden New Jersey shop. They pile up, one on top of the other, and they rush after her in pure havoc.

Then, she's out, and all the while, she has been rummaging for the strange duel pistols (the bullseye lantern with its strap and the now empty bag over her shoulders), and she loads the guns while stumbling along into the streets where the last sickly reddish sun rays have gone, and the rain that followed has gone, and its remainders all blink on the cobblestones. And while she pushes on, loading one of the strangely colored shells into one of the barrels, the wave of things spills out after her through the shop's entrance doors in numbers too big for them. The doors and the windows beside shatter to make room for even more of them, a sheer tide that comes out after her. Also, she realizes it's not the only thing that happens. Because there is movement from all sides now, a rustling and a passing of shadows behind windows from all the buildings that she passes. And then, when she comes to an intersection, things start to fall from the buildings there, agglomerating, taking shape so that she is now surrounded from many sides. And when she looks ahead, it's the just same: things falling out of windows and spilling out of doors and hallways into the streets. And as they do, they cut her off from the very building she came from and where she knows she needs to go back to.

And then, finally, there's no way left to go.

It's at this moment that she realizes that this has probably been it. She shines the light from the bullseye lantern around and wherever it falls, there is a writhing mass of things, objects, items in the shape of creatures that may be human but are goddamn anything but. They are all around, whispering and calling in their voices of grinding steel and of wood on metal and of metal on wood. They surround her in an almost perfect circle.

The weird thing is that she does not panic. She has seen it all before. What she feels inside now is not fear. It's rage. The pure blind rage for a world that doesn't listen, doesn't seem to work in any fair way. The rage that maybe has been building up inside of her ever since. She screams at them, and she screams at the world, not at this world, mind, but at the world in general. And then, silence falls.

Silence.

For a moment, rain begins to fall again, falling on her too-big coat and on all the things around, crowns or not crowns, as they stare at her. As if things could stare. 

The Silent Lords, everything seems to whisper. The Lords of Many Things.

It's right then that another sound goes through the assembled ranks of the things. The sound of moving and switching positions. A narrow lane opens from here to where she has just come from, the shop where she left the box. On it, Luce appears.