The Singing Sun

Spiral Two - Sacrial

I was awoken by the 'bang' of the door being slammed shut. A horrific headache rushed in. I drank too much. 20/20 hindsight. I mumbled out in a foggy state of mind.
"Mun...? Is that you? Are you going somewhere?"
No answer.
"Alright, have fun."
Mun would be upset. I would have been too. I shouldn't have acted that way yesterday.

Pain makes people see the situation more clearly. This dark headache. Here I am, hungover, lying in bed, awoken by the slamming of the door, filled with odd guilt. This was eerily familiar. Some mercurial experience I felt , fifteen, no, twenty years ago. I worded that poorly; some mercurial experience I have been feeling since twenty years ago.

I can picture it all in my head. Dimly lit room. I'm in it. I'm seven. Mun's there too. 4-year-old Mun. He fell asleep after crying about how hungry he was. Crying Mun makes me sad. I don't want him to cry.

Carn walks in. She's like our mother. Carn's holding a slab of bread. I say I want to wait until Mun wakes up. Carn says we can give him his share when he wakes up. I take a bite out of my bread. It's dry and sandy. I want to spit it out. I don't. I know Carn still worked hard for this morsel of bread. I swallow. The rough dough scratches against my throat as I do so. I don't like this. I look at Carn. She doesn't like this too.

One day Carn comes back home with another man. He says his name is Lusk. He's dressed in expensive clothes, and smells nice too. He smells like soup and ham. He says we can all go to his house; Carn, Mun and I. We would clean up his house from time to time and he'll give us food.  We're all hungry. We all go.

I sighed.
Unpleasant memories. The beginning of my childhood nightmares. I still haven't woken up from it. We should have never gone to his house. I muttered.

"I need a drink."

Then the look on Mun's face when he turned me around flashed before my eyes. I also remembered what I did and sang to him. My heart boiled. An inferno of guilt and misery washed though me. I wasn't shameless enough to chug down a drink after all that had happened.

"Or maybe a walk."

I headed north, entering the less-tamed section of the forest we resided in. Walking toward the north from the Band of Chaos, everything grew darker and more tenebrous as I moved further away. I caught glimpses of the moon. We usually couldn't see the moon from the Bright Hemisphere.

Such an ominous glow it was.Pale, yet glistening. It calmed me down. The light in the darkness. It's alluring. The world slipped away as I stared into the gleams of shining circle.

'Splut!'

My consciousness slipped back into place. I swiftly averted my gaze from the darkening skies to my feet. The sense of a repulsively vile ooze exploding out of a sack is felt. A hairy, black, fist-sized sack is squirming beneath my foot. Shadow bugs. I walked too far north, too deep into the forest. I inched back, away from the crushed carcass of the bug, and scraped off the remains of it on my shoe once I was confident I was a safe distance away. Upon a  closer examination of the path I was just barely about to tread down in, I found the ground swarming with more of those wretched crawlers cluttered across the foyer like barnacles.

One must never get too close to the Dark Hemisphere. For the first few steps all you may see are Shadowbugs, giving you false comfort. True, they are mostly harmless, unless you were both foolish and brave enough to stick one of those bags of filth in your mouth. Deadly poisonous they are. In the end, disgusting, but all and all safe if treated with caution. Stepping inside further into the realm of the shadows, however, promises greater danger. Or so we are told so.

Anyhow, I found a stress sponge by coming here. These, the Shadow bugs, were the few beings I could mass-slaughter easily and still feel good about myself. I took a deep breath.
I took mental notes of things I should keep in mind. No want, no hate. I couldn't want these pests to perish, much less dislike them. It doesn't work when I express feelings. All must be as it is, like the hearer's sayings.

"Do not will something to happen, and it will happen."

Once I was ready, I chanted.
Alto de flames and the light
In grace of the one's might
Set fire to the dark
Amber, bark
Burn and cleanse
The air lightened.
Boil the blood
Coat the mud
In soot mo then
Vu' uhn ze ta

The bugs pranced about uneasily.

Blun pin vhen
Ingra iigin vul

A spark rose.

In the sun
The flames shall cleanse

Flames erupted from each of the Shadow bugs. The pops of their shells and the boils of their ooze filled the air. The ground once infested with them was now but a floor of dirt caked with a puddle of ooze, ashes and soaring black smoke.

"Dirty pests."

I spat out.

"I still haven't lost my edge."

Glancing triumphantly over the field of burnt bug carcasses, I thought to myself.
"Good thing I was drunk and upset yesterday. I could've killed Mun. For real, if I were anymore calm yesterday."
Chuckling. Then calmness. The song helped me settle down, and the hangover was fading away. Back to normal me, normal Sacrial.
"....I should apologize to Mun."

I treaded back home. Mun was probably coming back soon too.

"Maybe I'll actually tell him I'll quit drinking."

I murmured.

"Or at least try to keep his promise about taking it easy."

I was hungry now. I could use a sandwich.