Kingdom Hearts: Army Of The Roses

Ashai

Solemnly, he sat still. Depressed on a bench, his head rested in his palm. For hours, never did his eyes wander from the mound of dirt before him. Dug so freshly, the air still loomed with the scent of soil.

With the slightest of steps, I too approached the grave.

"I found who you asked." Caelum didn't stir at my voice.

"You wanted one with demon's tongue... One to slay Odūn." Suddenly his eyes met mine; within them sat what could bring to me tears... A burning vengeance I had never wished to see him own weighed in his soul.

"Where..."

"Worry not-" Interest waned, he tilted away from me and again sat so stoic. "... I'll fetch him for you." His hand parted and gripped my wrist so harshly.

"Who?..."

"He... Has an impressive resumé, to keep it vague." Though he let me go I couldn't move on. Instead my hand hovered over his back, ready to press... Ready to console... Yet, I found even now, now when we needed each other most, that I could nought but fail him.

I left.

~~~~

I... felt... ill.

Staring back at however many hundreds of steps of sandstone I'd trekked had made me nauseous. Though this ail was vertigo not. It was the air, something foul skulked within its dry and empty body.

I looked on to the horizon, this desert was nothing more of an arid cadaver of a violent nature. How so violent? There was no free soul for this and the next horizon over.

'Free'

From the valley below, along the steps themselves, from within the earth under my own feet, a dreary psalm did play. Orchestrated by the suffering of a countless many whose sorrows were merely the gears of a more complex instrument. Shackles of adorned thorns wrapped men and monster by ankle, lined for miles they picked at trenches of rock; all these creatures searched for veins of a peculiar black stone.

An empire fueled by the capital of such immense slavery was a depressingly... impressive sight, but one nonetheless disturbing. I held a silent concord within myself: utter nought and keep moving, so I did.

Following the last of the stairs I came to the threshold of a hallowed mesa. Harboring within, a temple of a more archaic architecture was composed of a silken onyx rock. Upon crossing the plateau's threshold a nauseating quality swept through my own intellect; a sense so foul I had stumbled for a moment. Swiftly I found myself to a knee.

"Are you okay?!" For only a moment, I swore I eared the whispers of Caelum.

I took a breath to balance my sense.

"Something..." I struggled to mull the proper word to personify such vile presence. Wicked? Evil? Tyrannical, even?

"Something sinister dwells here." As I entered the hallow all grew silent. I came to the innards of the pyramid.

Solemn and sombre, the aper of moans derived a choir of misery; undistinguished by sex, the low melody — estranged to my ears — was sung almost as a melancholic ode.

This suffocating sickness I felt had been bartered; instead now an omen clouded my thoughts, diffidence took me as I came to the peak. Aye, the bethel here was wide and open with gaps which laced between pillars. Peering to the floor, man, woman, mer, and monster laid; nude, they sprawled atop one another: a bliss demonstration of unkempt aloofness. Well, that would be said if they were alive; in all reality they laid so still, so breathless, I could not differentiate whether they be in ecstasy or if they be victims.