The Black Tower Of The Black Desert
How deep and severe those stress levels ran. The effect of the servants of the dark had on everyone. Did they have any other plans? A long-robed spectre came into view. Of course they did, and I knew it. They just had this flair for being unglued about imagined towering mountains that had to be climbed within seconds, as they'd emerged right up in front of them. It was all an effect to send out to various targets. To stun, and cause feelings of urgency.
I was lowering my words to almost a whisper. Low vibrations pitched out in a perfect flow. The frequencies of my voice were mastered. I was going to deliver a deathly blow to the power their darkness had. I knew I could speak softly and it would still strike like an arrow. I knew the words but the apparition disappeared behind someone before I could speak them. I felt a nervous, cold anxiety creeping up as the now reappeared form shook rapidly with a wind that I could not even feel. He turned into a grinning desert land-monster and sunk down into a pool of quicksand. I thought that was an asshole thing of him to do. My anxiety disappeared. I walked away and off to this place. I wasn't following anything, but I was determined to see if the area of the quicksand lead anywhere else.
The torpid stiffness of the ground creaked beneath my feet. This was a dead world. A dead planet. Nothing grew here. Was this an earth of the spectre's past? A long, long pathway of hard, dried out soil lined with pebbles and small stones went along like highways. I was deep within another realm, I thought. I walked on and wondered what direction I had come from for as I looked all around me, the grounds, the whole area turned black as a deep midnight. Dark as if all light had never been shed and the appearance of it was like a gaping hole had all but swallowed the place itself.
It sprawled before me like a heavy passage force-field that was pulled open by a force from behind me. I moved out of the passage and walked with the wind and it began to slow and then finally cease to a small breeze. I looked around. What I saw was the most horrible, despairing landscape I had ever seen. I'd never seen anything like this before.
I felt perhaps it was named 'Bottomside' as opposed to 'Topside'. So I had a name for it. It seemed to fit.
The area was rounded, closed in by large black hills surrounding it. The entire ground was charred black as if a great, all consuming fire had burned it and left even the layers underneath to total destruction. All about the lifeless grounds flat stones here and there were strewn. There were some dead withered branches lying about, sparse driftwood that seemed to blend so well with the dull landscape that one had to be looking right at them to see them.
My eyes adjusted. A few flames, like small campfires lit the whole area in an eerie glow. In the middle of this hellish realm there stood a menacing, tall black tower. The base of the tower was empty, a structure barely standing. The sole support of the structure was that of four rounded sides which arched over the barren ground inside, and resembled more that of an empty silo rather than an ancient tower. Seeming more like an open guardhouse that was gutted. From far away it looked to be a dread tower of darkness. Yet up close it was the very essence of nothing. There was nothing there.
I walked closer, toward the tower. "Frodo?" then I thought for a moment. "Wait a minute, why am I calling for Frodo? He got out of this place a long time ago."
I came to the outer walls of the tower, I studied the outside fading bricks and saw that it was not as it appeared to be. Maybe three, four floors, instead of eight. Looking inside the tower I saw that there was a fire in the dead center, encircled with a strange assortment of wedged-in stones in the ground. An ancient watch tower it seemed now. The unfriendly atmosphere now took on an eerie glow from within its base and I felt warm and feverish. A feeling of long ago death was so thick in the air that I choked and wondered if I really stood in the midst of what was possibly Mordor. I stood still for awhile and just listened. It was neither warm or cold. No temperature. So still, so uneasily calm and I felt no presence of anything, good or evil. That felt worse, somehow. Nothing to fight for or fight from. I took it all in stride.
I went to the center of this tower and looked around. Nothing. I looked up and at first it seemed that there was a ceiling. Then I looked into the fire once more. It was slowly burning. Almost suspended in some repetitive way. I looked up again, all I saw was a hollowed out, black withering tower clear up to its rafters. It was abandoned thousands of years ago. The bricks that were built of it were so deformed with time that they appeared to be only dissolved pieces of rock. It was the strangest decay as the lacking elements made it last longer.
I saw a winged demon beast as it flew across the sky. Its whole being was more like a canopy of dust. As if it was a lost air pocket searching for its altitude. I watched it fly behind the mountain, yet still could not bring myself to feel fear, because there was no feeling of anything to be feared.
Then I felt a wind, then it turned to a small breeze. So I knew there was something of an airy domain to this god-forsaken place. I looked out towards the direction I had come, and where I had came through, the area was no longer there. I was enclosed in this place that was an infinite desert in a strange night's darkness, alone. I closed my eyes and thought I should wake, but, there was a small breeze indicating some kind of life was still lingering. The breeze I felt now had died down for long eons along with everything else before I had even entered this hellish realm. But here it came to me, to move with me. I looked back up at the upmost flimsy ceiling of the tower, the roof was almost as dissolved as the bricks that supported the beams were close to the point of crumbling. Suddenly a horrible voice spoke out from the darkness and I went to the inner wall's archway on the south and stared outwards. Neither did it comfort or frighten me.
"They've all been here and now they're part of the withered stones before you!" the voice boomed in my ears and shattered the breeze. The demonic voice pierced through the deserted landscape. I went to another archway and looked out, there was nothing. The various angles of mountains peaked in upward formations as sharp as blunted giant spades. I watched and listened. The air, the atmosphere, and even my heartbeat hadn't changed, or flinched at this demon's voice. I looked back at the fire and just sensed a scene to some ancient past. Other than that, nothing could be focused on by me. I had no attentive aim to give anything else as I surveyed everything that was literally nothing all around me.
I noticed that in and around the fire there were grey fragments of cloth, possibly garments, but so old and so aged with time that even touching them they would fall apart. I looked back to the outer area around the black tower. I saw nothing. I didn't expect to either. I studied the tower itself, looking over it up and down. The tower had been burnt and still covered with flaking ashes from the fire left burning for time to do the rest of its demise.
"What do you mean they're all part of the withered stones?" I said to the darkness and then softly to the fire, "Why would they be here?"
"You'll never see them again! They are dead here!" The demon's voice boomed louder this time and it almost shook me. But at the same time, this dead zone of a place made me as catatonic as it was. It just didn't phase me.
"Good. Does that mean you have nothing to torment now, oh demon? You've deceived them when they didn't know what you were." I answered back.
"They have no power to deliver torment to demons!" the dark voice returned. Somehow I felt the stupid idiot had no idea what I said, or simply misunderstood it.
"How are they dead? How did they die?"
Laughing, the demon said "Look on their garments they no longer wear!" Suddenly I saw an arm like a smokey, paper-thin formation point to the center of the fire. It startled me a little. Then I looked in the fire and saw no change although I could see the grey fragments a bit clearer. They seemed like garments. The ghostly arm that had extended through one of the arches of the tower, quickly snapped back out. I also noted that my question was not answered, so whatever death had happened, the demonic entity had no clue about it.
"Those rags are thousands of years old, you dumbshit! Come on! You can do better than that!" I said to the disembodied demon.
"Dead! And they died right here, right before you came here! Time passes like that here in this place! You've been on a long road." The mocking demonic voice was cruel and yet spoke with soft tones and it was almost soothing.
I stared into the fire and then focused on the wretched walls within the tower. I stared at the scorched landscape and actually considered the demon to be background noise. Something that was just annoying, like a TV commercial being too loud. I hadn't been here all that long, well I've been here longer than I had been on the road to this infernal realm. There was silence.
"So what do you want me to do about it? Them being dead, that is?" I mocked the demon again and there was a dead silence. I began to walk away from the tower and laughed at the demon, or whatever it was.
"You cannot leave here!" the demon's voice shattered the silence and I casually stopped to look in the direction of the tower. "Sure I can! I can leave anytime I want. I'm dead too, and I came here to find somebody and, of course, they just died so they'll be no company. I came to gather their otherworldly belongings, but since they were lost in the thousand years prior to now, and nobody's here. . .then. . .see ya!"
I walked further onward. I continued. By then I had walked a long way and the tower was but a small structure in the distance. Despite my feeling of terror starting to come back, I was still amused at how easy it was to walk away from that nightmarish and surreal tower. "What an ugly piece of shit!" I thought. With one last misguided effort, the demon voice squealed after me from the tower. I saw that it was now standing in the base of the tower looking out toward me. I felt a little unnerved that I had been standing where the demon now stood. Explaining the feeling of terror that started to come back. I spoke in a taunting voice and said; "The ones you really wanted were never here!" I walked a few more steps and unleashed a last mocking goodbye. "They that were here, they have a message for you. Well it's like this, they say FUCK YOU!"
The last look I gave toward the tower, I noticed that the ground was now a sandy color, and a bit more light was actually covering the landscape. There was now a continuous breeze.
I continued onward and found myself outside that horrible charred, blackened desert with the withered old dark monstrosity of a burnt ruin. I felt a chilly breeze and the darkness took on a more earthly night hour. Something more normal. I passed by an old pirate ship that sunk and washed ashore. It was dark inside and I saw no one within. My small family wasn't there either, but I felt their presence there, that they were still alive but not in the way I remembered.
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