Chapter 15: Changes
300 years ago, that was when the world changed.
Calamity struck, a cataclysm of abominable, bloodcurdling consequences. What once was unprofane and venerated lay desecrated and maimed through their presence, the arrival of the gates, portals, fractured discontinuous fissures in space and time. Creatures sanctified as little more than folklore, words of old wives woven to galvanise nightmarish phobias into the minds of naive children, walked disencumbered of human emotions atop a realm of vivacious green. Goblins, dragons, and all manner of Frankensteinian monstrosities, from myths of sanctified progenitors to fabled tellings, befell the world.
The great calamity, a time marred solely in the monochrome colour of crimson, waves of tainted iron relished the world, streets stained, bred and impregnated by the fetid scent, cities fell, ruinous vestiges cowled in illusory scarlet flames. They killed, captured, and enslaved, and within but days, the bastion known as humanity and all they had built appeared ravaged, blighted, never to be healed. Half the populace had perished without qualification to battle such overwhelming beasts. Despair raped the streets and minds of those who walked the realm, destined death the sole escape they saw fit.
A descent, from the heavens and every orifice of the celestial empyreal body of the domain erupted a luminescence. For some, it appeared blinding, a deific radiance, while to others, transparent to their eyes drolled a light of demonic despair, sultry and conniving, blasphemous to all they held in reverence. Gods, beings bearing such christened epithets, succumbed to humanity's homogeneous, unquestioned plea. They combated the beasts, driving them back through which they flourished, a world of quietude and equanimity, a solemn soliloquy to the primaeval chaos. Still from such serenity erupted a cacophony of clamour for across the desecrated realm quaked the flame of future, females spread far, gained gifts coined esper abilities, powers representative of the fantasy they now resided.
Eros recalled such telling from the pits of his mind, resting atop the precipice of desertion, a mere utterance from one of his anterior examiners, a tale he believed fictitious, a mere dream fed to the children akin to the stories from ladies of old, yet now, he thought it proper.
'Gods…' The dreaming boy murmured, his unconscious form squirming, encumbered by countless clamouring hands of unsung creation, 'Psyche's a god…I met a god. I received the powers of a god. She's real, they're real,' Eros frantically continued, the boisterous clutches of the clandestine artefact wrapped tight around his writhing corpse, asphyxiating what little breath he possessed. They grasped, clung profanely to flesh of snow white, pressing upon stomach no longer bloated and throat wrung tight. Desperate gasps unknowingly left the youth's lips, a perilous sweat blossoming upon skin, a deprived pink, yet the boy paid his body's instinctual plea little heed, his mind drawn elsewhere to the words and name of that veiled embodiment of erotism.
'Psyche…Psyche,' Eros mentally called, yet, his utterance fell upon deaf ears. No choir nor sultry breath to harmonise with his fruitless query, merely solemn silence shattered solely by vehement climacteric rasps. Sealed curtains of snow shot open, no longer nescient and uncultured to the martyrdom his visage experienced. The boy befell a world of shadowed, indistinct adumbral white, a realm amidst which the luminescent grace of the occupants of heaven failed to transgress, a nostalgic yet antithetical sovereign tactile sensation pressed upon his skin, or rather, it sheathed his form in a manner akin to a sarcophagus, wreaths of heavenly malleability now performing a transgression against the empyrean world above. Eros was confined, chained amidst sheets of matriarchal craft, a bedding all too familiar with that he knew yet undeniably different, arms flailed, a vicious discordant war between human and cloth, perspiration and scalding recycled breaths the exclusive rations granted to the youth.
Pliable ruptures spread forth ceaselessly from the human-shaped mount, that was, until the ornately sewn structure cracked, ruinous tears extending from the origin of Eros's outstretched hand, a shrill cry, before silence, the murder of inanimate sentience a gilt that rested upon the boy's mind for a mere second before it became too enraptured by the blinding radiance that fell upon heterochromatic pupils of pink and brown. A polychromatic rapturous effulgence dissimilar to that of which the youth was acquainted, its source not that of chandelier grandeur but something else, a progenitor bearing a varicoloured veined body. Myriad hues, from that of carrion crimson to aurous gilded gold and seabream green, befell the youth's view. However, even amidst such clandestine esoteric radiance, Eros's attention appeared strewn and stretched thin, focused solely upon something else, a shade, a blemish pressed atop the centre of his gaze.
Fibrous tendrils spread haphazardly upon a domain of eternal winter, a view the antithesis of unorthodox and arcane to the boy, at least it should have been, stalks of brown, darkened and common, so then why, why did such splendiferous threads fall upon his gaze, their bodies tainted, martyred, bestowed bodies of deific craft. 'Pink?' The boy absentmindedly monologued, a subconscious palm reaching towards such a heaven-sent gift as though to check the item's veritableness, silken and lustrous the untamed sultry rose wrapped listlessly upon Eros's strung-out finger, tips of pure pink scintillated amidst the unknowing boy's miscoloured and antithetical peepers. However, such shade wasn't sovereign for mere centimetres surpassing its corpus loomed the faded hue of mixed brown before, finally, the dreary, macabre pigmentation of childhood chronicle.
'What…What is this…What's going on?' Eros incredulously stammered, his mind too taken aback by the whimsical paint to focus upon the more pressing fact, the maimed bedding upon which his strength, once feeble and malnourished, ravaged with tyrannical cruelty. Eyes quivered, unbelieving and agnostic to the apocryphal change, a notion they would soon be wed and accustomed to, for absentmindedly, the youth began to move, his eyes surveying a world of laureate Virgilian ostentatiousness.
Sovereign exaltedness, a roof unknown to the boy, one bearing a shape akin to the crescent of an ark, a titanic dome, elephantine in make and transparency. Gilded rings of gold appeared etched into the curve, ebulliently glimmering in the sparse hopes of attracting the boy's magnetised gaze. Partitioned to an innumerable degree, segmented and fractured, each area spliced and barred by a beam of deific marble, the roof manifested myriad embedded and ingrained portraits, though not those constructed and delineated of paint, but instead grand windows of kaleidoscopic craft inscribed upon their face countless images, all of which far-gone, their meaning deaf upon Eros's obscured ears.
Eerie warmth prevailed upon the realm of his divested feet, marble spread infinitely before Eros, diverted, chaotically littered and strewn in multitudinous shades, the sole detriment and demerit of the craft redacted by the undeniable heat that wracked and prevailed amidst the realm of alabaster. Staunch ostentatious walls of marmoreal pompously supported the reverent celestial sphere. Still, despite their gaudy stature, they weren't without assistance, homogeneous in placement, opulent matriarchal pillars collaborating with their peers, plumes of white flourishing between the adulterated conception of heaven and earth. From their stomachs, eye level with the expeditious youth sputtered and seared, myriad corpus of flames, a pirouette of impassioned abolition shattering the virginal body of air, profane and demonic it fragmented, in its place a cambion conception of illusory form.
Glimmering in the authoritative fervent glow, Eros's eyes obscured by bangs of polychromatic shade fell upon his own carapace, for the motions he produced, his every stride reciprocated by alabaster fell sylphlike and imponderous, as though bare of body, free from the original sin. In place of drabs of obsidian embroidered with the finest gilded halcyon appeared a sheet saturated in the same achromic pearl as the land upon which Eros tread, no sleeves pressed upon his visage, nor was there the chasmic cleavage known as trousers to grace the domain closer to Gaia, a single item, an embellished bed sheet left to loom. A toga, cloth the boy knew not though one which only prompted his fervent interest, thoughts of origin concerning the space lay squandered amidst Eros's mind, the sole apple of his eye concerning himself, he needed to see, to observe.
A mirrored surface, the boy prayed for a reflection, an echo of his current self as though the antithesis of Bram Stoker's Dracula, ardent footsteps paced upon a cadaver of alabaster, a distant yet dissonant ensemble of self-produced sound, blurred creations littered the boy's eyes, their forms too complex for focus, a needless smear upon his mind driven by a cavalier, sovereign enchantment, one which failed to mask the congenital, ineradicable trepidation that brewed within the boy's mind. Eros's stomach lurched, a final lament in the form of acid bubbling amidst his stomach. His steps had quietened, the boy had reached his destination, for before Eros loomed a surface, though not one of polished glass, but rather the item's agrestal progenitor, barricaded amidst embankments of raised stone droned the constant melody of water, akin to the pressing song of rain it fell, a statue the boy paid little attention to the focal point of attraction, a fountain, a spring of fresh water lay embedded upon the realms marble ground.
Immediately the boy's gaze fell upon the domain of Viviane, a gut wrenching quake of apprehension blossoming unperturbed atop the very precipice of his mind.
Pink.
A mirrored image, nostalgic yet distant to the boy.
Skin of snow white stretched upon a canvass of deific craft, a mask of undeniable beauty. If before Eros stood defiantly upon the extremity that marred the realm between average and good-looking, now he sat adequately amidst latter most domain, bearing face men couldn't help but envy and few women desire to crave for it surpassed even their intrinsic beauty. A mere look failed to evoke lust. However, a deep desire akin to that of homely childish love would instantly flutter within the palpitating drum of all who beheld the boy. An untamed head of varicoloured threads fell listlessly upon a face sporting an emotion a stark contrast to that of which it perpetuated, dyed and mottled with a foreign shade; pink lay sovereign upon the summit of such strands, fading from a progenitor of brown. Still, it was the culmination of such changes that made the youth's gaze turn dreary, for eyes of heterochromatic pairing quivered, the left a defiant pink, the right a primaeval brown.
'Why…Why do I look like this…' Eros melancholically murmured, a hand brought subconsciously to his face, digits numbering five pressed upon deific skin, pulling it, caressing it, every motion akin to a foregone dream, yet to the boy, it couldn't be any more nightmarish, images of women, draped in a monochrome grey forced themselves to the forefront of his mind, their visages, buxom and voluptuous, apparent beauties, yet upon their face of assumed heaven sent eminence existed not the features of a human, but a blurred, indistinct landscape, without pupils to gaze nor mouth to question, and yet their tone, a cacophonous choir of dissonant dread resonated sonorously amidst Eros's mind. 'I don't want this…I don't want them, never again…I…I can't.'
And it was from such inception that an instinctual subconscious scintillation of pink erupted. A translucent parchment lay bare to the boy.