Ghosts

Clawed onwards, and upwards, the Greek-Latin incline. A stairway which towers over the steppes. Towers over town, and towers over oncoming parades inclining the stairway. Here the saints never aged, adored in armours of gold, and silver. Gems adorned. Scriptures engraved. Their skeletal remains shifted the many gaze above and past the pedestals, as ravens creep along the breadth of the Gothic cathedral's draped shoulders. The sun never shining and shimmering upon the cathedral's limestone and might, making it appear stretched and slender as the structure blended with its own hard shadow. Children run through the darkness like their own friends pestered and festered within.

I see their eyes shimmer and shine and you'd mistake them for the crows here, and truly I tell you: us the children have eyes you'd mistake for stars in a dark forest. The branches cross and shapes hatches capturing the eyes like stars. Stories that would emit disbelief———; leaves fluttering in the wind. I run along the edge of the sea. The green robed senators watch the glade, a tunnel of light, gods pass along whilst man are held against the choke.

The old gods discriminated through, parsed by the shine and shimmer of their auras. The pagan gods they've denounced, and degraded and dismissed are before the glade gnashing their teeth hidden amidst man.

A shining light in the darkness they've always spoke of. 'Always and forever.' Words attached to such a phenomenon. 'Attached, blended, yet separated and yet merged like the love of one's mother—for their child.' In this dark forest, love festers. In this dark forest, the omnipotent boil like a cyst!' A green senator cries.

We couldn't have it any other way, because it wouldn't have made any difference to stop the out-pouring of souls out of the glade. She pestered the souls to stay, yet the evils of the fairies were screams of outcries as the fairies were rearing the screeching and wailing souls into their tunnel-vision, making them follow the silver lining into the rib-cage of the glade, and then they went out-pouring.

Remorse had taken hold of my head and hand. I held the embossed head protruding against my chest. I feel the weight of my shoulder shift and lower, as the prosthetic fails me. The distance between me and the blade at my hip and hilt drew the corner of my eye. My body slumps to the side as my head tries to balance my own weight.

Speaking to myself, I feel pain, and I feel the anger which resided within me. I feel myself wither, yet burn against the cold winds the night drove at me. I had hoped that there'd be a change in the air come hell or high-water. Surveying the scene. Wide-eyed at the design of the Vanoireguarde like it was malforming between the supernatural and modernity. Rushes of colours fading into forty shades of green. A great mass of colour melted into light before the end of the tunnelling glade.

There was a sense in the word rooted against the ballast installed against the concrete wall.

I watched the world close-off and change as I pierced my sights into the tunnelling glade. Hear sounds which echo and reverb through the leaf-meshes of hedges and snaking tree branches. A wallow and whisper pulsated as bated breaths which held my attention, my ears were pricked. A vast, a hollow noise like a large metal pipe falling and rattling against the aggregate. The zephyr's heaped voices crackled through the belting glade's blots and shadows. They pestered at the bells and chimes towards the shrine.

A faint image of a shrine maiden progressed through the scene. She was passing along the horizon of a hard white light, and she shot me a glistening glance.

The green robed senators followed the guilt-wrights' means of record-keeping as the old and the new followed a fairy in-suite. I hear her beckon to the mother dryad? Dryad mother? I couldn't parse and convert their conversation.

I see this scene in my mind's eyes, and before me is the cathedral, the oncoming passerby's and the children whose eyes shone and shimmered like stars. I see fellow skeletal remains, and me on the pedestal. This was when I understood the significance of saints, and the fear I was bestowed with when I met angels with the faces of children and the wings of ravens. None could misplace, replace or displace a new god's face upon this peculiar beauty.

The green robed senators. The committee of old gods weighing the weight of your heart upon the scales and your old body upon the sacrificial table. Steady, they build their sepulchre of you against you. 'You did not recognise and submit to the gods!' They say for I had the courage to let them pass through me. I was merely prone to their sleeping spells. Inciting incidence through my inlaid traumas, they have their scribes write the litany of my life. And so I scream out into the glade, 'I know You are in there! The Awful Haunter of Nature—You come through the clearing of this dark forest. Come to the forefront. Come.'

The once Haunter came forth with eyes of levelling intensity. His hands marred, bloody and bruised. His forearms' flesh and sinew glacially fractured with splaying flesh signifying a deathly blow. Yet he remains.

A shamshir had struck his shoulder, and it stopped at the incline of fat surrounding a pillar of a neck. His haunting attire was far-gone, and replaced with a chainmail poncho and leather padding straddled on in haste.

He chuckled. Gasped and laughed in coughs. His eyes swirled the weird speckles of someone who was struck with pained-madness, and he spoke in a tongue drawled arse's arias.

He held the fairy king's daughter, the princess in his arms, and if we were to separate his appearance from her's she was untouched apart from the blood dripping on her dress from his hooked nose.

The fairy king had not paid the Haunter's attention before, nor did the green robed senators. There was a madness he recalled before when he was a young lad, and his father practiced statecraft which came from lining his inner circle's pockets. The ones who schemed and plotted behind the throne. Money the majority weren't to see.

All the wealth and power stemming from a life of crime. The Haunter knew this, and this was why the fairy king saw his situation frantically. The Awful Haunter of Nature was no fool. They were serving the forest-y fief's interest by bringing the blue-bloods back down to earth. To align the woods-y wonders onto them. We were all to believe that it were the fairies who were the first filter to enter this domain elegantly.

All things that have happened here before, all this? All of it had happened glacially. Serving as a separation between men. Setting men-to-men apart. Alas, because of this the fairy fiefdom was engulfed in maniacal laughter.

The Vanoireguarde, also known as: The Way of The Flesh. 'Am I to come to an understanding that the Vanoireguarde is simply merely a network of passages?' I gazed at the Lieutenant as the sandstone archways began to wane in the darkness.

'Hmmm. If I were to say that the Vanoireguarde were akin to a dark eminence I'd be somewhat right, yet still oh-so far off. Our Captain said to us once that the Vanoireguarde is like the arteries of this Labyrinth City, and like any artery it pulsates, spurts, yet it does not bleed.'

'So the secrecy of such a network of passages are near-spontaneous kinds of discovery. That's how I interpreted your words.'

'Precisely. It somehow clots its arteries and fades away like bruises rather than scars. A lot of Inlaid Library academics believe the Vanoireguarde is magicked.'

You'd believe the Vanoireguarde was just a canal. An aforementioned safe-passage. It's nearly never disclosed as to what the Vanoireguarde truly is. Many tell-a-tale of it being an organisation which operated like the Powers-That-Be, or an organisation which perverted the night as a dark eminence.

Some say that the Vanoireguarde is the anti-thesis to the Intelligentsia. Others say that the Vanoireguarde was an extension of the Inlaid Library, or a powerful man's very own personal grim reaper.

An officer who didn't know any better would argue that the Vanoireguarde predates the country's own Home Guard, and was the predecessor of their organisation, akin to ancestors, and akin to the destitute vices of Roma. An organisation originating from a deal with the devil. These are all rumours I say. Rumours. Nothing more. Nothing less.

And all that was yesterday's talk. So much can happen within another day. An episodic moment in our lives I digress. Because all of this was just an exacerbation of what is merely coincidental. A mere happenstance which has occurred due to causality.

I brought the pistol's barrel higher, its brushed casing still caressing my tarnished cloak, the guise of my face distinguished by the blood and wounds and burns which never stop poisoning at the surface you would say, Rotter von Rittschein's handiwork.

My heart was attacking my lungs. I swallowed my spit with a slow lowering gulp. I became sentient of my own heartbeats, the palpitations made it harder for me to focus on my breathing. A man was coming for me, yet I was fearing technique over an actual threat.

The blackguard watched the arching sandstone doorway. He could not spot me even from underneath these covers, even underneath this over-turned table, even though the white of my eyes glistened. He looked into this room's deepness with a frank face. I looked back into the looming sliver of light, his waist-lamp made his shape look larger than he ought-to-be.

Shadows were any clever gunfighter's vice. Shadows never gave any tell. Shadows always die away the same against any overwhelming light shone against it. This blackguard was no exception. He'll crawl back into that same darkness all the same.

I came through the shadow of night, after I fell after the contours of the blanket. I heaved myself forward and pivoted my body around the over-turned table awkwardly. The blackguard's faint breathing were plumes of warmth serenading in the coolness of our shadows.

He still stood before the archway surveying the room. He thinks he knows I am in here. I could see his doubts. He knows he's killed men of my stature before, probably disillusioned this one? Did he not notice as to how I dashed away on-over the shape of an upright carriage? I wrestled a horse's rear hooves for crying out loud!

The blackguard shot the over-turned table with his twelve gauge sawed-off. I was about to let off a wheeze but I remembered how cold this night was, that if I breathed through my mouth anywhere and at any moment the plumes'd be my doom.

In the faint shimmer of bubbling beads refracted waist-lamp light, I glossed over my only exit, begged with my demons to let me go. I ran through that bead-curtain begging for my life in my head, and he heard the jingle-jangle and pitter-patter of wooden-soles. I could hear my old man shouting in my head, no running in the house, or him scolding me for having heavy steps and that I should be walking from heel-to-toe, heal-to-toe.

Dashing across the corridors proved tiresome, so short lunges into each open room as I progressed through was ideal. The beads of sweat were hanging over my brows' ridges. Made me pour energy with each little pounce on-over mounds. The beads-of-my-sweat perspired and permeated by the perforated pores of my face.

Hunkered low and started bolting it into a pathetic run like the Hunchback of Notre-dame trying to make a break for safety into the Gypsy demesne of Paris. The sweaty teardrops attacked the outermost shell of my eyes, causing me to blink continuously.

I hunkered under in hard shadow holding my breath. I close my eyes, closed my world off from the withheld pain and longing, wistfulness and wild abandon perverting my mind with the unreal. If I could have held my father's hand without his lashing, I hope he looks at me below, from above, and shares and wallows in my danger.

I could feel the change in the air. 'It smells like war...' I heard my old man sleep-talk a slow, bellowing drawl of those words, fast asleep on the couch inebriated. My many treasured memories of my father, the heroics he never bore me as he murmured in his sleep. For he'll never admit it. He'll never tell me his begotten truths.

I could hear the old blackguard wincing, taking a hit of his stimulant. He took a shot on his left thigh earlier, the coach driver had his bolt-action on him, shot at the blackguard's attempt at a road blockade. Poor coach driver's dead. Now the bolt-action's with the blackguard. Laying it right into me, huh, world?

Repelling myself from hugging the walls and having my sidearm close to my chest whenever I peeked around the corners, I always kept the walls far in front of me as I swung around a curve. There was a shuffle of feet behind me, some of the missteps were loud consecutive squeaks unmistakable to the sound of someone scuttling.

My heart was beating faster than ever before. Every wall I dashed past went by in a blur. I was missing details of the complex which heightened my sense. I could hear my old master saying, 'Slow is fast. Fast is smooth.' Forcing my pace to a crawl.

I'd have never thought to have endangered myself in a large dilapidated complex. An old Imperial wartime shipyard left to the mercy of time. An industry of a once beloved titan. A physical ode to the wonders of ingenuity and innovation and invention

The extravagance of being swept in this mess was intoxicating. Two gunslingers with big irons to boot, except the blackguard had firearms, and I only had this seven millimetres on me. My trigger finger is itching but I keep it away from the firing mechanism and resting sprucely on the metal futtock of the gun.

The pine trees were tall here, and the branches would criss-cross to block the night sky. I was wary of the moonlight, but the moonlight goes both ways for us opposing another. I was already at an impasse, a large concrete wall, and crude aggregate of brick inlays were before me. I sensed the monolith's guise loom over me like God's face on a deep Sunday evening, like a heretical response blasting my sense of sight to peer into the cold looming sprawl.

'Ahhh...an old Imperial warehouse. How quaint. Hfff. Hfff. Sssmmmk.' I whispered out in short gasps with a smack of the lips. You could break through the dead of night into one of the forking paths leading into one of the many stories. I could filter my pursuer through the urban ruins. Here the sandstones were no more. The brick inlays littered or stockpiled, hardly supporting anything.

The beaten ground was charred, and the sand transitioning into fragmented glass. A world was taking place here, and it felt like sacred ground. Clouds swirled above, a feeling of something supernatural presided here, and I was at the precipice of its magick sweltering above and possibly at my feet.

Running away seemed like a good choice, rather to fall on astray against a supernatural wind aloft drifting me towards an uncertain peculiarity. My presence shifts and feels as wide as a lagoon. My body felt like it was hovering outside and above me.

I could sense something otherworldly. An aromatic kind of vibrancy. It reminded me of the smells of the Forgetmenots, with the souring Vanilla saps extracted from orchids, and even the smell of Roses and Blackberries were the in there mix, creating this sweet yet sour and suffocating aroma.

Father was concocting an aromatic. I remember. An aromatic which attacked your sense of presence, many inland would classify it as a hallucinogen or an opium, but to me it was as though my father was exonerating witchcraft.

My sister who was adopted from the Far East found the similarity of our Native Pacifican witchcraft to that of her forebears' who're Onmyodo practicing Onmyoji divination and magic. To my mother it was like the old Spanish Alchemy of old, and it was described to be something of a bastardised cousin to Chemistry herself, my mother explained to me.

As for my presence here, I sensed the ground, the wind picking up smelled of the flowers' aroma pestering my nose, I closed my eyes. I hear a feigning breath whisper sibilancies. For when I opened my eyes red flowers carpeted the Steppes, and I was watching ravens peck and chew the red flowers. The petals disappeared into their beaks like how we, like how lions, like how dogs slurped at gore and sinew masticating from our jaws.

It was encroaching. Slow approaching. A thousand eyes stares, and I felt the cold looming shadow of the thousand eyes of The Goat Mother. The Mother of a Thousand Young. A feint, trembling smile replaced my face. May be it was hysteria, a certain kind of madness which stretched the height of the boundary to touch two sacred separate grounds.

Then the blackguard came, and pulled me back into the reality of the courtyard within the old shipyard. A sharp tinny sound reverberated in my ears as the rifle missed my shoulder around the corner before the courtyard's vomitorium.

I rushed into the mouth of the beast, slid my back against one of the causeways and fell deeper into the darkness of the graveyard of memories. The cavity here smelled of mildew and string. The cobblestone flooring was slippery and wet. The night's face up could be smiling with its idiot face.

'Another dilapidated accessway with sprawls making way for vast complexes of weird turfs.' As I was monologuing to myself, I hear the shuffling of loose gravel from the entrance of the causeway.

'I hear you from down there. Heh. Hmmm, you know I once chased a man down here at this same shaft? He was a rich man, looked scholarly, coulda been an academic from the Inlaid Library. But you know what? Funny how I was chasing fast cash like the rich guy and came up behind on pay because I was supposed to bring him in alive. Uhhh, he had this Whalebone thing you see. It was a kilos worth and was like only good as like fossil fuel, yet he was adamant on keepin' it you see, and I wasn't havin' none of his talkin'. Thought I'd shut him up for good...'

The blackguard kept yapping away about how the old man was screaming and shouting about this dilapidated place being a source of magick for the old legend of the Spanish Alchemist. I wasn't having any of my time wasted on idle talk, I already bolted a couple dozen metres away from the threat.

His voice still echoed through the causeway, his voice was a soft downtown city boy's accent, yet he kept slurring his words and had a hard time trying to put fancy words as conjunctions for each of his individual sentences, which made him sound poor in speech.

Albeit, the idea an old rich scholar presumably from the Inlaid Library trying to barter his way with a whalebone was rather concerning, mainly because whalebone when grinded finely into powder was mixed with other fast-acting opioids to create a trip which brought one's senses to become senile. Assumably a stimulant which gave a quote-on-quote: Precognitive State. I doubt the effects.

'I know what you're thinking, isn't whalebone used as fine powder in opioids for a time diluted trip to simulate precognition? Funny that, don't you think? And I say, do you think it's an obnoxious question. Do you think?'

As I try to heave the tethered weight down another declining causeway, I thought to myself, what in the name of fuck!? Who is this man, and how is he able to discern my thoughts? Breaking up the questions, separating my presence, my actions and my intentions as I tried to kick a boulder over its supposed shaft.

That's when I heard him say, my name after all this kerfuffle. Tinsley. He called out my name. He said my name like it was just another Tuesday, and I was just another thorn in his side like he was some bureaucrat.

'Lord Captain Garrett sends his regards.' I heard him cock the gun from atop. The revolver was chambered with six point-forty-five calibres, and the hammer was cocked slowly as to make it echo throughout the causeway.

'To your brother, as well...' Once I heard the shuffling of loose gravel and heavy footing prance through the soft rubble, I was beginning to understand as to why I was never meant to find that letter. As to why the frontier was called the frontier stands to reason. The reasons were far too many to come to a meaningful answer, yet all the answers I had were a stretch.

The drop reminded me of a time so long-ago. When I was a young man already past my teens. There was a slope I remember so vividly. I remember being so heavily encumbered that this same fatigue right now before the drop in the shaft was about the same.

There was a cold silhouette below backlit by a discernible light I'd mistake for a lamplight, but I had come to an understanding that it was the old electric lights used to mark as to where a submarine would bay. In the solemn light I could see the silhouette of a floating corpse who had drowned presumably, or was a victim of the blackguard.

Do you remember? She says. The fighting in the high-altitude Alpine sector, above twenty-five hundred metres, where the sons of Alexander, and the Empire. Fought to take control of a frozen mountainous biome. Less than thirty-five degrees Celsius on-average were recorded those days. I recall the sergeant being a victim of the elements of avalanches, frostbite...at times even shock. His body was immortalised in that unforgiving climate, placed there to serve as a warning or as a reminder of how Mother Nature doesn't set men-to-men apart.

From the Adriatic Sea, into the Gulf of Venice. In the Northeastern edges of Italy. In the Carnic Alps amidst the Carnic Forces, firm before the Carinthian Force. A harsh incline was physically before us, but mental tolls would not subside. In 1915, a German aviation department was before the glacially declining facade of the Alps. The airfield constructed in 1915: Flugplatz Toblach. A base constructed close to the Italian Front which lied one kilometre to the South of the village of Toblach. A military airfield measured at seven-hundred metres long and fifty metres wide. Here the Italian Air Force commenced and resumed their winter training, and it was here Italian artillery observation planes sortied.

As much as I wished I was an airman, I had been unluckily drafted for the military, and had found myself digging my way between glaciers and rocky terrain. Only seldom cometh the eternal ice at three-thousand and eight-hundred metres up high. Up high to high heaven I presumed.

I know of the strategic importance of mountain ranges. Yet we battle the dangerous and zealous Zephyr, the rockfalls, the avalanches, the snowpacks, the ice, and the extreme cold...I am already paranoid of the glaciers and their crevasses shaped to consume me. Even as we move slowly, the uneven terrain and physical labour of traversing this hinterland made reinforcements and medical evacuation up and down these steep slopes and cascading plateaus all the more dangerous. I pray the wolfpacks below do not gnaw and clench at my bones if I were to fall.

My prosthetic arm still feels the weight of the halberd and the heavy-crossbow. I could still feel the mules kicking to gain traction in the snow as I replaced my ammunition off the satchels. You told me, conserve as much of the seven millimetres by five-five-three ammunition, we'll be needing heavier, highly consuming five-five-seven by point-forty-five ammunition with the heavy machine guns in their placements. I had to help drag armaments through tunnels cutting right into and through the drifts.

I began removing the bolts from my harness and replaced them. I slipped magazines into chambers. I remember inside my mule's knapsack containing the sergeant's jacket. I can describe the sergeant as: a friendly, and mild mannered man. Introverted too, if I can say without redoubting his character, for he kept to himself and tended to the vineyard before summer came to Italy.

I doubt the jacket'd keep the bullets and the bolts from frost, the icing encapsulating our ammunition and armaments are going to melt and moisten the gunpowder, and mechanism within.

'I'll have to send the my mule pack and have each individual take a magazine from within, and resupply it all from back down at the base plateau in the airfield. We'd have to haul the artillery piece-by-piece and reassemble the machine-gun mounts right into the crevices too.'

For power laid in the grand strategy of controlling the mountain passes and the valleys of this unforgiving mountain range. 'A good natural barrier against us and our enemies.'

Oh. Were we fools to not believe the Kaiserjagers'd be expertly trained in skiing and mountain climbing. Though I'd doubt they'd be nimble in grappling and clambering upon rockfaces as sharp as knives they could cut through heavy soles. Albeit, if I were to peak my head over the rockface hiding my silhouette I'd be shot by a Kaiserjager right between the eyes.

So we wait for the clouds to carpet the valleys, and we hide in them whilst scrambling for heat between our fingers and our toes———grenades and burst shells'd ride the fragmentation of splintering rocks, ricocheting and ripping apart extremities. Head—eyes'd be gone instantaneously. Instead of observing attackers, I'd observe whole patrol dislodged from edging through narrow slopes the blast pressured reverberated heavily from.

I cursed the unforgiving hinterlands. I cursed the heavens above as I struggled and shuffled onwards. I cursed the Imperials rappelling up the deep slopes with dispassionate faces. Coming to realise their dispassionate faces were frozen still. Edging our way up and down the slopes. Grappled with perpendicular cliffs protruding outwards like hand in prayer.

As I began to occupy higher ground, I remembered her's was like so too. Since I remember her telling me that she wouldn't have it any-other-way. I too wouldn't have it any-other-way. Indeed. I took the plunge into the depths below, and I fell like the rocks splintering off perpendicular cliffs that day.

Unlike the missteps which lead to many fallen into the abyss, the singular voice above heightened, and the water's surface made contact, I was deeply alarmed, by the depth of the drop. It had little room in the darkness, the floor was closer than expected had I not reeled myself in I would have shattered my legs after impact.

In the darkness, a single orange fluorescent light loomed at the end of the corridor. This stormy night was the filter of men discriminated between those who could tell men apart. Between those who could brave their fears. Arose from those fears, arose from those isolative confines.

To those who did not fathom what lied in the abyss. The deep wallowing abyss entrenched, sunken at the bottom of their own hearts. Certain the corridor was a lever to somewhere otherworldly, it had the face of God wrapped its single eye as the single fluorescent light loomed.

Within the inlaid bay, within a pressurised space there were bodies embalmed and preserved in clay. '...her Golden Apple...' Came the wake of a thousand porcelain hands and faces breaking the surface of the water. I was to bear witness to it all, for he knew me to be the recorder and the thief who held the accounts of a certainly famous Finnish Poet.

Hands-upon-hands flourished and broke out from the surface of the water, and their owners' porcelain faces were obscured in the opaqueness of the water's surface's increasing tension.

It was far too late. It wasn't just the city lad who suspected. From the top they came, and down it all went. The explosive cartridges detonated the small cavernous docks, and the porthole of the Wolfpack was consumed by light and then finally...the abyss.