On my journey through the ruins, I see murals full of spirals. There is text I can’t decipher and there’s eyes that keep on watching me.
There’s stairs built by those who came before, they’re crooked (flawed spacetime), and they clip through dimensions. It’s mind-bending the way they defy geometry such that a stair leading to nowhere gets me onto that ledge, the spiral one. It’s mind-bending how it turns me two-dimensional so I can climb onto the spiral itself. But it’s helpful, so I’m glad.
My handy walking stick helps me traverse the steep angles of the stairs. It digs into the material the stairs are made of, and I feel the stairs squirm, red marks left behind by my stick and my feet. There was a ‘rain’ of sorts, down below, with pieces of that staircase material falling down. What looked like arms flailing, and crumbling head, and I find myself standing on the torso of who/whatever those arms and head belong to. I believe there are legs here somewhere? The whole body is stretched out and I don’t think there are any bones remaining inside. Perhaps pthe previous travellers removed them when building the stairs.
And I walk and I walk and the spirals and the eyes and the spirals and the eyes and the– there’s a sound.
Sound. It’s coming from the text that I can’t read (the magicking in these regions has allowed text to be read out loud as people approach, I believe), it tells me how repetition is holy and repetition is holy how repetition is holy and repetition is holy and repetition is holy and repetition is holy and–
Get a grip, get a grip! So the stairs defy geometry a little bit more, and I get swallowed into a spiral in such a way that I end up on another spiral. I don’t know if there’s any eyes watching me right now but I feel watched, I feel watched… there’s no more stairs either, no more, there’s just this spiral and this spiral and I can’t see the skies or the murals or the murals, there’s no sky in here I’m inside what are you talking about and yet what even is a ‘sky’ what is a sky what is a mural what is a wall what is a body what is a staircase, nothing means anything and the eyes do not see and the murals do not spiral or make sounds as spirals and sounds neither are real, nothing–
It disappears it all disappears all crumbles I walk and I walk and I walk and I walk and I walk and I walk and I walk
Crumble. I crumble. The staircase system is incomplete, and that just won’t do. There’s going to be more travellers who come after me, how can they be expected to manage if the staircases aren’t complete? Appalling, the state of these ruins! I have to do something about it.
My body rains down as I walk and walk and walk and it stretches, stretches, stretches.
Then, my bones go away.
NOTES:
The planet of Chamkra exists thousands of years from now. The ‘undecipherable text’ would not be in modern English, like it is in the art. I also do not think they would know System of a Down, certainly their music could be influenced by them but nt in a way to allow them to directly quote the end of one of their songs.
Speaking of Chamkra (which you may recognise as the setting of my currently-on-hiatus story loaf), I hope to show you folks more pieces of the language spoken in that setting. Maybe a simple lore post too. We’ll see.