Ode to a Nightingale

Moderators: Forum Moderators, Active DMs

Post Reply
magistrasa
Posts: 667
Joined: Sun Jan 07, 2018 8:59 pm

Ode to a Nightingale

Post by magistrasa » Tue May 19, 2020 9:09 am

Image
 
For the first time in clear memory, Lorelei held a waking dream.

The sensation immediately, rightfully struck her as odd. Rare was the occasion that she would fall under such spells. Dreams would once come to her as tormentors, horrors that would strangle the breath out of her as she slept. But when she would rise, she would drink deeply from her memory draughts, and the nightmare would fall into the distant recesses of her mind. A mere half-year of this treatment, and they would not come at all.

I must be wary, she thought as the dream materialized at her feet, its swirling mists taking shape at the tips of her outstretched fingers. The Lady's messengers come in dreams of darkness. This could prove to be a prophecy. I must see, no matter the horrors.

As the vision formed, it did not resemble horror - nor anything else Lorelei thought herself acquainted with. She found herself dressed in fine silks and simple pearls, the raiment of a lady of the house. The path before her led her down the spiral staircase of a richly decorated manse, lit with faerie fire and lined with artwork and antique furnishings, all trimmed with embroidery and gold. As she wandered these unfamiliar halls, she gazed out through a velvet-curtained window at a picturesque countryside, glowing under the fading twilight. Despite the comforts of this wealth, its decadent splendor left her ill at ease. A chill passed through her, and she pulled her foxfur shawl all the closer.

Some rotten odor hung in the air, masked in spice and the fragrance of incense. In the distance, the voice of a young songstress drifted through the manse. Lorelei followed the sounds and scents through halls of portraiture bearing the faces of warm, inviting strangers. She stepped lightly as she walked whilst toying anxiously with the tight gold chain about her neck, all the while taking grim guesses towards the meaning of this strange dream. When she at last reached a pair of oakwood double doors, there was a moment of hesitation as she wondered what unknown awaited her lay just beyond. That hesitation shamed her. I must see, she fiercely reminded herself, and threw the doors open to stride ever forward.

The scene was a mix of charming, and chilling. A bountiful meal was set out atop a banquet table, every seat but two filled with feasters. She recognized the Sparrow, in all their boyish charms and feminine features, casting a lazy smile towards the performer just across from them. The Canary, who Lorelei still had not had the chance to know, was as beautiful as she wanted to be. Disarmingly youthful, lean and lithe, the girl rested back in pristine pleasure as she sang to her enraptured audience. An audience of young, rotted corpses. One particularly pungent collection of mangled flesh seemed to make the evening's meal, with its pieces scattered across plates and serving platters; but the head lay untouched, facing the seat that awaited the lady of the house at the head of the table. Another's skull and bones appeared to have been blasted apart by some great impact, and the body lay half-crumbling in its seat. A third rested back, its neck snapped and contorted at a grotesque angle, head lolling off the back of the chair to watch the door behind it. The last corpse sat hunched over, splattered with dried blood from the stab wounds that covered its body, its neck opened up from ear to ear. One seat remained empty next to the Canary. Something ached inside Lorelei as she looked across the scene - some old, forgotten pain, stirred to memory at the sight of the carnage.

Silent and unsettled, the dreamer slipped into her chair, staring across the length of the table at the figure who held the seat of high honor - the Nightingale.

Neither spoke a word, nor were they acknowledged by the Sparrow or Canary, who simply entertained each other in pleasant conversation. The Sparrow spoke of the excitement of their exploration and discovery, and the Canary listened with rapt attention, bells ringing in her hair whenever she threw her head back to laugh. Lorelei shrunk under the malicious gaze of the Nightingale, the avatar's aura of discontent and disappointment sinking into her very soul. She was expected to do something, but she knew not what. There was no plate before her. Only the lifeless gaze of the dead. Her skin crawled and her chest tightened whenever her gaze passed over the head, or any of the other bodies. So she kept her gaze instead on the Nightingale, and squirmed under the stare returned.

"Why are you so disquiet?" The Nightingale spoke with her own voice, with her mother's song, with her master's whisper - with every voice at once, and without a feeling between them. "These are wishes made manifest. The indulgence of your many weaknesses. Or do you deny them? Are these not your sinful desires?"

The Sparrow and Canary chattered on, deaf to this dreadful dream. Lorelei's throat felt very dry, but she answered as honestly as she could. "They are… small vanities I catch myself yearning for, at times." She forced herself to swallow as the chill returned. "Am I to be punished for the flaws in my yearning?"

"No." The Nightingale pushed up out of her seat, unsheathing the curved daggers Subtlety and Secrecy. "Your flaws are to be corrected." At her words, the shadows cast by the faerie fire sconces took shape and form, swirling and binding the Sparrow and Canary to their seats. Startled by their sudden bondage, they at last took notice of Lorelei, expressions bewildered and without understanding. The Nightingale tossed a dagger towards the dreamer, the blade embedding stiffly into the skull of the head before her. "These illusions you keep are a burden born from grief," the Nightingale spoke slowly, almost rhythmically, in that strange, halting tri-tone of hers. "They are grounded in fantasy. Not reality. A distracting day-dream when your mind must keep focused to the Night." With a tug, Lorelei freed the dagger from the corpse, staring down numbly as the children quietly questioned what was to come. "You must be rid of them. As you have done before."

Lorelei gave herself a moment to mourn. The moment was denied, interrupted by the Nightingale's fist slamming into the table with such force that it seemed the whole room quaked. She flinched at the feeling, her grip tightening around the hilt of the blade, and she made herself resolute. As I have done before. Her eyes scanned the corpses, lingering on each, and staring until the revulsion she felt towards herself faded into nothing. As I have done four times before.

Slowly, she drifted to the Sparrow's side, placing a hand on their shoulder. They looked up, anxious, but still forced a smile. "Have you decided what you want me to be?" Lorelei met their gaze, and paused as a pang of guilt passed through her. A question spoken so gently, yet it made her so sad. You, child born in chains… You, whose name I never chose, whose face I never saw… Please, let me forget you. With a silent prayer, Lorelei pulled back the Sparrow's hair and drew the knife across their neck, holding them tight during the violent convulsions that followed. Their life’s blood sprayed out in a sickly crimson, staining the foxfur and silks the woman wore, as the Canary watched on in abject horror.

When the Sparrow finally stilled and their last bloody breath escaped them, Lorelei slowly, numbly, moved towards the Canary. No matter how frantically she struggled, the shadows bound her still. “I’m alive out there, somewhere,” the young girl urged her murderer. “I am old enough to have children of my own! Won’t you save me? Have you no love for your own blood?”

“No love,” Lorelei solemnly confirmed, turning the dagger over in her hands as she stared down at the desperate girl. “Nor will you find salvation. You are alone. Just as I was. No... I cannot save you. Your miseries are your own to bear.” One swift motion, and the curved blade found the Canary’s heart - just between the third and fourth rib. The agonized writhing and the screams of pain fell away behind Lorelei’s thoughts and prayers. This world is empty of salvation. I cannot pretend at it. I must not. The pretending will destroy me if I let it.

The silence, the stillness, the aftermath of the slaughter left Lorelei with the sense of an eerie sort of peace. A spell broken only by her self-reflection, her realization that she had committed an atrocity. But even then, there was some resignation to it. She looked down at the bloodstained blade and dropped it clattering to the floor, she shrugged off the shawl, she cast aside the golden bracelets, she ripped out the pearl earrings, she tore off the jeweled collar, each act with an increasingly violent desperation. She had done what she had to do. There was no reason for shame or remorse. She had done what must be done. And yet, the guilt was there all the same.

The Nightingale was dissatisfied.

“It is weakness that inspires this emotionality,” she said coldly, her indigo gaze never leaving Lorelei as she spiraled further and further into a state of distress. “You can rationalize the reasonability of your flaws all you like. But you have forgotten that recognition of those flaws must be followed by effort to overcome them. You are satisfied with your weaknesses. You are pleased to find them so few in number. And for that satisfaction. You are sick.”

Her chest felt so tight that every breath was a struggle, but still she forced herself to maintain the appearance of composure. Her thoughts ran wild, her gaze flickered throughout the room in chase of imagined panic, and a guilt blossomed in her core that she could not fight down. When she answered the Nightingale, it was on her knees, with her head bowed in reverence, and a plea on her lips. “I am sick,” she confessed, as the sinner bares her soul to the saint. “Sick with regrets, haunted by my memories. I am sick, and I am afraid of what I may become. Please - I beg of you... Cure me.

When she opened her eyes, the house was changed. The bloody banquet was as she left it, but the faerie fire had winked out. The walls were stripped of their gilding and elaborate wallpapers, and years of untended age seemed to wash over it in an instant. In the midst of it all, Lorelei knelt naked and bloody, searching frantically for a voice, a symbol, a sign of where she had to go and what she had to do. Alone, she soon realized, and the realization slowly brought her calm. There's nothing to fear. There's nothing to perform to. There's nothing, nothing in all the world. There's only...

The Nightingale had abandoned her without an answer. But that only made sense, didn't it? The Nightingale could not offer her anything she did not already have, already know. For Lorelei and the Nightingale were one and the same.

I must make my own choices, and meet my own consequences. No answers or truths are won without pain.

I must not be so afraid to suffer.


When she woke, it was with a sense of calm serenity, a sense that felt like a weight had lifted from her chest. With a renewed clarity of direction, she rose from her feather bed and slipped into her dark, plain robes. The dream yet lingered. The intensity of the emotions had faded, but it was the context to her contemplative frame of mind. The voices echoed in her ears, the visions sank into her heart, and as she gazed into the looking glass, it was not her own face she saw.

The woman was yet known to this world as Lorelei - but when day gave way to twilight and the darkness returned, she would remember once more that it was nothing more than a performance, a pale imitation at life. Lorelei existed only as a vessel for the shadows, a mask to drive Her will. It was a thought that used to frighten her - sometimes it still did, when she became too immersed in the act - but in moments of clarity, she understood again that this truth was all that she worked for.

One day, she would finally forget Lorelei, and at last, there would be only the Nightingale.
 
 Adieu! Adieu! Thy plaintive anthem fades
  Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
 Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
  In the next valley-glades:
 Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
  Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?

× Career Sharran × MILF Supreme × Artist (Allegedly) ×
Will Trade Art For Groceries Again Eventually


Post Reply