Of my life before I know almost nothing. I remember that I was a craftsman or tradesman of some kind, but fell short of funds and took the life of a wealthy neighbor. I had a family then, I think.
I was put in stocks and blindfolded, and marched from the streets of the capital. As with so much I must retell my sense of time is shaky, even at so early a point as this. I remember dry grass giving way to bare, cool dirt and hard roots under my naked feet, and my head being pushed low as I was lead through a tunnel or cave. There the feeling of a great opening up, as if I had entered some cathedral; the sound of a hundred voices whispering, and that of my chains clattering reverberated in that enormous hall. The ground became moist and stale, and I was lead for a time surrounded by those whispers.
The time came that I was halted, and made to sit on that ground. My stocks were removed and the blindfold came off, and all about me I saw a faint blue glow. The dirt I sat in was a grey almost black, and I am repulsed even now to recall the writhing white shapes which made their way through that soil. Long pale mushrooms grew on rocks, odd paint or pigment formed an eye on some.
I know not how long I sat, nor why I remained. I never saw my captors, but occasionally my vision shew another hunched form in the same decaying robes I was given. The whispering quickly faded from my hearing, and was replaced by a grating sound the like of which I hope never to hear again. It was as if a symphony were assembled, comprised of the Metier’s great forge machines, all saws and grinding metal, tuned to cacophonous droning. This mounted in my head as pressure built behind my eyes. I felt a slow panic as I felt a slithering something, just beyond my vision, writhing and probing.
There were forms moving amongst us huddled shapes, too. They were only shadows, dimly present, but inevitable when one saw such a shape was this: one of us would be carried away, never to be seen again, or one of us would be devoured, bones snapping as I sat paralyzed by that screeching drone.
Next I remember a shape, like me, made to withstand the droning, the pressure, the sound of his fellows becoming a meal to those shadow things. I saw the shape clearly, it was seated facing away from me, and used the sight of it as a focus. My mind was desperate for something to occupy it besides the horror of that place, and a familiar bodily form was enough. I saw something pass between myself and it, circling that anchor of my mind like a shark contemplating an ignorant diver. I saw it stop its circling, and it raised an ink black hand toward the unsuspecting man.
I found myself held no longer, and the greatest moment of relief and shock I have ever had I exclaimed, and reached my hand out towards the pair, trying with all I had to stop that shadow monster, even for a moment. My shock came when the seated figure fell forward, extending its hand to something unseen before it, I saw its mouth open in a shout before the whole being stopped, bewildered.
My vision returned to my body and I turned my head to see up into the face of the shadowy thing, saw it smile and gesture to the great fleshy bulb of a fungus, a sigil painted on it like that of an enormous eye.
I was lead up and up impossibly many grey stone stairs, the dank glow of that horrible cavern fading behind me as that wraith of a being, one of those which feasted so damnably, lead me by the light of a dim torch. The rank stench of the smoke teared my eyes, so that I fell fully to the floor when I was finally let in to a room. There I was strapped to an operating table before I could resist, my arms extended to my sides, my jaw wired shut and my eyes pulled wide.
How this next could be I cannot fathom. My present state as I write this is relatively whole. I have not the masses of scars such a stitching back together should produce. I am not diminished from all that was taken from me, but I must insist upon this point: what follows I swear, by my hope of rebirth and salvation, by all the Five how that makes me shudder, and by the Will, this happened.
Firstly, my head was taken from me. It was placed some distance away from my body, as it shuffled and convulsed from the severing. Any who has seen an execution by beheading understands. I could see clearly at last the creatures that stood about me, like wrinkled old men crossed with grotesque vultures, they stood stooped, their arms half vestigial, with long fingers which bent with too many joints. Over one eye each had a peculiar mark, like a scar or tattoo. Three lines, crossed so that the eye made their center.
With their implements they butchered me, and indeed I saw the muscle of my arms and legs heaped on to a great iron pan, I saw the greasy red and grey and purple of my guts strung out and carefully displayed upon another. My heart was placed upon a third, it was split open and stretched to make a vessel. What was placed in such a gruesome chalice? Finally their attention turned to where I sat, or where I thought of myself. It is an oddity that we imagine ourselves to be wherever our sense of sight begins, even when the proprioceptive screams in contrary.
In one clean pull my brain left that sacred home of the skull, and two pale, fleshy hands trembled as they placed it into the mess that was made from my heart. With this a sound came, an echo of that grinding harmony, and my attendants chittered and departed. I was alone for a time, until a trio of new horrors arrived, they shared that odd mark upon their eyes.
The first was a wrinkled old man, maybe the grandfather of those butchering vultures, in a robe of black and gold, with a delicate black cloth covering his sunken eyes. He leaned inward to inspect the pile of my guts.
Next came a creature with a smiling mask, dressed in a motley of reds, from it came a horrible clicking and gasping and wet sucking, as if it were attempting to speak without the necessary faculty. It set about the meat of my limbs with its knives. Blessedly I was spared the sight of its feasting, save that as it devoured the mask was pushed upward, and it leaned back, as if to drop a morsel down its throat.
Finally a great beast of a figure ducked into that abattoir, its face surrounded by a crest, like that of a man whose skin has been flayed from his skull. Its many piercing eyes found mine, and held me in a stare which stilled any protest my scrambling mind could conjure, and it showed it broad flat teeth in a smile. One of its four enormous arms reached out and took my brain and heart in its grasp before it set about consuming them.
A time later I was whole, my mind buzzed with alien thoughts, my eyes flashed with visions I could not control, and I stumbled alone down a great arched hallway. I recall how cold and still the air was, and thin, as if I were at the peak of some lonely mountain. As I pushed onward I entered a great room, round and ringed with open windows all along the curving walls. Its floor was intricately tiled in greys and whites, and in its center was a black marble staircase, seemingly standing unsupported. As my eyes followed that stair up and up impossibly I saw the figure of a man. He descended slowly, his eyes focused on me from behind yellowed glasses, and I heard his crooning voice call to me. Realization came to me as details resolved. Black feathers made a mantle at his shoulders, and bones and viscera hung from his waist like fetishes. It was the Watcher, the Raven, that carion thing which eats the dead and keeps their secrets. And he wanted me for his own.
I panicked, then. So much of this recollection is fractured, like child’s terror the mind has hidden from itself. I was looking out from one of those great arched windows, and saw the great city of New Byzantium laid out before me. I could see for hundreds of miles, the great world-city laying itself bare before me.
I cast myself out from that window and fell, never looking back. I knew then, as I know now, that if I had let that last creature put me under its spell nothing I had experienced would compare to that torture.
In the quiet corner of a noisy bar I write this, and try to recall who I was before, and dare not think of what will come when they find me again.
They will. They can see, those things. All of them, I know it, anything that carries an eye is theirs. That mushroom? I saw myself through it. They were teaching me. Initiating me. They share His seeing, His secret knowledge. I can see too, now. I have some of those secrets rattling around my head.