Nihil
Jason Scott
Deep within there is a city. The dwellings are towers, huge black towers crooked with old age and older evil. The city's spined and spired shadows dim the mottled harbor a darker grey. Docks of old that once carried innumerable feet to innumerable vessels drown, half-choked in the oozing bile swelling and falling around the crumbled shore. Here and there some flicker of movement blinks over the sand or behind a window, this or the rattle of a loose pebble the only signs of the presence of the small creatures that hide from the sun, the small creatures that time and man have chosen to forget. These are the eyeless ones, the ones who crawl in the mist and whose blood runs cold in their rotten arteries. Overhead the thick black palls of a thousand fires melt together, dancing and swelling until all the sky is blotted into unbeing.
Down amongst the twisted alleyways that wend their way like nicotine-strangled veins beneath a dead man's skin, down where the darkness breathes fear and the light dies before it arrives from the sickly sky, down where even the vermin are sluggish and slog about in the mud as though lost in the mind of a madman, down where echoes ring almost before sound and the muttered whispers of dry demon-lips flutter on the mist, I sit on my throne of yellowed bone.
For three hundred and sixty-five days I labored to build this throne, and for sixty-five and three hundred more have I sat upon it reaching inward into the cave of my mind. A thousand trinkets from a thousand lost souls did I steal to build my throne, a thousand parts of a thousand corpses did I hack and tear and stretch and meld into one. Immovable now I sit, gazing blindly into blindness and the depth of all.
I am become zero.
For sixty-five days and three hundred more I have sat enthroned at the center of a city of spiraled death, of crawling filth and seeping hatred, king in nothing and king in void. I am king in darkness and king in the colorless nothing of the dead. I am king in the abyssal thrumming heyday death-throes of my city. I am the king jackal, the king vulture, the king sitting and sitting and strumming my skinless fingers to the tune of my mind's strangulation. A crow perches on my shoulder, wisdom in death. A snake curls upon my feet, power in fear. A lion hangs dead from the city gate, zero.
A million warriors of the ancient kingdom once marched here, a million harlots and a million craftsmen. I have devoured them, for I know. I see. I dwell. I have swallowed them up, as I have swallowed the river and the tides and crushed the mountains. The earth bleeds, ocher, into the sea, and I revel still and am silent. The trickle of a thousand rusted rain gutters and the gurgle of the living sewer are my music. The echoes of a forgotten race are my symphony. And so I sit swollen with death in a city of naught, pondering on what was not and what will not be.
I am become zero.
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