Leaks in the Noose | Refresh

Shut Eyes | S 1 ♦ M 1

There were no clouds keeping the swollen moon from falling onto the countryside. The land, dry green hills and lonely trees, seemed to be swimming through a haze; one that was just there and hardly seen, yet holding a presence far-too heavy for its appearance, and enough to isolate the moon in the sky. This was an ugly fog, though one you'd miss if you weren't lively as it passed.

The wind was absent, and its presence seemed missed. It may have cleared this fog and unmasked the stars, stripping dominance from the moon and balancing the night. But it was gone; and the moon's orange darkness seemed to rot the land in its absence.

In the crumbling town of Ederas, sunk amongst the hills, every creaking piece of wood was being honed in on and visualized then hated by the town's restless residents. Any arguments above a whisper were clear and privy two homes away. And, for some time now, the slow and steady bark of an unattended hound was managing to slap itself so thoroughly across all of the inert town that nearly every conscious resident was now predicting its coming cries with an obnoxious degree of clenched-jaw accuracy.

This night was cold and still and miserably sterile. It fanned out a sense of tension and pressure that was stoked by the dead cold, though it originated from that voided sky above and the maddening orb stalking through it. This night brought a wicked sense of entrapment that was experienced by most, though only realized for what it was by an overly conscious few; who couldn't help but dwell on its looming strangeness. The ignorant remains of the population felt it in bouts of discontentment, rage, manic passion, and general excesses of being. Not being able to pinpoint the culprit fueling their fire brought confusion that helped fill the night with a particularly fierce lunacy which unavoidably roared in the deathly stillness.

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A particular event was taking place at this time, and it was just about to reach the small village of Ederas. It was bringing with it what would be the first taste of a far more extraordinary affair; one with a magnitude that the village's residents or their friends or the friends of their family had ever known or even heard of—their was likely a handful in the whole dominion of Amon who might have read of such things.

Truthfully, fourteen scholars throughout the entire realm of Meresu had come to know of an ever-so slightly similar occurrence that took place at some mythical time far off in the doubtful past. Yet, even they would soon be awe of the glimpse Ederas was about to receive; which might be considered a component, a brush stroke, or even more accurately, the loading of paint for a canvas.

And this all truly began for the residents of Ederas with the sounds of a quick and slapping pulse, first starting as the faintest wisps from the north then gradually swelling and trickling its way ever-louder down into their homes.

For the residents of this heavily-aged and poorly-maintained village, many who remained restless on this already unusual night, that sound had carefully come from the most minor of nothings all the way to an impossible agitation as they laid in bed or paced about their homes or haunted their windows listening to the rising beat of:

thump

thump

thump

And then once more and then again and then another time with that ever-climbing thump and thump then thump. Each of the completely foreign sounds was soon tearing through the dead black in rapid succession with a rhythm that seemed to sing out a nasty heartbeat that should be desperately avoided. For this was marching that the people of Ederas were suffering through, or being rapped up and out of their sleep to meet, but it was to such an immense degree that no one in the entire realm had ever experienced anything quite like it. This was a sound that'd been deriving from tens of thousands of synchronized heavy grey boots slapping together against the cobbled stones that made up the only paved road passing through Ederas. Their village had actually been built around the road, known as the Grand Route of Anic; it was the longest in the southern reaches of Amon and by far the most efficient, traveling all the way to the coast in the north as well as extending an unknown distance into the south, becoming lost somewhere in the mad lands.