ADENA, THE BLEEDING
...and as He walked there, through the broken capital of desert and ash, Venadak lamented Himself for His weakness, His fallibility, His permanence to the fragile cusp of mortal emptiness, sorrow and shame. He sung with weeping tears to the God, truer than Him, inside of Him... and though it did not answer with words it wept in return. It bled and poured, ripping the walls of His arteries that mirrored the veins of man, and as He collapsed into the charred sands of that newly forged desert He sobbed and clutched grains of individual earth. Vessel, we called Him. If not a Vessel, what was He? A lost, sorrowed, shameful nothing; a thing so worthless as to not even deserve the sand that dug into His lips and clung to His teeth, so He spat it out.
Humbled, was He. Humbled, was the God of Creation, the Prince of a collective once so transcendent as to harvest the life of stars. The Bleeding was not only blood, for Him, His own and the Leviathan's... it was also tears: shameful ones, wanting ones, guilty ones. Fearful ones. For if He could fail so utterly, He the greatest of the great, transcendent Adac kind, who ever could be expected to maintain our order ever again?
It was this moment that reforged the vessel a husk... this moment of tribulation, which He could not exceed. It was this moment where the Gods did not fall beneath the auspice of a Prince, but to each our own order and will, our own and fleeting.
And so I write to you of the Bleeding... not as a gentle, detached teller of events as I have in the past, but as the voice and mouth of my husband's demise. I am Saren, God of Time, and this is my Analect: the Forbidden Book of Bel.
Corruption, 1:1.
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Oh hollow day... oh hollow days... His love will make them go away, from when the time the lamb was once astray.
He visited me, that night. I saw him waiting in the doorway, beneath the arch, looming in his suit of silver thorns. His eyes were a deep crimson like when he was mired in Corruption, but he wasn't at all: I could tell, just by feeling his presence, that he was not mired by Corruption or at least not compelled by it... but controlled instead by his inner, devouring mite. The Leviathan smelled me and hungered me, for I was the kind of nourishment it once knew, and his shadow moved through the doorway and into the chambers of my room. I began to fear, truly, for the first time since the End. Venadak was a man of meditation and tranquility, forever condemning himself to stagnation and silence to tame the unassailable leech within. In that moment, he was neither of those things: he was not himself at all, but merely a hollow artifice to be wielded by the puppetmaster inside.
If not for my tears and the pleading sound of my voice, I believe he would have consumed me that night. This moment, dear sturgeon, has shaken me. I cannot imagine I can continue my duties as I have without seeing, in my periphery, the shade of those hungering red eyes.
The Journal of Saren, 43 Searing, 4597.
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