Pool_2

>> Dungeon <<

(somewhere outside Belfast) Whispers were floating low, over cold stone. Foreign, strange sounding words. Oddly compelling, emotional in rhythm. A sad ancient tongue, almost Hebraic to the ear, was being methodically chanted before a bloodied wall starburst stained in streaks of blackened red. But spattered blood was not visible, not now, in the dark. Even so, illumination is relative. On the brightest summer day, in this bleak place, daylight could barely pass through the solitary crack provided by failed grout. This grudging benefit, a grant relinquished by two large granite blocks, marked time in the real world, the one outside. It was time, God's time, slow hopeless time, that impelled itself as light through the far corner of the stonework walls. Light. Time. One and the same. Just enough to know that both were lost. Not enough to grasp. This was, must be, night, save for the subtleties, it was otherwise hard to tell. At least darkness was kind to dream as it washed the walls of their red infected reality. Solar time was harsh and punitive. Mental time had to be constructed from wits alone. Sanity could survive no other way. In his cell, ritual shukling recitations in native Galeage were his timepiece, and his only journal, the ayd. Each evening, as a call to the faithful in the Holy City a solemn call to God for deliverance of his beloved, a rhythmic chant long into the late hours. He sought the ancient ways as only they had ever seen God face to face. In ancient dialects, he knew them, cornerstones of his art, he asked - God, are you there? Night after night to breathless silence. Nothing. Then the whispers. This night as on so many before, his chanting stopped abruptly, of self inflicted distraction. Painfully heaved breathing worked its way down the granite wall, hand by