high house of the dead

"He wasn't always like this," She said, in tones that one would use to speak of a lover lost to madness.

I could feel the gravity, the raw desire for me the shrieking pit before me exuded, and knew with certainty that the only thing keeping me from tumbling helplessly over the edge was the oh so gentle touch of the Lady's hand on my arm.

We stood, not talking, in the storm of wind and debris ripped from the world around us and drawn ever deeper into that nothing. I was not sure why she was showing me this, why she would bother to bring me here without intent to feed me to the Void. Perhaps she needed to share this with someone, show that she to could feel grief and sadness. Perhaps again that was just arrogance on my part, to humanize the Lady, as if the realm of the dead could share with me foibles and failings.

She turned, leading me gently, but firmly, as a mother might hold a child in a crowd. As we descended the gentle slope, I felt the pull of that maddened hole begin to ebb, and realized I had been clenching my teeth, tensing every muscle I had. Mere moments in the presence of that thing, the Lord Oblivion, even with the Lady's protection, had weakened me, enfeebled me. I began to stumble, and the Lady patiently slowed her pace, never letting go, but neither forcing me onward.

I suppose if there were one trait that would describe the Lady it would be patience. She waited, serenely, for each of us in time, some arrived in moments, others she would wait for many millennia more. Our meeting with her was inexorable, to the point where it was often the defining event of inexorability. That she would wait but a few moments for me to recover myself should come as no surprise, though in truth, it seemed to clash with her hard exterior.

Many tried to negotiate with her, but none could. She would not let them. Whether they begged, screamed, threatened, or tried to frame an irrefutable argument, her answers always remained the same. The time for negotiation was long over once you met the Lady, and though she felt no need to cut short the pleadings, she remained firm, and not once in all her time, had she bent or broken.

We reached the cracked riverbed that we had crossed arriving here. The place I first had felt that tug, the drive to continue on, to throw myself forward to whatever waited at that mountain's peak. As we crossed it, the last of that pull left me, and I felt a burst of energy as the haze about my mind cleared.

"That is why the dead remember, and why they must remember, cursed or gifted as you choose, they must not forget." The Lady said, releasing my arm. "Now, shall I walk you home, or do you prefer to be alone with your thoughts?"

"As you wish Lady, I would not think better without your presence, though perhaps you ought leave before my mind conjures questions I ought not ask." I replied, as politely as I could.

And thus I found myself alone, around me naught but grey barren wastes, behind my a riverbed, the boundary marker of a force that unearthed within me such primal terror to even contemplate that I felt my mind shy from the topic.

'why they must never forget' she'd said. I pondered that as I wandered through the wastes, seeking my home, and friends and family.