Calliope

* Maybe you had a home once. A real place...but you don’t know. Or maybe it’s actually that you do not remember.
Where you live, if it can even be called that, is now this:
Walls and floors and ceilings, all made of parchment.
Arcane scripts and diagrams spidering over the yellowed surfaces.
You know each page by heart and yet, every so often, you find yourself compelled to return to the beginning and meticulously examine each one again, stroke by faded stroke.
What you have isn’t hope. It’s grim, iron-hard resolution.
The certainty that among these accursed pages, you will find what you see. A lock. A key. A passage.
A way to break the spell that binds you. That you’ll be able to cleave yourself from this prison of parchment at last.

* You have some measure of freedom while the grimoire is open. It should offer some relief, but too often, it does not.
It’s a tantalizing taste of the freedom that seems perpetually out of your reach.
Still, you make the most of the time you have. Your search for a key continues here: in a dusty study, surrounded by towers of books; and your notes, a dizzying constellation of pushpins and symbols, all interconnected by webs of scarlet thread.
What causes the prison door to open? That’s what you aim to find. Every moment you spring out of the pages, taking a deep and dusty breath, you flood the air with questions—
Who are you?
What did you do?
What day is it?
What did you say?
And more and more, a seemingly endless fountain of questions, as varied as the writings you’ve compiled so far, as numerous as the stars.

* You try to find the common denominator.
Not the same person who opened the book? Perhaps the same breed, the same color. Perhaps the same element. The same letters of the name?
Too many variations, too many factors to consider! You decide to move on...
What time is it, then, down to the last second? What day of the week? Or the month? Or the year?
Even idle remarks...Oh, you wish you could leave them be. That you could ignore them; but of course, you can’t, because what if they hold a clue?
And so you have to ask, you have to listen. You have to pay attention to everything.
Down to the words you say. The scratch of your pen against paper. Other sounds just on the edge of hearing. The way the shadows tilt across the walls. How the dust sparkles in stray sunbeams...
All that and more. Everything.

* The web grows ever wider. Almost every minute that you are awake, you add a handful more nodes and strings to the mix. It’s a wonder you still have any space left at all.
(And though you try to consider everything, you hate to consider what might happen once you finally run out...)
A moment. You force yourself to take a moment. To breathe, to collect your thoughts.
You consider the web. What was there before, what was there now, and what else there might be.
Here and there, a few strings are darker than the rest. They haven’t been touched in some time, and are only gathering dust.
It’s tempting to take them out. To throw them away, and to definitively conclude that you’ve eliminated those possibilities...
But you can’t, because you haven’t. And it’s possible, too, that you won’t.
The web grows ever wider. You fear that it might swallow you whole.

* It comes suddenly: the sensation that fills you with an urgency exceeding fear.
It’s your prison, beckoning. Reeling you back in.
You fight against the pull as best as you can, but it will not be ignored. A sickening backwards jerk, back into the void...
Then they slam shut. The book covers, your prison doors.
Around you, all is darkness. You feel it seeping into your mind, enfolding you in somnolence.
Even without your shape, your mind continues struggling, fighting to remain lucid. To stay awake, for you know that if you slip, you’ll forget everything and have to start over again.
“Stay awake!” you silently order yourself. You frantically summon memory after memory of what you examined last time and what you aim to examine if—
No, when you are released again.
You remember the shadows cast upon the walls. Perhaps you ought to measure them? Or how the books in the room were arranged; have they changed since your last visit? You must consider who opened them, if they’ve been opened, and why. Whether the furniture was moved, or the room cleaned. You must consider who did those things. You must consider when it happened.
You must consider—

~ written by Disillusionist (254672)
all edits by other users

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Awakened Ferberus