“Volcanic” by Unknown
The amount of short stories and other works of fiction I’ve written about Hell could be made into a large volume all of its own (but I’m holding onto them, just for now). It’s a source of infinite inspiration to me artistically, something I can’t say I particularly believe in but at the same time gives me a limitless supply of visions and constantly warping interpretations. The following is a short piece that was originally part of something much larger. I may get back to completing it one day. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy! Originally written on the 23rd May 2017.
“Poets of the Fringe“
On the shivering coast of the great circle sea of viridian plasm, that vast body of infernal solution with its myriad of ignitions, shock waves and bursts of dead light, there stand the stoic poets. These unwavering souls were deemed too valuable by the Unmaker to waste in the likes of the killing fields or to be fed into the mouths of the various, wandering titans. The intellectual perished serve a higher purpose: creation. Their sole function, to stand an eternal vigil between the dead waterline and the rotting dunes of oblivion.
On those shifting sands of fragmented dreams, the damned face the infinite nothing that both exists and does not beyond the horizon of the pseudo sands. And there they are forced to compose grotesque sonnets and vile poems to the infinite glory of the hell both behind them, and to the maddening mysteries of that which lies beyond.
Born in the excruciating ecstasy of a bastard spawning within the confines of perdition itself, their potent words take form and become continental extensions, such is their immense power. Resonating consonants that influence the very fabrics of the rock and air, expansions of the deadscape whipped and spun out of rancid thought alone. Verses birth mountains of purifying flesh. Choruses become bottomless depths of blood. Stanzas of horror metamorphosise into ghastly landforms, around which nightmare storms congregate and throw wild abandon in their orgies. And around them all, hideous, shambling abominations, once mere words themselves, crawl and twitch across the new clays.
Their repulsive compositions are infinite, and therefore so too are the maddening expanses of the inferno they spawn. With each new chasm and monolith influencing the words of the next poet laureate, it is an endless cycle of birth and evolution, soaked in the blood and agony of battery farmed creation. It is a most horrific process, a sickening childbirth played out to a thunderous symphony of crushing bones, tearing sinew and rattling gurgles.
With the breaking of each new dawn, their fried and soiled minds are wiped clean of their freshest conceptions, and they must endure anew the depraved forging process. Aeons without number, void of end, a special damnation without cessation or even the lingering hope of a distant reprieve. They are the unwilling architects of their own perpetual doom. A process so draining, so arduous and foul that it wrings sangria tears out of blackened sockets, eyes rendered mere ghosts after punishing centuries of burning visions assaulting their feeble tissues.
But still, they endure and compose. It is demanded, and the way is unquestionable.
The volcanoes vomiting liquid bone over the sorrow fields, the black smoke stacks belching fire and puss to the crackling sounds of consumed flesh, they are all products of the poets’ horrific artistry, twisted constructs of the maimed intellectuals’ finest works.
And for evermore, be it under the watchful eyes of the blood moons or the scorn and judgement of the scorching suns that they themselves birthed, the cursed compose on.
The Book of Hangman 