Thirteen Doors. They all lead into one chamber. In its centre an arched staircase entrance, down into an underground vault. A hall of grand size. Here is laid out a feast. For thirteen people. Each is served by a waiter at their seat. A kitchen staffed of thirteen cooks the meal.
On the walls are tapestries woven of blood soaked fibres and inlaid gold thread. They smell of copper and have a muddy quality, one that glints and glitters in veins across the surface under candlelight from table and chandelier. The inlay depicts each chapter of a story told locally. That of Harper.
Harper was a small child who lived in the forest, they were born to a visitor. At one point in the deep past a visitor had landed in the young forest, and waited there, buried for the trees to close up a canopy overhead. So that in the dark their child could be birthed, and crawl, slime covered out into the light. Harper was found by the children of the berry harvest. And brought to the town, a baby of size and shape that was unfamiliar.
They had talked to the children and stated that they must be taken to a manor. In the region the only manor was that of Lord Astonmarsh. And so, from the town, with a cadre of children and Inn regulars, the baby Harper crawled through the streets to the door of the Manor. And here, welcomed in, Lord Astonmarsh gave a feast. One that Harper ate of hungrily, a feast of game blood pudding and hard truth. That the forest would be surrendered to Harper, should they never touch the town again. And so Harper retreated here. To this forest, where this thirteen entrance vault stands at the centre of a great and labyrinthine estate.
And in the meal, is the gravelly bread of Thronax, and eggs from the farm at the edge of the forest, brought in as a gift, and the fourth and fifth kiss of a goose, made as monster bones, and poloin, and gramenaderan, and castor oil dishes and wishbone mound and thistle balls and preston cakes, and Wheat and Corn and Fire and Cards made of gelatin and frozen grozens and thumbtack soup. There’s a head full of lice that screams as you open it up and extract a kind of sweet red gelly from inside, and Several Roasting Pigs that all sing the national anthem of this country that Harper landed in. They sing it so sweetly that it’s hard not to feel a pang of jealousy at their skill that makes eating them all the sweeter and more sorrowful. And in the feast you are told the story of Harper.
Of the baby landed manor headed forest owning creature who then began to dig down the foundations of a many walled palace made of rock and so perfectly dimensioned and designed amidst thorny florid overgrowth. And eating it becomes a kind of lullaby, that tickles your back, and legs and the bones inside your legs til they dance under the table and you rock your chair so that the waiter made out of squirrels and rats and beavers sewn together must hold your seat down. And they do so without being asked since all of you all thirteen feel this rabidity at your core.
“It’s called a reality feast because it gives you a taste of what Harper sees. It expresses to you your lack of knowledge and lack of ability to experience. In fact it is called a feast because it is a taunt. Pleasure offered up from a place that you won’t ever know. It’s domination.”
This is recited to you as you fall into a deep sleep and when you awake you are walking back towards your house, in the town, on the edge, of the forest, that was forfeit to a creature that can see. Except one of you is missing, and it’s accepted that that one person has gone. Into wherever Harper lives. Into reality. They didn’t hear that voice, and what they saw was no feast, but an empty table, it’s said, but what can we know. Just rumour. Just games. Go home now. Think of nothing and think of the glimpseberries and retchmonolith stew and all of the little sweet cows lined up in rows, little cows and calves made of sugar and you pop them into your mouth and they melt. And in your pocket, a small sugar cow now. Curled up. Sleeping. Waiting to wake up to a day where it can see clear.
GlitchOut 