Skroom Tattlewink
Oh, salutations and tribulations dead reader.
Ardnard the wicked. Ardnard the depraved and irredeemable. You are loved in the grandness of your glory, for the living spaces where you shelter (many) of your citizens that flow your streets like blood. Our factories are your pumping heart and the river your intestinal tract peristaltically discarding of both trash and the poor. Oh thank you, Ardnard, for your daily work. Let us all toil in your blood and share our drinks in camaraderie in your liver.
The Liquescents are drawing close. I can smell them and their wafts of burning coal, hear their little death boxes rattle above the miniature engines. The teeth of their snuffling guard hounds clatter in pain, and their untrimmed claws scrape against the cobblestone when they walk. An unseemly band of degenerates. It is as though they sense me too, like a blind man fumbling after a toilet. And trust me, dear reader, I smell like the guts of Ardnard in my current situation.
Many readers have written, asking what in the world have I done to deserve such a hounding? Simple. It is because I go where no one else go. I am a parasite upon this city, opening unorthodox wounds that never fully healed, spreading the skin apart and highlighting the festering malice inside. That is why, my dear reader.
As for now.
It is the festival of flesh, where thousands of Ardnardians congregate to celebrate – you guessed it – flesh! Every year all kinds of flesh-wielding creatures roam the Grand plaza of West Nard doing all kinds of gruesome things. Last year someone offered to pay me to eat them! Oh, sundangling day, what sights to perplex, to smell and hold. If flesh is your deal, then you are too late now, since it was yesterday, but buckle up for next year when they repeat this festival of corpulent horror and excitement.
This year was the most eventful festival yet. I watched the fleshmancers prance around with their fleshy underlings on leashes. They build the tallest flesh tower yet, all 150 meters of sun-blocking biological entities. I had an ice cream in its the shadow, then I continued down the Grand Plaza.
Crisp was the air, and loud were the folk. The latest salary clunked in my wide pockets, and for a moment I lost track of time and space. Two figures approached me from up some stairs in an alley. I thought for a horrifying second they were Liquescents, but thank great Fleptimus this was not the day.
“Are you that guy?” they asked, observing me like a fabled creature.
“Yes,” I answered. “Of course.”
Dear reader, I am always the guy.
It was perhaps not the brightest of plans, but the sharp sun had stained my vision and my mouth was parched. I can recognise a party from a tremendous distance; the subtle smell of sweat, of spilled drinks and regret.
I ventured down a spiral staircase, down into the underbelly of an old factory. Upbeat, transcendent music met my ears and my eyes gazed upon a large hall lined with a bar and a mass of others avoiding both sun and flesh in this oasis. They supplied me with drinks, asked about my journalism and the latest news of the Liquescent, for they were hiding too. A pleasant woman lit me a vile roll of krahash, and I accepted it gratefully, puffing and drinking like the man your mother tells you to keep away from.
Things are blurred from here, dear reader, but I will describe them as much as my brain and right hand can in synchrony.
It must have flowed through the rusty vents, or perhaps it was in the drinks all along. The underground party reached new heights when the mind-altering started. I understand in hindsight the source wasn’t from my fellow dancers and krahash smokers, but at the time we all accepted it as a natural turn-point.
The sounds amplified, spinning around my cochlea in perpetual motion. The thick and smoky air thinned into the pleasant breeze of the unhabited coast.
I kissed a man, I kissed a woman. I met my maker a thousand times. I saw the cosmos as a blotch in my red, sore eyes. Someone vomited cheap Tinker & Turn on my waistcoat, and I used it to mark the walls with a detailed exploded diagram of my genitals. We all laughed, not as people, but as a unified pile of consciousness.
That’s when I sensed something was wrong. I saw my right hand, my most important of appendages (no, I also use it for writing), limp by my side, deprived of circulation and locomotion. The ocean breeze clogged in my upper respiratory tract, and I stumbled out a door where the familiar, thick and crusty air entered my lungs and nourished them with vital oxygen.
I shouted for people to flee, but their minds were strung up on whatever unholy substance exploded their synapses. Instead, I crawled and clambered until I reached a carved out tunnel deep underneath soil and rock.
A grand hall manifested itself in front of me, draped in red, smelling of iron and dust.
There she sat, what must have been the Queen of Flesh herself; a fabled figure from the backwaters of an unhealthy mind. A throne of meat, a cape of skin from the most esteemed creatures – it took even me by surprise.
“You’re that guy,” she said, and she didn’t sound pleased.
“No,” I stammered, rather pathetically.
Dear reader, I take it back; I am not always the guy.
I saw the fleshmancers and the butchers dancing around my vision. They were everywhere.
The Queen spoke, some long-winding speech of how she needed our flesh to fuel her immortality. She told me to have understanding of their lifestyle and culture. Without her, their flesh-society would collapse and burn, creating an economic depression for Ardnard and every city and society in its trade and vicinity. It was the same corrupted speech any creature draping itself in flesh would make.
“It’s always been like this,” she explained. “It is not without sacrifice that the world goes around. What difference does it make if we use a few unsuspecting people as fuel? You, of all people, should understand that. We need you, and you need us. It is symbiosis.”
Apparently, I didn’t understand, and she sent her goons on me, stampeding and searching for my flesh.
I have covered the Festival of Flesh for two decades now, since I was a youngling dropping out of medical school. Fleshmancers seek the rawest flesh, the most scented and nutritious. I did what any reasonable person would, and with my safety knife, I cut off my little-finger. I threw the bleeding finger like a torpedo, reaching above the heads of the hungry monsters. Their noses followed, and in the same moment I bolted through the door I came, stumbled up the stairs and into the blinding sun of the overworld.
Oh, dear reader, I cradled that empty socket and I spilled a tear for my lost brethren, for they were gone when I searched the wretched place.
I bought a new finger at the flesh market. It belonged to a discounted old man (it was the only one I could afford), so now I have a tanned, wrinkly finger in place.
Oh, the hardships of your life shall not go unnoticed, for I have worn your finger, and I have inherited your arthritis.
Life is never a winning battle, thinking otherwise is an illusion worse than the mind-altering drugs of the Flesh Queen. In the meantime, we will toil in Ardnard, and find meaning in the creases as tapestry to bolster the safe spaces inside our minds.
I am lying on my back now, in the house of some stranger who allows me to sleep here in return for whispering bedtime stories into his ears. I will continue, as always, dear reader, to bring you the very best content of Ardnard. That is my tapestry.