023 – Effigy of Freedom

When you walk upon the land that the Dreadwake flood rolled over, you will meet the strangest, most bizarre tranquillity you’ll encounter in your life. Everything is dead, and yet, it would writhe now with new and terrible life. The grass would blacken in its fractal metamorphosis, twisting in impossible ways in front of your eyes. It might sing. It might curse. It might radiate colours into your mind. Or crumble like glass under your feet. The trees will walk the land with gentle steps, some of them crying in enlightenment of their newfound mobility. Other will sit still by their corrupted roots, twisting into spires of metal and alabaster bone to birth fleshy fruits that erupt with scream and moans. Fire will splash in streams, water will boil from torches, air will form the ground and the dust will fill your lungs. Everything will be wrong in every way to your stunted senses, and yet, nothing will be hostile, nothing will try to invade your space, despite the fact that in such a place… You are an oddity. And in the very middle, the centre point of the fields of lunatic corruption, you will find it, the catalyst to it all, the pin of madness in the fold of reality. The Effigy, sculpted from the evaporating essence of the void, anchoring it to the cruel realspace, singing praise to the power that made it and radiating malignant potency that fuels the spread of corruption.