You hustle quickly into the library carrying the two wings and the halo in your arms. As you move you can't help but feeling somewhat self-conscious as if someone, or something, is watching you as you near the statue. Each item fits perfectly, as if someone had specifically made them into keys.
As you fit the final object, the halo, and turn it into place, the small alcove in the suddenly cracks open, slitting sideways like some automatic door. As the statue and its plinth sink into the ground, a gaping hole of darkness sits before you. And from it comes... this Stench. A horrible, rotting smell that threatens to turn you inside out just from getting a small whiff of it.
Knowing it is your job as a savior to brave this mysterious room, you hold your nose shut and take a few careful steps inside. Just as your thinking it may be a good idea to wait for your eyes to adjust to the dark before entering, you suddenly feel something soft, and fur-like, brush against your face.
Jumping back in fear and shock, you decide to throw caution to the wind and raise a flame in your paw to give light to the object in front of you.
Except... it Isn't and object. It's a FACE. A face so distorted and yet somehow familiar. and with a gut wrenching pang, you realize what is in front of you is in fact the majority of the face that had been peeled from the body of the Priestess Diana. Raising your light you behold the full nature of the thing before you. A monstrous figure, so distorted that Frankenstein's monster himself would pull back from it's odious form. Flesh is stitched to flesh, limbs to limbs, skin from one body attached horridly to the muscle of another, innards of one poor victim show clearly through the beasts tightly pulled skin, as various liquids drip sickeningly from the blasphemous creation. Blood seeps from the stitch like the sanguine nectar of a poisonous flower, just as water falls slowly to the floor, tainted with the decay of rotting flesh.
With a supreme effort even the gods might have trouble pulling off, you force yourself not to collapse in shock and fear, and while you do swallow down some bile you manage not to curl into a nervous wreck from the sight of the monster. Avoiding the gaze of Diana's half face, distorted by the utmost extremities of pain, you force yourself deeper into the room. One by one your light dawns upon piles of organs, flesh, and skin piled seemingly orderly and horridly on shelves. Faces, hanging from hooks like sagging masks, stare at you with pain and anguish in the dried up countenances. It is all you can do to ignore the stench of death and the puddles of flesh-water and blood as you make your way to the back of the room.
Even here there is no solace, as upon the wall is, carved and scratched in blood, the plans for the beast you just recently passed. Several small models, no less distorted in with their minuscule pieces of body tied together haphazardly. Pulling your eyes back to the wall, you realize more than the diagrams cover its stones. Words, etched in the same blood, surround the gruesome pictures.
KIlL. CrEaTE. kiLL. CReaTE. ShOW Me The TRutH. SpIRiT kNOWs, CREaTe, KiLL. cREAtE LIfe, TaKE lIFe. RIsE AboVE AlL, FolLOw SpIRiT. THEy aRE ALl MAteRIaLS. BodY Is HoLy. OH so HOlY. oh SO mINE. Mine. MINE. MINE!!!
This is as much as you can take. Holding your breath you turn and attempt to walk calmly from the room. The faces of torment call you back, the room itself calls you to death, to give yourself over to the creation of a greater being. You cannot help but stare again at the face of the monster. Its face, half the fair face of Diana on the right, left half a convoluted abomination of multiple pieces of flesh made to mock the shape of countenance. The left, pulled from its original owner's head, threatens to fall from its makeshift socket.
And with that you leave pretense behind, running from the odious room as fast as you can. The doors slide silently shut and the statue rotates back upward, as if nothing out of the ordinary had ever occurred in such a tranquil corner of the library.
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