More Words

What follows is another vocabulary post, with focus words in italics.

“Aren’t you an aesthete like me?” he asked with apparently genuine sincerity, yet his eyes actually betrayed mockery sensed only by the sensitive.

With his proclivity, Artist spotted the dissemblance, and began mapping out the nefarious potency of his anti-ego. This person flouted the pure decency of true art, perverting not just real beauty where it might exist manifest or hidden, but also going beyond personal vanity to destroy it, replacing the original quality with its mockery or caricature.

Living folk twisted into a wreath of bodies surrounding a stone monument, both re-cast in alabaster as creative work of a sick mind. Genuine evil existed in this dangerous manipulator, Artist could keenly feel.

“You murdered these innocents and buried them in the open, as what inchoate architecture?” was therefore Artist’s response to him.

“Architecture? My, have you gotten it right, fellow creative!” Flecks of salivated madness seemed to spatter from the velvet of his response. “A fitting temple at last for the God of Sacrifice, that his devotee might at last end his wayworn search for a foothold, upon Frontier and World!”

He then stared fondly at Artist, “And we need just one more major offering to consecrate this grand shrine… shall we paint you in, before mounting you?”

No chills ran down Artist’s spine at this: wasn’t even worth the bother. “Are your colours potable then? Sure could use a drink. ” He had not responded uselessly with false bravado, or excessively with defiant one.

“Oh…? Very good, we could yet inculcate the true value of sacrifice in you yet!” Victory lust blended with silken voice, as nimble fingers dabbled in a left arm’s upsweep. The alabaster corpse base of formerly people lit from below in sickening indigo.

In response, Artist’s mien took on a deeper look of the determination of the just, as he abruptly stood up, orange flickers unravelling the hardened steel shackles around wrists and ankles in a rare display of sublime power, as they clanged down to raining bits.

With fluid swings of arms, Artist then drew splashes of limn from kegs standing before usually dart-swift mantis guards man-high, but presently stunned into paralysis.

The smearing pigments flew across to the evil acolyte, like gaudy bolts of cloth which now began to wrap him in portrait. He whose tongue just oozed with so much unctuous evil was now struck dumb in unbelieving surprise, his face a falling expression of disappointment in failure, mixed with rising panic in those still speaking eyes, that he would replace as that last sacrificial ingredient!

The base of bodies which he had so fastidiously created, now so aglow with light seeming to emanate dull heat, latched its huge purple tentacle onto his now garishly painted torso, and wound him in spinning, to mount atop those who had died by him and been pushed into the alabaster stone.

His final pose was that same frozen struggle of his victims, an exaggeratingly soundless scream, but he had fulfilled his god’s desire. This statue anew began the deity’s re-forming, just as this cavern began converting as the new temple. Rumbling began high and low, felt but there was no shaking.

Except, of course, Artist was still around. Lifting the kegs of remaining paint by far touch with his hands, he dashed them against the recent statue with such force that his average build could not hint at. The painted vanity crumpled atop, the corpses shattered below, the last trapped spiritual vestiges of the victimized finally left in sighing peace.

A bloodcurdling roar resounded in the remaining minds in the cavern, breaking down the acolyte’s mantis-folk sidekicks, before they could recover enough to spring upon an unfazed Artist, and dismember him in revenge. The destruction quickly died down, and silence resumed in place. Ritual disrupted, sacrifice denied completion, yet another perversion avoided.

Artist looked into the ruined structure rapidly dimming into the darkness, as if mourning, besides the twenty or so unfortunates, the loss of a creative sibling who talked too much of the twisted. “Not so casually garrulous now, are we?” He softly spoke the imagined conclusion to their supposed conversation up until this moment, then hurried out so fast, it would have appeared that he teleport-vanished. But none other was left to see.

Brief background: In mythic World, there is Frontier; upon Frontier, River Town; from there, Sage and friends; Artist is one of them. Together they’re also Unreturned to Island: this be one of his solo adventures before becoming another invincible Versatile.