Ouroboros: A SpellCraft Short Story

A myth, told by old vampires to younger vampires, and eventually forgotten by both.

LET US BEGIN TO SING of the Becoming, o creatures of the void!

Let your voices ring through the yawning chasm of nothingness that exists between this world and the worlds beyond.

Let the song of this place shatter the stillness of its silence, its shards prismatic resplendence in the interminable dark. Let them serve as star-guides as the story of the ouroboros winds.

Ouroboros.

Leviathan.

Whose gyrating coils churn ceaselessly in that blackened, tideless sea, whose mindless consumption of itself is a warning to all of the dangers that betide the audaciousness of fools.

In the lightless reflection of those coils are still traces of a boy of gold and silver. Sharp of face and sharper of mind and possessed by ambition, deep-rooted and boundless within his heart; its ceaselessness compelling him through decades of humankind. Those frail-bodied beings who touched a magic he could only dream to hold could not sate the ardent drive that possessed him. Weak and infinitesimal as they were, their knowledge did not compare to that divine space that existed between the stars.

So that flaxen-haired youth, his silver-storm gaze fixed upon his prize, dug deep within himself, finding the roots of his heart’s desire; and the boy of gold and silver painted himself in sigils of blood to summon the thing which he craved.

Writhing Leviathan, seething creature of the tideless-sea, creator of storms in the void, whose magnitude far surpassed the monumental cords and tethers of magic both in this world and beyond, should have known better than to answer the boy’s call.

But ravenous ambition ate at the core of that great serpent. So, twisting Leviathan took up that rictus-faced boy and consumed him until he was nought but shadows of blood and gold and silver.

No more should that astute mind have fixated on thoughts of ascension; no more should those flashing storm-eyes have sought the unyielding truth that existed within the empty spaces of the void between myriad stars.

But the boy was ravenous, too. And so the boy of gold and silver and blood and shadow turned his teeth upon colossal Leviathan, and well did he eat of that ophidious form until there was neither beginning of one nor end of the other.

Until the world fell away and all that remained was the dark reflection of glittering gold and shining silver in a lightless void and a great aeonian hunger of ambition.