Feed Drop - Burned by a Paper Sun (Maeltopia Tales)

0:00Greetings, gentlemen and gentle ladies from hell. Prepare yourselves for an other infernal journey, because part two of season two of the gentleman from hell premieres October 14th, so mark your calendars and write yourselves for another hellish ride. For the gentleman is coming, and hell is coming with him.

2:30The story of the longest night in Grey Witch, however, is not an account of its darkest. I have met with the withered and festering shadows of ancient men, so that I might unearth the deeper tales, buried far beneath the dusty fears, and forgotten screams that have gone mute with time, and fright ruined memory. For the human condition, independent of a heartic curiosity, can only drink of so much distilled horror, before it has impaled the reject the contents of its fear and liberated mind altogether. The concentration of horror's eye-speak of began only shortly after the sheriff and his men were carried into the goblin darkness,

3:31and the townsfolk began crossing themselves as dawn approached. A book concerning these greater shadows was written long ago, and resides within the wrinkled clutches of Gabriel Crow, a horse doctor and most secretive of the Grey Witch Elders. He brought me to the grave of dead memories, and for no small donation to his practice. I was conducted to the parched depths of an old barn, well beyond the casual paths that outline the routine movements of persons travel in beyond the city.

4:33The book, slept beneath a badly damaged tractor tire, wrapped in burlap and smelling of old things. Crow would not touch the book, but only gesture that I should pick it up, allowing me the solitary and awful responsibility of disturbing the sleep of devils.

5:38The book's offer had long since been swallowed whole by the passage of time, as nothing within the mangled tomes so much as hinted at a name. It was written in a hasty hand and sounded like the written thoughts of a lunatic. Nevertheless, the author's unlikely narrative played at the edges of plausibility. Perhaps not for the reader's foreign to Grey Witch's history, but to the initiated those words hum like black smoke, from a fire that had once burned worlds and now slept within the ashes of time, waiting to burn again.

6:39Even upon the very first page, horror leaked from the ancient faded ink, as the opening of the book accounted for the days after the darkness and the madness it birthed. Madness has become plague, for the devil has pitched and stooped cold fires into the heads and hearts of many. Great are the numbers who now perish of strain or go forth to craft murder. Most are sick with terror, for the potency of this darkest fear works frailty into the resolve of the body. Those others, smaller and number, have been made cursed of God and now go cloaked and wigged. Heen on black alleyways and emity building roofs where their poisons buried stoke their blackest desires,

7:47singing those terrible songs that once we did here. The days that followed this black affair were thick with suicides and madness, so much so that the church could no longer contain the flood of pale lunatics who were dying of madness. Provisionary structures were raised wide and weak to enclose those persons no longer fit for living,

8:47but who had not yet yielded to death. Soon these temples to madness became wooden mausoleums as insanity was but the harbinger of a long and wasting death. A season slipped from hell as descended on a soul. The air is choked with half dead wailing, vermin move over our city like storm clouds and search within it like flood water. Not can be done for those who scream as if to awaken our sleeping guard, so that our good lord might catch them as they tumble into hellfire. The screams had become a summons to those mad grey witches who were driven into the woods. They who would use the screams to sing and kill by.

9:53The the the the no longer able to suffer the poor screams of the dian or the pestilence and plague they invited. It was quietly decided to abandon the sick and insane to the wasting houses. They believe and shut their ears up with wax so as to keep the last shrieks from echoing within their already haunted recollection. It wasn't until the last days of autumn that the last feeble whimper died into a chorus of wind and cricket song, renewing the pleasant harmonies of the night and the cold silence of conscience.

10:56The following snows fell bleak and heavy upon the silent and untended shelters, washing them away in the unmoving waves of white nullity. The townsfolk looked out over the humped snow drifts, hoping not to dream of the dark places and frozen faces that were wading, with infinite patience to be loosed from winter's grasp. When spring clouded its way up through the melting corpse of winter, townsfolk only wished that the death shacks could vanish with the cold, revealing yet another collective nightmare.

11:58Nevertheless, when living colors replaced the pallid snows, legions of stinking shelters rose from the death of winter, like fields of crooked wooden skeletons. For weeks the forsaken flesh and wood festered in the damp grubby fields, and was attended only by a strange coldness that refused the spring warmth its seasonal sway. Finally, with torches in hand, the men of Greywitch drew close to the places where their fallen kinsmen had been eaten alive by madness. But before the rickety structures were set ablaze, it was realized that the shelters were entirely empty of human remains. In the place of bodies were the artifacts of a wretched industry.

13:07Dolls hwn from vulture bones, which were clad in the furs of rats, journals written down in crimson, fetid inks, veils formed from countless fly wings, eaten utensils fashioned from consolidated animal bones to assist in the evening of the spoiled flesh that once clung to the animal bones. But nothing matched the horror of what was seen hanging from the wall of a particular Greek in shelter. An enormous portrait had been painted using the fluids of pests, depicting the occupants of an asylum. The figures, men, women and children, were described in muted color and no person or thing cast a shadow has given the lack of evidence for any candles or lamps.

14:20The portrait was likely rendered in absolute darkness. The faces of these persons were mischraping and worried with conflicting colors. But certain articles of clothing and jewelry handed at particular departed friends and family members and all were depicted as standing and able-bodied. Overburdened with piles of horror, men fled from the shelters that had absorbed the madness they were built to enclose, and only when they came under the wholesome shadow of the church did the men see the tall fires burning upon the field of mad houses. Fires that the men had not set. The men were taken to the hospital to get the hang of the fire.

15:23We did spy many naked footsteps, drawn in myro that had been softened many nights ago. When the earth drank deeply at the spring rains, it was not unforeseeable to know the path by which they traveled. They amused themselves with dark works to pass the cold and dark, and when finally winter shrank from spring, they set their feet upon the path to devil's play. There can be no doubting that beneath those sagging and evil rooftops was a devil called out to them, they are now gathered. The last portion of the journal has trapped by forgotten hands, dying inks and rotting parchment.

16:27The last portion of the journal has trapped by forgotten hands, dying inks and rotting parchment, a wicked memory, a sin that was repaid in the coin of everlasting spite. Now, having read the account, I have no doubt that it will rob me of too much sleep, and perhaps even revive a slumber in collective nightmare that will be nourished by fresh screams and nightmares. The unknown writer speaks of a dark anniversary, exactly thirty years after that devil prolonged night waxed beyond the gates of mourning, and how the afterbirth of that malicious occasion had been collected and redistributed within spaces that no man should ever have occasioned a scream from.

17:31It seems the Gerald Fleck, a local farmer, was attempting to dig out a well, when the farmer had achieved some unknown depth he encountered a large piece of black stone, as round and as tall as a wagon wheel. The size and shape of the stone was unique, but not as odd as the queer reliefs that were scattered about its surface. The symbols upon inspection were revealed to be little more than a primitive carved depiction of a man holding a torch and crouching amongst a number of smaller squat creatures. After noting the strange aspects of the stone, the farmer proceeded to break it apart with a sledgehammer for easy removal. When the first hammer blow was struck against the stone, fissures shot from the point of impact and traveled to the opposite side of the stone, cracking it in half.

18:35Immediately, a black, choking smoke and soul seren screams erupted from within. The farmer scrambled from the hole as fire rose from the ever-widening fracture. The smoke and screams reached out from the hole and climbed into the sky, and an associated stench caused the farmer to reel and empty the contents of his stomach. The fire and the stone rose higher, and the screams doubled over into choking, gasping sounds. At some point, the farmer determined that the fire was burned in from the end of a short wooden torch, which was held in the right hand of a shrivel-naked man.

19:42This man was trying with failing strength to rise up from the innards of the broken stone, pouring out all around this wretch of a man for hundreds of tones, wet with nauseated fluids and loud with an awful bleeding. When the withered man finally realized that he was being watched, he threw out his hands for the farmer and opened a toothless hole for a mouth, projecting a septic flood of tortling wet noises. The man from the rock stood for but a moment and seemed as if he could not be understood, and then fell to his knees into the gathering forms of rag-and-mphibies. When his torch touched upon the squealing heap of tones, it ignited the fouls smelling liquids covering their bodies, calling up a fire that consumed all those who had come from the stone.

20:57After the incident had been reported to a local sheriff, an inquiry was made into the matter. While both the stone and the remains of a man who had once occupied its center were both found, the identity of a man and the manner of his incarceration and survival of both men and flame were harder facts to acquire. However, by careful examination, a small fragment of clarification emerged. At the bottom of the wet-it-stone centre of the rock that did give birth to both men in beast, there was found a silver ring, having apparently fallen from the shrunken finger of its most miserable host.

22:03The initials laid into its silver red E-F. I do not wonder that the man within the stone was none but Edward Fleck, subject to the awful pleasures of the devil and who even now departed beyond mortal dusts, has only hotter fires to comfort him. On that very same day, another black miracle was perpetrated within a barn that belonged to a cattleman named Tobias Mum. Around midday, Mr. Mum heard and muted but dreadful chorus of screams emanating from somewhere near his barn.

23:03Having gone out to the barn many times and find enough in, he decided to make use of a number of his hired hands to search for the sourcedless disturbance. To the surprise and shock of all, the locus of screams was determined. The stretched belly of a cow, heavy with calf. Having encountered wickedness beyond reckoning, a cattleman summoned the town clergy, hoping that God night yet preserved the valuable livestock from the baleful powers that were known to occasionally visit Greywitch. By that evening, the animal was placed in a large tent and the church ran all gathered with their holy fetishes, yet few had any idea as to what they might do with them.

24:18The night seemed unusually black and due to the particular day, many holy men and cattle handlers feared the night might overstay its welcome. Suddenly, a wind rose in the field, subsequently extinguishing the blessed candles that had been positioned around the tent. Next, the screams became words, pleading with God, with unnamed mothers and with the devil, but to whomever or whatever they pleaded, the request was the same. Death. With the arrival of words, all hopes that the anomaly was the product of irregularity of natural biological courses were dashed, along with any courage that might have lingered within the breasts of the assembled men.

25:23The words seemed to aggravate the wind as they rose in sound and fury, yet its howling did nothing to diminish the volume of the misplaced voices, but rather, like a bellows working upon the strength of the fire, the wind seemed to augment them. The conflation of night and nightmare continued when the winds began to twist about the tented cow, formed in a column of angry wind that tore up the tent and flung it into the blackened sky. When the cow was made visible to the assembled men, a horrible process began. A live birth in of twenty screaming human heads. Each head came in its turn, some muttered indistently and other soft and screened, but all were overnight and quite awake in their plight.

26:30In the pile where they lay, thick with afterbirth, with a mound in streaks, even knowing upon one another and fits of terrible madness, within minutes the head slowly ceased their commotion and became still with the quiet of death. And so, the twenty-one men who ascended into the longest darkness have returned. The book concludes with mere conjecture. The devil, excellent and timeless at his craft, knows more about the soul of a man than even he who might have shaped it, and just as he who minced a coin may not know its worth as well as the one who thieves it.

27:38The fallen king knows each shadow by name and may call them into a service. He gets them to that wicked city where in spaces lifted from hell he keeps them. They are the unclean children of the devil who are born not of dust, but from darkness and to it they must return. The Saginaw Cal�us Journal entry one. With the book consumed of its worth, allowed the hungry flames of my hearth to finish when mold had started. Crow of course is dead, have enjoyed that small but grown company of wise and corpses I have left behind.

28:48And with each corpse I pile onto death's altar, the music that was once contained only within my dreams now grows all the more perceptible after waking. So much so that I can almost make out the words, but not just yet. Despite the stories and lives I have devoured, my hunger for knowledge remains unquenched, as these vanishingly small impieties will themselves be nothing but scraps of nourishment before the hungry mouth of time. To be eaten and then forgotten. And the wisdom I have rediscovered merely an incomplete song that only hints at the crooked path to Devil's clay. Yet there are important things I have gleaned, but is still the wisdom that transcends the sum of stories and victims that I have amassed.

29:54The way to Devil's clay is not the snake in nameless road that winds through the dust. The way lies through the graveyards of the soul, where the silent forms of nightmares lie unrecall and where black ambitions waste in of hunger. However, as the music grows louder, I am learning how to revive them, and when dead shadows bloom, even graves can become gardens. And once I have consumed enough of the forbidden fruit that shall rise from the soil of forgotten gardens, I too shall be cast from the light. To walk the Devil's Earth.

31:12The Devil's Earth. Journal entry two. Last night, I woke from slumber, but not from dreaming. I could feel sleep sloughing from my body like fire-blackened flesh, revealing a nightmare that endured beyond sleep. I watched as my wicked shadow was thrown upon the wall, earning black and deep into the wood. Whenever I moved, it crackled and smoked as it drew up beside me. Still, the dream diminished, and I was left renewed of weakness and whincing at the sun, casting only a weightless shadow upon the foot of my bed. But in those moments, when I was radiant with darkness, a liven nightmare that cast a burden shadow, I realized much.

32:18Once I believed that the darkness was friend to evil, on this count, I am wrong. It was not a foulness that overflowed me as I enjoyed the fullness of my dream, but a breathless freedom. And it was not the wane light of the moon that afforded me sight, but through an alien quality of darkness, a different light that does not fall upon the Earth to reveal its particulars. But shines only to disclose its doubtful nature and proper a world that declines to solidify before reasons' devices, and will only obliterate any efforts at knowledge beneath surging waves of molten dream. Whatever the quintessence of darkness, whether it is fixed or flowing, it has no name that it answers to.

33:21The last words I will ever write. I do not know how, but I awoke some time ago upon the nameless root. As I walked, I could weakly recall at some distant time, standing before a great blackness. The darkness was so thick that I thought of holding my breath before plunging into it, and I feared I might dissolve within it and so lose myself. My body did fall away like fleeting dream memories that cannot escape waking, and for time I was simply all the darkness that ever was.

34:23I held in my pitching memory all of the lands I had ever shrouded, and all of the souls and smiles I had ever filled. And of course, all of the light that had ever diminished me. I remembered with pride those times that I had struck down the light, and how many times I had swallowed its brilliant children. And most of all, I remember how I longed for the light to return to me. I could hear the unquiet darkness within me, and at last I knew the words, and so I sang. I became the man that would have been, had fallen angels crafted the world, undimmed by the hollow glories of virtue, and uncorrupted by the frigid raptures of truth.

35:24And then the horrible loneliness and hopelessness that had always been my mortal companion fled me, and was replaced by something equally terrible, as one burden was replaced by another. The awful weight of pity. I wept for the pathetic shades who try hopelessly to force the light upon themselves to see what light can never reveal. Then I realized what I must do. I would hunt the light bearer. I would chase its killing light across the skies, rip free the miserable shadows from its blazing mouth, and I would stalk the halls of its bright prisons, whose many doors open onto the places where dreams have won their wars against waking.

36:24Only when the corpse lights our sung to sleep, and dream back into darkness, will we put down our burning shadows and poison voices. Only then can this nightmare of living and dying fade into the endless dark of some nameless wonder from which we all came, and to which we should return. At last, I walked the length of the nameless road, passing by the wrenches who disappeared beyond doors and vast distances. I could hear the quiet shadows in their blood, coiled snakes that stirred with every small piece of forbidden fruit they had secretly indulged. I slipped past the low house woods and into Devil's clay. The city was offered to me as a complete thing, not as an aggregation of houses for no people ever lived there.

37:32Devil's clay can seal only one thing, if only partially. One thing that lives in every house, every cellar and attic, and looks out from every window. I chose a home for myself, and made my way to its rooms. Upon a desk that should never be, was written a small note. It read, welcome home. I looked beyond my cracked window. I saw grey maffours walking of a dusty road-grade witch, dragging its crooked shadow behind him.

38:33The Burn by a paper sun is a meltopia production. Today's episode was written by Mark Anzlone, and performed by Stephen Zivak, Mith and M.K., and was conducted by Walker Cornfeld.