dreamer

Horror wells up inside Zov's mouth in muffled gurgling sobs, strangely familiar.

Jellied eyelids pried open, he sees blobs bathed in a faint yellow light overhead. Tears streak across his temples and congeal into pendulous imps swinging by his earlobes whispering foul secrets. His tongue rolls up like a slice of dry cured ham and pushes back against his throat.

“H-e-l-l....”, he draws a sharp breath and tries to scream but merely intones in the manner of a mute.

“Feeling a little tongue-tied, Master? Might you be that randy little dandy that stole my tongue-twister?”, a gravelly drawl crawls up from the miasma. 

As Zov rolls his eyeballs, his eyelashes fizz into his sockets like soldering irons.

"Well, well, ma' deah boy, we all want free speech, don't we?", the voice now resounds clearly before bursting into menacing mirth.

“What hell is this, Macabre Punster!”, Zov demands.

Or so he would have as he attempts a gut utterance after the guttural fails him, half-hoping a flourish of indignant characterization might resonate with the jesting knave's heartless wit. An instant endowment of ventriloquism by the Lord's even-handed ways (as they are rumored to be) he reckons would make two-bit counterpoint to the amorphous malignity that holds his body captive and tears at his soul, but a counterpoint nevertheless. Yet not a squeak escapes his corporeal innards.

It strikes him then that even the most desperate entreaties of the conscious mind (that naive moribund sailor whose charmed odysseys atop torrential undercurrents lead him to be enamored of his own illusory powers of navigation) would never appease the Ambivalent Dreamer Who Knows And Yet Doesn't...