The Oculus

Without uttering another syllable, gliding angelically into the sordid milieu, The BSD reclined, unencumbered, almost playfully into a vast, celestial gown supported by the numerous, scantily clad coryphées. An absurd and robust silence hung in the room like a dewy mist, moistening all those about. Artisans began to resume their Sisyphusian chores, bent on appeasing the delirious, seemingly specious demands of their high priest. Vines hung ominously like the ropes of the nooseman, the lush greenery outside misty and overbearing. Anuk moved first.

As imminently as he began, as if with pensive forethought, the artisans came as protectors, warriors, a vast contingent of ancients besetting on a presumptuous rodent. Pinned to the sodden walls of the edifice, the dampness soaking persistently into his cape, Anuk was without rebuke.

Darkness pervaded the nave, a thick obscurity, milky, obstinate, opaque. The oculus allowed light to drift, muted as it was, onto the altar below, filling the rotunda with a morbid, oppressing air. Toplit, dazzling, magnificent, a tuft of hair atop his holy head, the BSD lay in silent, oracular augury.

Garner, unsure and increasingly trembling, knew not what to do. He lifted his eyes cautiously skyward, towards the heavens where he was no longer sure his god, or even a god, existed. Everything he thought he knew, he thought that he had understood, about intersexual relations, fidelity, devotion, sensual aptitude, religion, veracity, justice, whimsicality, dandyism, sport, love, abhorrence, discernment, stoicism, hedonism, pleasure, mediocrity, physicality, was fundamentally and barbarically tainted, the foundations of principle shattered beyond recognition.