Secreted & Anointed

Story by Magnanimous

So I decided to try something a little experimental for my first contribution here. I know I'm more of a writer than I am an artist or anything of the sort like that, but having seen the standard set by some of the writers here I got the impression that I had to push myself a little bit harder.

I have been reading a lot of Lovecraft lately, and while I wouldn't dare compare myself to such a hailed genius as that, I do get the impression that in trying to write this piece I might have got a bit carried away from time to time.

As such, if this is too pretentious, long-winded and verbose for you to stomach, I sincerely apologise, and assure you that as it moves along it does ease up a bit.

Oh, and as a warning, I haven't used any strict names for any characters involved, so certain terms might begin to become repetitive...

And I don't normally write in first person, but I needed to in order to achieve the nameless end and make the story more psychological...

AND I had originally intended for it to be self-contained... but the more I wrote, the more I got new ideas about how I wanted it to go, and the more I realised that it would be easier to split it into parts... so I'm only giving you Part 1 for now.

Here you go:

Secreted & Anointed

Part 1

Sitting down to write this, I still cast glances to the curtained windows through the doorway to the front room. The brightness from beyond the opaqued fabric still causes me to squint, so unfamiliar has it been to me for a time that I could not hope to know. And with luck holding, it should not be long now until I am allowed again through that open and keenly decorated front room that I remember from moments of a past age, and back out into a world of surely strange and alien things such as I had never known. For the time being, this is my furthest step outward from a lower and smaller place that has been a home to me, and this page upon which I write these words, my greatest freedom. Indeed, it is a wonder that the thrill of words and their casting has never slipped from my memory. And so with this most gracious of gifts granted to me, I have been entitled to commit to paper as much else as I can retrieve from the depths of my tired mind, and tell of my life in the care of my beloved Mistress.

~~~~~~

Once, I had been different in all ways. I still remember the outside world as it was, and the fragments of a life I once lived with what could have been moderate ease. I recall now hazy memories of routine, working amid stacks of paper with quill in hand, a suitably comfortable apartment in the city, a life that left naught to complain for, but yet a sense of lonely restlessness. That is the one sensation that most sums up my memories of a life long gone. I was a man of reasonable health, though certainly no great muscle, and for what may have been right in my life I was lonely and somewhat dissatisfied. Of the people I may have once known, I remember none. Of family I might once have had in that world I left behind, all faces and names are lost to me. Even the name I once held myself is now gone from the depths of my mind. Only one face of all do I recall, from the first moment to every after.

It was from the window that she had been gazing, the same window that now lit the rooms beyond this small study with broken and scattered light behind the curtains. It was sitting in that window, gazing onto the cobbled street beyond, I had first seen her. There was a small street beyond, and a way I had not been prior. I do not remember what it was that first caused me to change my route and walk along that seemingly minor of streets, but even in but a passing glance, the memory of her face had lingered with me. Those vivid blue eyes that lurked in the dark beyond the glass panels. Those serene and deep azure eyes that had held to mine for at once the longest and shortest moment. And that soft, wavy black hair that cascaded over her shoulders like a river of midnight.

I had come back the next day, and every day after, hoping to catch another glimpse of her again. It had been the spark lit in my unfulfilling life that with each passing day slowed my steps. Sometimes she was absent, but the disappointment of such days flew away with each moment I caught of her face, and eventually the subtlest but most rewarding of smiles. I admit that, to my memory, I have always been of a shy and quiet disposition. So it was that I rarely hung around, and even for these moments which became my life I would not hang around overly, afraid that my presence might become unwelcome. I had begun to ask a

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