Virididerms with drawn faces from places you and I cannot place on any map
Their mountains formed by ruins marking our world’s devastation
They believe in diminutive elder races, first to walk the face of the earth
Their faces were turned from Sol, they never returned from their subterrene halls
Beneath the mounds, centuries sleeping, the thorny trees which they held sacred are best avoided
Naked save for flapping rags hung in thanks
Leaking tankers blackened the lake for a millennium
Descendents of ants and plant men without genitals living in tent cities
Psychedelic book of genesis littered with contradictory tenets
Almshouses empty of deeddoers in a vast everafter under Antichrist lash, after the rapture.
Revelation of the kind which turns Lovecraft protagonists pale and eventually insane
What hear ye of the feathermen of the highest reaches
Whose flaxen heads are sun-bleached, who teach their sons bird secrets
Who watch birds beak-preening and mold their flesh to that appearance
Flensing and fitting with apperatus the faces of their sons and daughters
Who might be slaughtered as offerings to an exalted Sun God should crops falter
Blood on sun-abandoned shining Sinandonny’s altar and surrounding mortar.
They suppose in ancient time their leaping posts
Which they pose upon before taking flight, served ulterior purpose, though it is unknown to them
Questions we pose they propose also, had aliens some hand in us
Had the change from animals to us been gradual or quick as a dagger thrust
They know only the harshest and most brutal justice, oft swift
High priests pile high the tribe’s lucre, perceive the future
In the past, studying relics of the last ages whose surpassing technologies must have created the Blasts
The feathermen are wiry and wily but illiterate, technologically incompetent and deliberately obstinate
They are checked by a thirst for word of the old world, they will submit to masters to taste ashes, teasing out what they were once
They wish to be worthy of it again, whatever it was.
Surrounding lands are subject to their law
Where their winged troopers land, a flag is planted
Rival oblasts are taxed heavily or blasted by fantastic cannons
Slaves are put to the lash
They will spend miserable hours fashioning from gold and stone scenes from the oldest story of Sinandonny’s tutelage
The breaking wrists please the raging gods of this broken realm
Oblates pray by day and spend nights constricted by odalisques
They suspect something about a sightless energy once harnessed, which arced between obelisks which were laid in a grid
Albino walls leached of pigment trigger memories of old Iberia’s sunlicked wide ways
Orpiment sun like an experimental opal, doped by the solar lull, the wit-dulling thud of lady sun’s branding cudgels make curmudgeons of the lovely
Coal-black their antient flight suits, which they had removed from ancient tombs
Knee-high boots one cannot stoop in.
Flyers get high before flying, skulling back a black concoction near impotable paints the gullet
The impossible becomes possible, even probable
He cannot stop spitting
Bitter, bile-ridden spittle gutters out through a gap between stout beak and snout
He tosses back his head
Toplit mask adopts sinister aspect
He fans his arms and his clinking wings sink, settling slowly like an excommunicate in a bagnio
Metal feathers as clothe Athena’s clockwork owl span his back and arms
He casts an alarming lamashtu shadow
By such cunning devices can entire assaulting armies be held at bay, or halted entirely, on the steep slopes where even goats falter
Several seconds later their mind implodes, reality is pulled back and nodes ignite in grid lines like lit gelignite charges discharging, scarring marching dimarchis, all along the frontline
Looping wires like jungle vines sprout from the skullback like a rat tail or a mullet
Each seam must be faultless to shield them from the bullish aether, which loathes a falling acorn’s floating.
A skinbound psalter on an open-air altar, exalted at the ziggurat’s tip, holds the secrets of their flight science which only the applied, sage-guided wisdom of the tribal fathers can harness
No other may look upon it save he who triumphs in their trials, he who has seen and survived the wiles of the woman in the hall of strange dials
The pyramid toe to tip slippy with blood rich in infidel cells from the severed heads whose death empties cells
Peasants armed with blood-rusted axes follow in the tracks of the slave carts which journey from the mountain ramparts to the human market at Deloapis, where an idol to the Bronze Bull of Apis with eyes of lapis lazuli and emerald-lined thighs, and a spine etched out in gold as a boon to divine eyes
Strips of votive flesh sold as relics, latent gifts ‘long to the dead
Even a skinless head the flesh fed to crows knows things a living man cannot
They greedily jam limbs into gore-crammed foetid burlap sacks
Flensed arms hang like drying pheasants on door jambs
The rude are defied and the tenacious are brought to the sky and let fall
Its steps slickened by copious bloodletting,
Priests in motley vesture blistered by a sleepless sun.
They say once the world’s richest lived there
Vast ditches and manmade embankments once the walls of deep bank vaults serve now as defensive ramparts
Sealed tombs topped by turrets from which escape odd currents, strange occurrences thereround occur
Word as currency
Lazarets in which suffering fluxed degrade to pleurisy
His family say there is no better place for him to be than the pesthouse
Even rats do not go there, avoiding its pestilent air
Puzzling scars marking salt’s far advance in lands long sealess.
They leap from lofty peaks
The heavy beaks they wear for life distort speech
To a theremin-redolent choir of shrill android noise.
Have you visited the terrapin men on the isles of merriment
Many woozy evenings I have spent, to my detriment, filling my head with their gaseous stories
Have you visited the dawn age men in cold storage, storeys of cryopods adorned in glories like a wall of cameo daguerreotypes as some forgotten war’s memento mori
Have you visited the cenotaph atop a sea stack
A raft brings you out there, a man-rat in the guise of Charon helps you onto an odd boat which floats above the water
Ropes like root systems dangle from the underside of the floating islands, their striking aspects
Sky highland coloured, latticed by railgun slugs to start the evening proceedings.
Alchemisland 
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