The Alabaster Feast
The mist of Oakhaven does not hide the town; it preserves it. The nobility of the valley live in estates of white marble, their skin as pale as moonlight, their lives stretching across centuries. I was a 'Vessel', a biological sculpture crafted from the finest clay and stolen memories, designed to be the ultimate luxury: a living, breathing archive of a dead era.
I spent my youth in the gardens of the House of Valerius, playing the harp and reciting poetry in a language that no one had spoken for a thousand years. I was loved, in the way a collector loves a rare vase. I was cherished for my purity, for the way my eyes could reflect the sorrow of a century I had never lived.
But the beauty of Oakhaven is a mask for a starving hunger.
On the eve of my twentieth year, I discovered the Ossuary. Beneath the marble floors lay a forest of calcified remains—thousands of Vessels, their bodies drained of everything that made them sentient. I realized then that the nobility did not just 'live' for centuries; they fed. Every fifty years, they would harvest the consciousness of a Vessel, absorbing its memories, its emotions, and its vitality to refresh their own fading spirits.
My escape was a frantic flight through the weeping willows and the silver streams. I ran until my lungs burned, until the marble walls of the estate were nothing but a smudge on the horizon. I found a sanctuary in the deep woods, a place where the mist was thick and the shadows were kind.
But the hunger follows.
I began to notice the change in my own reflection. My skin was becoming translucent, and my thoughts were starting to fragment. The nobility hadn't just designed me to be a vessel; they had linked my life-force to theirs. By escaping, I had severed the connection, and now I was leaking.
I sat by a black pond, watching my fingers slowly turn into glass. I realized that the 'freedom' I had found was just a slower way of dying. I was a masterpiece that had been removed from its gallery, and without the gallery to sustain me, I was simply dissolving into the air. I closed my eyes and listened to the wind, waiting for the moment I would finally become as silent and still as the marble I had left behind.
*** OTMES_v2_Code: [M7:8, M4:9, N2:0.7, K1:0.8, theta:90°, I:1.0]
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