>>500100

Поясняю.

They are here… with you… not so much inside me as speaking with your voice.

There is a head on a pole behind you.

And you walk, though there is no ground. And you see, though your eyes have rolled into your brow. Through and over, around and within, you flee and you assail… For you are here.

Here.

They seize you from time to time, the Sons of this place, and you feel the seams tear, hear your screams. But you cannot come apart—for unlike the Countless Dead your heart beats still.

Your heart beats still.

There is a head on a pole behind you.

You come to the shore that is here, always here, gaze without sight across waters that are fire, and see the Sons swimming, lolling and bloated and bestial, raising babes as wineskins, and drinking deep their shrieks.

There is a head on a pole behind you.

And you see that these things are meat, here. Love is meat. Hope is meat. Courage. Outrage. Anguish. All these things are meat—seared over fire, sucked clean of grease.

There is a head on a pole.

Taste, one of the Sons says. Drink.

It draws down its bladed fingers, and combs the babe apart, plucking him into his infinite strings, laying bare his every inside, so that it might lick his wrack and wretchedness like honey from hair. Consume… And you see them descending as locusts, the Sons, drawn by the lure of his meat.

There is a head… and it cannot be moved.

So you seize the lake and the thousand babes and the void and the massing-descending Sons and the lamentations-that-are-honey, and you rip them about the pole, transform here into here, this-place-inside-where-you-sit-now, where you have always hidden, always watched, where Other Sons, recline, drinking from bowls that are skies, savouring the moaning broth of the Countless, bloating for the sake of bloat, slaking hungers like chasms, pits that eternity had rendered Holy…

We pondered you, says the most crocodilian of the Sons.

“But I have never been here.”

You said this very thing, it grates, seizing the line of the horizon, wrapping you like a fly. Legs click like machines of war. Yesss…

And you refuse to succumb to their sucking mouths, ringed with one million pins of silver. You refuse to drip fear like honey—because you have no fear.

Because you fear not darnation.

Because there is a head on a pole behind you.

“And what was your reply?”

The living shall not haunt the dead.

Это момент, показывающий путешествие Келлхуса на ту сторону и раскрывающий подробнее некоторые аспекты местной метафизики.

Голова на шесте - это буквально голова Келлхуса, служащая якорем, удерживающим его душу в мире живых. В глоссарии можно найти упоминание, что находясь на Менгедде Келлхус заменял свою голову на одну из тех, что висят у него на поясе.

И здесь же говорится о том, что для Сотни пищей являются человеческие эмоции - любовь, надежда, страх, гнев, храбрость...
Что косвенно подтверждает то, что "вечное проклятие" не такое уж и вечное, а сама Сотня - паразиты, гоп-стопающие души в середине цикла перерождения.