What was embedded in most, drifted along the wayside of Adrian’s trajectory, nearly becoming a conscience but reigned by his presumptions. He felt the world owed him everything, as his caustic unresolvedness devoured months and years, while isolating himself from those he deemed inconvenient. This habit undoubtedly increased, and like gaping clams in deserted waters, his inner voices beckoned him toward implosion, while beside him whimpered the lost self that only suspect practices made reachable. Like his friend Dmitri Sokolov, his interest in the occult caused his childhood birth of sexuality, bringing peace that aligned him with what he neglected. The truth spoke in a form that seemed evil in its beginning stages, until its tune changed with maturation. During the year he and his companions were tortured, at the same age but at different times and places, the two were engrossed in the seductresses of classical art, from the 12th to the 19th century. These women were spectral muses who lived since before the human race.
Daniel Schroder, on the other hand, hated the occult and felt no attraction to them. Though they were not associated with Griffith Alliance, his knowledge about it still repelled him from these matters, compiled with his anti-authoritarianism. His friendship with Adrian and Dmitri, brought catharsis through their hardships. They bemoaned the rising perversion, as images of these spirits were slowly replaced with those of the androgynous beings. An oil painting that stirred them most, shared the title of the book Adrian found, “Death of the Old World.” Its photographic realism bleakened its banality, as a fraud might show cruelness through self-pitying adages. The picture portrayed a man with a nose-less, slender face, and his head slightly tilted to the side. Except his seemingly cabaret eyebrows, even thinner than Adrian’s perpetrator’s, he was completely hairless and trapped in a white strait jacket, with a touch of brooding narcissism. In the dimness were a light-blue, ceramic brick tile wall and floor, on which he sat and leaned against.
Before becoming acquainted with Adrian, the other two were tortured because of shouting death threats at Griffith Alliance, calling them hypocrites and degenerates while standing outside the monastery’s entrance at midnight. (A few hours prior, Daniel introduced Dmitri to alcohol and intoxication). Through the window they saw the charlatan congregation, in a large hall with a chandelier above them. The cult leader was Marcus Griffith, who stormed over to the window with his usual youthful nimbleness, which seemed manic with his hollow, angry grin. His aged body made this all the more of a spectacle, as his long, square and sunken countenance had shifted out of role. He was no longer the magician of platitudes and hearsay, since the raucous stripped him down to the savage he was.
The hallucinogenic dehydrants later imposed on Daniel and Dmitri, were pink oval tablets that induced the revulsion of staring at food excessed with richness, as their color somehow penetrated the nature of their effect. Was it just their harsh, saccharine brightness that set their subjects on edge, or was it also the unexplained chemistry these lifeless forms encapsulated? One was distributed to each, and after swallowing came the illness and pains that they notoriously inflicted. What differed from Adrian’s predicament, was that they vomited ten minutes in. A maddening feeling lingered after their incarceration, on the cusp of the euphoria when a traumatized body enters shock. Whenever they reached this rapture in rare occurrences, they shivered and withdrew from others till normalcy resumed.
The Specters of Tradition: Volume 1: Daniel Schroder 