Into the Void

[Pyra Shineflame]

<p>It was one of those things that you think you really should have seen coming, but for some reason you <em>didn't </em>because you were so wrapped up in a billion other things like a fly in a spider's web, struggling and cursing out loud that you should have <em>known </em>somehow that the next twist of Fate was just around the corner waiting to cut your purse and your throat. It was one of those things that made too much sense to <em>make sense</em> and when I thought about how a daily fight to stay alive had become complacency and even worse, when I thought about how no one knew it had been thousands of years in the making, destined, fated, predetermined and what have you, and then this grand cosmic scheme <em>fails</em>-</p><p>How is that possible?</p><p>I mean, it's not that I'm not <em>glad </em>the world hasn't ended, Neriak is still here, the annoying Thexians are still being annoying (if the threat of everything going poof doesn't get through their thick skulls, what would?) and so is that smarmy Nerian merchant who still won't sell me that [Removed for Content] statue because I haven't done enough for the city lately, as if saving Norrath doesn't count. Everyone knows and at the same time they don't know. And I can't tell them because I'm not sure what exactly happened myself.</p><p>Tiggtoggler told me the basics: there were wobbles, ticks and spinners in the temporal and spacial relative planes which then twisted in odd flagnuvian configurations that eventually created lesions that manifested as visual arrays that acted as some kind of gnoggnardian transporters for the denizens of another plane of existence.</p><p>That is the last time I ask a gnome to explain anything. In my own words, something happened which let something else happen and then it was like Terris Thule hijacked reality. It all went pear shaped. And we fixed it. Kind of.</p><p>That is as specific about it, as I've been in the past month. I want to talk about it. I don't want to talk about it. Sometimes I have to let the pressure out and I scream at a random spider, or bat, or slave and other times I am this close to ranting at our Goddess about why she didn't <em>do something</em> but I don't because I'm scared, not stupid and half convinced that winning in the Palace was a fluke, because we aren't done and it's <em>not over. </em></p><p>I'm tired of hearing about the Shissar and their doom day calendar, or prophecies, or runes, or swords, or fortune telling stones, I'm tired of people asking me what happened? Because time is all twisted in my head, I saw people who should be thousands of years dead alive and kicking, the colour purple still makes my eyes itch and no one seems to realize that I saw Oblivion.</p><p>And...and I think it broke something.</p><p>The only thing I do know is when the mess escalated because my wings had itched. </p><p>Short history lesson:When little me was born, I was perfect in every way except for my wings. There's some kind of weird obscure theory that wing development was tied to the condition of the spirit bud, but all I know is that when they started coming in, they weren't going to ever let me fly. </p><p>So we got rid of them, and I got brand spanking new shiny ones that could "fade out" a bit so I could put on a shirt without having to rip holes in it first. Now when they started itching, I was a little worried because they're magical constructs and those things can be [Removed for Content] delicate and it wasn't like I could fix it myself (I'm sort of banned from the K'Lorn library, long story) and let me tell you, an itch you can't scratch will drive you up the wall.</p><p>When I told Vaeryn, she was all "I am sure Her Ever Darkness will indulge you" and I'm all "Suuuurrre" because being a Goddess is bound to be tough work and I was reasonably sure that if you wanted an audience, you had to have something a bit more noteworthy than "My wings itch." So from there it was either The Dead or The Spurned for my itchy wings and both give me the creeps. So I <em>ummed </em>and <em>awwed,</em> said I needed to get some fresh air and resolved to just deal and refrain from ripping them off.</p><p>I didn't have to because a few days later it stopped. I took them for a test drive around Darklight, marveling at the fact that they were back to normal, killing a few fanatics and almost managed to completely miss this cute little storm in the air. It was tiny! As big as me, just hovering there with static making popping sounds in the air, and it was like, one baby cloud as dark as midnight playing grown up.</p><p>It was new.</p><p>It was odd.</p><p>It was exciting.</p><p>So I wasn't afraid then. I should have been.</p><p>I am now.</p><p><hr /></p><p>I'm trying something a bit new, and thought that the events of TSO was a good place to experiment. Never tried a first person narrative before, so this will be fun to share ^_^</p>

[Zindicatt]

<p>You are very funny!  I really really really like it! Now I have to dig out other things you wrote, being new to here and all.</p>

[Pyra Shineflame]

<p>Thank you for the compliment! It was really fun to write!</p><p>Now just to get things out in the open, I wasn't alone. Well, I kind of was since I was the only one flying around there, but I wasn't <em>really alone </em>alone, you know, because I had the others. I'd love to claim that I single handedly stopped the invasion and saved our collective hides from being overrun by oblivion but I really can't because a) you probably wouldn't believe me and b) it would be so untrue its not funny. Don't get me wrong, I love a good lie, especially when it can cause some mayhem but...just no.</p><p>Anyway me being, well, me who had found something shiny wanted to share it with someone, <em>anyone, </em>if I was being honest (ahem) so I hauled wing back to Neriak. 1 Walk of the Dead, Death's Grotto, Neriak to be precise and I wouldn't recommend stopping by to visit because the owner is a bit crazy and a bit lazy and the front door itself is at least 47 death traps alone.</p><p>I can kill people. I know I can, I've done it plenty of times, but it was always a spur of the moment kind of murder. You know, the I need to go somewhere and you are in my way, or I need a hand, or I need your pants and they always refuse to do what you want so they must be...neutralized. (That's a word I learned three years ago and I finally learned what it meant yesterday. I hate euphemisms.) I don't mean anything by it, it's just the way the cookie crumbles.</p><p>Not so with the Ebon Mask, and doubly not so with the Arms. Assassins are [Removed for Content] <em>obsessive </em>about that kind of stuff. It's the what, the when, the how, the where that no one else bloody cares about because a dead guy whose had his head bashed in from behind and a dead guy who was subtly poisoned is wingshredding out of luck either way.</p><p>Rece knows this, understands it, but it doesn't stop her from giving me this annoying half look of disappointment when I tell her that poison isn't my style. <em>Really </em>isn't. But then she'd shrug, thread blood chocolate hair around a finger and granny cluck. </p><p>It was like that. </p><p>All the time. </p><p>So after I hit the door in sixteen different places, knocked the knocker in five different rhythms and stomped on the steps, I knew what to expect. Of course, just because I knew what to expect didn't mean that the unexpected wouldn't happen. As soon as the door opened I was met with a new trap: a fireball to the face. </p><p>Yeah, it was like that too.</p><p>It burned (duh) and I could feel each layer of skin melt off as I thought that maybe all Rece needed was a welcome mat? 'All trespassers will be submitted to torture?' 'Welcome to Torment?' 'House of Pain?' Perpetual injury is a pain (no pun intended) to deal with as my first instinct was to heal myself. Great! Except my face was essentially healing and re-burning over and over and over until the trap ran out of oil.</p><p>I was tempted to feel angry, enraged even. But it was Rece. It's like being mad at Neriak for being underground. Not to mention healing myself with no preparation, incantations or anything made my head feel fuzzy and stretched and it was a chore to see straight, much less be angry. So I floated in, making sure not to touch the floor, and these slow, sprawling footsteps sounded in the foyer. Then they got quiet, and a hand touched my head. I didn't jump, I <em>swear.</em></p><p>"Survived I see." Rece spoke and I was instantly jealous. If I could take one thing from anyone in the world, I would take Rece's voice. It was silk, velvet, steel, ice, fire, ash and smoke; she could sound like anyone, anything and I'd take it just so I could sound like someone that should be <em>reckoned </em>with and not a bug to squash. "I thought I would have got you this time."</p><p>I gave her the evil eye. "For me? Oh, you <em>really </em>shouldn't have. My face? Overcooked. Like, <em>wingshredding lava. </em>Good job<em>.</em>" Her lips quirked and the fingers on her right hand twitched. "Shouldn't have cut your hair," I couldn't help adding.</p><p>That lazy half shrug and hum. "Shisrae is here."</p><p>"And Kaber." It was almost like a correction and not, because I knew that she knew that I knew that those two were inseparable. There was no Shisrae without Kaber. It wasn't possible. Like a halfling and it's jum jum. A dwarf and its ale. A woodelf and its tree. It was "and" and not "either, or." But Kaber was kind of...different. </p><p>"Alright." Another half shrug. "Why are you here anyway?"</p><p>I stared at Rece for a moment, mentally back tracking. Why was I here...I turned this way, and then that way feeling mightily embarrassed and then I found the memory I was looking for.</p><p>"Oh! Have I got something to tell you guys!"</p>

[Zindicatt]

<p>Keep it coming keep it coming LOL.</p>

[Pyra Shineflame]

<p>"Do ya?" Rece slinks over to the open door behind me, rolling her right shoulder and casually flipping a simple switch. Hundreds of clicking sounds, the door swings shut by itself and all the traps reset. I pouted, absently wondering how many absolutely evil tricks I could pull with a mechanism like that. "Don't you think Shisrae would want to hear it?"</p><p>I kind of felt a little guilty. "I guess...."</p><p>Shisrae is the kind of person that you have to look hard at, and study for a while to tell that she's crazy. Shisrae is the kind of person that you have to look hard at, to see that's she's even <em>there</em>. The dark elf tendency to fade into the shadows and the fact that Shisrae can sit still for <em>hours </em>(inhuman, I tell you) makes a nigh invisible combination. Unlike Vaeryn, she's a full blooded Teir'Dal with a predisposition to dark magics, cruelty, hate, egomania and everything else not-happy and not-nice. Her magical aptitude was through the roof, was intelligent, useful and on the fast track to being someone of legends.</p><p>The second Najena, maybe.</p><p>But like a gnomish invention, she broke suddenly with no discernable reason and she broke hard. Chaos happened. Collateral damage. They say one who studied the mental magics enough can reverse effects of trauma or amnesia but come on, the only people around here studying the mind are studying how to irreversibly break it. Vaeryn tried but I think it was something Shisrae saw, a scroll or rune maybe that made her drift in and out of reality.</p><p>If she's lucid, its a complete accident, like one of those marble games at the Wanderlust Fair where you have to tilt a board and get the marble to roll into a shallow in the center <em>and stay there.</em> The marble rolls in, it teeters, the marble wingshredding rolls out and you lose five silver plus some of your sanity.</p><p>That's where Kaber comes in.</p><p>I don't know how she did it, and I think that mystery is one of the only things keeping the Spurned and the Dead from simply erasing that particular blot on their history (if one actually looked at the history, it would be nothing but blots I bet), but she made him.<em> </em>To the others, he's a Shisrae filter, turning her thoughts into comprehensible words. But he doesn't have to follow orders, he can think and he <em>knows.</em></p><p>Kaber scares me. Just a little. Shisrae doesn't. So she's crazy! I can say she promised me four plat yesterday and I'd get it. Not really seeing the problem there.</p><p>I guess I just don't trust vampires, even servants, on principle. Dead guys don't have much to lose.</p><p>They are sitting on the windowsill when we get there, Shisrae just staring out passed the glass intently like she's trying to randomly generate something to kill and Kaber is imitating a statue. I clear my throat and Kaber's eyes dart in my direction. Silence. Nothing .Else. Moves and it is creepy.</p><p>"Um..."</p><p>"Shisrae," Rece raps on the wall with a knuckle. "Your Arasai is here."</p><p>Her head moves with the slight jerking movements of a body animated. "Oh?"</p><p>"Yeah....right here...behind you." I wiggle my fingers in her general direction but being the spoil sport that she is, Rece put a hand on my head. It was assassin language for "behave." And when someone who kills people for a living tells you to shape up, you do it.</p><p>Shisrae turns to face me, pink eyes glittering like the rancor crystals scattered around the caverns. Reflecting light unevenly, with a shadow of impurity flitting in and out of the center. By the focus in her eyes I can tell she is a little more "here." Not a lot, but enough not to be particularly talkative about the tree hugging, peace in the word, love, happiness and all that crap. I mean, <em>shred my wings. </em>Is it any wonder she's practically on city arrest? A qeynosian would probably have a heart attack. Hell, if I didn't know she wasn't <em>serious </em>and was just an unfortunate victim of a cracked mind, <em>I </em>would keel over.</p><p>"How are you?" She smiles, wide and bright. "Was it there?"</p><p>"I-wha?" I glance at the assassin, only to see a slight frown on the Ayr'Dal's face. Very encouraging. Hang me out to dry, why don't you...</p><p>"The beginning of the march." Kaber interjects, smile tugging at his lips. "Time comes around again."</p><p>Shisrae shushed him, a look of something like religious fervor, or anticipation...knowing on her face. "Did you see it?"</p><p>"I, uh," crazy people put you off balance. Fact. "I saw a storm?"</p><p>They looked at each other, and then she turned back to the window, completely ignoring me once again. Seriously, why did I bother? I gave Kaber an annoyed look, hoping he'd pass on the message but he just shrugged and gave me that toothy grin that made me want to pop out an incisor of his. I could use that for stuff, you know?</p><p>"Too nice of a day for this." An exasperated sigh. Rece rolls a shoulder. "Shisrae alert."</p><p>"Yeah?" I say, because um, what else am I going to say? I have to say <em>something. </em>"Yeah."</p><p>I thought it was just another ramble, another nonsensical saying that made some kind of warped logic in her head but really had no bearing on reality. March? Time? Uh, what does a storm have to do with any of that?</p><p>What indeed.</p>

[Zindicatt]

<p>"Shred my wings".  LOL!</p>

[Pyra Shineflame]

<p>There are many different ways you can lose your mind.</p><p>Shocking, I know.</p><p>But thanks to a really awkward conversation with Vaeryn I'd rather not go into detail about (the things that woman does to people...maybe its just lingering-) I know quite a few of those ways. First, there's exhaustion. Put a person through enough emotionally and physically draining experiences and they wear out like an old carpet or your armor after too many careless deaths. They will reach the point where they simply can't patch themselves back up again afterwards, can't maintain "hope", and they get stretched kind of thin like and desperate and it creeps up on them, madness. It starts on the outside, bags under their eyes, twitchiness, can't focus and then it seeps in so that their thoughts gets disjointed and then they just <em>stop.</em></p><p>I've seen it in the faces of the spies in the dungeon, underneath the Palace, the ones who come in thinking they are the Good Guys but they aren't, not really, cause we spent the last who knows how long locked away from the rest of the world. Not saying we didn't cause a little bit of mayhem, cause that would be a lie you probably would see through right away, but it's a bit hard to cause a lot of bit of mayhem when you're buried underneath several tonnes of solid rock.</p><p>And we're trying to keep the peace a bit, alright? So they just stay there. I don't know what happens to them. So don't ask. It's easy to tell when they've given up, they stop making sense or stop trying to altogether, that's all I'm saying.</p><p>Then there's obsession. This type starts inside from the person, well, obsessing (bet you didn't see that coming, did you?) over something or other be it themselves, reputation, knowledge, power, yadda, yadda, your dog and grandmother. The path of least resistance. Obsession strengthens the mind, but only in that area and when its your <em>mind </em>that does the whole one-trick-pony thing, the rest of you takes a vacation leaving you stuck with something so hyper specialized that it's useless.</p><p>The last type I know about is the brute force method. You take something overwhelming and beat someone else over the head with it. Rinse and repeat for as long as necessary, but if it takes too long, it wasn't overwhelming enough. Could be trauma, emotional crisis (although really, what kind of sissy breaks their brain over something stupid like that?) or it could be magic. It's the equivalent of shattering a glass pane into millions of little pieces with a rock and then sticking every piece back into the frame. All the pieces are there, just not where they once were, and not in a coherent pattern.</p><p>Just so you can understand where I was going with this (because I started with one train of thought and then kept hopping tracks, you really should learn to stop me when I start babbling), let's just say the left corner of that glass pane had been everything Shisrae knew about prophecies and godly history when she was sane. And then crap happened. That knowledge was scattered but being crazy didn't mean being ignorant or stupid. She knew stuff, gleaned from books I would have fallen asleep on after reading the title, she just couldn't...tell anyone. So naturally, when there was something that might have been just a figment of her strained imagination, but could also be a fragment of something truly important trying to make itself known, we hunker down to decide what's what. Well, I think the Goddess might understand her without needing to fly through hoops like us, but that's only to be expected.</p><p>She's a Goddess after all.</p><hr /><p>I volunteered to get Vaeryn for some reason that I can't remember right now, maybe it's because she was the closest one to Rece's house and I'm was just being lazy like that (that's probably it). Vaeryn's what we call a "coercer" because they are the ones who are very good at making people do what they don't want to do. She's like a hybrid because with her it won't be something you don't want to do. It'll be something that <em>at first </em>you don't want to do but she'll twist your head around with words and magic until you think it was your idea. Illusionists do it like that, firmly on the side of the light ironically... Any two bit mind mage can stun, dazzle, silence, <em>coerce </em>you into doing something. It's the ones you don't realise you would kill yourself to please that are dangerous.</p><p>It's what I call a double whammy. Mixed or not, women beautiful as her don't appear often so naturally, I don't like her. (I don't like those that enjoy causing injuries that can't be healed with a spell)</p><p>Which is, you know, perfectly alright because she doesn't like me too much either (and what's a little violence between friends?). But if I don't like her, then I <em>loathe </em>her husband in all his cross-eyed, hoity-toity, cry-baby and all around jerkish unglory (because I'm sure that one thing the <em>esteemed </em>Koada'Dal don't know how to do, is how to take a wingshredding joke).</p><p>I knocked on the door. And prayed ever so silently to the gods that the more tolerable mage would open it. And then I remembered that in a move of collosal dickery, all of them abandoned Norrath for no reason better than having performance anxiety. And none that would bother answering me now would really care.</p><p>In hindsight, this is where it all started to go downhill.</p>

[Zindicatt]

<p>Still reading <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p>