sparkindarkness (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sparkindarkness) wrote2005-07-08 10:14 pm
sparkindarkness) wrote2005-07-08 10:14 pm
Sparkindarkness 68 - the last stretch
Whoa, wait, that can't be right.
68?! Sixty-eight!? You are kidding me, right? I haven't done 68 ficvs for ALL my universes together.
Right?
The gate looked like black iron. Not cast iron that had been moulded into a wonderfully ornate piece of onyx art - but like a common metal frame had been caught in a devastating fire that twisted it into this blackened wreck. The ground around it was scorched and torn, the sky seemed to be dimmer here. The wind blew, cold and wet with some stale, dead scent on the air. Not the smell of death, the smell of death would be comforting. I knew death, I understood death. This was the smell of old, dusty dead rooms. Rooms that have been shut up for years - large empty, sealed houses where on eccentric inhabitant rambles among the ruins, weeping and mourning years past. It reminded me of Great Expectations, the old woman who lost her husband and wore her wedding dress for the rest of her life, rambling around a large, dusty empty house. It was the smell of despair and grief so deep that it no longer allowed for sanity.
Nikolai parted the gate, pulling one of the doors roughly away. It looked simple, but I could feel the power of magic that had to be poured into it. These doors had to be rammed open with pure clerical power. I don’t think I could have done it, not easily, not quickly. There were things here even death and decay couldn’t kill. End, maybe, but not in any way I understood.
I think even ghost took a deep breath before we passed through the gate. I don’t think any of us expected this to be pleasant.
We came out in a desolate wilderness. There was no gate any more, we stepped out from the bole of a huge tree, tortured with chasms and fissures in its peeling bark. The tree was dead - or looked it, it was hard to sense death in the realm of the spirit, it was as if true death didn’t really apply here - or maybe it applied in ways even I didn’t understand. Nothing was simple here. The tree was blackened, again as if some mad wildfire had raged through, but it was also twisted with peeling bark and half rotten limbs, as if the tree had been sickened and diseased before the fire had raged and destroyed the last vestiges of life. No leaves clung to its naked branches. There were no buds, no greenery, no sign that life might ever return.
Liam cut off a branch with his pocket knife, “no new life. It’s dead.” Nikolai nodded.
The large plain had several such trees, all like this, all twisted painfully, rotted and burned. Without checking I knew they were all dead. The plane itself was as dead. No grass, weed or flower grew from the dead, sandy soil. Nikolai ran the soil through his fingers, feeling the grit, the sand, the dry almost dusty quality of it. There was no life in it and no potential for life to come.
A steady, driving rain fell from a black sky. More sleet than rain, icily cold that seemed to stab right through my clothes. A thousand icy knives stabbed at our flesh - was there any weather more miserable than sleet? I couldn’t tell whether it was day or night, the roiling, moody black clouds were so thick that it wouldn’t have mattered whether there was a sun behind them or not. A constant prevailing wind blew, still carrying the scent of empty grief and a scorched heart. It wasn’t strong, though it was strong enough to blew the sleet in our faces and make it all the more miserable, but it was incessant. It never weakened, just a constant, sad, prevailing cold wind on a shelter-less plain. It was the only sound - the falling sleet and the driving wind. No birds sang, no insects buzzed, no rivers laughed or danced. Just the falling sleet, and the writhing of the dead trees in the unforgiving wind.
“Was there ever a more desolate, heartless place?” Nikolai shuddered, pulling his wet coat closer around him. “I think your lover is here, nephew… is there any force in the world more cruel than love?”
I blinked at him. I wanted to ask him what he meant by the cryptic comment, but was afraid of the answer. No more hard truths, no more painful thoughts, I just wanted Rick.
He will be there Ghsot seemed as subdued as the rest of us. He pointed to a mound on the horizon - it was nearly impossible to make out through the weather. I looked a question at the spirit.
I can feel him there. And that’s a city - I can sense it. I don’t care how much he’s moping, he’s hard pressed to tell the difference between a tree and a wolf, no way he’d be cowering in the wilderness like some mad hermit.
It made sense, and there was no other direction besides. The distance seemed vast, I think it would have taken us days, or weeks, if Nikolai didn’t have his shamanic arts to reduce the distance here. It was still brutally hard. As hour after hour passed, the wind never stopped or lessened, constantly driving into you. The sleet fell in a steady torrent, we couldn’t have been colder and wetter if we had swam the North Sea. The clouds never lessened, never parted to allow the slightest sliver of light - sun or moon.
While the weather remained constant, the landscape changed. No less bleak, no less depressing, no less dead - but the ground began to slope up hill towards the city, making the walk a tiring hike in the loose soil. Before long my leg muscles began to burn and my feet ache, I reached out with my magic for what comfort I could, a sliver of infernal strength. It came easier here - as if the daemons were closer. Or maybe they saw something that amused them. I was too tired to care, mentally, physically and emotionally, this land seemed to drain you. I drank of infernal energy and resolve to keep myself going strong. Nikolai may have been able to draw similar power from the spirit realm, or maybe the older man was just as tough as old roots, worn and hard. Maybe he’d trekked the natural wilderness enough for it not to bother him any more. Either way, he didn’t suffer as I did. Liam was nearly dead on his feet. While all Camaalis were supposed to spend a lot of time in the countryside, not everyone indulged in hiking (unlike those who have clearly been driven insane by inbreeding who would actually do this for fun). Liam had no magic to energise him and he was suffering.
The closer we came to the city, the worse it became. The weather grew still colder, leaving Liam shivering uncontrollably until Nikolai reached out with some of the spirits he had called to him to protect the Seer from the dreadful cold (I didn’t offer to lend my daemonic power, I suspect it would not be welcomed). It was a measure of how exhausted the Seer was that he accepted. The ground was now torn about by briars and thorn bushes, some unnaturally large with thorns longer than my hand. Some just clung to the floor like a carpet, forcing you to delicately pick your path through the savage branches. The soil itself had brushed aside in places, leaving jagged, razor edged rocks that could cut through boot leather (even my Guccis. Rick owed me a new pair of shoes). Again I was thankful for Nikolai’s presence, if it weren’t for his spirits and his spirit charged medicines (though Rick would laugh himself silly at the collection of salves and unguents that made up Nikolai’s spiritual first aid kit, not one brand name drug in sight) I’m not sure we would have survived to get here, so often did the thorns tear into us. I think he had paid his debt to us after we spared his life. Rick was right - there are benefits to mercy.
We arrived at the gates of the city, tired, worn and wounded. If anything, though, our resolve was stronger. You don’t trek through this much, endure all this, without going through with your goal. The gates rose above us, fire blackened wood and twisted iron, they looked strong enough to withstand armies. Nikolai sighed heavily and reached for his spirits once more. I shook my head, we might need his versatile strength in the future, there was no need for him to waste his strength and chiminage now. I focused on the doors. They were alien and strange, like everything here, but I did not let my mind dwell on it. They were less physical substance and more the essence of depressed stubbornness, of angry walls and the hermits will and likely a thousand other things I wasn’t even going to try to dispel. I didn’t care, I didn’t need to know, not really. All things end. Eventually, somehow, even if the ways the end are beyond my comprehension, nothing ever lasts forever. I took that, the inherent capacity that all things have to end, to be finished, to be destroyed, and threw it at the gates - I threw my own inherent decay, humanity’s own inevitable draw towards their own destruction, life’s own natural ending at the gates. I threw Sorcery in its purest, most undifferentiated form - the simple essence of destruction - of ending - at the gates.
Nikolai sensed what I was doing as the power pushed against the barrier, he drew back, face carefully blank in the face of abomination. Liam just shied away from the powerful dark magic he didn’t understand, but could feel like oil on his skin.
The gates were tough. The gates were powerful. The gates could stand forces beyond human imagining…. But even they would collapse one day. Even they would end. Slowly, so terribly slowly, they began to crumble. My wards burned m, searing badly. I gritted my teeth and called my sorcery, focusing everything on the doors even as my hands burned and my throat felt like red hot knives were slicing their way to my spine.
There was a hand on my shoulder. I cut my magic off, almost instinctively. I looked up, it was only then that I realised I was on my knees, shivering helplessly. I looked up and had to brush my hair out of my eyes, it was thick and dirty, soaked with sweat. Liam looked down on me, worry dancing in those normally sensuously challenging eyes. I nodded once and tried to get to my feet. It took three attempts and Liam’s help before I could. My wrists were agony, my throat unbearable. A quick inspection showed where the flesh had actually cooked around the wards, cooked and burned. I don’t know how long I had knelt in front of the doors, but by the aching in my knees, it felt like hours. Enough time for Nikolai to prepare a collection of salves and cures anyway - how very efficient of him.
“That took more power than I expected.” My throat made talking agony, even with Nikolai’s salve. My voice creaked terribly.
“It got the job done, that is what’s important.” Nikolai’s voice was pure neutrality - better than condemnation at least. And he was treating a Sorcerer and Infernalist, which is more than many Camaalis would - they acted as if our evil was catching. He was actually earning a lot of points in my eyes.
I looked at the door. Or the place where the doors were. Nothing. No scrap of metal, no twisted supports. No charred remnants - not even dust on the wind. The stones in the wall to either side were also missing. I smiled, just slightly because it pulled muscles in my neck painfully. Perhaps I had overdone it a little - or maybe not. I just don’t know how spirits come apart. I really must study this some more.
Donald’s magic made it possible for me to stand without help - which was an achievement in itself. I felt horrendous. My wards still burned - I cannot remember the last time they hurt this much and my whole body felt sick and tired. I gritted my teeth and forced myself into the city - it was for Rick. I would do anything for him… though I may give him hell when I finally find him.
The city was an urban reflection of the wilderness outside - bleak and desolate, hard and sad and cruel. The dark sky seemed even darker under the looming shadows of broken sky scrapers. The floor of the broken street was ravaged by pot holes - some so big and so deep that a man could fall through them into the dank sewers below. Across the broken tarmac was scattered shards of broken glass -some easily large enough and sharp enough to cause severe damage. The windows of the looming buildings around them gaped empty and blind., some of them darkened by past infernos. At their foot, among the twisted and broken street lights, lay twisted wrecks of burnt out and crashed cars, some of them still smouldering. Down a side street I could see a broken water main, foul, polluted water fountaining high into the air. Steam drifted across the roads from rotten manholes and ruptures in the road, clouding the already freezing dark streets in a thick, cloying, oily mist.
We crept silently along the main street, towards the centre where one single tall tower rose - still whole, though battle scarred and every pane of glass was broken. Darkness clung to it, an electricity wire was ripped down in front of it where it sparked angrily - arcs of electricity that you would never see in the real world. Despite the actinic light, the darkness that clung to the tower was never broken.
The wind still whistled past the broken towers, still carrying its musty smell of madness stemming from grief - but unlike the wilderness, there was sound to cut through the falling drizzle, noises carried on the wind. We circled, warily, trying to find the source of the noise- there was weeping, a broken, empty sound of someone who had wept for days yet still found grief inside demanding release. There was a cry, a faint, broken cry of the helpless, someone asking for help who knows it will never arrive, there was a wailing, a loud choral wailing of dozens of voices raised in terrible grief. Laughter danced just at the edge of hearing, hard edged and wild, the sound of someone who has spent too long alone, who as endured too much and now laughs at the phantasms in their mind.
“In the wilds, despair is the absence of life, despair and heart rending grief is to see the land twisted, abandoned and dead beyond hope of saving, beyond hope of life or green things ever returning. Despair is the void, that something beautiful and wonderful will never be again, there is only the harsh, unforgiving, nothingness.” Nikolai whispered to us, eyes darting to every shadow. “In the city, despair and grief is the pain and hate of your fellow man. The hopelessness of a society that does not care for you or anyone else and slowly cannibalises the very souls of its people. In the city, despair is man’s inhumanity to man.”
I blinked back tears that pricked to my eyes in sudden insight “this is Rick’s creation.”
Liam frowned, “I thought we all already knew that,” he panted, still trying to recover from the uphill march. “He’s trying to keep people away.”
“No.” A tear escaped my eye. I dashed it away angrily, this was not time for tears, there were greater battles to fight. “The creatures from computer games and anime were his guardians against intrusion. He wouldn‘t do this, not use some bleak wilderness to make people give up out of despair.” I laughed, I could hear my own tears in the sound. “You saw the Guardians, he’s hardly subtle. If wanted to create a landscape to stop us there’d be walls and laser guns and probably dinosaurs stomping around. This is just a reflection of his mind. Something he created - what? Unconsciously? Or maybe he created a place to stay and this was how it changed.”
Liam still frowned, but Nikolai nodded, just slightly. For a second I thought I saw a shard of sympathy in those hardened sapphire eyes. Just for the briefest fraction of a second.
Ghost sighed deeply, in a day of firsts, I saw actual sadness cross the spirit’s face, again the alien emotion remained only the tiniest instant before fading.
Yes, I felt him build it, then twist it without knowing. I hoped you wouldn’t catch on…
I started walking faster, doing my best to ignore my body’s protests, ignoring the sounds of pain on the wind. I saw shadows creep closer out of the corner of my eye, dark things and menaces reaching out from the narrow, dark alleys. I didn’t slow down, I just lashed out, almost randomly,. Sorcery, Necromancy, Infernalism, I’m not sure what I used, I just throw power around me and kept walking under a rain of dust from the bricks I shattered. This was a reflection of Rick’s heart - which meant all this despair and anguish was just what was in his head written large on the world. I choked a laugh, it was obvious, even when Nikolai tried to gloss it over. The despair of the wilderness wasn’t a great beautiful thing that was now barren and dead. That was despair over a garden! It was such a city boy’s idea! Despair in the wilderness was knowing the great vast power of the wilds and knowing that it didn’t care whether you lived or died, while your froze in the hollows and were stalked by predators - that was the despair the wild’s brought. I started to run, I never wanted this to happen again - never wanted to gain an insight not my lover through my insight into pain and despair. The two should never go together, the two should always be alien to each other!
68?! Sixty-eight!? You are kidding me, right? I haven't done 68 ficvs for ALL my universes together.
Right?
The gate looked like black iron. Not cast iron that had been moulded into a wonderfully ornate piece of onyx art - but like a common metal frame had been caught in a devastating fire that twisted it into this blackened wreck. The ground around it was scorched and torn, the sky seemed to be dimmer here. The wind blew, cold and wet with some stale, dead scent on the air. Not the smell of death, the smell of death would be comforting. I knew death, I understood death. This was the smell of old, dusty dead rooms. Rooms that have been shut up for years - large empty, sealed houses where on eccentric inhabitant rambles among the ruins, weeping and mourning years past. It reminded me of Great Expectations, the old woman who lost her husband and wore her wedding dress for the rest of her life, rambling around a large, dusty empty house. It was the smell of despair and grief so deep that it no longer allowed for sanity.
Nikolai parted the gate, pulling one of the doors roughly away. It looked simple, but I could feel the power of magic that had to be poured into it. These doors had to be rammed open with pure clerical power. I don’t think I could have done it, not easily, not quickly. There were things here even death and decay couldn’t kill. End, maybe, but not in any way I understood.
I think even ghost took a deep breath before we passed through the gate. I don’t think any of us expected this to be pleasant.
We came out in a desolate wilderness. There was no gate any more, we stepped out from the bole of a huge tree, tortured with chasms and fissures in its peeling bark. The tree was dead - or looked it, it was hard to sense death in the realm of the spirit, it was as if true death didn’t really apply here - or maybe it applied in ways even I didn’t understand. Nothing was simple here. The tree was blackened, again as if some mad wildfire had raged through, but it was also twisted with peeling bark and half rotten limbs, as if the tree had been sickened and diseased before the fire had raged and destroyed the last vestiges of life. No leaves clung to its naked branches. There were no buds, no greenery, no sign that life might ever return.
Liam cut off a branch with his pocket knife, “no new life. It’s dead.” Nikolai nodded.
The large plain had several such trees, all like this, all twisted painfully, rotted and burned. Without checking I knew they were all dead. The plane itself was as dead. No grass, weed or flower grew from the dead, sandy soil. Nikolai ran the soil through his fingers, feeling the grit, the sand, the dry almost dusty quality of it. There was no life in it and no potential for life to come.
A steady, driving rain fell from a black sky. More sleet than rain, icily cold that seemed to stab right through my clothes. A thousand icy knives stabbed at our flesh - was there any weather more miserable than sleet? I couldn’t tell whether it was day or night, the roiling, moody black clouds were so thick that it wouldn’t have mattered whether there was a sun behind them or not. A constant prevailing wind blew, still carrying the scent of empty grief and a scorched heart. It wasn’t strong, though it was strong enough to blew the sleet in our faces and make it all the more miserable, but it was incessant. It never weakened, just a constant, sad, prevailing cold wind on a shelter-less plain. It was the only sound - the falling sleet and the driving wind. No birds sang, no insects buzzed, no rivers laughed or danced. Just the falling sleet, and the writhing of the dead trees in the unforgiving wind.
“Was there ever a more desolate, heartless place?” Nikolai shuddered, pulling his wet coat closer around him. “I think your lover is here, nephew… is there any force in the world more cruel than love?”
I blinked at him. I wanted to ask him what he meant by the cryptic comment, but was afraid of the answer. No more hard truths, no more painful thoughts, I just wanted Rick.
He will be there Ghsot seemed as subdued as the rest of us. He pointed to a mound on the horizon - it was nearly impossible to make out through the weather. I looked a question at the spirit.
I can feel him there. And that’s a city - I can sense it. I don’t care how much he’s moping, he’s hard pressed to tell the difference between a tree and a wolf, no way he’d be cowering in the wilderness like some mad hermit.
It made sense, and there was no other direction besides. The distance seemed vast, I think it would have taken us days, or weeks, if Nikolai didn’t have his shamanic arts to reduce the distance here. It was still brutally hard. As hour after hour passed, the wind never stopped or lessened, constantly driving into you. The sleet fell in a steady torrent, we couldn’t have been colder and wetter if we had swam the North Sea. The clouds never lessened, never parted to allow the slightest sliver of light - sun or moon.
While the weather remained constant, the landscape changed. No less bleak, no less depressing, no less dead - but the ground began to slope up hill towards the city, making the walk a tiring hike in the loose soil. Before long my leg muscles began to burn and my feet ache, I reached out with my magic for what comfort I could, a sliver of infernal strength. It came easier here - as if the daemons were closer. Or maybe they saw something that amused them. I was too tired to care, mentally, physically and emotionally, this land seemed to drain you. I drank of infernal energy and resolve to keep myself going strong. Nikolai may have been able to draw similar power from the spirit realm, or maybe the older man was just as tough as old roots, worn and hard. Maybe he’d trekked the natural wilderness enough for it not to bother him any more. Either way, he didn’t suffer as I did. Liam was nearly dead on his feet. While all Camaalis were supposed to spend a lot of time in the countryside, not everyone indulged in hiking (unlike those who have clearly been driven insane by inbreeding who would actually do this for fun). Liam had no magic to energise him and he was suffering.
The closer we came to the city, the worse it became. The weather grew still colder, leaving Liam shivering uncontrollably until Nikolai reached out with some of the spirits he had called to him to protect the Seer from the dreadful cold (I didn’t offer to lend my daemonic power, I suspect it would not be welcomed). It was a measure of how exhausted the Seer was that he accepted. The ground was now torn about by briars and thorn bushes, some unnaturally large with thorns longer than my hand. Some just clung to the floor like a carpet, forcing you to delicately pick your path through the savage branches. The soil itself had brushed aside in places, leaving jagged, razor edged rocks that could cut through boot leather (even my Guccis. Rick owed me a new pair of shoes). Again I was thankful for Nikolai’s presence, if it weren’t for his spirits and his spirit charged medicines (though Rick would laugh himself silly at the collection of salves and unguents that made up Nikolai’s spiritual first aid kit, not one brand name drug in sight) I’m not sure we would have survived to get here, so often did the thorns tear into us. I think he had paid his debt to us after we spared his life. Rick was right - there are benefits to mercy.
We arrived at the gates of the city, tired, worn and wounded. If anything, though, our resolve was stronger. You don’t trek through this much, endure all this, without going through with your goal. The gates rose above us, fire blackened wood and twisted iron, they looked strong enough to withstand armies. Nikolai sighed heavily and reached for his spirits once more. I shook my head, we might need his versatile strength in the future, there was no need for him to waste his strength and chiminage now. I focused on the doors. They were alien and strange, like everything here, but I did not let my mind dwell on it. They were less physical substance and more the essence of depressed stubbornness, of angry walls and the hermits will and likely a thousand other things I wasn’t even going to try to dispel. I didn’t care, I didn’t need to know, not really. All things end. Eventually, somehow, even if the ways the end are beyond my comprehension, nothing ever lasts forever. I took that, the inherent capacity that all things have to end, to be finished, to be destroyed, and threw it at the gates - I threw my own inherent decay, humanity’s own inevitable draw towards their own destruction, life’s own natural ending at the gates. I threw Sorcery in its purest, most undifferentiated form - the simple essence of destruction - of ending - at the gates.
Nikolai sensed what I was doing as the power pushed against the barrier, he drew back, face carefully blank in the face of abomination. Liam just shied away from the powerful dark magic he didn’t understand, but could feel like oil on his skin.
The gates were tough. The gates were powerful. The gates could stand forces beyond human imagining…. But even they would collapse one day. Even they would end. Slowly, so terribly slowly, they began to crumble. My wards burned m, searing badly. I gritted my teeth and called my sorcery, focusing everything on the doors even as my hands burned and my throat felt like red hot knives were slicing their way to my spine.
There was a hand on my shoulder. I cut my magic off, almost instinctively. I looked up, it was only then that I realised I was on my knees, shivering helplessly. I looked up and had to brush my hair out of my eyes, it was thick and dirty, soaked with sweat. Liam looked down on me, worry dancing in those normally sensuously challenging eyes. I nodded once and tried to get to my feet. It took three attempts and Liam’s help before I could. My wrists were agony, my throat unbearable. A quick inspection showed where the flesh had actually cooked around the wards, cooked and burned. I don’t know how long I had knelt in front of the doors, but by the aching in my knees, it felt like hours. Enough time for Nikolai to prepare a collection of salves and cures anyway - how very efficient of him.
“That took more power than I expected.” My throat made talking agony, even with Nikolai’s salve. My voice creaked terribly.
“It got the job done, that is what’s important.” Nikolai’s voice was pure neutrality - better than condemnation at least. And he was treating a Sorcerer and Infernalist, which is more than many Camaalis would - they acted as if our evil was catching. He was actually earning a lot of points in my eyes.
I looked at the door. Or the place where the doors were. Nothing. No scrap of metal, no twisted supports. No charred remnants - not even dust on the wind. The stones in the wall to either side were also missing. I smiled, just slightly because it pulled muscles in my neck painfully. Perhaps I had overdone it a little - or maybe not. I just don’t know how spirits come apart. I really must study this some more.
Donald’s magic made it possible for me to stand without help - which was an achievement in itself. I felt horrendous. My wards still burned - I cannot remember the last time they hurt this much and my whole body felt sick and tired. I gritted my teeth and forced myself into the city - it was for Rick. I would do anything for him… though I may give him hell when I finally find him.
The city was an urban reflection of the wilderness outside - bleak and desolate, hard and sad and cruel. The dark sky seemed even darker under the looming shadows of broken sky scrapers. The floor of the broken street was ravaged by pot holes - some so big and so deep that a man could fall through them into the dank sewers below. Across the broken tarmac was scattered shards of broken glass -some easily large enough and sharp enough to cause severe damage. The windows of the looming buildings around them gaped empty and blind., some of them darkened by past infernos. At their foot, among the twisted and broken street lights, lay twisted wrecks of burnt out and crashed cars, some of them still smouldering. Down a side street I could see a broken water main, foul, polluted water fountaining high into the air. Steam drifted across the roads from rotten manholes and ruptures in the road, clouding the already freezing dark streets in a thick, cloying, oily mist.
We crept silently along the main street, towards the centre where one single tall tower rose - still whole, though battle scarred and every pane of glass was broken. Darkness clung to it, an electricity wire was ripped down in front of it where it sparked angrily - arcs of electricity that you would never see in the real world. Despite the actinic light, the darkness that clung to the tower was never broken.
The wind still whistled past the broken towers, still carrying its musty smell of madness stemming from grief - but unlike the wilderness, there was sound to cut through the falling drizzle, noises carried on the wind. We circled, warily, trying to find the source of the noise- there was weeping, a broken, empty sound of someone who had wept for days yet still found grief inside demanding release. There was a cry, a faint, broken cry of the helpless, someone asking for help who knows it will never arrive, there was a wailing, a loud choral wailing of dozens of voices raised in terrible grief. Laughter danced just at the edge of hearing, hard edged and wild, the sound of someone who has spent too long alone, who as endured too much and now laughs at the phantasms in their mind.
“In the wilds, despair is the absence of life, despair and heart rending grief is to see the land twisted, abandoned and dead beyond hope of saving, beyond hope of life or green things ever returning. Despair is the void, that something beautiful and wonderful will never be again, there is only the harsh, unforgiving, nothingness.” Nikolai whispered to us, eyes darting to every shadow. “In the city, despair and grief is the pain and hate of your fellow man. The hopelessness of a society that does not care for you or anyone else and slowly cannibalises the very souls of its people. In the city, despair is man’s inhumanity to man.”
I blinked back tears that pricked to my eyes in sudden insight “this is Rick’s creation.”
Liam frowned, “I thought we all already knew that,” he panted, still trying to recover from the uphill march. “He’s trying to keep people away.”
“No.” A tear escaped my eye. I dashed it away angrily, this was not time for tears, there were greater battles to fight. “The creatures from computer games and anime were his guardians against intrusion. He wouldn‘t do this, not use some bleak wilderness to make people give up out of despair.” I laughed, I could hear my own tears in the sound. “You saw the Guardians, he’s hardly subtle. If wanted to create a landscape to stop us there’d be walls and laser guns and probably dinosaurs stomping around. This is just a reflection of his mind. Something he created - what? Unconsciously? Or maybe he created a place to stay and this was how it changed.”
Liam still frowned, but Nikolai nodded, just slightly. For a second I thought I saw a shard of sympathy in those hardened sapphire eyes. Just for the briefest fraction of a second.
Ghost sighed deeply, in a day of firsts, I saw actual sadness cross the spirit’s face, again the alien emotion remained only the tiniest instant before fading.
Yes, I felt him build it, then twist it without knowing. I hoped you wouldn’t catch on…
I started walking faster, doing my best to ignore my body’s protests, ignoring the sounds of pain on the wind. I saw shadows creep closer out of the corner of my eye, dark things and menaces reaching out from the narrow, dark alleys. I didn’t slow down, I just lashed out, almost randomly,. Sorcery, Necromancy, Infernalism, I’m not sure what I used, I just throw power around me and kept walking under a rain of dust from the bricks I shattered. This was a reflection of Rick’s heart - which meant all this despair and anguish was just what was in his head written large on the world. I choked a laugh, it was obvious, even when Nikolai tried to gloss it over. The despair of the wilderness wasn’t a great beautiful thing that was now barren and dead. That was despair over a garden! It was such a city boy’s idea! Despair in the wilderness was knowing the great vast power of the wilds and knowing that it didn’t care whether you lived or died, while your froze in the hollows and were stalked by predators - that was the despair the wild’s brought. I started to run, I never wanted this to happen again - never wanted to gain an insight not my lover through my insight into pain and despair. The two should never go together, the two should always be alien to each other!
no subject
not desolate post-apocalyptic city-thing. ouch. what a nasty fall. *folds arms* this is not acceptable. darren will fix it.
no subject