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Doors of Destiny
Posted: 28 May 2006 01:50 PM |
There was a door.
Outside it, the road south stretched on. It had been some time since he’d returned to Midor—really returned, rather than merely stopping by to drop off casualties before heading out again. Officially, he was a Midoran; in truth, he’d never felt like one. It was just a place and they were just a people that had happened to adopt him.
All life was intransient. There were only faces that came and went. People he worked with for a short while, and then were gone. A neverending stream of patients and victims. People who’d taught him, people he’d taught. It was not by choice that his life was this way, but somehow, despite his best efforts, he always ended up abandoned. As much as he tried to tell himself that it was a sign that he had to dedicate himself to his faith and his faith only, his human nature rebelled. He was not so disconnected from humanity that he could live on an abstract concept alone.
Seeing Lillian again after all these years had been an unexpected shock. Finding out that Claude was dead had been a bigger shock. They were his two sole links to the world. It was as if reality had been lurking in some distant corner all these years and had suddenly jumped out and slapped him in the face.
Perhaps it was just as well.
It was in that state, acutely aware of reality and having finally emerged from the fog he’d been wandering around in for seven years, that he entered Midor in answer to the White Bishop’s summons.
He’d noticed, but hadn’t really paid attention, to the fact that all the correspondence he’d been receiving for months now was official news. Glowing reports about the city being ushered into a bright new age; the appearance of the blessed Righteous Swords, who brought an unprecedented and brilliant level of order and justice to a city already renowned for it; the glorious manifestation of Midoran himself for the first time in history.
And yet—no correspondence from his peers. No confirmation from priests and paladins and others he trusted. Only silence.
He’d noticed, but hadn’t really paid attention.
Too late, he wondered what it meant. Far too late. He was inside now and could not leave; that door was shut to him, unless he wanted to automatically be declared a traitor and never know why. What had happened? What had changed?
There was a door.
The difference in temperature as he stepped through it was a shock to the system, the interior frigid enough to make his breath fog up. The chapel was small and severe and lit by a cold blue-white light from an indeterminate source. It was not the Academy’s main chapel, nor the public one off to the side of the main courtyard. No, this was a secluded place tucked away deep in the labyrinthine back passages, and rarely visited.
His footsteps sounded loud in the lonely emptiness as he strode hurriedly past the neatly ordered rows of pews and past the girl who was always there, every night without fail until precisely half an hour before Lights Out. He shuddered a little as he passed her. Her presence sickened him. She was like the pale ghost of someone who had never lived, restlessly haunting this cold, dead place in search for something that wasn’t there.
Not that he was much better. He hated this place. He only ever came down here to do detention with Mother Vicias, and that seemed to happen every second day.
He didn’t know what he was doing at the Academy. He didn’t belong here, didn’t want to be here, wasn’t even a Midoran and found their religion frustrating. It had occurred to him to leave; but he didn’t know where he’d go if he did. It was as neat a trap as he’d ever seen, and from the looks of it, he was not the only one who’d fallen into it. Nearly half the Academy’s students were people like him—too young to legitimately fend for themselves, too hopeless to turn down hope when it was offered. The entire isle was a gigantic rehabilitation centre, prisons within prisons, and even the jailers were prisoners, although they didn’t know it.
There was a door.
He paused at the threshold and scanned the quadrangle. It was Crescindelle and the trees were aflame with dying colours, all red and orange and yellow beneath the waning light of the sinking sun. No one ever really came here, but that was the point, wasn’t it? In a way, that made the place uniquely sacred to their little close-knit trinity. Here, even Claude and Lillian observed an unspoken truce, for all that they were mortal enemies.
He slipped inside and shut the door behind him. The two of them were still there, where he’d left them: Lillian curled up beneath the tree in the far corner, and Claude hovering over her like a brooding mother hen. He crunched his way across dead leaves that crackled and snapped like brittle bones beneath his feet.
“Has there been any change?” he asked, dropping to one knee beside Claude.
“Well, at least she’s stopped convulsing,” the younger man said, his usual merry expression set into grim lines. He ran an agitated hand through his scarlet hair. “Congratulations. You’ve achieved the impossible. You’ve broken the unbreakable.”
He fought down the urge to retort that this entire ill-advised dare had been Claude’s idea. There was enough guilt to go around, and flinging accusations back and forth wasn’t going to solve anything.
“Mother Beaucaire’s on the way, and I’ve also informed the Duty Officer,” he replied instead.
The lines on Claude’s face eased, though he didn’t entirely relax. “Right.” And then, because there was nothing better to say, he repeated, “Right.”
He turned his attention to Lillian’s crumpled form, feeling a fresh pang of guilt stab at him. Her eyes were still glassy and wide with horror, and she was still twitching spasmodically. A simple scare curse. Hard to believe that something so trivial could have felled her. He had assumed it would bounce right off her. He had assumed she was invincible.
But that’s what happened when you jumped to hasty conclusions and overlooked basic facts. She was only human. She was only eleven.
Some things become so familiar that you stop seeing them. Your mind fills in the gaps. It adds details that aren’t there and you no longer see what’s actually there.
There was a door.
It was truly colossal, hewed from some alien black rock and carved with runes and serpents and skulls, clearly designed to intimidate all who looked upon it. Frankly, he wasn’t in the mood for mind games. He barely glanced at it as he followed the Gatekeeper into the tenebrous ante-room. His lungs were burning, his ribs were still smarting with the memory of the stab wound he’d received from the acid-tipped blade of a Shadow Giant even though the wound itself was long gone, he had a terrible headache and he was starting to come down with a cold from days of slogging through the rainy, muddy banks of The Great River.
His reluctant guide led him down a spiralling set of stairs into a scene that looked like it had come straight out of the legendary realm of Nethar’u.
“The Pitsss of Dessspair,” the hooded Gatekeeper hissed.
Despite himself, he stared about him with a mixture of dread and awe. It was a scene of pure pandemonium, the temperature scalding in contrast with the chill of the tower upstairs, the light too bright, too red, too garish, the air filled with a cacophony of shrieks and screams and sheer noise.
It took some moments before his brain could put together the jumbled images before him, resolving it into a vast subterranean lava lake. Slabs of carved obsidian formed a network of walkways above the lake, and though it looked at first as if they were suspended over the lava by thin strings extending to the rock ceiling far above, upon closer inspection the strings revealed themselves to be columns of solid rock about two metres in diameter. Leaping from the lava or skittering across the walkways or flitting through the air were deformed, demented shapes of truly grotesque monsters—some of them recognisable as demons that were favoured as familiars or summons by wicked mages, some of them nightmarish beasts that were supposed to exist in legend only, others completely unfamiliar.
All in all, it resembled a madman’s playground.
The Gatekeeper led him across the walkways, stopping at a particularly large slab that would have resembled a wizard’s lab if it had been enclosed by four walls. The man kneeling on the floor and diligently absorbed in the task of drawing a summoning circle was unusually muscular for a mage, with a shock of red hair that was the same colour as the light given off by the lava and vivid green eyes the colour of witch fire. He wore leather armour rather than robes, in the black and purple style of Naillamne, and he had grown a goatee at some point after he’d left the Paladin Order. It made his features—already mocking and merry to begin with—look positively satirical.
“I bring you your visssitor, Masster Esssmond,” the Gatekeeper announced.
Claude looked up, then sprang to his feet with his usual energetic agility, flashing the dazzling smile that had so beguiled even the sternest lecturers at the Midoran Academy.
“Jerec! So nice of you to visit.”
He put down the glowing wand he’d been drawing with and clapped the elder man on the shoulder. If he had expected the blow to stagger him, he was disappointed. After all these years in the field, Jerec was no longer a pushover.
“Can I get you anything? Tea? Coffee? Zogruuth here makes a—” Claude broke off at the positively frosty glare Jerec shot at him, then turned to the Gatekeeper. “On second thought, run along, Zogruuth. We have grown-up talk to do here.”
The hooded guide slunk off, glowering.
“So. I take it this isn’t a social call.” His tone was still light, but there was a slightly hysterical edge of nervousness to it now. “You have that lecturing look. You know, you should never have stopped teaching at the Academy.”
Despite the ambient clamour, it seemed as if a terrible silence had descended. He let Claude squirm for a handful of heartbeats under his cold scrutiny before he spoke.
“I lost two of my team in the underground cavern where the blue dragons dwell,” he bit out frostily. “Another one nearly drowned in The Great River and three nearly fell to the Shadow Giants. In the end, I had to call in a major favour with the Krakens to get in through the south coast instead of via the river. I was led to believe—” The quiet tone of accusation and hurt becoming a snarl now, “—that you had been taken to Naillamne against your will, and now I find you are quite happily one of the tower’s warlocks. So help me, Claude, I am not walking out of here empty-handed, and if that means hauling you back to your parents in Midor like the misbehaving child you are, then so be it.”
“Hah! As if they’d care,” Claude scoffed. But there was a moment’s hesitation before he said it.
“They’ve been worried sick,” Jerec said quietly, relentlessly.
“Only because it’s politically advantageous.” Claude’s lip curled. “It’s just an act to gain them sympathy. It’s about what you’d expect from a pair of Menarokians.”
“Claude, you can’t prove that.”
“I can. Or I will soon,” he amended. “I am this close to finding a solution to end all injustice and deceit. I can take apart a soul and put it back together again with all the darkness removed from it. Look. Do you see this?”
He swept a box up off a nearby desk and pulled it open. A half-finished skull carved from the bone of some unknown leviathan lay inside, with two glimmering emeralds set within its eye sockets. Jerec involuntarily took half a step back, the first twinges of fear rising up to overcome his cold fury. No benign magic had ever resulted from anything that had to use skulls or bones as a component.
More frightening, though, was the desperate madness that radiated from the man who’d once been his best friend.
“A soul is just another form of magic. Another form of energy that can be quantified, broken down, rebuilt.” He was smiling like a pleased child who had figured out a particularly difficult riddle. “This is how it is possible to temporarily affect it with magic. Instant fear, instant happiness, instant wisdom, even instant death.
“Imagine there was a way to make those changes permanent. Imagine there was no longer a need for jails. You could cut the darkness out of someone’s soul and rid them of their criminal tendencies—forever.”
He stepped back and placed the box back on the desk, laying a hand atop it protectively.
“Imagine you could build a pure form of sentient life from scratch with no darkness inside. The opposite of Life and the opposite of Undeath—with this healing ability built into it.”
Jerec stared at him with a look somewhere between disgust and incredulity.
“Claude, life isn’t an equation to be solved. Life was meant to be lived,” he argued earnestly. “People have to succeed or fail on their own merits. For better or worse, they have to decide for themselves what path they’ll take. Taking that decision away from them renders life meaningless.”
There was a door.
He took a long step to the side to obstruct it. Lillian skidded to a confused halt, spun around, and slammed full-tilt into Claude.
“Furthermore,” Jerec continued blithely, “it’s the sort of bruising you could only sustain if you’d been in an Asashi tournament, a boxing match, or some sort of brawl. Clearly not from clumsily mis-stepping and falling down a short flight of stairs, which would leave altogether different injuries.”
She backed away from Claude, eyes narrowed as she looked between the two of them. But the glare was mere reflex and had no real force behind it; she’d been backed into a verbal corner and she knew it.
“I don’t have to take this from you,” she snarled. She reminded Jerec of a harpooned shark thrashing bloodily and vainly in a net. “I’ve got other things to be doing—”
“You have nothing else to be doing,” Claude cut in. “You solved the Sovereign Gambit scenario yesterday, you’ve got no other homework due or tests to study for, and you have no life. You’ve got nowhere else you need to be right now.” He flashed a grin. “Face it, Villanova, your efficiency’s working against you.”
Her teeth visibly ground together. “What do you want?” she asked coldly.
“How about the truth?” Jerec asked quietly.
She whirled to face him, and he winced anew at her split lip and the bruise marring her cheek. Like blazes she’d tripped down the stairs; stairs didn’t punch you in the face and snap your ribs.
“You want the truth?” she snapped. “Fine. It was a necessary disciplinary measure. I’ve been training with my grandfather during the holidays. He sets his standards higher than the soft ones they have here.”
He saw Claude roll his eyes. The finest training facilities Midor had to offer and she considered the standards too low.
“A necessary disciplinary measure,” Jerec repeated disbelievingly. Discipline was one thing; outright brutality was another. “How long has this been going on for?”
She drew herself up to her full height, glaring at him defiantly. “You don’t need to—”
“How long?” he demanded.
She started and nearly back-pedalled into Claude again, defensive hostility giving way to sudden shock. Jerec never lost his temper.
“Ever since I got in,” she murmured faintly.
Claude swore under his breath. Jerec stared at her with sick horror and she dropped her gaze, her ears going as pink as the permanent flush on her cheeks. Ever since she got in to the Academy. Ever since she’d been five.
Eight years.
“And it never occurred to you,” Jerec said slowly, “to say something to your friends?”
She looked up again, seething. “Of course not. It isn’t any of your business.”
“Oh, and how silly of us to think it was,” Claude said scathingly. “It’s not like it’s our job to right injustice. It’s not like it’s our responsibility and duty to help others. We only happen to be the only friends you have in the world, and Midoran forbid that we might actually care enough to offer moral support.”
“There isn’t anything to set right, I don’t need help and I didn’t ask you to care,” she snapped. “This is exactly why I didn’t say anything. I knew you’d make something out of nothing.”
“Nothing? Is that what you think this is?” Claude looked aghast. “Lillian, unnecessary and excessive brutality and humiliation isn’t discipline; it’s bastardisation.”
She opened her mouth to retort, but no sound came out. You had to hand it to Claude: when he dropped the air-headed clown act and went into serious Paladin mode, he didn’t do things by halves and he certainly didn’t pull his punches.
Uneasily, Jerec wondered if it would occur to her to ask how much they knew and how they knew. If she found out what Claude was, this conversation was going to get a whole lot more awkward.
He needn’t have worried. Claude was, if nothing else, a master manipulator.
“You know what? I’ve had enough.” Claude flung his arms up theatrically in exasperation. “I’m sick of being treated like scum for trying to help you and I’m sick of being ripped to shreds for caring. You have no idea how hard it is to be your friend, Villanova. I give up. It’s not worth the effort.”
He stepped past her to leave—
It was the equivalent of a knee-jerk reaction, or a baby’s reflex to curl its hand around a proffered finger. She snagged his elbow as he passed, emotions see-sawing between two poles until one end finally settled and dropped.
Once, Jerec had seen a lion in a circus, born and bred in captivity. To maintain its ferocity and assure its cooperation, it was fed just enough to keep it healthy but not enough to make it satisfied, and regularly whipped. To the lion, there was no difference between one human being and another. It hated them all equally.
But a human being is no mere animal. A human being has the capacity to rise above instinct.
She bowed her head contritely.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
There was a door.
Its dim outline swam hazily before his eyes. “You’ve got half an hour,” said the tattooed woman who stood in the doorway, and then she pulled it shut as she departed.
He was acutely aware of wrenching pain all over his body. It was as if he was a puppet, and his nerves were the strings which fifty different puppeteers were yanking in a hundred directions at once, and none too gently.
A hand upon his cheek turned his head to look into a pair of familiar diamantine blue eyes.
“Jerec, I need you to focus. There isn’t much time,” Lillian murmured.
She spoke quickly about the poison. Some clinical part of his brain latched on to the facts automatically as she began to list the symptoms and cause, even though his mind was wandering. She mentioned Morghuulvoth and he shuddered. They were going to move him to Haven, under the care of Kruvious Seyon. She had to make a decision—
Nightshade.
“We can wait until you get to Haven and see what happens. Or we could end it now.”
He gave a fractional shake of his head at that. The room splintered into a thousand fragments and refused to coalesce into one image again. He did, however, manage to narrow it down to triplicate.
“Haven it is.” She squeezed her eyes shut. It went without saying that if he went to Haven, he would die.
He wondered vaguely whether she knew that he forgave her for what had to happen next.
There was a door and he departed as quietly as he arrived.
~*~
When I got home, I could not sleep for hours and went out on the roof and looked at the stars. I was bursting with the agony of being close to a great light that would devour me if only I were to open the strange door I had found without looking for it. Surely the rays of stars can kill you, fulfil and yet starve you to a panic hunger.
- Paul Jenkins
Anatomy of a Cloud |
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The End of the Beginning
Posted: 30 May 2006 01:50 AM |
It was a cold day in Haven.
Of course, every day here was cold. A lonely wind wailed and fluttered restlessly about the desolate grey landscape. It tugged at the gold-bordered black robes of the weary middle-aged man who stood with his hands gripping a healer’s stave and his head bent in prayer. It tousled the strawberry blonde locks of the dour and statuesque young woman who stood behind him and to his right in a vaguely militant stance.
Moment by moment, the temperature rose, and a grim and blazing light swirled high overhead like a vortex, like a maw of fiery colour opening wide against the drab and featureless grey face of the dead sky. Kruvious Seyon opened his eyes slowly, turning his head to look behind him.
This was it, then. The point of no return. Lillian took a deep and shuddering breath and caught his eye. Her lips moved senselessly but no words formed.
For what she had done and what she still had left to do, may whatever God existed out there have mercy on her soul. She had condemned a good man to death, the one person left in the world whom she trusted unconditionally. She could have saved him, but had refused. She had dragged others into this conspiracy and now their lies were on her conscience. There had been no attempts to resurrect Jerec; she had forbade it. She was as guilty of murdering him as whoever had poisoned him.
And she was a fraud and a traitor and a deceiver, and so help her, her work was not yet done. It had only begun.
She shut her eyes and turned away. “I can’t watch,” she said quietly. “I’ll wait back at the main encampment.”
Three minutes later, a pillar of flame descended from the sky, and all the sentries on duty paused to gape at the airborne flame strike. Kruvious emerged from the western pass some moments later and wordlessly handed her an urn full of ashes.
She made it all the way to one of the empty auxiliary command tents without losing her dignity. But when she put the urn down on the desk and tried to write up the funeral preparations, she had to concede defeat and leave the task for the morrow. She couldn’t see past the tears in her eyes and her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. |
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The Beginning of the End
Posted: 31 May 2006 01:40 AM |
A place.
A place that was nowhere and everywhere.
In the space between heartbeats, between the blinks of an eye, between sleeping and waking—
A place. A threshold.
A voice. The memory of a voice. A warning, a premonition—
::{There are things you must see. Things you must know. Disaster looms and you must prepare. You have shown yourself fit for the burden you are about to take on.}::
A wispy hand of pure light, extended.
::{Let us go.}::
And now a door shuts and another one opens.
And all is at it was meant to be.
~*~
If the red slayer think he slays
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
The Upanishads
~ Finis ~ |
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Re: The Beginning of the End
Posted: 28 Mar 2014 02:55 PM |
This is possibly my favourite thread from Vives, if I could ever choose just 1. Mainly because of the collaboration it involved. Ficcy was some ringmaster for this one. :)
So mainly a selfish bump so I can always find it easily,
Sirac |
'The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.' - Richard Bach, Illusions. |
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