REPENT

The end is nigh. Follow the prince. Though he is doomed, his is the only way to salvation!

[asproudasaprince]

Blog Closing

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.  I come to bury Cecil, not to praise him.

Sort of.

Cecil’s transition into a Revenant was a huge story point for the character, such that he is far enough from his original concept that I consider him almost a new character, and a new character deserves a new blog.  A better, more organized blog, for all your Spooky Cecil needs.

asproudasaprince has closed, and is now a redirect blog for the new Cecil Saville, in case you’re one of those weirdos who happens to like the character.

[return-to-avalon-deactivated201]

“Guinevere and Lancelot” by Michael Manomivibul on INPRNT

[asproudasaprince]

Cecil pushed open the door to his room at Roanwilde with a sigh.  He had explained to six servants and his mother how a migraine had him in his grasp, and it needled at him that he would be so dishonorable as to lie to his own mother.  Preservation soothed him, wearing down the jagged edges of his heart and pride, which he had broken almost twelve years ago, until the pieces could be fit together again.

His only solace was that the migraine was a half-truth.

In addition to his newfound ability to read people by nebulous auras of pastel colors, Cecil had started to have visions, whenever someone touched his left arm.  It had been severed in the Mists when the demon confronted him, and his skin was covered in splotchy white marks that looked as if they had been burned.  Part of it remained there, by his reckoning.  When he touched another, he tasted their fate.  He could see the possibilities and truths of their choices spread out before him in an dazzling procession of limitless visions that made his body seize as his mind reeled and strained to endure the glimpse of infinity.

It was a merciless onslaught of sensations, and he knew it would be another thing he would have to master, though he had little idea how.  He was one of the first to have such a connection to the Mists in hundreds of years.  The powers had come with the price of a spirit within him, and no instructions.  He decided to meditate upon that later, as Eleanor taught him, to empty his mind so that he could better blur the lines between where his will ended and Preservation’s began.

His room was a lonely and spartan affair.  Armor from tournaments that he had won were set upon stands, from his first hauberk of chain mail that he had once loaned his cousin, Lilah, to the suit of black armor he had worn as Cedric Blackwood to fight for the honor of a woman he had later forced into hiding.  An empty wall mounting hung above his bed, where Fantomas once rested while he slept.  It had been his pride to pass the ancestral blade to Delphine.

He had come not for these mementos of past victories, but for that which he would wear to secure future ones.  He passed his favored axe and mace, and a shield that had once been Desider Saville’s, to grasp his bookshelf by the edge and ease it back.  It swung wide with a ponderous lack of grace, swiveling about to reveal what lay hidden mounted to its false back: his lacquered black armor that bore the symbols of the Order of Whisper, and the red arming jack that the plates were meant to be mounted upon.

Yet that was still not what he sought.  The world seemed distant to him as he closed his fingers around a long red cloth that had once bound him to a woman he danced with feverishly at the Nightcrest Festival that welcomed the Season of the Phoenix this last year.  He ran his fingers over the fine silk cloth, and frowned as its colors reminded him of her curls.

It was a painful reminder.  He had failed her, as he had failed Eleanor and Ariav; as he had failed Fadia, his father, Janto, his father, Luxelen, Delphine, and all those who saw loved him for his ferocious courage and noble heart.  It was little more than a sash of silk, and it weighed little in his hand, but he had never carried something so heavy.  

He wrapped it about his eyes again and again until no light bled through; until all he could see was the color red, which reminded him of the gaping chasm between who he was, and who so many believed that he could be.

“I shall grasp sweet sunlight,” he whispered to the dark world around him, hoping that it would carry to the Hall of Heroes, where he knew Eleanor to be.  “If just for thee.”

[asproudasaprince]

A Better World: The Calling

Cecil had heard the word ambrosia before, but had never comprehended what that would taste like until he—they?—sat bolt upright and gasped for breath.  The air was cold, and crisp, and one part of Cecil’s mind wondered at how gripping the sensation of it filling his lungs well and truly felt after being so long without.  It was like a first kiss, or the first taste of sweet red wine.  It was a gift and a blessing, and he praised Dwayna inwardly for her infinite mercy.

It took Cecil several long moments, wherein he gulped down air, to realize that he was not in Hartwick Manor; that his heart hammered in his chest as if it had when he had fought in war; that there were eyes upon him and their stare was wild and frightful.

“Where am I?” He felt mounting panic as he posed his question to those around him, and it was only then that he realized he could not see beyond his own nose.  The fear bled into his voice. “Where am I?!” he demanded to his silent watchers.  He squinted at the darkness, and he felt the urge to thrash wildly at where he thought he heard someone breathing.  His nature reared its head as his rage and fear mounted.  It was an ugly creature with hard brown eyes and a clenched jaw; an unreasoning and uncompromising monster.  It always lurked beneath the surface of his skin, threatening to sink its teeth into those who were closest to him.

But Cecil knew now what Luxelen and Delphine saw when they spoke of him; he knew his nature, and for the first time in a decade, he did not see a monster when he peered inward.  “Where am I?” he requested a third time, this time in a softer voice.  

“Where the friendless can find friends,” a small voice called out to him, and Cecil stood bolt upright.  He had heard the voice before, and recently at that.  The asura he had met in the bowels of the Maiden’s Whisper trundled closer.  His gaze darted to her, and despite his diminished eyesight, he could see a faint ripple of blue-grey light where she stood.  It pulsed brighter with every beat of the agent’s heart.

“Welcome back to the world of the living, Keeper.”  He did not know how, but he knew the asura bowed to him.

“How long was I out?” Cecil could feel how gravelly and dry his voice was, and he brought a hand to his throat.  It did not ache as it once did, but still it burned from how dry it was.

“Two days.”  He did not hear her shift, and her demeanor did not change, but he felt her discomfort from afar.  “You died.”

“If I died, then why am I here?” He strained to feel the presence of Preservation in his mind, but he could feel nothing beyond a warm tingling sensation at the base of his neck when he thought of the spirit.  This is who we are, he decided.  This is who I am.  

“A very good question, my lord.”  As the asura spoke, a corona of pastel color flickered to life.  “I was hoping you could answer that for us.”  The lights rolled around her, licking the air like tongues of rainbow flames, and Cecil squeezed his eyes shut just to block out the distraction.  It did not help.  The flames were visible even in his mind’s eye, and he knew from the tone of the asura’s voice that it was something visible only to him.

“I put myself out to travel to the Mists,” he admitted, though the asura had been the one to tell him to use caution.  More bands of color flickered to life behind where the agent stood, and Cecil knew they were not alone in the room.  “And I encountered spirits.  One saved me from another, and then...ah…”

The asura waited for him to continue, but Cecil offered little in exchange for her patience.  He could not grasp the words he wished to use to explain himself.  “She is with me now,” was what he settled on, but it seemed a poor explanation.   “With us, I suppose.  She can hear  this conversation.”

The asura was  silent, and the colors around her diminished, and favored warm blues and pinks.  She is  perplexed, he realized.  Though  could not see her, he could discern her demeanor from her flickering aura,  as he would have done with her body language.  It was certainly a more difficult thing to read.  Cecil was a warrior, not an oracle, and he felt a trickle of electric fear run down his spine as he  realized he might be forced to be both.

“I see.”  The aura became as before, and did not betray whatever the agent felt.  “Your connection to the Mists seems to have made you capable of communing with spirits.  The order was aware of this being ancient magics from Cantha, and we've received scattered reports of similar abilities being used in Maguuma by...well, people of interest.”

Cecil shifted uneasily and uncomfortably.  “I see,” was all  could say.  He knew that made him and whatever new powers he had gained of interest to the order, and he was unsure of  that meant.  

There was a long and stiff silence where Cecil came to the realization that the agent and her cohorts were communicating, perhaps with hand gestures.  He could hear  rustling of their sleeves. He had been taught a little of such languages when he was being trained by Kyranias, years ago when he was Initiate Saville and not Keeper Saville.   “My eyes are closed,” he rasped, “not my ears.  What's the matter, agent?”

The agent’s aura flared, in surprise or anger, and she turned to face him again.  “Lightbringer,” she  corrected.  “And we were discussing an offer for you to consider.”

“Make it, then.”

The Lightbringer’s aura burned bright again, and Cecil knew it to be anger this time.  “You joined our order to make this world a  better place, and  fight the influence of the elder dragons.” Her patience was strained, but she managed to sound polite.  “In some ways, you have, as one of our more established agents in Divinity’s Reach.”

“But?”  Cecil tensed, and fear brought goose pimples to his bare flesh.  He realized too late that he was without his armor and sword.  If the Order planned to terminate him, there was little he could do about it.  He wondered briefly if he could kill one of them if they set upon him, but their auras did not flicker, and the Lightbringer’s body guards did not approach.

“But you are a warrior,” the asura said, and Cecil sucked in a quiet breath as the words reminded him of another asura, and all at once he recognized her voice from elsewhere.  His eyes eased open, if only just so, and he saw that the asura had removed the cloth that swaddled her face.  "And you must die in battle,” she sighed, “or you will never be welcomed into the Hall of Heroes."

“Thekka,” he breathed. His lips pursed, and he squeezed his eyes shut again.  Of course the Order of Whispers had their fingers in his affairs, down to and including his personal health.  Thekka had been the Priory magister who attended to his wounds when he had breathed deep the miasma.  The Order had known about his illness before he did, most likely.

“The very same,” the asura said, with no small amount of satisfaction.  She was smiling at Cecil, and he was aware of it.  “Forgive the duplicity.  The Order takes care of its own, which is why I am here.”

Cecil stretched, then rose to his feet.  The sheets that preserved his dignity began to slide from his body, and he felt gooseflesh ripple anew across his body as he stood in the cold cellar of what he assumed was the Maiden’s Whisper Inn just before catching the sheets.  “Go on,” he said, folding his arms to hug the sheet to his broad chest.

“Mordremoth has struck.  The Pact has been broken.”  Thekka took a moment to let that settle on Cecil, who had a thousand questions and a hundred fears.  He wet his lips as she spoke again: “The bulk of our field agents have been stranded with no hope of rescue, or died.  Most of our sylvari agents belong to the dragon now.”

“That’s…” Cecil paused.  He had no words to describe the mounting horror he felt swelling within him, and his mind went to Kyranias, the sylvari who trained him.  He balked at the thought of the invincible guardian being broken upon the will of the elder dragon, but fear niggled at him.  If the sylvari had been claimed by Mordremoth, he did not see what made Kyranias so special as to resist the call to arms.

He did not finish, but Thekka spoke for him.  “Terrible.  Horrific.  The worst thing that could have happened.   But therein lies your opportunity.”  He could hear how she ran her fingers through her short hair, and Cecil’s brow furrowed in thought.  

“We need new field agents, Keeper.”  She approached him with timid steps, and offered her hand to him.  “And if you can prove that you can master your new powers, I am willing to support you when next I report to Preceptor Snapdagger.”

“Will Preceptor Velazquez mind?”  Cecil had never met Doern Velazquez personally, but he had made it a point to know to whom Rupert reported.  He had never trusted his handler; something about him had always set Cecil ill at ease.  

“He won’t have much of a choice,” Thekka admitted.  “The Order will crumble if we have a velvet glove but no iron fist.”

Cecil took a deep breath, and he could feel the distant ache in his lungs that was the knife through his chest.  Preservation and the witch had done what they could to stave off his death.  The rest, he realized, was up to Grenth and fickle Lyssa.

“I can think of no is no greater calling than this,” Cecil admitted.  “It would be an honor beyond words to fight what cannot be fought.”  

He told the truth.  He had no further words to offer as he knelt before Thekka, took her tiny hand into his own, and kissed the signet ring that she wore with all due deference.

[pre-party]

Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.

David Foster Wallace (via pre-party)

[endless-unfolding]

My love, take these walls, these wars.           Dull my blades. I am tired of the hunt. I’ve laid my only words at your feet. Open for me.           I want to know, be known. Want and be wanted.

Jeanann Verlee, from “Your Mouth Is a Church, I Forgot How to Pray,” Nailed (July 21, 2014)

[sharanga]

[smokestackmen]

[desabaf0]

[wordsnquotes]

You must suffer me to go my own dark way.

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (via wordsnquotes)

[ourwildways]

Dimension of Night by Mikko Lagerstedt on Flickr.

[asproudasaprince]

A Better World - 4

No, he hissed inwardly.  Not here.  Not like this.  His thoughts were with Ariav as he strained to move even the tips of his fingers, but for all the strength and grit others had attributed to him, he could not.  He had to get home.  He grounded himself with thoughts of Tyria, and the grassy ground below him began to melt away.

“Stop.” He did not know where the voice came from, or whose voice it was, but his focus cracked.  The ground was solid again beneath him.  His heavy, drooping eyelids opened to study the bleak forest around him.  The demon had been pierced through its chest by a lance of soft blue light, he had seen it, but there was no demon to be found.  The forest had grown quiet and still.  It lacked the malevolent intelligence that had bled from the demon and into its shard of reality.

The only thing that moved in the glade was his savior.

She stood awash in cold moonlight, clad in ancient armor and wearing a long skirt of chains.  She was a creature of soft, translucent blues, like the ghosts of Ascalon but with ethereal beauty and quiet dignity in place of their unending hatred.  Her helmet was tall and crested; a tattered cape billowed behind her, flapping in a breeze Cecil did not feel nor believe was truly there.  

“You are hurt,” she said, and Cecil wished that there had been something approaching compassion in her clinical tone.  Cecil wondered briefly if spirits in the Mists were all bereft of empathy.  “Rest a moment.  You are safe in my shadow, mistwalker.”

He gasped for air as the muscles of his throat flexed, and rippled back into position.  Every breath taken in the presence of the spirit was enough to lend vigor and life back in his dying body.  “You,” he croaked, “saved me.”

The spirit considered him in silence for longer than Cecil would like, but whatever mending magics she fed to him made it easier and easier to breathe, and each breath taken was another step on his journey home.  “You called for help,” the spirit explained.  “And no cry for help shall find me wanting.”

“Thank you.”  He paused, and tried to wriggle his fingers.  He still could not, but he felt the blades of grass upon them.  “Who...are you?”

“No one anymore.  My time has passed.”  The spirit did not seem distressed or disheartened by that admission, and Cecil’s heart lurched for whoever the spirit had been.  She floated closer to Cecil, as light as a leaf upon the wind.  The chains of her skirt writhed of their own volition, without any urging or negotiation from the spirit.  He yelped in protest as they coiled about his wrist and ankles like snakes, but he had no strength with which to fight as she hoisted him up into the air, holding him suspended at what passed for eye level.

“Now, I am an idea.”  Her voice had quieted to a low, intimate whisper, as if she had just shared some great secret with Cecil.  “I am Preservation.”

“I am Cecil,” he managed through clenched teeth.  “Let me down.”

“No,” Preservation replied, and Cecil wished there was malice in her tone.  He knew it was for his own good, elsewise he imagined a spirit named Preservation would not hold him prisoner.  “Why did you come here, mistwalker?” she asked of him.

The question burned Cecil.  “I lost someone to the Mists,” he explained, unsure how to phrase himself when talking with something that lacked humanity altogether.  “I came here looking for her.”

“Whoever you are looking for is not here,” the spirit explained gently.  Cecil nodded in reply, and tried to moved his fingers again, to some middling success.  “You must promise me to be more careful, mistwalker.  You are young and your powers are new.”

“I promise,” Cecil murmured, and he meant it.  How much had he been willing to sacrifice to reach the ghost of Eleanor Hart?  It sickened him, and he briefly wondered if it was the spirit’s fingers in his mind.  “I promise,” he repeated, and again: “I promise.”

“Good.”  Preservation did not so much as take her hidden eyes off of Cecil.  A pause.  “Why were you crossing the Mists to find her?”

“Because I love her,” Cecil choked, and he did. He still loved Eleanor with every breath taken, and he had grown ashamed of that.  How much had he been willing to sacrifice at the altar of Eleanor’s memory?  It is for her, Gia had wrote to him  It is all for her. You give the only corner of your heart that is not devoted to family or country to her memory, and to her memory alone.

Another writhing chain shifted, and it lifted Cecil’s plain tunic to reveal the pressed bluebell he kept beneath over his heart.  Preservation drew back, as if surprised, and the page fluttered to the ground. “To be without her is to be without my arms, my legs, my beating heart.”  He lifted his chin to the creature, too proud to cry a second time today.  She could see his missing arm; if she thought him theatrical, she had the good sense of mind to not voice the idea.

“Your love has become your anchor,” Preservation admonished as she eased towards the ground, and picked up the fallen flower.  She pressed it between Cecil’s fingers.  He could only barely hold tight to it.

Cecil hesitated.  “Yes,” he admitted, and that word was so very much like acid upon his tongue.  

“I am sorry.”  Preservation floated before him in silence again, then:  “Do you wish to go home?”

“Yes.” Cecil furrowed his brow at that question.  He thought it a strange question. “Why do you ask?”

“I was going to ask if you could tell me what Tyria is like now.”  The curiosity made Cecil’s heart ache anew for the spirit.  He wondered if any other spirits grew homesick.

“Lost, and broken,” he admitted, and it pained him that he could not give the spirit better news.  “The fury of the dragons has shattered armies and broken my kingdom.”

“Oh.”  Preservation’s voice quavered, for once.  “Are you going to save it?”

The question struck something raw inside of Cecil.  The rising concern in the spirit’s voice was enough to leave him dumbstruck.  It was the sort of question a child would pose, and he had the notion that whatever instincts the spirit had were pure.  It was a strange thing, to meet a creature with the honor and wisdom of a child in a place that he was certain would be the death of him.

“Of course,” he choked out, and some small part of his heart meant it.  It was the noble and true part of him that his sister admired despite herself, and that Eleanor had tried her best to drag squirming into the light.  It was the part of him that had pressed him to join the Order of Whispers, and fight the influence of the elder dragons tooth and nail.  It was the part of him that wanted to give Ariav a better world than the one he was born into.  

“I would do the same, if I were you.”  He knew the spirit was smiling, even if he could not see whatever lips she might possess.

“I am not yet so noble minded as you, Preservation,” Cecil admitted, “though my bluebell hoped that one day I would be.”

She released him then, but he sagged to his knees in the grass.  The weight of his body was too much for his numb legs to manage.  She circled around him, studying him and taking in his qualities.  He felt her eyes upon him, though he knew she might not have eyes at all.  Her hands came to rest upon his shoulders, and all his trepidations about the spirit eased.

“Would you like to be?” she asked without pretense, and Cecil frowned up at her.  “As noble as me, that is.”

“I wish to all six gods that I could be such a person.”  He tried to force himself to his feet to stand before her, but he was not yet healed to fullness.  He grimaced in indignation as he tumbled forward, whereupon Preservation caught him.  He looked up to her, and he knew her to be nothing if not kind.

“You can be.  You came to the Mists alone.” she whispered to Cecil, and he bristled.  Her spectral fingers grazed his cheek.  The way her knuckles caressed him was so hauntingly familiar that he shivered.  “But we can leave together.  We can be one.”

“What?”  He drew away from Preservation, his expression hardening.  He recalled that the demon had wanted much the same from him.

“Together, we can be more than we were apart.”  The spirit did not resist his efforts to retreat.  It hovered above him, quiet for a moment. “A bastion, strong enough to preserve the hunted and the forsaken.”  Her voice grew softer as she spoke.  “A sword, with which to pierce the hearts of the elder dragons.  You would be whole again.”

“Whole.”  He repeated the word as if to taste it, and considered the spirit for a moment.  He had not felt whole in almost a decade.  Even with Ariav in his life, he was missing some small fragment of himself.  “How?” he asked, quiet and conspiratorial.

“We could join together at the cusp where soul meets body,” the spirit explained, though in truth that meant very little to Cecil.  “You would stop being Cecil.  I would stop being Preservation.  We would be…”  She seemed to flounder as she searched for a word to explain to someone who had never truly experienced the freedom of being a spirit.

“A conversation,” Cecil ventured, and Preservation nodded.  “Between two souls.”

“Exactly so,” she agreed, and she said no more though Cecil waited a full minute for her to extrapolate.

Cecil hesitated.  Wouldn’t anyone?  His mind warred with itself, arguing first one way and then another, as he forced himself to his shaking feet.  He brought his hand to the stump where his arm once was.  Whole.  The word silenced all other thoughts.  Whole.  He drew his fingers from his bloody stump to reach for Preservation.  He strained for her, and stumbled as his legs nearly buckled beneath him.  

Likewise, she reached for him.  Their fingertips kissed for but a moment, before she became as intangible as the wind.  She bled into him the way sunlight soaked into one’s skin, and their union left his—no, their—skin tingling.  Their temples throbbed from how quick their heart bounded, and they struggled to breathe for a moment.  The mists around them drew in and out of their lungs with every breath.  Preservation had not tasted air in so long, and Cecil had never tasted the power of the Mists.  The Mists congealed around Cecil’s bloodied stump, fitting him with a new arm, spectral in nature, that had once been Preservation’s.

“Whole,” they said together as they brought their hands to their cheeks to touch their face.  

[magic-spelldust]

cold atmosphere by iacobvasile

[asproudasaprince]

A Better World - 3

( Content Warning: Drugs, death, violence. ) 

The door creaked as it swung open, its arc ponderous and uneasy.  Cecil’s breath was ragged and strained as he stumbled into the room.  The world turned underfoot with all the grace of a falling boulder, and Cecil had the poise to match.  He was moving from memory alone.  His fingers traced along the smooth face of the heavy oaken door until he found the edge.  He couldn’t feel the tips of his fingers.  It made it more difficult than it should have been to make his fingers close around it, and he had to put all the meager strength he could muster into the turn of his hips and the pull of his arm to get the door to swing shut again.  

The world beyond his nose was a blur, and he laughed aloud at how the colors ran together like the pigments in his mother’s paintings.  It was a strange thing to laugh at, and somewhere in his addled mind he knew that to be true, but he couldn’t help himself.  The way the colors bled together was so pretty that it made him want to laugh and cry at the same time, so he did, until he was seized by a weak coughing fit for want of air in his ruined lungs.

He had mixed the syrup, which had been given to him bythat one of his many physicians to relieve his cough with something sweet (He couldn’t remember what), and he drank it deep.  The syrup had always made him tired, but the heavier dose stole from him any semblance of grace from his gait and likewise it robbed him of any silver he might possess from his tongue.  His world was slow and ungainly, just like he was as he collapsed atop his bed.

He laughed again. If he could feel anything, it would be shame.  He couldn’t imagine what Ariav would think if he came to see him, but he remembered that he was some place else; some place far away, for his schooling.  It was some Priory institution, he remembered, and that was his very last thought as his heavy eyelids drooped shut.

Cecil sucked in breath as if he had just broke the surface of an icy lake as he came back to consciousness.  Cold sweat ran beaded down the back of his neck, lending a chilling bite to the wind that caressed him.  There was no pain in his lungs, and he could feel the telltale itching that blades of grass always left upon his skin.  His mouth felt like cotton as he turned his head about to get his bearings.    

A quick survey of his surroundings, and Cecil knew--somehow--that he was in the Queen’s forest.  He had awakened upon a stump, leaning over it and clutching its sides as if bracing for the edge of the headsman’s axe.  Mists coalesced around the glade, as thick as smoke.  The fog writhed hither and yon in the pockets of his vision.  He swore he could see the trees moving around him, and so he looked one way and then the other.  Every time he regarded the forest at a new angle, it had moved, or changed its paths completely.

“Where am I?” he wondered aloud as he moved forward.  Every step forward reshaped the world around him.  Their leaves were green for one heartbeat, then autumn’s golds and reds when next his heart thrummed; saplings one breath, then towering oaks the next.  It made his head throb, and it was not in the way his last dream had been.  It was sharp, and as real as any pain he had ever felt on Tyria.

The forest paths were maddening and they confounded him with such an ease that his patience had been grinded down within moments rather than minutes.  Nothing was as it should be.  The trees had even begun to twist into unnatural shapes.  They pierced through the ground like they were the jagged, broken teeth of this world, intent on chewing Cecil until he was little more than mealy, bloody pulp.  He would not have been surprised if that was the case.  There was a malevolent intelligence to the way the path twisted before him.  A cold shiver went down his spine as he recalled curious Orlando pulling the wings off of butterflies, just to better write a poem about the torments of first love.

“Maybe it was just because he could,” a tremulous voice called to Cecil from behind, and hot fear coursed through his veins.  It was Orlando’s voice, and he wheeled about to face whatever ghosts were behind him.  There was nothing except dancing colors that faded into the mists; they were colors which somehow bore passing resemblance to his deceased younger brother.

“Who goes?” Cecil called, and he reached a hand for the sword he always kept at his side.  “Show yourself!” He drew the blade, and the weight was unfamiliar in his palm.  He furrowed his brow, and glanced down to the weapon.  What should have been steel was made of the same writhing mists as surrounded him, condensed as if someone had hammered it upon some ensorcelled anvil until it formed a blade.

What answered him was a dry laugh so familiar that it made Cecil flinch.  It was his father’s laugh.  He was frozen in place, and whatever was watching him knew that.  He heard a sharp whistle, saw a streak of bone white, and felt his left shoulder exploded in pain before he could reconcile what was happening.  He came to his senses on the ground, pinned to it by a spear made of the bones of some massive, evil creature.  His sword fell from his grip.

What approached from beyond the trees and mists was massive beyond reason, standing full and truly thrice Cecil’s heights.  It walked upon four legs, each with odd joints and terminating in clawed feet.  A torso rose out of its front, giving it the crude appearance of a centaur.  It had purple, chitinous plating mounted over its shoulder and what passed for its head, which Cecil thought looked like some nightmarish twist of a tortoise, a beetle, and a crab.  It had no mouth; only one baleful, yellow eye fixed in the center of its head.  Powerful, all-too-thick muscles rippled along its entire body, the sinew twisting and straining visibly beneath its red skin with each step it took towards Cecil.  Bone ridges ran the length of the creature’s forearms, both of which were easily the size of Cecil’s torso.

Cecil was too terrified of the creature to form words, but the creature spoke despite its want for a mouth.  “You come to my home, and you make demands of me, mistwalker?”  The demon spoke not with one voice, but with a chorus of discordant rumbling.  Cecil was certain he could hear the moans of the damned in its rumbling corners.  “How dare you, you insignificant little beast?”

“What do you want from me?” Cecil managed through clenched teeth.  He strained to stand, but the spear in his shoulder kept him pinned to the earth.  He could feel the demon’s presence like a knife in his mind as surely as he felt the spear grinding against his bone.

It paused, as if to consider the question, before grabbing hold of the shaft of its spear and piercing it deeper into the earth.  “Freedom,” it hissed into his mind.  He could hear it even above how shrieked in an agony so keen that it brought unbidden tears to his eyes.  “From this wretched place.  From the Mists.”

“I can’t,” Cecil whined as the creature placed its foot on his chest.  The crush of its clawed foot upon his chest was like being buried alive again, but there was no Eleanor to save him. “I can’t help you with that,” he stammered, his breath little more than wheezed words.  “I don’t know how.”

“Liar.”  The word was not said in accusation, but in a soft, amused whisper.  “You must awaken in your world sometime, mistwalker,” the demon purred, as if pleased.  “I will breach your world through the magics that brought you here when you do.”  It ground its spear even deeper into the ground, and Cecil’s hopes of escape were buried with it.  “I will wear your miserable skin and bones.  I will hunt down your mother, and make you watch as I kill her.  You will watch, a prisoner in your own mind, as I make you break your sister’s skull against a wall.”

“No,” Cecil gasped in horror beyond reason.  The demon brought his pulse to a frenzied fit.  He thrashed despite his predicament, throwing what little of his weight he could in trying to force the creature’s leg from his body.  It did not move an inch, except when the demon elected to step away from Cecil of its own volition.  He gasped for

“Yesss,” the demon hissed.  “It is all I have ever wanted in these untold years of solitude: to hunt, to kill!  To feed on suffering!”  It sat back on its haunches, its one eye watching its fallen prey. Cecil had never seen a thing so full of hate.  It was in his mind, and he could feel its fingers picking apart his memory.  He flinched away, and tried to think of anything other than his mounting terror.  The demon squirmed with unmitigated pleasure as Cecil struggled.

“Why do you resist?” It wondered aloud, and again Cecil heard the wails of the dead and dying.  His fingers strained for the hilt of his sword. “I feel your rage, always hidden in plain sight.  Is it heavy, I wonder?  All that fury?” Cecil managed to grip his fallen weapon, and the beast snorted at the sight, though it had no nose.  “I will give you such sweet release from all that hate.  You’ll come to enjoy the killing by the time we choke the life from your son.”

A chill ran down Cecil’s spine, and his hard gaze met the demon’s one eye.  The creature doubled back as if struck as he felt his hatred matched.  The creature was many time Cecil’s size, and it was powerful enough to snap him in half.  He wore no armor, and all he had was his sword in hand.  He took a swipe at the demon with his sword, but the creature was far, far beyond his reach, and Cecil screamed in impotent rage.  The swing broke the creature of its shock, and it chortled at Cecil’s feebleness.

“Eleanor,” Cecil rasped as he laid his head to rest.  His shoulders sagged in defeat, but Eleanor’s name would be his last breath, as he had promised promised her in a field of swaying wheat.

“You would call on her again?” the demon scoffed. “You have killed her once already.  Let her rest.”

Cecil snapped.  He had walled off what he felt for Eleanor ever since he cried upon Delphine’s shoulders, but that wall crumbled, as all his walls eventually did.  The same tears he cried that night in his office welled in his eyes again.  “What do you know?!” he shrieked, and his heart raced and hammered such that he was sure it would break out of its bone cage.  “She is my Lionheart!”

He squeezed his eyes shut and brought the edge of his sword down in a brutal arc, twisting and writhing so that his aim was true.  His jaw clenched as his blow rang true, slicing deep into the joint of his own pinned shoulder.  Cecil’s breath came in choking gasps at the shocking pain wracked his body, but he swung again, and a third time, coloring the grass of the misty glade with a spray of gushing red as he lopped off his own arm.  He wished he could have been numb to the pain, but the shock did not set in until after he scrambled to his feet, his mind dizzy with pain and his legs leaden from exhaustion.

“Hear her roar!” Cecil cried, before fulfilling his promise again: “ELEANOR!”

Cecil charged like a wounded boar, stumbling every step as he rushed down the demon, but still he pressed on. He threw all of the hate that the creature had promised to release him from into a single sword thrust that found purchase in the demon’s abdomen.  It glanced off the creature’s hide, and Cecil’s rage turn to terror.  He drew the blade back and hacked at the demon again and again, no thought given to form or function, until at last it was too much.  Blow after blow rang off against its hide, to no avail.

It glanced down at Cecil, more curious than angry, before closing its meaty fists around his neck.  Cecil could taste blood in his throat again as it squeezed tighter and tighter.  He swung at the beast’s forearm again and again until the muscles in his neck tore, and the bones snapped.  His body went limp, and no amount of will could force his fingers to hold onto his sword.

“You’re a brave one, mistwalker.” the creature mused as it tossed Cecil down to the ground.  His head rolled uselessly as his collapsed windpipe gurgled on blood.  He could see his arm, still bleeding and still pinned to the ground a few feet away.  The creature tromped over to its weapon, and pulled the spear from the ground.  

Cecil closed his eyes as darkness crept into his vision.  He could feel, however faintly, the approach of the massive demon.  When Grenth calls to you, go willingly, the witch had said, and so Cecil struggled to breathe Eleanor’s name out one last time as the demon raised its spear to execute him.

The last blow never landed.

[justbeingnamaste]

Teach me your mood, O patient stars. Who climb each night, the ancient sky. leaving on space no shade, no scars, no trace of age, no fear to die.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson-

.gif animation by George RedHawk (google.com/+DarkAngel0ne)

[asproudasaprince]

A Better World - 2

The rush of warm air from the Maiden’s Whisper rolled over Cecil, enveloping him in an embrace as familiar as a lover’s.  The feeling left him with a dull, throbbing ache in his throat, and a dry tongue.  He wanted to do little more than stroll up to the bar and quench his thirst until he couldn’t feel his face and fingers anymore.  It was an ugly and base desire that tied his stomach in guilty knots that writhed and coiled tighter as he tried both to hurry and not look hurried as he pushed through the pleasant, cloying haze of the bar room floor.

A single word cut through the low, intimate murmur to catch Cecil’s attention: “Captain!”  The voice was familiar enough that it gave Cecil pause, and his steps stuttered as he crossed the threshold into the private seating room.  “Captain,” the selfsame voice called again, this time closer, and he turned on his heel to regard whosoever felt the need to call upon him.

“Has Lady Luxelen got you calling me that still?”  He killed the rising urge to smile, however barely and gently, at the first thought of Luxelen.  “I’m afraid I’m no longer a captain.”  

“So I’ve heard.  I was sorry to hear of your early retirement.”  The man who had called to Cecil bore some passing resemblance to Luxelen.  He had the same amber-blonde hair and sunkissed skin, but his eyes were a striking blue, and his demeanor was more reserved.  He furrowed his brow in worry the same manner, though.  “You’re sorely missed in the chamber, and elsewhere, I imagine.  Care for a glass?  It’s on me, my lord.”

Cecil did not like the emphasis on elsewhere, nor the way the man lifted his hand to rest upon Cecil’s bicep.  It was overly familiar, and Cecil stiffened first at the touch, and then again when he realized he knew the man.  He was a magistrate that Cecil had used to pull information on pending bills early for the Order, and Cecil had made him unwittingly complicit in treason and espionage with honeyed words and .  What turned Cecil’s wrenching guts to water was that he could not remember much of the man beyond that fact.

“I’m sorry,” Cecil croaked, “but what’s your name?”

The man’s warm expression curdled.  “Corwin,” he snapped, and he drew his hand from Cecil’s shoulders.  Corwin’s hands balled into angry fists at his side, and Cecil could tell from his demeanor that a swing wasn’t too far behind.

“Oh, no,” Cecil murmured, without taking his eyes away from Corwin’s furious gaze.  “I know that.  I meant your surname, Corwin.  I’m to be wed soon, and I wondered to whom should I address the invitation.”

That bluff was enough to catch Corwin off-guard.  He scrutinized Cecil for a moment, and perhaps his haggardness did him some favors, for the gentleman relented.  “Tamzarian,” Corwin replied, coolly.  “Now, about that drink…”

“I’m afraid I’m here on business, magistrate, not pleasure.”  The mention of Corwin’s title abated him further, and Cecil took a moment to admire the strong, square cut of the man’s jaw.  “The chef here makes the best shepherd’s pie that I’ve ever tasted.  I was going to see if he could spare me the recipe.”

“Do you fancy yourself a chef now, instead of a captain?”  Corwin inclined himself towards Cecil, though he folded his arms over his chest.  The closeness made his throat tighten.

“No.”  The word spilled awkwardly from his lips.  “But I thought it might be a good, warm meal if the weather is unreasonably cold.”  

“Then I’ll let you get back to it then, my lord.”  Corwin stepped away, and bowed low to him.  Cecil had to swallow what felt like a rock in his throat when their eyes met again.  More and more base urges were welling up within him, and he could feel beads of cold sweat trickling down his forehead.  

When he turned away, his legs were shaking.  He hadn’t felt the press of warm flesh in so long that the idea of turning it down was making him nauseous beyond words.  His stomach churned fitfully as he pressed into the kitchen, and he wondered if the workers there could hear it as he took to the cells of the wine cellar.  The chef and his helpers did not so much as look up from their work.  

He was trembling overmuch;  he had to brace himself against the wall as he descended the stairs.  It’s an addiction, he realized for the first time of his boundless concupiscence, and it could not have been anything else.  He could taste the promise of vomit in the back of his throat as he entered into the wine cellar, which thankfully smelled more of wooden casks and dust more than wine itself.

“Is there something I can help you look for?”  Cecil heard the voice, and he could even feel eyes upon him the moment he entered the room, but he knew not from where.  It took him a moment to realize that it was from an asura, swaddled and nearly hidden beneath red, black, and gold cloth.  Cecil had been so distracted and inattentive that he nearly tripped over it, and the asura looked none too pleased as they drew away from the proud lord.

“Yes,” Cecil started.  His temples throbbed as he scrutinized the asura.  He would not have been able to put a face to the name, even if he knew who they were beneath the cloth.  “I’m hoping to find what cannot be found.”

There was a brief moment of hesitation where even a mask of cloth could not hide the incredulity on the asura’s face.  “You shouldn’t seek what cannot be sought when you look like such a mess.”  The little creature looked him over with unmasked disdain, and Cecil felt the smoldering fire of his once unending rage flicker alight for the briefest moment.  “What is it that you need, Keeper Saville?”

Cecil, however, had learned to put aside his pride.  “I need the help of our Order.”  The asura’s expression softened at the admission.  “Something is happening to me, and I do not know what.”

The asura hesitated, and pulled down their mask of cloth to reveal the soft, round face underneath.  “I’m all ears.”  Her large, heavy ears perked up.

“A witch came to me, and…” He sighed.  And tasted like sweet death, he thought, though he said,  “and infused me with some manner of magic.  She breathed life into me, and if not life, then vitality.”

“Not altogether unheard of.”  Cecil was not sure what an asura would look like if they were nonplussed, but he was certain his cohort was just that.  “Has this magic affected you in any other way?”

“Yes, Lightbringer.”  He took a knee not to be on eye-level with the asura, but out of respect for their position.  She smiled at him with a grin that was too wide and too sharp for him to regard comfortably.  “I had a strange experience last night while I slept.  I believe I left my body.  I don’t believe I was dreaming.  I could feel what was around me; every smell, every touch, every taste.”

“Well,”  The Lightbringer folded her arms over her chest.  “What did you see?”

That gave Cecil pause.  “A better world,” he murmured, repeating the words of the phantom that wore Eleanor’s face.  “Or, perhaps, just a different one.”  He nodded, more sure of that answer than the one that Eleanor had given him.  “A different time, a different place, where different choices were made.”

The Lightbringer paced around Cecil, much like a shark or a wolf encircling their prey.  Cecil felt at ease, though.  The Order of Whispers was certain of his loyalty, and he of theirs.  “They say that when we die, our spirits return to the Mists,” the Lightbringer explained, and Cecil was irritated that they would feel the need to explain such a basic concept.  “Perhaps it’s because you’ve one foot in the grave already,” she thought aloud, “Whatever life the witch put into you, it could theoretically be bleeding away into the Mists, and your consciousness goes with it.”

It was a stronger answer than Cecil had come to on his own.  “So you think I might be having visions from another world in the Mists?”

“Like you said: a different world, a different time.”  She rubbed her chin, and looked distant as she considered the possibilities.  

A thought occurred to Cecil, and he felt a chill run its course through his veins, as icy as the Mists when he fell through it.  “So, I could possibly return to that place if I tried.”  He looked up to meet the lightbringer’s eyes.  They widened in curiosity and surprised, bright and vivid and green, and Cecil hardened his expression to mask himself as he always did.

“Whatever you’re seeing, you need to remember that it’s not your Tyria.”  The asura unfolded their arms from their chest, and reached out to rest a gentle hand on Cecil’s bicep, the way a mother might a child.  “The Rift is where all time and space converge, keeper.  If you try to walk through the Mists, you may find that you retrod old paths, but you might also lose the way back home.”

The Lightbringer could never have known that such a fate would be sweet release for Cecil.  “I will keep that in mind, Lightbringer.”  He bowed his head to the asura in deference.  “If you could put out feelers with our spies in the Priory, I’d like to know more about the Mists without rousing my family’s suspicions.”

“What will you do in the meantime, Saville?”  The asura looked him up and down the way Cecil looked at horses.  It made him shift uncomfortably under her gaze.  She seemed content to let Cecil do as he pleased; she knew she could not stop him.

“Rest,” he rasped as he rose to his feet.  He could feel the burning in his lungs, but it was a farcry—an echo—of the pain it should have been.  “Good day, Lightbringer.”

[buckying]

[beholdingslut]

This Heavy Craft. P.K. Page. 

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