6 - 1 [Magus] Morrigain: Nightmares Reveal the Chains that Bind

The Gods are beings of the Beyond. Further afield than the Empty Firmament Above and further still than the Place Where Stars Dwell.

They look into our mortal realm with eyes of fire and flame. Tethered to the Earth by the Heavenly Spheres.

Lumenari is moored by the moons lunat, by Twins of Black and White.

Oriath by our blood and kings, dwells in the Morning and Evening Star, the Omens of War.

Solaria by the Eye that Wakes Up The World, shining upon All Things the Light Most Holy.

Dyeus Dwelleth in Sky of Wine and in the sphere furthest from Terra Mundus, for His Heavenly Judgement is to be blind and impartial to any and all.

Maiahnah, Goddess of the Twain Fruits of Life and Knowledge, dwells closest to Sola in the Heavenly Form of Mercury. For only does the Light bring forth Revelation and Breath.

Elaria is the sphere second-closest to the Sol-Mother’s Form. She is the Holy Bride, She Who Gave Man Lust so that he may enjoy life and have taste for war.

Mortus dwells in eclipse, appearing when the Visage of Lumenari aligns such so that the White that Solaria bringeth is smothered.

Beware when the spheres align and Night Falls Upon the Day.

-Mandatos Maiahnah, Holy Scripture of the Cult of the Twin-Sisters.

The Lone Sparrow - From 17th of Last Frost to 1st of Evening Star, Year 1125 A.E. (5 days of the Solarian Cycle elapsed)

Fever and malaise were his existence. Blurred and disjointed visions of ash blotting out the sun and of a gargantuan gullet devouring the earth in a single gulp.

Tehlos had come in his nightmares, in toothless maw and vengeful wake.

All would have their End, so that new growth would come in the wake of ruin.

It was oh so cold. The biting and burning cold beckoned with open jaws of formless fire, familiar and friendly. It seduced him with whispers of false warmth and phantom heat.

Yet he did not dare come hither to its pleas.

It was a sleep once taken that he would never awake from.

In between blinks, he saw eternity.

In between bouts of consciousness amidst the sea of slumbering insanity, he saw the soul.

In all of its mind-bending and eld splendor, for the core of being was wrought not of nevian white as most of the Sevenfold Faith would preach, but instead darkest dark.

Black as blood under the moonlight.

The One Awoken - Eternity Between Blinks

Barry awoke without waking, his sight once shrouded in slumbering dream now brought to lucidity.

He was back in his childhood hamlet, laying atop his bed, the straws of his cot prickling his skin ever so slightly.

Though he felt his heart belonged in someplace far away from here, the hay-filled cot on top of unsturdy wood made him feel at home. Whitewashed walls and a thatch roof were his confines. The room he laid in was uneventful; a small chest, and a bed. Simple though it may be, he was lucky to even have his own parcel of domain.

He had helped his pa build the house after their last one was infested with blacken mold. With childish muscles tensing, the fibers burning with the middling strength therein and the baleful weight thereout, Barry had held aloft wood and transported burdens of stone.

Mundane thoughts and remembrance for a mundane time. Long before Barry ran away from the hamlet, taking with him cloak and the clothes on his back, a waterskin, and his pa’s axe.

The new house’s building was a decision not lightly taken as the amount of work and daylight required ate into that of hunting and other dues for such a sequestered settlement in the bowels of the Higgenhollow boughs.

The forest that entrapped the hamlet was far to the North of the Ydden River and the heat it brought, a bit easterly to the Highlands of the lordlings, yet colder still.

Mundane thoughts and remembrance for a mundane time. Long before Barry learned how to fight. How to kill with nary a need for waking thought. The act of swinging steel engraved onto his very flesh and bones, muscles honed for the arts martial; the Forms.

The house was built for necessity beckoned no freedom of choice. Most often did necessity take free will and constrain it to that which was needed not wanted.

It had become too hard for Barry to breathe given he was but a wee bairn no older than six winters, so his ma and pa decided to burn down the infested house and rebuild farther away from the damp stone of the hamlet spring. They lived with gram-gram for a time while rebuilding.

Mundane thoughts and remembrance for a mundane time. Long before Barry stained his pa’s axe not with the sap of tree, but the blood of brigands. Sure, men they might’ve been—once upon a time—but with hearts black as coal, sin coating their very veins, the act did not bring much in the way of guilt.

Rapists and murderers, the lot of them. Or so Barry told himself so that the night would not be haunted by Morrigain the Demoness of Terror.

She Who Dwells in Hearts Most Troubled.

It did not work. Morrigain still came, in a thousand-thousand grasping, pulling hands and baleful shadow. She came with the judging eyes of the dead he had made so, their voices spitting spiteful spittle most foul.

Condemned them to the Pale River, he had. And so they now condemned him, in his dreams.

Murderer.

Killer.

Blackheart.

Yet, for all his thoughts on nightmares and all that which made his sleep falter, Barry’s current location could not be farther from which his mind festered upon.

He was safe, comfortable, and dull.

Sunlight poured through the window. A single hole in the wall with shutters of wood protecting him from the outside.

Safe, comfortable, and dull.

May as well have chained him to the wall. That room had become a symbol of imprisonment through the years, binding him to a peaceful and yet boring life.

Safe, comfortable, and dull.

It was the worst of prisons, one that was hard to part with because of himself. Barry had become his own warden, trading excitement for safety and swallowing the key.

It was no life worth living, hollow and devoid of all that made his heart thrum. The blood in his veins beckoned for adventure beyond the hamlet. His soul screamed for reprieve from the chains that bound, for freedom.

It was no child’s fancy, no young’uns’ rashness, no fool’s folly.

Barry knew the worth and truth of things deep down, even if he could not express them into words. Even if he could communicate his meaning with his ma and pa.

Words did no justice for things so deep in one’s heart, for they were both too simple and too complex; unfitting. Even more so when one had not bound their meaning to utterance of breath. When a thing remained unnamed.

Like trying to execute an incompatible longsword Form with an axe, the act was a lesson in futility and frustration. A Fehler or Scarmaker strike could not be done with a woodcutter’s blade without changing it so much that the technique became something else entirely.

Therein lay the crux, Barry realized.

He would not change the core of himself for the fleeting whims of others.

If Barry had not heeded to his instincts, the fire in his eyes would’ve surely faded. In either uncaring apathy of living a life not worth living, or by the glaze of self-inflicted death.

With the thought both bitter and sweet, of freedom found and of past bound, the vestiges of stupor lifted from his shoulders.

Flecks of dust floated in the air, unhidden by the warm morning light.

Everything felt comfortable and familiar, and yet also wrong. Like eating water-softened rations in the dark, relishing in the taste that hunger brought. And then feeling the weevils and maggots squirm in his mouth. Spitting out the bite with horrified disgust and then washing his mouth with water was not nearly enough.

But it was the beginning.

He awoke without waking, mind aware of the wrongness yet stuck inside the realm of dream the same.

Knowing of a problem did not fix it. Most often did truth and the knowing of things bring about unease and sorrow rather than any sort of acceptance and peace.

Barry knew now. Barry remembered. He wished it were not so.

Memories of his close brush with Mortus, of his arms being turned to stone and crumbling to dust in the cold waters of the Pale River, made their way to his present awareness, inundating his mind like a flash flood in Monsoon.

The doom of his band and his lover; head crushed like a rotten grape, and bodies cleaved in twain by inhuman blade.

The Awakening of his soul; Da’ath and the visions that came with. Of ash and cold, of death and oblivion neverending.

Of a toothless maw brought about in vengeful wake, devouring All Things.

His soul’s desire for freedom had been met, its blade whet not upon river stone but sulfur and bone. The call had been answered in the most twisted of ways.

Barry had gained all that he wanted, and lost it all the same.

Powerless, the word both a whisper of dying breath and the ragged wailing of sorrow.

His reacquired awareness of the days past shook him to the core, rattling his head like a Dominidas bell. Barry’s form trembled, his knees going to his chest and his arms wrapping around them.

Back and forth.

Back and forth.

Back and forth he rocked until he could no longer do so. The hurt and grief made his heart thrum and spasm like a bone stuck in the throat. His chest ached, an emptiness like the firmament of unfathomable depth where the Nine Hells lay.

Morrigain had come first and taken Her due. And now, Tehlos beckoned for the rest, an insidious devil on his shoulder.

Let loose, it pleaded, the want for ash and cold intrusive and digging. Barry could taste it on his tongue, a blade covered in sweet honey. Yet, sharp and deadly metal still lay at its core no matter how lilting the devil’s song may be—rotten rations all the same.

Silence the light. Snuff out the noise.

Bring about the dark, bring about the quiet.

Break apart its bones and suck the marrow dry.

Tehlos.

Barry opened his eyes to silence, the whispers gone with the Name of the End of All Things.

For, after all, it knew all Barry had to do was utter the Name and it would come.

A devil’s deal, waiting in patience for the knowing that a blade once sheathed and tethered to the hip must also be drawn. Danger and need and want would be the fingers by which would damn him to the Nine come the unsheathing of fell and accursed steel hidden in the scabbard of his soul.

Barry shook his head, laughing a mocking little laugh, the kind so drenched in the self-awareness of the irony at hand that he reckoned it would make a fine bard’s tale.

The laugh died in his throat, silenced by the knowing of where he lay.

He could deal with the baleful power at the back of his head another time, for though he was no longer entrapped in eld whispers, Barry was not truly free. Reprieve from the blade coated in honey, yet imprisoned in his own mind he was.

Last time I was here, there was grey water at my feet and an expanse o’ black. Strange that it changed so much. Mayhaps because I was dreamin’?

Barry flexed his will, imparting his desire upon the illusory weave from which this dream realm was wrought.

Leave, he said in thought and imbued with his want.

Nothing.

His spirit and the will it carried by its skin and channels were effectively neutered though neither limbless nor weak. The strength still lay inside himself, Barry felt.

The difference was that something else pushed back against his ministrations of will with equal force. Like trying to move a limb that the mind thought existed yet was severed from the flesh; dissonance.

Time passed, slowly and agonizingly as Barry tried variations of his initial attempt. Yet the results were the same. A greater power suppressed his own, fetters of will clamping down on his spirit and soul.

The dread grew and grew as boredom gave way. And in the quiet of the realm of dream, Barry was forced to stay.

With nothing to do, his mind wandered. A dangerous thing, he knew.

He ruminated. He remembered, the images like strikes of lightning and the hurt like scars on his trembling heart.

He wished it were not so, but his ability to affect his desire upon his surroundings was gone.

Back to mortal, he was dragged. To a state of powerlessness and beholden to the uncaring laws of the world.

No amount of wishing or want would change anything, the bygone days set in sulfur-stone.

In his childhood room, Barry trembled and shook, the past far too much. Even though the housing stood stalwart, he felt the walls encroaching upon himself, strangling him without ever truly moving.

Staying still was to let himself be entangled in thorny bramble. Staying in the silence was as violent as bloody battle.

Anything to get away. Anywhere but here, he thought, mental voice wavering.

A man’s wits could only be a polished and sharp blade for so long. When survival was no more an imminent worry, hidden grief and hurt came to the fore. Rust was sure to follow and dull the edge of the mind, as inevitable as the pails of water during the month of Rain’s Hand.

All steel would turn back to dust and crumble, inexorable as Tehlos the End of All Things.

Unable to stay atop his cot anymore, Barry sprung up from the rickety bed. He dashed towards his doorway.

A wayward thought, like a man wandering in a brook and finding a curious and queer-colored little stone, came to the fore then.

Why hadn’t he thought of that? Leaving through the door.

Barry pulled back the curtains wrought of roughspun cloth; darkness lay at the threshold like blood staining the surface of water.

It was not empty nor simple black, but instead shadow made substantial.

It was darkness that stared back.

Eyes twinkling like the beads from which spiders saw the world, a thousand-thousand orbs of moistened black lay in the depths of the darkness-that-stared-back, shining with the luster of hunger incarnate confined to the form of gnats.

Yet, Barry did not fret. Those were eyes of kin and kith, whispering of shared ancestry. Their presence comforted him, eld visage not-withstanding.

Blood and darkness, their voices without voice did sussur, concepts given form as images in his mind.

A lake under the stars was at the forefront of the vision. A pool of black waters reflecting the light above and taking their essence for itself.

There, in the waters, he felt camaraderie. There, he saw power for the taking, glistening like the maddening gemstones that inhabited the nighten firmament.

Bind the Stars in the Web of the Hunter, the voices of kin and kith chittered, their amalgam murmur like mites crawling up his neck.

And the fingers of a lover brushing down his spine.

The vision faded from his sight no different than fog under the noon sun, leaving behind a pang of want and need in Barry’s heart.

Those bright little lights were but flies for the taking. Defenseless things caught in the trappings of what lay in the darkness-that-stared-back.

The thoughts of leaving this place were gone. And in their place was the visceral need for reaching where the stars slept.

Barry reached towards the shadows beyond the curtains with his hand, hungry for the stars that surely lay beyond.

Hungry to Bind Them in the Web.

Before Barry could fully grasp the darkness-that-stared-back, his arm recoiled backwards in surprise; his hands were wrought of the same darken substance that lay beyond the threshold of his room.

Stars of all colors flitted through his skin of night sky, pillars and misty congregations of light floating inside his flesh like he were a bottle filled with tar. Embers were suspended in the viscous liquid, thrumming like fireflies.

And he, the spider.

The eyes of the constellations watched from the black depths of his flesh, scrutinizing him as he did the same to them.

Barry’s sight traced his arms, going further up until he was thrice bewildered. His whole body was wrought of the tapestry of the night sky. He had no clothes whatsoever, as naked as the day he was born.

Smoke covered any of his indecent bits, the hazy veil of blacken mist endowing him with a semblance of propriety.

Luminous coils and twinkling mites dwelled in the ink beyond his transparent hide. From spirals to stranger weavings of stars, there was every configuration possible.

Yet one stood out, drawing his attention.

A comet of crimson, bright as blood shed in battle, spread through the skin of his chest from left shoulder toward right hip, the celestial spearhead bound for his heart. The falling star slithered through his hide like a serpent yet was somehow stuck to the middle of his sternum, motionless yet moving. The bending of logic was apparent.

A paradox.

The word seemed both eld and familiar to his tongue, yet Barry somehow knew it well enough.

Unbelieved yet still true; hard to accept to the mortal mind of man.

How the illiterate sellsword knew the definition for such a highbrow concept, he was not sure. The knowing of paradox was there, ingrained in him, part of the self yet somehow distant.

Like waking up and finding oneself with a new limb sprouting from their back, the newfound knowledge left Barry in a daze.

What, in the bloody-fucking-Hells, is happenin’ to me?

I thought this place a realm of dream. I felt it in me bones, but…

This is too much. Too fanciful, too feyen for just a waking dream.

Am I dead?

Have I fallen so deep into the Pale River that I’ve been spat out into the sands of Limbus?

Or am I plain ol’, batshite insane?

Don’t rightly know which would be worse.

At least it ain’t the Hells.

After acclimating himself to his eld form and weird circumstance, Barry reached towards the dark once more.

The unease had slithered back, insidious tendrils of probing and festering dark at the edges of his awareness. It had prompted him to hurry and run from this place, to leave.

Yet it was no prowling predator, no stalking beast that was to hunt him for his flesh. The unease was simply himself, a part of the greater self which he denied counsel and ear, wishing to not dwell upon whatever it had to say.

For the truth hurt to hear and was even harder to accept.

Paradox.

With both the iron-hot poker of unease and the futility of pondering whatever the Hells was happening for he would get no sure answer, Barry went forward, unto the breach.

With a trembling hand, skin like glass and flesh of starry night, he brushed a single finger against the veil of shadow made substantial.

He touched the darkness-that-stared-back; it took him hand in hand, pulling his arm with might undeniable. A leaf in a whirlpool he became, falling into the suffocating black and stripped of his sense of direction. No up nor down, tumbling inside the gullet of the darkness-that-stared-back.

After a timeless instant, eternity bound to a blink, he suddenly felt cold dirt on his face.

He had not fallen, just appeared.

Barry got up from the cold ground and surveyed his location. The earth beneath his feet was mute-grey, the hue of ash without cinder—dead and hollow, without the vital flame of life. All around him was a colorless forest clearing. There was no wind, no leaves swayed in the air, everything a mind-numbing grey.

Dead and hollow the forest clearing was, yet substance was to be found at its edges. Beyond the confines of the gnarled and twisted and naked trees of grey, shadow-stuff floated in the air, obscuring his vision.

Darkness-that-stared-back, waiting in blind joy for the End of All Things.

A flash of light at the edges of his sight caught Barry’s attention. Looking up, he saw the most beautiful starry night of his life.

Countless stars with colors of every hue, vibrant as the workings of fire that pierced the night sky come the month of Moon’s Sight. Their arrangements were like lanterns on the Lumen Festival, the position between the lights crafted with the care of uncaring and eld hand.

The patterns brushed against his mind, theirs containing greater truths. His hunger was set ablaze in second wind.

With eyes like a ravenous wolf eyeing a flock of sheep, Barry traced the stars above.

A comet, bright red like a gash in the flesh made by naked steel, cut the firmament above in twain.

I’ve seen that red, fellen starling somewhere ‘afore.

Barry recognized, too, some of the groupings of stars, though not as traditional constellations. These were no mundane weavings known to the people of King’s Kedwen, but instead a pattern he had seen but a blink before he fell to the greyen earth of the clearing.

Looking down at his body, he saw the firmament above, for it was a reflection of himself.

At the center of the sky above was a hungry maw, a breach into the darkness-that-stared-back. It was mirrored in his nighten skin below, his navel a hollow wrought of shadow made substantial, devoid of starry complexion.

As above, so too was it as such below.

Barry traced the lights above, linking them to the marks on his skin. His body had no hair, his fingers caressing a glass-like texture that was cool to the touch.

If I’s got not a hair on me rump, am I bald?

Barry felt the skin atop his head, bare of any hair whatsoever.

Strange. Where are my ears?

His digits barely brushed his face, and what he felt gave him no small amount of pause and dread. With a pang of panic, his hands scoured his head with heightened vigor, looking in vain for things he had possessed his whole life.

His features were smooth as an eggshell, no protrusion of nose or depression where sight could be held.

Hollow and ambiguous, his form was. Alien and eld as the sky above. Devoid of human anatomy beyond the silhouette and rough shape of what man was.

A constellation he was, stars bound by strands of silver to endow the semblance of bodily form.

He had no eyes, yet he saw.

He had no ears, yet he heard.

He had no mouth, yet he needed to scream.

Barry tried for naught to push breath in a turbid wail from his throat. No muscles spasmed, no sound was borne to the world within himself.

The greyen forest was silent as a faraway strike of lightning that heralded the thunder that never came.

Hollow and dead.

Slowly, the horror went away. Barry knew it in his bones, if he had any in this queer body of his, that this was not the waking world. That this was not his flesh, but instead the representation of his intangible soul.

The knowledge was instinctual, carved into him not by years of repetition, but by intuition born of something primal. He felt so in the core of his core, in the insides of his bones.

The mystery of all that was happening to him led Barry to air his questions out as open-ended thoughts.

Where am I?

What is this?

What is happening to me?

The questions echoed through his mind like screams in a cavern.

Yet he was not alone. Something outside of the greyen forest took heed to his words.

The darkness-that-stared-back answered.

Avahtari, murmured his soul, voice like a serpent licking at the air. The words were of a foreign tongue, yet their meaning came to the fore and into the fold, apparent as Solaria at Her height.

Avahtari; descent of Tehlu—Divinity—upon the Earth in tangible vessel.

Avahtarr; incarnate.

When the mind of man meets with the voice of Anatehlu—Ascendant.

This was a realm of concept given form, all for the function of communication between himself and what dwelled inside the core of his core, the marrow of his bones.

His soul, borne to him in the realm of dream made lucid.

With the revelation came a tickle on the periphery of his being, a strand beckoning to be pulled.

And pull he did.

The soulborne thread can unwound from the greater cloth that was his eternal psyche, bringing about words without voice.

Scour the fat with sacred flame.

Skin peels back and flesh burns away.

Ashen bone borne to the world.

Luaithreach.

He whispered the Name that flitted through his mind, the formless wind that danced at the edges of his awareness gaining substance.

The susur turned to howl, growing in tempestuous power.

The fetters that bound his will melted away like so much slag and scale being shed from a blade.

Luaithreach, he said in the voice of his soul. And so it was done, the veil lifted from his sight.

Mind of mortal, yet eyes and ears of god.

The stars called to him then, voices both burning cold and frigid hot, promising arkane knowledge and power.

Where before the patterns whispered of great mysteries and hidden truths, now they screamed.

The stars sang songs of ice and ash, theirs full of meaning yet nary a single word.

An image flitted through his sight as he heard their songs, of a strange fruit hanging upon a white-barked and gnarled tree whose leaves were the stars themselves.

Its skin amaranth and its flesh succulent. Both in sight and smell, the fruit was alluring, like the glint of a gemstone and the vapors of a potent druggae made into one.

It awaited in the darkness-that-stared-back.

Barry reached out towards the heavens. A hand like his own reached back, the titanic finger brushing against his faceless and alien visage.

Knowledge both eld and arkane flooded his mind, permeating his psyche like water in dried and cracked earth during the drought month of Sun’s Height. It seeped into every crevice and fold, illuminating the unknown.

His soul, in response, did not leave the event unnamed nor unexplained.

Enlightenment; mind expanded beyond mortal ken, it told him with a voice like the dying breath of a great sage.

When the arkane is unhidden. The water of noesis imbibed, mortal ken shed like a serpent’s skin.

Yet what be arkane?

That which is kith to the Path, his soul answered itself, tongue forked like a snake.

For the Way made two, the Black and the White, and so—

Whatever meaning his soul tried to impart onto him further was lost in the sea of stimulus that overcame Barry with the flood of knowledge.

Starlight, both scalding like boiling water and burning fire, seared his eyes shut and opened his mind to what laid beyond.

The White gave way to the Black, for all things must have their end. And from the ruin, comes the beginning. Origin and end were but one and the same, for the Wheel was circular in nature. Both were but a single spoke upon Its ever-turning being.

The essence of darkest dark flowed into the throat of his soul, cold as the grave and bone-chilling as a gust of winter’s breath. The black that lay in between the light coated his insides, tendrils of icy fulgur clawing through his nighten flesh.

Pain and pleasure; excitement and dread. The emotions and feelings coursed through his being, braided in twain and inseparable as the Twin Ewes of Eothas and Ravah.

There was no night sky below in the greyen forest any longer, the avahtarr for his soul having been merged with the tapestry above. He looked down to the forest, his sight all encompassing.

The sea of stimulus abaded, leaving the guiding of the soul to be heard.

Ethos, said the whispers of ice and ash.

Authority; scepter and crown over the base aspects of existence, Barry answered back.

For he and the eternal psyche were one.

Instinctual knowledge bearing the eld and arkane, the knowing of things not meant for mere mortals bound to the Coil, was his. A blade in the hands of his soul, the weight both comforting and exciting, for it beckoned to be used.

The one Awoken tensed the newfound muscles of divine will, commanding them to bring about a change of his design.

Yet, it was for naught. With the oneness and authority came a distinct sense of not belonging. His mind did not mesh seamlessly with the threads of the tapestry above, too simple to be bound to the eld song of ash and ice.

Eyes and ears of god, yet mind of mortal.

Barry fell from the sky, a cloak of trailing night wrapped around his shoulders. A vestige of ethos, of authority made manifest. A drop of residual yet no less pure noesis, of knowing beyond mortal ken.

A span before Barry fell, he opened his eyes to the waking world, awoken from the realm of his soul.