Post by Ian Xanthe on Mar 27, 2007 7:23:08 GMT -8
The Doomsayer hurriedly traced the stones to open the trod to the Dreaming that lies within the ankh of Compassion, as the desert wind whipped around his shoulders. He had recieved the letter from Phaidra only moments ago, and rushed to the shrine, the trod...to Seiren, hoping to reach her before the Versalis could strike. The Glamour erupted from the stone, forming the lose outline of gate, like a rip in the fabric of this world, that led into the Dreaming. He sprang towards it, running once more.
The suprising blast of icy air pulled the breath from Ian's lungs, as his foot hit the snow, making a distinctive soft crunch on the otherside of the Trod. A field of ice rolling on in every direction where once there had been spring grasslands. The air was still thick with Glamour, hanging almost electrically over the region. Halfway to the thin line of the horizon could be seen the perpetual, and ever-raging glamour storm known as the Versalis to the Fae of Arcadia. The Storm had always been. As long as there had been dreams the storm roared through them. It was the manifestation of one of the most pure laws of Glamour: Change...
The Storm Ripped apart the fabric of the Dreaming itself, leveling entire empires in moments, rearranging and finally redistributing the Glamour without prejudice or distinction. Nothing could endure the fury of the Versalis, save the kingdoms that had employed lengthy and ancient arts devoted to anchoring thier palaces, and cities to the very fabric of the Dreaming. It had long been called the soul of the Dreaming itself...a constant rebirth of Glamour that wandered the realms of the Near and Far Dreaming ceaslessly. Ian had missed the storm passing through this stretch of the silver path by only a minute or less, and stood now in the wake of the most furious force in all the Dreaming.
The snow was bright white, reflecting the light of a full and literally blue moon that silently hung high above the icy wastes on which he now stood. The landscape was dotted with spires of deep azure rock and ice, that protruded like crooked teeth from the otherwise smooth rolling snow.
A whisper floated from his barely parted lips and snaked its way through the ice cold air carried on a cloud of Ian's own breath as the weight of crushed hope crashed down on him...
"No..." His heart sank, as he too, sank to his knees in the bare dusting of snow on the ground. He was too late to save her... She, as most every woman, wife, and mate he had ever loved was gone. More than a millennia of images of burying those he loved flooded through his memories. Faces, emotions, lifetimes shared, all culminating in image of the garden of stone he left in his wake, gravestones on which he had written each of thier names...
He had lived so long, that the people of the Kingdoms of Arcadia had given the chaos he wrought a name. Doomsayer...
Glamour hated Ian Xanthe.
And he hated it back...with all that he was.
His eyes listlessly refocused on the edge of the quickly disappearing Versalis storm as it raced away to the west. Ian stood slowly, and began running...with a new hope. One in which he could catch it before it was gone...and let it take him, with her. His unaging muscles stretched groaning as the fresh stitches Phaen had woven through the deep gashes recieved only days before , began to snap, and unravel. Physical pain was only a dull, unoticed breath in the force of loss and hoplessness that now raged through him. The thin strip of clouds sillohetted by the myriad colored lighting roaring through them, were still disappearing faster than he was able to cover ground. Glamour erupted from deep within him and seared through muscle and bone bringing the magic Quicksilver to him as he cast the cantrip invoking the art of Wayfare. The snow passed by now in a blur, and as each cantrip faded after the few seconds of its duration passed, he cast again, ...and again...
He approched the edge of the storm with speed that left drops of blood from the freshly opened wounds trailing and almost hanging before dripping to the snow in his passing. He was close, so close now he could taste the Glamour like copper in his mouth that was weaving through the air beneath the clouds of the Versalis. He would find peace now, rest in a moment...after a lifetime too long.
It took his mind a few seconds to feel the throb of pain just above his right ankle, ...and the image of the world slipping from a blur to the detailed focus of gravity winning as he tumbled forward, skidding and rolling several yards through the snow beneath him to a stop within a stones throw of the Versalis's edge. His Glamour was expended, and he could not call upon the speed of Quicksilver for at least the passing of another night.Confusion and rage filled him, as the storm once more was speeding away faster than any man could run, and with it, any hope Ian Xanthe had of being with Seiren again. The pain from muscles used far beyond thier still damaged and healing state, flashed through him. Ian slowly, turned and rolled to his back to see what had robbed him of the rest he so desperately desired. Standing a few yards behind, motionless, was Samarah...waiting, as she always had for him. She had taken her full Nocnista form, standing on jointed sleek ebony legs that reached the height of a full grown person. Her bright red eyes, and sleek chitenous body, gleaming in the half light of the moon. One of the her long front legs was still extended, and its end bent a bit as it had caught his ankle seconds before.
She had been with him now for twelve hundred years. His chimeric familiar...one of the most powerful of the nightmare chimera that still existed in Arcadia, as they had grown in strength and knowledge together over the years. The silence of the moment that seemed to last an eternity, as an old fae, searched in vain for a reason as he studied the ancient chimera, was broken only by the sound of her voice in his mind. A prescise female's voice just above a whisper, whose tone and pitch sounded like glass towers being shattered miles away , "I regret... to inform you Ian, that your request for suicide has been denied."
Samarah could feel his emotions, knew Ian better than he knew himself, and with the logic and foresight of a spider...she knew exactly what was comming. She could feel the Dreaming renowned Fiona rage, as it began to bubble up from the depths of his Fae soul, and although her body did not visibly tense, her muscles flexed below her shiny exoskeleton, and readied themselves...no creature in the Dreaming could avoid the magical fear produced by the presence of a Nocnista, save a Fiona, because of the fearless boon granted to them by Glamour from the First of thier House.
Ian could feel her calm...logical, almost alien thought processes, as his anger spread. It had taken the two of them a few years after they first joined, to process one anothers very different almost diametrically opposite thoughts and feelings, and begin communicating in this way. She never really had feelings...in all the time he had known her. A spider simply had no use for thought processess that seemed to obscure rational behavior. She was never angry or saddened, her voice never raised or lowered...she simply, calmly, was the balance to the chaos of the Fiona with which she had bonded.
Despite his injured body, Ian was on his feet in moments, his hands clenched: one in a fist, and the other around the handle of the sword that was drawn and readied in a flash of movement. The air whistled across the surface of the blade as it was leveled toward Samarah's two largest eyes in the center of her head. The sword strike stopped abruptly at an equally swift shiny leg, that raised to block it. The blades edge made a soft clinking sound as it hit and withdrew from her chiten covered leg, and was followed by strike from his foot as he kicked toward her mandible protected mouth.
They had sparred often in thier hundreds of years together, and the fluid dance of Ians blade and body was matched only by the sheer swiftness of Samarah's supernatural reflexes and octagonal perception from her many eyes. But never before had the two "danced" in midst of Fiona anger since thier first encounter all those years ago. He, a young Fiona looking for the fight of his life, and she , a rather young Nocnista , that had never before encountered anything that posed a threat to the poison and precision of her hunting ability. They had fought for fourty-three hours, until both were so exhausted they agreed on a draw, and never since then had left one anothers side.
Samarah opened her mind once more, gauging his emotion, and patiently countering strike, after strike...
Ian's voice roared into the silence of the crisp winter air, "Why!? Why would you rob me!?" again the blade snaking towards her and once more, was parried by a swift movement of one of her many legs.
In his mind her voice once again calm, and crystaline said simply " Your self destruction is not...condusive, to my desires."
He may have been a seasoned warrior and fighter, but Ian had already put his body through hell only days ago, and the fatigue of the damage done was quickly weakening him with every strike.
His muscles couldnt react fast enough to parry the tip of her leg as it struck his jaw with the force of a troll's fist. It sent him reeling, to the side, and down to one knee. The world came once more into focus, and slowly the blood began to drip from his freshly split lip to the snow beneath him. Ian chuckled lightly, looking at the blood as it fell. It was a dangerous sort of laugh, the sort of sound produced by the chaos of a mind that was now unravelling with debilitating weight of a Fiona's emotion.
Samarah had heard that laugh often enough to know, that if she allowed this to continue, she would have to kill him, because he wouldnt stop...until one of them were dead.
Ian didnt even see the second blow as it was leveled against his opposite jaw...and once more in a flash, he was sent reeling and landed on his side a few feet away. His sword remained behind under one of the many well placed legs of Samarah, where she had pinned it, before hitting him.
This time it took well over a minute for Ian's conciousness to readjust and focus enough to look at her.
Through gritted teeth his voice could be heard once more, "You Cold, uncaring, bitch...It's my life, my choice, and I'm tired..."
Samarah had moved now a few feet from him, and righted him slowly, leaning him to rest his back against one of the jagged spires of stone that jutted across the snowy plain.
Her response was quick and calm, "It is...not yet time..." her mind struggled for a moment, trying to express the thought, "I...do not wish...." again a flash of strange chaos and feeling, as he interrupted, "I dont give a damn anymore, what you think..." Ian's eyes narrowed, "and I dont give a shit about what you want."
Ian focused on her eyes as he continude, "You'll never understand how I feel, or how hard it is to watch everyone around you die, and not be able to die with them. You dont understand falling in love with a mate, or the pain and loss that comes in losing that love. Ive held some as they died Samarah! Powerless in all my Sidhe wisdom, to save them. Im tired of a grave being my last memory of those I love. I cant do this anymore! I dont have it in me anymore..." His voice filled with a sarcastic spitefulness as he continude, "But you...you cant feel a damn thing, you just dont have use for it. Fae are illogical in thier pointless emotion to you... as you have expressed for centuries in the many arguments we've had." Samarah could feel now the hopelessness, the fatigue, of a mind that had seen more than any man should see, and endured longer than any emotional creature should have to exist. And while his features remained youthfully immortal, the soul inside was that of a very old man.
Ian yelled as loudly as he could, " I can't do this anymore!"
Somthing within the mind of Samarah snapped suddenly as he finished the words.
In a flash Ian was being held up and slammed into the rock behind him, several feet from the ground. Samarah's strong frontal feelers and the claws as big as hands held him by the collar of his shirt and pressed him to the stone. Her eyes seemed to light on fire and glow from within as they met the surprised violet of Ian's eyes. He blinked a moment, and his mind was flooded with love, and fear, and pain and certainty, ...from her, as her voice roared in his mind "It breaks my heart to see you this way!"
She meant every word...he could feel it, and she understood emotions he had been conviced she couldnt comprehend.
Ian's violet eyes immediately filled with tears of apology , and shame...as he looked down slowly from her eyes...
Samarah's voice continude to tear through his mind with a force neither knew she was capable of expressing, "I have been with you through this all, I have guarded... and protected you, your mates,...fought and bled along side you!"
Ians shoulders heaved slightly in a silent sob.
Samarahs mind raced to find the words as she continude yelling, "Our Souls are bound by Glamour, for a thousand years, a part of me has died with you, each time you bury someone you love!
As long as there is life in me, I will do all I can to ensure that I dont have to bury you, Ian!"
Her voice abuptly softened to a fearful whisper, "I dont know how...to bury you...because I would be lost...without..." Her voice in his mind faltered for a moment, as she whispered, "...you."
Slowly, Ian looked up trying to see her through tears. Her voice continude, with the familiar crystaline precision but her tone carried the affection and fear that only a man's most treasured friend could convey, "You owe me more than this..."
The words stung as only the truth can sting a man. For all the time spent, her constant companionship, her unrelenting guard as he slept. For the sanity she always seemed to be able to give in his darkest moments...Ian knew she deserved better than hopelessly throwing away his life.
Carefully, but with a tone that seemed tinged with tears, even though here many eyes could shed none she said, " All those who have taken the time to love you, deserve better than this."
Ian Xanthe nodded lightly through fresh tears as he leaned his forehead to hers, and a very rare emotion from Ian touched her mind, ...vulnerability,...as he whispered, "I'm not sure ...that I know how to keep going anymore."
Samarah answered gently, "One day, ...one hour, ...one moment at a time...as we always have for the things in which we believe."
Slowly she lowered him to his feet , and he sat on the cold snow...remembering everything...everyone...
He had no words left... and none were needed as Samarah waited patiently...as she always had for him.
Many quiet hours....he sat with a millennia of memories...before looking to her and saying softly."Thank you...for putting up with me."
Samarah's mind was once again aligning, her thoughts returning to the clarity she was used to as the chaos of emotion faded...and she answered in return, "You are worth the time."
In silence the Doomsayer and Nocnista turned toward the trod that led to Sosaria...and toward the only thing they could both agree, they still believed in...
...a Freehold, named Roses.
The suprising blast of icy air pulled the breath from Ian's lungs, as his foot hit the snow, making a distinctive soft crunch on the otherside of the Trod. A field of ice rolling on in every direction where once there had been spring grasslands. The air was still thick with Glamour, hanging almost electrically over the region. Halfway to the thin line of the horizon could be seen the perpetual, and ever-raging glamour storm known as the Versalis to the Fae of Arcadia. The Storm had always been. As long as there had been dreams the storm roared through them. It was the manifestation of one of the most pure laws of Glamour: Change...
The Storm Ripped apart the fabric of the Dreaming itself, leveling entire empires in moments, rearranging and finally redistributing the Glamour without prejudice or distinction. Nothing could endure the fury of the Versalis, save the kingdoms that had employed lengthy and ancient arts devoted to anchoring thier palaces, and cities to the very fabric of the Dreaming. It had long been called the soul of the Dreaming itself...a constant rebirth of Glamour that wandered the realms of the Near and Far Dreaming ceaslessly. Ian had missed the storm passing through this stretch of the silver path by only a minute or less, and stood now in the wake of the most furious force in all the Dreaming.
The snow was bright white, reflecting the light of a full and literally blue moon that silently hung high above the icy wastes on which he now stood. The landscape was dotted with spires of deep azure rock and ice, that protruded like crooked teeth from the otherwise smooth rolling snow.
A whisper floated from his barely parted lips and snaked its way through the ice cold air carried on a cloud of Ian's own breath as the weight of crushed hope crashed down on him...
"No..." His heart sank, as he too, sank to his knees in the bare dusting of snow on the ground. He was too late to save her... She, as most every woman, wife, and mate he had ever loved was gone. More than a millennia of images of burying those he loved flooded through his memories. Faces, emotions, lifetimes shared, all culminating in image of the garden of stone he left in his wake, gravestones on which he had written each of thier names...
He had lived so long, that the people of the Kingdoms of Arcadia had given the chaos he wrought a name. Doomsayer...
Glamour hated Ian Xanthe.
And he hated it back...with all that he was.
His eyes listlessly refocused on the edge of the quickly disappearing Versalis storm as it raced away to the west. Ian stood slowly, and began running...with a new hope. One in which he could catch it before it was gone...and let it take him, with her. His unaging muscles stretched groaning as the fresh stitches Phaen had woven through the deep gashes recieved only days before , began to snap, and unravel. Physical pain was only a dull, unoticed breath in the force of loss and hoplessness that now raged through him. The thin strip of clouds sillohetted by the myriad colored lighting roaring through them, were still disappearing faster than he was able to cover ground. Glamour erupted from deep within him and seared through muscle and bone bringing the magic Quicksilver to him as he cast the cantrip invoking the art of Wayfare. The snow passed by now in a blur, and as each cantrip faded after the few seconds of its duration passed, he cast again, ...and again...
He approched the edge of the storm with speed that left drops of blood from the freshly opened wounds trailing and almost hanging before dripping to the snow in his passing. He was close, so close now he could taste the Glamour like copper in his mouth that was weaving through the air beneath the clouds of the Versalis. He would find peace now, rest in a moment...after a lifetime too long.
It took his mind a few seconds to feel the throb of pain just above his right ankle, ...and the image of the world slipping from a blur to the detailed focus of gravity winning as he tumbled forward, skidding and rolling several yards through the snow beneath him to a stop within a stones throw of the Versalis's edge. His Glamour was expended, and he could not call upon the speed of Quicksilver for at least the passing of another night.Confusion and rage filled him, as the storm once more was speeding away faster than any man could run, and with it, any hope Ian Xanthe had of being with Seiren again. The pain from muscles used far beyond thier still damaged and healing state, flashed through him. Ian slowly, turned and rolled to his back to see what had robbed him of the rest he so desperately desired. Standing a few yards behind, motionless, was Samarah...waiting, as she always had for him. She had taken her full Nocnista form, standing on jointed sleek ebony legs that reached the height of a full grown person. Her bright red eyes, and sleek chitenous body, gleaming in the half light of the moon. One of the her long front legs was still extended, and its end bent a bit as it had caught his ankle seconds before.
She had been with him now for twelve hundred years. His chimeric familiar...one of the most powerful of the nightmare chimera that still existed in Arcadia, as they had grown in strength and knowledge together over the years. The silence of the moment that seemed to last an eternity, as an old fae, searched in vain for a reason as he studied the ancient chimera, was broken only by the sound of her voice in his mind. A prescise female's voice just above a whisper, whose tone and pitch sounded like glass towers being shattered miles away , "I regret... to inform you Ian, that your request for suicide has been denied."
Samarah could feel his emotions, knew Ian better than he knew himself, and with the logic and foresight of a spider...she knew exactly what was comming. She could feel the Dreaming renowned Fiona rage, as it began to bubble up from the depths of his Fae soul, and although her body did not visibly tense, her muscles flexed below her shiny exoskeleton, and readied themselves...no creature in the Dreaming could avoid the magical fear produced by the presence of a Nocnista, save a Fiona, because of the fearless boon granted to them by Glamour from the First of thier House.
Ian could feel her calm...logical, almost alien thought processes, as his anger spread. It had taken the two of them a few years after they first joined, to process one anothers very different almost diametrically opposite thoughts and feelings, and begin communicating in this way. She never really had feelings...in all the time he had known her. A spider simply had no use for thought processess that seemed to obscure rational behavior. She was never angry or saddened, her voice never raised or lowered...she simply, calmly, was the balance to the chaos of the Fiona with which she had bonded.
Despite his injured body, Ian was on his feet in moments, his hands clenched: one in a fist, and the other around the handle of the sword that was drawn and readied in a flash of movement. The air whistled across the surface of the blade as it was leveled toward Samarah's two largest eyes in the center of her head. The sword strike stopped abruptly at an equally swift shiny leg, that raised to block it. The blades edge made a soft clinking sound as it hit and withdrew from her chiten covered leg, and was followed by strike from his foot as he kicked toward her mandible protected mouth.
They had sparred often in thier hundreds of years together, and the fluid dance of Ians blade and body was matched only by the sheer swiftness of Samarah's supernatural reflexes and octagonal perception from her many eyes. But never before had the two "danced" in midst of Fiona anger since thier first encounter all those years ago. He, a young Fiona looking for the fight of his life, and she , a rather young Nocnista , that had never before encountered anything that posed a threat to the poison and precision of her hunting ability. They had fought for fourty-three hours, until both were so exhausted they agreed on a draw, and never since then had left one anothers side.
Samarah opened her mind once more, gauging his emotion, and patiently countering strike, after strike...
Ian's voice roared into the silence of the crisp winter air, "Why!? Why would you rob me!?" again the blade snaking towards her and once more, was parried by a swift movement of one of her many legs.
In his mind her voice once again calm, and crystaline said simply " Your self destruction is not...condusive, to my desires."
He may have been a seasoned warrior and fighter, but Ian had already put his body through hell only days ago, and the fatigue of the damage done was quickly weakening him with every strike.
His muscles couldnt react fast enough to parry the tip of her leg as it struck his jaw with the force of a troll's fist. It sent him reeling, to the side, and down to one knee. The world came once more into focus, and slowly the blood began to drip from his freshly split lip to the snow beneath him. Ian chuckled lightly, looking at the blood as it fell. It was a dangerous sort of laugh, the sort of sound produced by the chaos of a mind that was now unravelling with debilitating weight of a Fiona's emotion.
Samarah had heard that laugh often enough to know, that if she allowed this to continue, she would have to kill him, because he wouldnt stop...until one of them were dead.
Ian didnt even see the second blow as it was leveled against his opposite jaw...and once more in a flash, he was sent reeling and landed on his side a few feet away. His sword remained behind under one of the many well placed legs of Samarah, where she had pinned it, before hitting him.
This time it took well over a minute for Ian's conciousness to readjust and focus enough to look at her.
Through gritted teeth his voice could be heard once more, "You Cold, uncaring, bitch...It's my life, my choice, and I'm tired..."
Samarah had moved now a few feet from him, and righted him slowly, leaning him to rest his back against one of the jagged spires of stone that jutted across the snowy plain.
Her response was quick and calm, "It is...not yet time..." her mind struggled for a moment, trying to express the thought, "I...do not wish...." again a flash of strange chaos and feeling, as he interrupted, "I dont give a damn anymore, what you think..." Ian's eyes narrowed, "and I dont give a shit about what you want."
Ian focused on her eyes as he continude, "You'll never understand how I feel, or how hard it is to watch everyone around you die, and not be able to die with them. You dont understand falling in love with a mate, or the pain and loss that comes in losing that love. Ive held some as they died Samarah! Powerless in all my Sidhe wisdom, to save them. Im tired of a grave being my last memory of those I love. I cant do this anymore! I dont have it in me anymore..." His voice filled with a sarcastic spitefulness as he continude, "But you...you cant feel a damn thing, you just dont have use for it. Fae are illogical in thier pointless emotion to you... as you have expressed for centuries in the many arguments we've had." Samarah could feel now the hopelessness, the fatigue, of a mind that had seen more than any man should see, and endured longer than any emotional creature should have to exist. And while his features remained youthfully immortal, the soul inside was that of a very old man.
Ian yelled as loudly as he could, " I can't do this anymore!"
Somthing within the mind of Samarah snapped suddenly as he finished the words.
In a flash Ian was being held up and slammed into the rock behind him, several feet from the ground. Samarah's strong frontal feelers and the claws as big as hands held him by the collar of his shirt and pressed him to the stone. Her eyes seemed to light on fire and glow from within as they met the surprised violet of Ian's eyes. He blinked a moment, and his mind was flooded with love, and fear, and pain and certainty, ...from her, as her voice roared in his mind "It breaks my heart to see you this way!"
She meant every word...he could feel it, and she understood emotions he had been conviced she couldnt comprehend.
Ian's violet eyes immediately filled with tears of apology , and shame...as he looked down slowly from her eyes...
Samarah's voice continude to tear through his mind with a force neither knew she was capable of expressing, "I have been with you through this all, I have guarded... and protected you, your mates,...fought and bled along side you!"
Ians shoulders heaved slightly in a silent sob.
Samarahs mind raced to find the words as she continude yelling, "Our Souls are bound by Glamour, for a thousand years, a part of me has died with you, each time you bury someone you love!
As long as there is life in me, I will do all I can to ensure that I dont have to bury you, Ian!"
Her voice abuptly softened to a fearful whisper, "I dont know how...to bury you...because I would be lost...without..." Her voice in his mind faltered for a moment, as she whispered, "...you."
Slowly, Ian looked up trying to see her through tears. Her voice continude, with the familiar crystaline precision but her tone carried the affection and fear that only a man's most treasured friend could convey, "You owe me more than this..."
The words stung as only the truth can sting a man. For all the time spent, her constant companionship, her unrelenting guard as he slept. For the sanity she always seemed to be able to give in his darkest moments...Ian knew she deserved better than hopelessly throwing away his life.
Carefully, but with a tone that seemed tinged with tears, even though here many eyes could shed none she said, " All those who have taken the time to love you, deserve better than this."
Ian Xanthe nodded lightly through fresh tears as he leaned his forehead to hers, and a very rare emotion from Ian touched her mind, ...vulnerability,...as he whispered, "I'm not sure ...that I know how to keep going anymore."
Samarah answered gently, "One day, ...one hour, ...one moment at a time...as we always have for the things in which we believe."
Slowly she lowered him to his feet , and he sat on the cold snow...remembering everything...everyone...
He had no words left... and none were needed as Samarah waited patiently...as she always had for him.
Many quiet hours....he sat with a millennia of memories...before looking to her and saying softly."Thank you...for putting up with me."
Samarah's mind was once again aligning, her thoughts returning to the clarity she was used to as the chaos of emotion faded...and she answered in return, "You are worth the time."
In silence the Doomsayer and Nocnista turned toward the trod that led to Sosaria...and toward the only thing they could both agree, they still believed in...
...a Freehold, named Roses.