• Solo • The New Chaos.

Nir'wei comes to grips with facing a new dimension of reality and begins his journey to find the Great Beyond.

Moderator: Staff

User avatar
Nir'wei
Approved Character
Posts: 989
Joined: Mon Apr 18, 2016 6:38 am
Race: Mortal Born
Profession: Councillor of Natural Affairs
Renown: 897
Character Sheet
Character Wiki
Plot Notes
Personal Journal
Templates
Letters
Wealth Tier: Tier 5

Featured

Contribution

Milestones

RP Medals

Miscellaneous

Events

The New Chaos.

Image
Ymiden 1st, 719, immediately following this.
The Untold.

You, and your pack, are on your own down there.
No Immortal will find you.
No connection will escape.
You, and your pack, are on your own.

Those words reeled, over and over, in his screaming mind, as he remembered the Immortal tearing a gaping wound in the fabric of the world, revealing a blood red maelstrom. A void that stretched out infinitely, with no ground and no sky, no air and no water. A place of true chaos and a primordial emptiness, where no mortal should ever tread. Then it launched towards him and swallowed him whole, along with the rest of his pack. The last vestiges of his grip on the world, now that Faith, undoubtedly, assumed him dead. Now that he was dead, no matter what twisted joke the Immortal had pulled, dragging his soul back to some lucid half-dream, a translucent spirit-beast of a wolf. He had to keep reminding himself that. If he forgot, for even a moment, it was like he could almost imagine this was real.

He floated, but it wasn't really floating. Everything just stretched out beneath him infinitely, as it did in all directions. Light seemed to come from everything and nothing at once, so at least he could see the nothing better. Colours, lights, swirls, they seemed to be everywhere, mingling in the air with no source and no direction, bursting into existence and dissipating in constant flux. It was a palpable sensation. At one point he'd tried to open his mouth - his muzzle, actually - and he'd found tastes, so many tastes he couldn't keep up, sweet and sour and savoury, beautiful and disgusting and everything inbetween. Perpetual sensory overload. Infinite possibilities. For better and for worse. For the sake of his mental sanity he'd shut them all out as quickly as possible. Too much to handle. All of it was too much to handle. But that wasn't even the worst bit. The bit that made him want to scream and pant and cry. It was the fact that all of this was unraveling before him. Piece by agonising piece. Like being trapped in an hourglass and watching every grain of sand fall, slowly growing closer to smothering him completely.

Even though this place by all accounts should have spread infinitely in all directions, there were 'walls'. Perceivable edges, no matter how close or far away they were, though this was no mere box. The limits of this place folded over themselves endlessly, appearing in the middle of nowhere or so far out into the distance that reaching them was like stretching a hand out to touch a cloud. He could see them crumbling, cracks forming and splitting whatever held this infinite chaos together - or perhaps kept it from just breaking apart into everything else and rending that too. Or perhaps those boundaries were just the boundaries of this reality folding over itself, merging together to become whole? Why else would a pure, perfect cube of glass spontaneously form before his eyes, then shatter into a million tiny shards the moment he batted it with a paw, scattering vibrant swathes of rainbow light as they shot in every direction across the cosmos?

The Dead, a field of dried corpses walking towards the soul tornado that had destroyed them all, had been better than this. The Cathedral of Dreams, bitter remains that it was now, had been better than this. The Miasma, stinking rotten forest filled with lost and twisted creatures, had been better than this. For all the strangeness, there had at least been some basic pattern of order to keep him grounded. Here, there was nothing. Everything he'd thought he'd ever known was wrong.

In the vast emptiness there was only one landmark to guide his way, to orient him. It was only by looking at it that he could realise he was slowly somersaulting backwards. The Ball. Like a moon drawn close or some indescribable celestial being, it loomed nearby, motionless and calm. In a dimension of infinite colours and vibrancy, it stuck out like a sore thumb, pitch-black and dead, almost diseased from the way it hung. He wanted to say it was slightly above him, but without any sense of direction it could have been below, to the side, in front, behind. Its surface was cracked, pock-marked, with huge tears and chunks ripped out of its surface. Pieces of it hung in stasis around those open wounds, making it look like they could have been made seconds ago, even though they could have been made before he was born. Beneath the broken surface things swirled and snapped, somehow even more vibrant and chaotic than the outside, and he could hear it too. Winds whipping, the sounds of grating stone and shearing metal. Things constantly breaking and falling apart. What being could tear apart something big enough to encompass all of Idalos? He shuddered even at the thought. He'd been silly to think that the Miasma was an empty place, squalid though it was. This place might be no different. In a dimension where everything was possible, why not towering monsters with pinky fingers as tall as a house?

No, no. Stop. STOP.

He'd done this over and over again. Struggling and failing to come to terms with it all and then drifting into abstracts and empty thoughts. It was this place. Overpowering, unbearable, oppressive. It was this task. It was the fact that he'd already died and they were still ready to torture him with a glimmer of hope against impossible odds, toss him into the void between worlds and wait for him to succumb to madness in the brief moments he has before extinction. Or that's what they'd said. After all, it wasn't real.

The others were there. Lingering nearby but still spread out around him, much in the same way they'd been scattered the moment the Immortal had tossed them into the nothingness. Greyhide was upside-down, or perhaps the right way around. Cold, Myrth, Squeak, they were chatting somewhere in the background of his mind, still coming to terms with their new transformation. Cold in particular no longer looked gaunt and unwell. Squeak mingled easily, because of course he did. Vabina's troubled mind still panged with shame and loss - even in her last moments, it seemed all she could think about was seeing Karliah once more. Archailist was in catatonic shock; he'd accepted Nir's death willingly and with grace, and now being shoved back into their connection was clearly going to take some time. And last, Cyshe. Oh, dear Cyshe. Her head was an enigma. He'd have better luck reaching the Great Beyond with a blindfold on than make sense of that tangle. But she was alive. Hell, she'd literally died for him, and she didn't even seem sad about it. He was her Warden. She needed him. And she knew that even in her death, she'd never abandon him. Well, she was right. Even in the face of his own death, he didn't regret his choice to not take Traveller at the first moment he could and fly out of there. Even now, his heart swelled with pride, remembering them all fighting tooth and claw in the face of inevitable death. Bloodying them until they almost broke. Showing them all what they got, when they kicked the dog one too many times.

Now it'd brought them here, but they weren't angry at him. He'd stayed with them and fought with them until the bitter end, and now even beyond they'd continue to fight, until they made it home again. As ever, they were the chain that held him up. And he was the anchor that weighed them down. Without them, he'd sink to despair. Without him, they'd float off into nothing. Together... together they'd made it this far. He owed it to them just as much to himself to keep them all together now.

Taking a deep breath of what was most certainly not air, his mind suddenly leaped back to the beginning in a vivid hallucination, brought forth by Archailist and his tenuous grasp on his soul. No, not the boat bound for Rynmere. No, not even his reunification with Faith, or his first meeting with her, or Greyhide. In all his life, there was only one positive thing his mother had ever told him. A deceptively simple exercise, once she'd had him sit on the floor of their small wooden shack as the smell of fresh-picked orchids tickled his nose from a vase nearby. "Think of the flower," she told him. "Picture it in your head; white and pure." It wasn't hard, just mentally picturing a flower, but she hadn't been satisfied. He needed to think of every detail, every petal, every curve. Then imagine it blossoming, thinking of the way it opened, the petals turning towards the light. "This is your soul. Now... feel its colour turning red. This is your passion." He didn't imagine it this time, or rather, he didn't put any effort into it. The colours shifted with her words, growing from the stem all the way to the tip, from white to blood red. "Feel it rushing inside of you, filling you to the brim. Feel the power, the heat and pressure deep, all the way down in your chest." She wouldn't stop until he was practically shaking with it, the scent of flowers somehow permeating through it all. "Now, orange, your creativity. Yellow, energy. Green, your peace. Blue, honesty. Purple, dignity." Each time she cycled, new words replaced the old. Aspects of his personality. Emotions. At one point, yellow became his right arm and purple became his left leg. His soul, his mind, and finally his body. "We're all a lot like flowers, you know. We have roots that we never leave, we have leaves that we stretch to the sky. I dream of flowers in the sky, you know. Filling it... until the world turns the most vibrant shade of black."

The memory faded, slowly, and his bleary eyes opened. Back to the eternal colours, that now looked so much like an eternal field that it almost made him laugh. Laugh!

Yes, he'd died. Yes, so had all of them. But this was real, for better or for worse. This prismatic void. His paws waved erratically in the emptiness, trying to find something tangible, something whole. He wanted it, he needed it, and he poured every ounce of whatever he had left into finding one, until... his paws met solid floor. They didn't; there wasn't anything below him and never had been, but for the first time ever it actually felt like he was standing on something roughly solid. Ever so slowly the others around him found their own, roughly centered around him, and with every mind concentrating on that one thought, the 'ground' seemed more stable. Only Archailist and Cyshe refused, the squirrel settled on Nir's head and the water-spirit stood on Greyhide.

The Ball loomed before them, but despite its frail and broken appearance, every crack and hole seemed filled with nothing but reflective black ooze. Besides, he didn't like his chances of finding anything of use in there. Instead he turned outwards, to the vast emptiness of the prismatic void. With no walls, no floors, no barriers and nothing but an incomprehensible eternity stretched out before him, he started to walk. Like many things, distance didn't seem to work as it was supposed to, and every step stretched with the length of several hundred, causing the Ball that had once been the only grounding point in this floating chaos to rapidly shrink and shrivel from existence behind him, until he turned his head and found nothing but the same emptiness that awaited him every other direction. However, now, he kept moving regardless.

From now on, as he'd always been, he and his pack would be their own anchors. And it was time to explore the prismatic void, and find a way deeper, into the Great Beyond.
word count: 2064
We return to where we started, and pass onwards into history.
User avatar
Nursia
Posts: 206
Joined: Sun May 26, 2019 8:24 pm
Race: Undead (Ghost)
Profession: OOC Account
Renown: 0
Point Bank Thread
Wealth Tier: Tier 1

Milestones

Miscellaneous

Re: The New Chaos.

I begin my batch of reviews with a very cerebral, thoughtful take on the Beyond.

You tackle high concepts, here. The idea of an infinitely folding space, and positional relativism paired with sensory overload. Usually authors tend to avoid this sort of topic because it can be heavy on semantics and light on action.

But you managed to do this exceptionally right. Nir'wei is subject to this confusing mesh of reality in such a way that it's not only interesting, but it kept me hooked all throughout the post. That's a significant achievement in writing, and I cannot wait to read the rest of this.

Enjoy your rewards!


Nir'Wei

Rewards


Knowledges:
Meditation: Contemplate the nature of the soul to bring your troubles into perspective.
Meditation: True happiness comes from accepting yourself.
Meditation: Stability is not a state of mind, it's a state of being.
Detection: Filtering out the colours and noise of the background.
Detection: Searching for flaws and openings on a surface.
Detection: Picking out identifying details of the Untold dimension.
Wealth:
Renown:
EXP:
+10

Feedback


Understand that all criticisms are done in good faith. It would be a greater disrespect to not say anything in the face of problems. Please contact me through this account's inbox if you wish to further communicate on the matter of improvement, or if you feel as though anything is unduly harsh.


Player #2

Rewards


Knowledges:
Wealth:
Renown:
EXP:

Feedback


Understand that all criticisms are done in good faith. It would be a greater disrespect to not say anything in the face of problems. Please contact me through this account's inbox if you wish to further communicate on the matter of improvement, or if you feel as though anything is unduly harsh.
Image
word count: 296
Post Reply Request an XP Review Claim Wealth Thread

Return to “The Untold”