2018-06-01: The Inevitable Nature Of All Things
- Log: The Inevitable Nature Of All Things
- Cast: Loren Voss, Isiris Shango'Ra
- Where: Pearloats Pasture
- Date: June 1st 2018
- Summary: Loren, en route to the camp at the Tzadkiel's landing site, crosses paths with the man known only to Gebler as 'Azazel'. A nightmare ensues.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
Rain is now a near certainity in parts of the Pearloats pastures. According to the locals, the past year has been a trial and a half, with flooded croplands and failed harvests become more the norm than the exception.
Today had started out full of ill promise, but with no percipitation yet in the forecast.
Yet, as it happens, is the key word in that statement.
The message is sent. Loren allows himself a breath of relief as the tablet finally reports a successful transmission across encrypted channels. Not likely that there would be anyone able to listen in, but why take chances?
He'd been delayed. Maybe deVriese had beaten him back to the landing site. Maybe he should have tagged along with her after all.
Maybe it's too late to regret anything now.
Command will have the essence of the shift in Lastonbell at least. They'll know someone now has what they shouldn't. Then it'll just be a matter of a debriefing once he gets back...
Damn. He really should have gone with her. But he'd been paranoid about being followed...
The message was sent, it seems, just in time. A flash. A low rumble of thunder.
The deluge that quickly follows.
I certainly have all the luck, he thinks, shoving the tablet deep into his bag and races down the road, splashing through the shallowly-filled puddles in his path. Where's a good place to take shelter--
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
That is when the pilgrimage arrives.
It starts inocuously, a black crow flying past. There is no warning of the thing, no horizon to look to to have seen them approaching. A group -- at least a hundred strong -- begin to make their way through the pastures. As the rain peals overhead in great thick sheets, sending the traveller barrelling for cover, he will almost assuredly find himself in the midst of the crowd almost before he knows it. It is in the same fashion as a man who takes one turn too many in a massive labyrinth only to find himself in an unfamiliar territory, in an unfamiliar terrain, and only knows when it is far too late to see.
Children, all of them, a group of lost and wandering souls, sheathed almost entirely in black and grey, sporting skin that is two degrees too pale to be natural. Shrouds cover them, as if they head to some great reckoning, head to the death site of some great beast. The group in greyscale begins to pass Loren almost too quickly to match their shambling gait, moving slowly in one axis, but travelling a few paces too fast to match their biology. The rain pounds at a hundred hoods, but is never minded.
Crows and blackbirds of varying sizes flap through the air, unaware of the storm.
The group moves with nary a sound beyond the vaguely insectile sound of feet picking their way through the wet earth, heard only in the merciful pauses in the rainfall, but nevertheless the sort of sound that eats to the very core of a man. They come from Lastonbell, as if a grand crew of survivors seeking refuge, but they head in no particular direction, no particular town or way that could be discerned as the final destination of the great shambling crowd.
A bird laughs overhead, and it carries over the din.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
He's not looking where he's going, really. The rain's falling in sheets as it is and visibility is skewed. The most he's hoping for is to catch some light in the distance, or some break against the horizon that at least suggests an inn or some similar lodging.
But right now he'd even take a tree with a particularly strange girl.
He's nearly soaked through already. The bag's waterproof, but it's only small comfort that it won't mean damage to the gear within it.
This was where Rolance grew its grain -- is still where it attempts to grow its grain, if with somewhat less success.
There are no trees. No breaks.
No shelter.
"Ha--?!"
It's like they rose out of the ground. He's suddenly caught up in a crowd of people, dressed in grey, nearly invisible under the unrelenting downpour. He stumbles, turning to look after them as the crowd seemingly presses on without stopping. Even in this sort of weather.
Loren stares after them, sliding his rain-coated glasses from his face. "Refugees...?"
Wait. From which side? Anyone from Hyland would have gone east. Anyone from Rolance... would have...
That thought flies from his mind as he watches how the crowd 'moves'.
The hair on the back of his neck stands on end. Slowly, he takes a step backwards, before catching himself and turning around sharply.
Something's wrong.
His breath slows, draws tight.
"Hey. Hey! Where are you going!?" he yells after the crowd, grasping for some hint of normalcy here.
Something's wrong!
He takes a breath. And slowly here, he draws the blade sheathed at his side.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The children will end up walking right through Loren if he doesn't take great care to move to a side.
It's hard to see the children walking through the din of rain and the torrential downpour. But even so, on closer examination, they are cut from the cloth of the nether, their hoods, caps and coats just barely translucent to the eye. One can see the other side of the dirt beyond them as they move past, and perhaps if one focused hard enough at the fine edges, even see such vagaries as the stars and the midnight sky on their peripheries. But that is the only detail that a man could make, were he finely composed enough to do so.
They are as silent as the grave as he shouts after them, their pilgrimage and procession uninterrupted by his grim realization, and the sheer horror with which he tries to gain their attentions. They shuffle onward, undeterred. Even the slide of steel from its sheath gains him no mind. And even if he chose to strike one of them, it would be doubtful that it would produce anything. At the best, he may be ignored. At the worst, there would be blood.
"And who are you, to draw upon these grounds such steel..."
The voice is a measure of honey in the ear. Impossibly dark, and beyond stretch of the mind. Madness can be a provocative thing.
The man materializes from the nexus of a few souls crossing upon one another, appearing standing in the shadow the moment they pass. He is unlike any other traveler tonight, standing there as if he'd never known anything else, and had been waiting there for eternity. He faces away from Loren when he first draws steel, and the symbol on the coat at his back is plain: the long centipede of Gevura, the symbol for Gebler forces. He stares off, long and into the distance, calm and unpreturbed. "You would harm those who bear you no ill?"
He laughs, and it is a horrible, musical thing.
"How cruel," he surmises appreciatively.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
They do indeed walk through him, though this isn't something Loren notices. Not at first, anyway.
It will ultimately clinch the observation he's made: what's before him, what he sees, can't be real. It's an illusion. A construct made of...
It's not against what he takes to not really be present that he draws a blade. This is solely for whatever else lies in wake.
But it probably looks about the same, with no other target presenting itself. With Loren himself standing on the fulcrum between the retreating 'refugees' and whatever else might lie waiting further down the road.
Something's wrong! the thought insists again, and it's all he can do not to scream back at his own internal dialogue that he knows that already. He knows that, he knows that.
A voice speaks and his mouth goes dry. Where--?
He turns.
And there. He. Is.
Loren has all of a second for his gaze to trace the long symbol of Gebler's emblem down the back of the man's coat, and that's still enough to know that the person standing before him now is no ally.
Months ago, there had been a report. The Major had crossed paths with a certain person. Was it the report or the rumors that had said that only Kahm had returned. He can't remember.
A shudder works its path downwards, out from the spine, down along the arms. The hand holding the blade -- not a Solarian sword, not anymore -- shakes.
In a heartbeat more, it feels like all the blood in his body has gone to ice.
"...Azazel."
This is where I'll...
The mental rejoinder comes in hard, not unlike a hand across the face. No, you idiot! You're not allowed to die here! Do you want 'perished like a fool' to be the final comment on your paperwork? Get out of here!
He still doesn't move immediately. His gaze remains fixed on the figure before him; his free hand reaches up slowly to slide his glasses into his jacket pocket.
Lightning overhead sheds illumination. Too brief. Too soon gone again.
Loren takes a breath. Water slicks across his face; he eases one boot backwards with a squelch into the mud.
And there from the rain itself he draws out its nature.
The essence of water is to flow.
This, he draws into his body.
And in the next breath and next heartbeat, he's turned to bolt, a desperate flight across a muddied road.
Even... the Major couldn't. I...
GS: Loren Voss has attacked Loren Voss with Haste Factor! GS: Loren Voss has completed his action. GS: Loren Voss takes a solid hit from Loren Voss's Haste Factor for 0 hit points! GS: Quick! Statuses applied to Loren Voss!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
He turns to run.
And he, in turn, raises his head by three degrees.
'By the time you think to run, it is already over.'
Loren turns to run, and finds himself on the steel steets of Etrenank.
It is a very different world from the one on which the Sacred Empire precariously balances. The sky is dark, and the clouds that normally form the carpet beneath the world are black and turbulent above. The rain seems everpresent no matter how far Loren runs, and in this visage it is impossible to tell how long the skies have been weeping for the city in the sky. A world once gleaming, pristine and polished is now warped and bent, rust gathering in the spaces in the dark. Long green streaks of calcium trail from the water flowing past Loren's boot, forming a torrid white crust as it drains off the edge of the world.
There, ahead of where Loren has elected to run, the older man is standing once again. His hands slide up as he tucks them into the pockets of his long grey coat, the gorgerine-style military armor embellishments along its breast and mantle shifting and bunching with the motion. His back is still facing him, and it feels very much like he might as well had run backwards, for all the good it's done him. He is fast, and his body moves like the water he channels. He could escape. Easily. But in what direction should he even run?
And the agent is so inviting, when he speaks.
"The site for your own consecration is this place, this time. Whether it is fatal to you is your own decision. Ah, but you've travelled such a long way just to perish in a long forgotten place. Unless that is your wish. Do you want that to be the story of you... that they tell the workers in their hexagon cells? ..."
He turns, and it seems to take forever. No one thing he does seems to belie the notion of his facing Loren, but he turns regardless. His movements are alien, and he never actually is seen in motion, for as nonsensical as the notion is. A moment ago, he was facing away. Then he stood closer to Loren, facing him, his hands never leaving his pockets. His image refracts, kaleidoscopes as if it were merely a figment of a fevered imagination, an image in a mind that is too addled to remember right. Was he ever facing away from Loren? He was. Did he move? He must have. You did see him move, didn't you? Yes, but though you can recall the exact moment in which he was in the middle of turning, each iteration of his movement is hard to place, each action occurring as a discrete sense of 'change' but no motion, and each discrete frame of reference occurs out of order with eachother, some even occurring more than once.
It is headache inducing to even determine which direction he is facing even now.
And, those eyes.
His eyes are as blue as the spring skies, glowing with daylight even in the darkest night. They are clear, crystalline, and beyond inviting. Truthfully, they are abhorrent. The thing is so perfect so as to be artificial, and to be painful and unnatural to even look at, even to behold. That he stares evenly and calmly regardless, showing Loren an unnatural stigma beyond the ken of sheer attractive biology is a statement in itself. It is the kind of terrible thing that one cannot tear eyes from, the kind of horrible thing that is correct in every way, and so pleasing so as to invoke revulsion.
It is cruel, the way the nightmare agent stares.
Do you still feel like running?" he asks, his voice warm and amused by the Ether censor's antics. "Come and sit with me awhile. There is no where else you can go, and be subjugated in this fashion. I will make it easy for you, the one who was left behind."
If Loren takes a moment to look behind him, he will find himself on the very edge of Etrenank, his very ankles being nipped at by the great void behind him. There are no clouds beneath him to sheathe his gaze, and no ground below that to suggest a terminus to an incidental fall. Beyond vertigo, the world yawns out behind him, opening up into an inverted space below where one could fall forever, starving well before they ever hit terra firma. The feeling of height, even here, is stomach churning, and leaves the question: Again.... where does one run?
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Loren Voss with Hope Evisceration! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action. GS: Loren Voss takes a glancing hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's Hope Evisceration for 32 hit points! GS: Weaken! Statuses applied to Loren Voss!
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
He turns to run, sped onwards by the power he possesses by birthright. He does not hold much hope he will get very far. Still, there's a chance -- however slight -- that he might be able to lose the man in the pouring rain.
And then for Loren, the world changes.
He slows to a stop, as if each step were heavier than the last. A bad idea, a part of him chimes in, but how could he help but to look up through the hauntingly familiar streets, his gaze taking in the city distorted. There, he's sure he knows that building, but it's only barely recognizable to him now.
It's as if it's all been cracked open like an egg and left to rot.
The rain still falls. He's soaked to the skin.
There's nobody here. Except--
Before him is again 'Azazel'.
The fingers of his free hand curl inwards, nails finding his palm. It's as if he hadn't so much run away as had space around him distorted instead. Like he hadn't taken a step at all.
"..."
He backs up, treading out half a step. It should be mud underfoot, but it feels like steel.
"This... doesn't make any sense," he finally utters, shaking his head. "You're-- what have you done? You can't possibly have--"
He becomes aware of it in a stepwise manner. The urgent thought unfolding from the base of his brain. The realization he'd halfway already had, and the realization he'd lost his grip upon what is actually in front of him.
'It's an illusion. A construct made of ether, the thought completes.
This isn't real. This isn't real. This isn't real.
"...None of this is real!"
And slowly, shutter-stop, the man turns.
He did, didn't he? Loren hasn't turned away, and yet, he couldn't say for sure precisely when 'Azazel' faced him. Started to face him. Wasn't facing him. He straightens, lifting the blade before him.
Inexpertly.
Loren was never trained in how to use a sword, has only ever watched someone else do so. It's a mimic of what he feels might be correct at this time, his heart all the while pounding in his veins.
This is the point where he actually looks looks the man in the eyes. He discovers in a heartbeat that he can't find his breath. The eyes are... it's unnatural. Terrible. And yet perfect. Even beautiful.
What's wrong with you? He'll kill you and leave your corpse to the birds!
He shifts his other foot backwards, and there freezes. His gaze tears at last away from 'Azazel' as he glances over his shoulder to discover what he'd hoped wasn't true.
He's on the edge. The edge of the city. Or the world? His boot after all is hanging in the empty air above a yawning black. There's nothing, nothing below. If he let himself fall-- this isn't real, nothing should happen--
He shudders. And yet, how much faith does he have in what he can't see?
Then he shifts his weight, planting that foot back down on what passes for 'stability' as he stares back at the man before him. He takes a step forward.
"I wasn't... left behind. You're trying to get into my head, aren't you?" His eyes hood.
The rain still falls.
"You'll have to try harder than that."
Where do you go when back is no longer an option?
The answer is: you go through.
He grips the blade -- steadying it with both hands -- and charges straight at the nightmare agent.
GS: Loren Voss has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Astral Hammer! GS: Loren Voss has completed his action. GS: Isiris Shango'Ra guards a hit from Loren Voss's Astral Hammer for 59 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
"What makes a nightmare any less real than what you determine to be reality?"
The two are alone now, aside from the distant call of birds in the distance, perching on the carcasses of shattered drones embedded into the street. The pilgrimage, one presumes, continues in a land far away. This world is all that remains, or is, as far as the eye can see.
The man with the blue eyes continues staring at Loren thoughtfully, in the throes of his struggle to make sense of what is around him. His declaration does not surprise him in the slightest, though his blink is slow and catlike, calm tempered by the unreal nature of his eyes. Even a second's worth of respite is merciful succor from those clear and bright diseased eyes.
"The judgments you make about the world around you are arbitrary, biased towards your own comfort. But your body understands what your mind attempts to refute with logic. That there is no reason in a reasonless world..."
"That is why you were abandoned."
He watches him draw blade plainly. It takes no great oracle to tell the young man's preference for the book over the blade, but he makes no overt move to defend himself against the young Solarian, his hands slowly slipping free from his pockets, the sections of protecors at his chest settling as his gloved hands hang loose at his side. There is something listless about the man, something beyond his focus, but he has no real battle pose, even less than Loren's own. "Let all pretense be abandoned in the moment of your consecration," the nightmare agent plies mildly. "I thought little of those whom gathered before me prior..."
"Do not..."
One hand lifts, catching Loren's charging blade in his gloved hand.
He steps out of the shadow of himself, leaving himself to hold that blade.
Then he reaches for Loren's side, with another iteration of the same hand.
"..disappoint me."
The blade is held fast, in one bleeding palm. If Loren does not break free of his grip in time, he will sink his fingers into the younger agent's side, a crushing claw of a blow penetrating past protective clothing and deep into the flesh there. There is where he will draw his own sword, unsheathing his own sword inch by vicious inch from Loren's own flesh, as if it unfolds entirely from Voss' own nightmare. All the while, staring into his eyes.
Those sickening, inviting blue eyes.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Loren Voss with A World Without! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action. GS: Loren Voss guards a hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's A World Without for 85 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
"Because--"
He has no evidence. What was that about making assumptions--
But at the same time, he knows this isn't real. Because he knows this is a trick, he knows this is an attempt to unnerve and unseat him. "--Because I know this isn't real! I know where I was! I know what I was doing!"
He does, right? Doesn't he? It wasn't a dream? But he perseveres because to do otherwise would be to hand over his own life immediately.
"This 'now' is an illusion, chosen only to sow doubt in me!" He grits his teeth, seething out a breath.
That's what this is. An attempt to make him believe Solaris could fall.
"You-- traitor!"
Those who cannot put their faith in themselves instead place it in others. People, nations, institutions.
Is it brave? Possibly.
Foolhardy? Yes.
But if there's another option -- another option besides giving himself up to the darkness beneath, or outright bolting for it with all the futility it might bring with it, Loren just doesn't see it.
It's just a pale, half-remembered imitation of his brother's form when he lunges, a thought that at a later date and time -- if it ever exists -- may send Loren to a darker place. But it's still all he can know or begin to attempt.
Even if the last time he attempted something like this had led to something worse than failure.
Blade meets flesh, and in the seconds that follow -- as the man catches the blade, as the shadows shift sidelong and move -- Loren realizes he's made an error.
'Do not disappoint me', the man might say, but Loren is far more aware of the hand on his side (he shifts a few micrometers, as if attempting to pull away at the last moment) than the words spoken.
His gaze meets 'Azazel's'.
From an external angle, it's still possible to pinpoint the moment the hand claws its way into his viscera. Loren's gaze grows fixed; his body jerks spasmodically. He lets loose an agonized howl, his head rolls back a handful of degrees. His grip falls from the hilt of the sword. Perhaps the sword falls too.
The pain is for a moment everything.
i'm-- it's-- this-- it hurts-- just one mistake...? is this real? this-- i can't-- not here-- it can't-- I won't--!
The biggest warning sign is quite possibly the intent look that returns to his eyes.
Agony is a language of the body. As a medic, he understands this well. As well as the pathways by which it travels.
Reroutable.
Normally he'd breathe. It hurts to breathe. He doesn't need to focus right now anyway. It's been done for him.
His hands reach out and sieze the nightmare agent, here on the shoulder, here on the side. Normally, it would be a prelude to a throw.
And normally, he would breathe again.
But right now focus has already been done for him.
His will is enough to draw up that great splintering spire of concrete and metal (rock and earth and stone) right underneath the man he's attempting to grapple.
All he's trying to do is ensure his opponent stays put, right in the spot the etheric-borne spear rises underfoot.
GS: Loren Voss has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Terra Set! GS: Loren Voss has completed his action. GS: Isiris Shango'Ra critically Guards a hit from Loren Voss's Terra Set for 24 hit points! GS: Mighty! Statuses applied to Loren Voss!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
"How enchanting, the idea of being a traitor."
The sword is a long curved thing, and Loren can feel every steel inch of it as it exits his body, ideated from apparently nothing, some sort of sick seed in his nightmare producing the saber gleaming and whole from the ruptured wound in his side. Razor agonies sing an echoing aria for Loren, stifling out his thoughts and focusing him on the simplest things. Rather, the simplest thing of all. Pain is a cruelty. But it's in a way so mercifully simple.
5 seconds of time stretches out to feel lie forever. Right now, the young Solarian's howl splits the air, his grip on his sword vacating. Even as he shakes Loren's blood from his sword, he lowers Loren's blade in another angle of perception, his own blood tainting the weapon from where it razored through his glove. He never pauses, never shifting from his original position. Even as Loren grips onto one frame of reference of him, clinging to it as a drowning woman might. The steel in his eyes meets the abominable blue of the nightmare spinner. The man called 'Azazel' reflects on him coldly, calmly. Mild is everything he feels, but his interest is a jangled, sparking thing. Not unlike the blade of Ether that pierces through him, earth and steel rupturing through his chest and forcing him off of his feet.
Blood sprays Loren, heartlessly.
The spinner's head sags in its traces, the dim glow of his eyes casting a haunting shadow across his face.
"... Is that what is important now?"
The voice emanates from multiple places at once. The body, suspended on the spire. The iteration standing near Loren, the nightmare agent still holding Loren's sword in his off hand, as surely as the impaled still holds his own curved blade in his. "Doubt was already seeded in you long ago. The system I show you is merely the real nature of things, the treason against Her. The inevitable nature of all things to betray you. The nature of life. The nature of a system. The nature of a woman. The nature of family. So. When you say a thing like, 'I know what I was doing,' and, 'I know where I was before...'"
"....what mooring does that have to a thing such as 'now?'"
He flips Loren's blade in his hand, catching it by the hilt.
If Loren even glimpses at it for a moment, he will miss when he steps out again from the shadow of the spire spear, another angle of perception orphaned from the congruity of things. If he sees what he does, if he stops to think for only a moment on what he does, he will not see his perception split again into a third interpretation of the agent, and Loren will only know he is already there when the nightmare agent slams the claw of his hand into the wound at his side again.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Loren Voss with Remnant Treason Thesis! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action. DC: MISS! Loren Voss completely evades Remnant Treason Thesis from Isiris Shango'Ra!
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
The extraction of the sword from his body -- 'impossibly' is a feeble protest at times like this -- drags on, and on, and on and on and onandonandonandon
There are truths that can be found in pain, in the organic workings of the body. Peel it back, analyze it further, until it has no meaning.
But pain, while subjective and cruel, also has a grounding effect. When he digs in and begins to reroute it, it also serves to pull him back from the brink and whatever else might lie over the edge when the mind gives out.
He needs to pull that wound together, that rend in his side. Whatever else came with it. He knows that, but right now, he also needs to fight before he's simply torn apart.
He lets go as the man is struck by the earthen/metal spear jutting from the ground below. He takes a step or two back before he doubles over and clutches at the tear in his side, breathing -- painfully -- hard.
The man's still talking. Of course, Loren thinks. Of course, he's not dead.
"Doubt...? You're projecting," he croaks, attempting to stand up straight. He needs to heal the wound. But where's the voice coming from? He doesn't have the time to focus on fixing it--
"This is real? I think... you've been staring into your own illusions too long. Ha..." The breath is a pained one.
It's a lot of blood already, isn't it... He must be losing his own grip on reality if he's making comments like that at a time like this. At this rate...
"Might... as well... have no 'mooring' at all if that's how you're going to... to think about it--"
The man flips the sword in his hand, easily.
Normally, Loren would have looked at the blade -- sheer reflex, one that would have been his undoing.
But he's learning, bit by bit, what the nightmare agent is capable of. Still clutching at his side -- for an illusion (it was wasn't it) the wound bites as suredly as if he'd actually been torn into -- he watches and sees properly this time the shadow that steps out from the shadow.
The ensuing tertiary split.
He rolls back, twisting his torso -- agony awakened again and coloring his expression -- before that hand can so much as lift let alone connect.
He didn't even think about it this time.
But this places him in a precarious position amidst a battlefield that's apparently composed of copy after copy of the nightmare agent.
So Loren, still clutching at the wound in his side, does the first thing he can think of:
Pale off-white light blooms about him in a suggestion of crystalline structure: the strength and stability of the earth.
And then he straightup rounds on the man only known to him as Azazel and attempts to deck him right in the face.
He has a brief, pre-emptive moment of prayer for his defensive instructor and all those bruises. Hand-to-hand, as a last-ditch defensive measure, fortunately had been on the curriculum for medical.
GS: Loren Voss has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Starfall Aegis! GS: Loren Voss has completed his action. GS: Isiris Shango'Ra takes a solid hit from Loren Voss's Starfall Aegis for 60 hit points! GS: Cover! Statuses applied to Loren Voss!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The reductive nature of the thing proves a boon for one prone to steady and iterative analysis.
Loren struggles with him, crossing minds with him as easily as one crosses blades. He suggests that he is projecting, a notion that gains no purchase in the mind or eye of the nightmare agent. "Disappointing," he would say. "I would have thought your perceptive abilities to not be so plainly colored by your own preconceptions and biases..." he reasons aloud.
Really, all that can be seen is his mouth, beneath the pale blue cast of his eyes.
"Perhaps you merely need to be reminded of your place in this world of ours."
The response is hard won by Loren, the tracking of the iteration and the piercing of the kaleidoscope with a crystal fist, a full on haymaker of a punch that lands square on the nightmare spinner's jaw, his body ragdolling as he rockets fully off his feet, sailing no less than ten paces before crashing unceremoniojusly into the ground, kicking up dust in his wake. He lays there prone, his body spread eagle as he looks up at the sky for a time. The sky which pounds rain onto him, inky black hair soaking through and collecting in the rusty pools of water at his side.
He stays there awhile, content to lay.
The world undergoes a shift, vaguely told by the change in the hue of the lighting across the street. A cold blue becomes a warmer orange hue. As Loren's gaze trails to chase the positioning of the man whom he knocked down so handily, the hue shift is where he landed, and then as the edge of the world vanishes in Loren's peripheral, next he looks, it is all fire and burning. One of the petals of Etrenank burns, and drones scurry about to put out the flame. A gear, one of the most advanced units, has been crashed. Mangled beyond all repair. The pilot's dome is nothing but a bubble painted with crimson.
"You are still naive," the agent at Loren's side tells him quietly.
"The reality of a thing is not for you to decide."
"In truth..." He thinks aloud, placing a calming hand on Loren's shoulder.
By the time Loren can find a moment to whirl on him, he will be faced with a man barely older than he is now, taller than he is now. He wears a full helmet and a Solaris Gear Pilot's Suit, the glass within his helmet sprayed through with blood red, hiding his face. Monogramming on his uniform reads 'E. VOSS.' The voice is intimately familiar.
"...What is real is often just secondary."
Dauntless, the ruin of the Voss family will slam his blade through Loren's middle.
In its rightful hand, Engil's Blade is not at all unsure, not at all unskilled.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has activated a Force Action! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Loren Voss with A Cruel Orisha! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action. GS: Loren Voss takes a solid hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's A Cruel Orisha for 204 hit points! GS: Loren Voss enters CONDITION GREEN!!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
Blood will drip down the blade.
It's easy to remark that it's just a dream, that the thing ramming a blade through Loren's body is someone dead and gone a long time ago. But he is impossibly strong, even though half of his suit is charred through with the black of the flame. Once the blade finds home, Engil will hold Loren right where he is, forcing the pain into every fiber of his being. It spreads, the sensation of agony unlike the norm of what the Gebler medic is used to experiencing. At one moment, he has him through the gut with the blade. In another moment, it's fatal, and through the heart. In another, the blade is at his neck, in a painless checkmate. Each time he stops to think about it, each time he turns it over in his mind, the sensation shivers, as if unsure which cruelty to be at any given moment.
As this happens, Loren is given an infinitely long time to mull over the words.
"Did you think.. that life was going to be easy for you?"
"Why should it be? You got to live on..."
It is easy to see where the Gear made landfall. It is easy to see that everyone knew who it was who killed so many. 'They should all be thrown into the hives,' one says. 'It is treason,' another comments, 'that my boy died and that child lives!!' 'My sister is dead because of him,' 'my father died..' 'In the fire...'
In the background, it takes an eternity for the nightmare agent to stand. He slowly walks towards Loren in the background, his mouth echoing the words spoken by so many. No matter where Loren's eyes are pointed, he can see in his peripheral vision the one who fell slowly approaching him with sword in hand. No matter what direction he moves in, once the blade is in, Engil will contradict every one of his movements, facelessly staring at him, as the nightmare spinner slowly approaches behind him. His Ether reaper blade slowly lifts.
If Loren doesn't find a way to break loose of the hold, the agent will quietly stride past the edge of his vision, moving behind him silently.
That is when the gorefest will begin.
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
A rather similar thing had been said to him by the woman calling herself 'Cassidy Cain'.
Loren, however, is not quite in the position to appreciate or dwell overmuch on this, with more pressing concerns.
Which are currently leaking between his fingers at his side. He just needs a moment, enough to focus and do it properly--
Which is one reason why he slams a fist into the face of one of the figures before him, all in a desperate attempt to create the space he needs to save his own life. Echoes of the light still dance about him as he stares at the apparently fallen form of the nightmare agent. The sound of rain becomes like an echoing roar; Loren sways on his feet for a moment and upon steadying himself, takes a breath.
The world twists on itself.
Blue, to red, to orange.
Flames.
He at first does not process what he's looking at. Something's burning down there, kicking smoke and the trailing ends of the still-burning fires into the sky. No, it's a Gear. No--
Realization comes like a kick to the gut. He knows what he's looking at, even if he never saw it, never even read the report -- how could he? why would he? -- on the incident.
"Stop it."
He's straightened by now, bloodied hand still clutched to his side.
"I said, stop it! What's the point of this!? Why--"
A hand rests on his shoulder.
When did the man slip his attention again? He can't keep going like this, he's going to--
The thought cuts short.
There are no thoughts to be had at all.
Not as Loren looks up at the uniformed figure of none other than his deceased older brother.
'Shock' doesn't do the expression on his face justice. His stare is a fixed one, wide-eyed. His lips part as if he were about to say something.
Which is the point which the blade -- that's right, the reforged sword, made from the parts that Engil himself had once used, the only thing that ever survived him -- is slammed right through his gut.
He struggles, at least at first. Not unlike a fish caught on a line. But his brother's phantom holds him fast. The sound that escapes him as he makes a pointless attempt to free himself is downright broken.
It's total. There's no escape from it -- the sense chases him wherever he tries to run. It spreads, it swallows him up. Thought becomes splintered, fixated on a few key points. Agony. Terror. The desire for flight. A mind, brought down to the most basic of instincts.
And the moment stops and starts again.
He dies in the next moment.
Held at blade's point in the next.
Torn to pieces in another.
What's real? What's actually happening now? It's all gone to him, just one moment repeated in hideous variation.
And between these moments, he can think, and he can hear.
...Just like they thought he couldn't. Or maybe didn't care that he'd heard. After all, there was no punishment for the destruction or the loss of life. There was no one to punish.
So there had been a different sort of justice doled out, in a fashion.
"Stop..." His voice is hoarse, just above a whisper, before the cycle repeats again.
The shadow of a man is still approaching.
He tries to push back against his brother, but in the end, he might as well attempt to move a mountain. He's here to die, right? Isn't that what he'd decided? So why even...
His hand slips from the wound at his side and grazes his bag, still there. Still intact. Leaving a smear of blood across the satchel as he slips his hand inside.
Of all things, it's her words now that come to him now.
"Many people just think to use it for fireballs or whatever, but things like lighting a fire to cook are just as important for forging a bond."
He needs more than a fire now.
His fingertips find the tablet deep within the bag.
"Please," he nearly begs, desperate. "I promise, I'll die. Just not here. Not now. Please."
It is perhaps one of the more unusual invocations of a Guardian's power.
The blade once again sinks into him.
And the earth -- metal, city, rock -- splits underneath in a spiderwebbing radius of a fracture, heat rolling up in a furnace blast from the depths.
Dinoginos will take everything he can grasp and render it down to be born anew. Such is the nature of the mountain Guardian.
GS: Loren Voss enters CONDITION GREEN!! GS: Loren Voss has attacked Isiris Shango'Ra with Material - Hypogaean Pyre! GS: Loren Voss has completed his action. GS: CRITICAL! Isiris Shango'Ra critically Guards a hit from Loren Voss's Material - Hypogaean Pyre for 37 hit points! GS: Mute! Statuses applied to Isiris Shango'Ra! GS: Hyper! Statuses applied to Loren Voss!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
"There is no point," Engil explains, voice bitter.
"Everything that you ever were peaked in Jugend. To think that I died, and you lived on..."
His voice is the soft familiarity of a missed ghost, run sharp on a whetstone through the vocalizer in the helmet. Parts of him are warped and unnatural. Though tall of his own accord, he is supernaturally so when he faces off against his younger brother here, a reaper-like disposition making his anger seem more real, the fringes of rips and tears across his bloodied suit fueling his shame. "My time is over... my dream is dead.. and what do you do with our family's honor?"
The blade sinks in an inch, shaking in the wound.
"You only insult this blade..."
Whispers of judgement echo all around him. And then it is over.
A threefold scourge made of steel. There is no mercy from the lash of Ether and edge as the young man closes with him, arcs of Voss blood climbing the walls of Etrenank. Loren can feel it long before the Ether reaper ever falls on him, the echoing pain of the nightmare agent carving his way through ghosts of him, cutting down his body once and again. A man of reason in a reasonless world, he will know this will not end until nothing is left.
That is why he summons Dinoginos.
The nightmare agent is enshrouded in a wall of flame, and everything falls apart.
Etrenank is sheared in twain by the pyre of the forge, the great mountain guardian bursting forth to bring everything down into the forge, the rusted tulip rendered into carbon and ingots for new steel. Curtains of flame eat away at the raw edges of the city, nonsensical corruption spreading across the leading edge of the burn. Parts of the city crumble, losing mooring and sending cables as thick as an arm snapping and lashing throughout the zone, only to be eaten away to nothing underneath the searing flame. As hot as it is, it renders steel not to slag, but to fused glass.
Engil screams as the fire claws at him, ripping into his long and lanky body. He loses hold of the blade in Loren's middle as the street lists dangerously under them, tipping delapidated drones and ruined Gear parts down into a fiery sky that never ends. Angrily, he shrieks, clawing and grappling at Loren, as if to drag him off into the great abyss.
A great white flash of light blooms from the curtain of flame.
Then the whole of the rotting city begins to crumble, sending everything into freefall.
As everything tumbles, parts of Etrenank flicker into and out of existence as they break in half and shatter on eachother, metal rippling like water as hundreds of tons crash into one another, corrupting visibly as they pitch and roll into and out of existence. The curtain of flame parts, as the nightmare spinner's blade cuts through it, a long expression upon his face as his eyes whip from one ideation to the next, his blue eyes carving out trails in the world. His blade flares, as he braces against a steel street no longer moored to anything solid in reality, his coat flaring behind him as he readies himself. He locates the only two things in this tumbling nonsense world that he cares about. The mountain guardian, and the one who summoned him.
He kites through the air, flame clinging to him like great black wings. He attempts to scythe them both down in a single arc. A grand, flawless blow to cut the head from a god.
GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has activated a Force Action! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra enters a Counter stance! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has attacked Loren Voss with The Promised Gate! GS: Isiris Shango'Ra has completed his action. GS: Loren Voss takes a solid hit from Isiris Shango'Ra's The Promised Gate for 132 hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
"Don't be a liability," his father had said.
"To think that I died, and you lived on..." his brother's phantom tells him now.
"You're... the one who..." Loren utters back hoarsely. "Don't-- don't you dare blame this on me! You're the one who--"
Before, once again, he's run through the heart.
Before another moment ends and another begins, and he begs for an end for the circuit in which he's been caught.
Everything burns.
Everything is consumed.
The instant Engil releases his hold on him, Loren falls, dropping to his knees as the fire rages. His hand lowers by inches to the hilt of the blade transfixing him, and with the same slow sleepiness, can only just think:
Oh. That was real.
Desperation, so present in him just moments before, seems to ebb away like the tide. A miracle occured, and yet...
You're burning again. You're disappearing again, he thinks, watching, unmoving, as his brother lunges for him. Grabs at him. It's over...
It all fades in white. It all falls.
He's falling, too, somehow. He's stopped struggling to make sense of it -- there's no point in doing so anymore. It's all still burning.
Was it like this when she summoned her Guardians? He doesn't think so--
The blade scythes through the air.
Dinoginos has no substance. The man might as well have cut a ghost. Instead, the Guardian's presence in reality nearly spent, the manifestation simply comes to a stop, and with it the heat and destruction it wrought.
For Loren, though, the situation is a little more dire.
Flesh is all too capable of being cut.
He's aware of pain. Of the red flash against his field of vision followed by the black, pulsing and consuming his entire field of vision, piece by piece.
He's lying in the roadway, in the mud. The rain is still falling in sheets. It's so dark.
His hand, shakily, rises to find the hilt of the sword.
"Why..."
Can't you even die on your feet? Get up!
It's no good. My legs aren't working. It's over.
If I'd just kept it to return home instead, I might have...
He closes his eyes and lets his head slump back.
...Out of options. I... if I die here... no, what if I did... if I tried... Three minutes. Anything more and... Will that be enough?
The brain can survive without oxygen for about three minutes before damage starts to accrue. So, if he can buy three minutes of clinical death via his will... enter a sort of stasis...
He just has to hope 'Azazel' will leave the dead to rot.
Hope he wakes up again.
Hope he doesn't simply bleed out afterwards.
Loren takes one more breath, dredging as much focus as he can into this single exhalation. Carefully now--
He stops his own heart.
And after that, for him, the world goes dark.
Just a limp figure in the mud amidst the wind and rain, a dead body by the side of the road.
TIME REMAINING: 00:02:56:44
GS: Loren Voss has attacked Loren Voss with Restorative Arc! GS: Loren Voss has completed his action. GS: Lock and State! Statuses applied to Loren Voss! GS: Loren Voss heals Loren Voss! He gains 200 temporary hit points!
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
Engil falls, desperately swallowed by the sky below.
In the end, he still reaches for his brother.
The world tilts on its axis, then shifts across another, as if a key opens a tumbler, aligning the secret pins to the world before the door opens, just before reality completely breaks down, and Etrenank crashes into the gorge. A curtain is pulled free, and the world as it was peels away, the force of Ether draining from the skull.
The braid of the world is undone, revealing the truth of things. An entire tract of the pasture has been flash fried, boiled away to nothing. Long arcing slashes score the earth in mass crescents. And then, the blood. It forms a grisly network of splotches and arches, forming boiling black pools of pitch. There is no reason to the scene, no forensic to be made of the affair. The entire world is jumbled up, and rearranged, the great crime never to know at all.
When he finally reaches the ground, he grips his temple, his blade low and at his side. And when this world reasserts itself, it is hard for him not to see the head of a god on the ground at his feet, and the sky burn red with blood.
His breath comes in desperately measured heaves, and each step is blessed agony.
But it is not the first time realities clashed in his skull.
He stands over the Gebler's body for some time, his coat hanging jangled off of his small frame. Silently, he kneels by him, going through the dead man's effects. Items are scattered, the blade of his brother disregarded. He spends a long moment considering the comms device he is able to produce. And he is one of the few here able to realize what it is, what it is for, and how to operate it. The awkwardness of reality and the linear nature of time causes him confusion, one blue eye narrowing to compliment his frown. He is only moments from leaving. But one last thing drags at his mind, in this burned and rusted place.
"You are lucky," he asides, "to have such blessed heritage."
He drops the pad on the body, with red script on it. 'DISTRESS ACTIVE.'
"I still need her.. For this, you will suffer this world's cruelty awhile longer."
<Pose Tracker> Loren Voss has posed.
TIME REMAINING: 00:00:00:00
When the buried 'charge' of ether he'd left within himself jolts his stopped heart back to beating again, Loren doesn't regain consciousness immediately. How long it takes is not a question he'll ever be able to answer.
He's aware first of the storm still howling out overhead.
Then second of the pain, flaring up from his guts. Getting some control over that takes a little bit longer.
And then at the sight of the red light from the the device left resting on his chest.
Oh... someone's coming.
Possibly.
Which is followed by the realization: the man had gone through his belongings. ...Summoned aid?
But there's no time to worry after that now. At this rate there might not be much for a rescue to find.
First things first. Find wherever that man dropped his medical kit and self-administer the strongest analgesic he can. And then, patch up whatever's safe to patch up.
And wait.