2020-11-15: The Great Work
- Log: The Great Work
- Cast: Isiris Shango'Ra, Timotheus Lovelace
- Where: Aquvy...?
- Date: November 15, 2020
- Summary: At the behest of another, Timotheus Lovelace seeks to create the power with the might to entrap a god. But a problem has arisen. Fortunely, his client has a solution.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
It has been eighty days since the initial exposure.
What followed next could aptly be described as a crisis of science. The request had been polite, with nary a raised voice in word traded. But a look into those eyes, and the promise of madness and forever could scarcely be explained. It was the kind of broken-eyed glance that was somewhere beyond human, and somewhere beyond the span of all known things under the sun. What was left was the incomphensible black, and all of the things that lay there in the dark, of the sort that changes you forever. A promise in a song that was never sang, made in a world with no sky.
'Create for this world a power to contain the gods that should be best forgotten.'
The crows always flock over the island when he comes, a journey which he has made twice before. The pilgrimage he undertook was one that stretched the entire world, and his goals lay in far flung corners across them, or so it seemed. This place, a vast and lonely collegiate of ancient towers on a small island in the Spiran archipelago, was once foster home to myriads of fearsome creatures, descendants of the hounds and guard of the lord who originally erected the first tower. Now, through the nightmares that grip the island wholesale, the only thing that remains are ghosts. Ghosts, and the horrors that man wrought.
The lonely hall is grand and wide as he enters, a single lamp held at his side as he climbs the stairs of the seventh tower standing, ancient and ruined artwork long dead crawling with mad images at his passing. Spectral hands reach in agony from broken portraits, and the heroic angels and kings depicted in stained glass turn their blades to their own necks moments after he arrives. These vagaries shiver into existence and disappear just as quickly.
The crows themselves begin to gather roughly thirty minutes to his ascension. There is not really a particular 'entryway' they prefer, no window left open and no door left ajar. They appear commensurately with the sensation that one is being watched, and consequently appear in every unspied corner, with more ruffled feathers and quiet chatter bridging the edges of the ear by the minute, with their chatter growing more and more mocking, more and more anxious, until the moment he finally arrives, a man in grey, who enters the halls afforded to his steward with the restrained serenity of a man accustomed to halls lousy with the hue and cry of madness.
He arrives, as he said he would on this day.
<Pose Tracker> Timotheus Lovelace has posed.
The business in Kasutho had ended in failure. There was no sense mincing words. All his experiments had created wretches -- he'd come closer, closer still to the answer, yes -- but they still remained incomplete wretched things. To merge undying flesh with an undying mind... it should not be difficult.
Not as difficult as this.
And yet.
He had known they would come. He had prepared for them a trap, had moved his important components and notes out ahead of their coming.
And once the trap failed to do as he had wished, he had fled. He had licked his wounds for a time, awaited further word from her, and resumed his studies. But it hadn't been long before he had received a... visitor.
It had been a polite request.
It had been a mad request.
It had intoxicated Timotheus Lovelace. He had agreed, fascinated by the request and visitor both.
Has his benefactor noticed, yet, how how his research has been diverted? And does it trouble her?
The crows are his first warning sign that his visitor has again come. He had said that he would return on this very day.
BGM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWUe_-QM2EM
Timotheus stands before a great decaying portrait of someone whose name he does not and cares not to know. One hand clutches the cane upon which he leans tightly, the white tattoos on his fingers the only sign of the occupation that has taken up most of his long life: Symbology.
Once this had been the library of some long-dead lord. Now it is overtaken with tables stacked with tomes open to various esoterica, to reams of paper covered with his spidery handwriting, to sketched half-Symbols, mere shadows of what the visitor will require:
Something to shackle a god.
Timotheus gazes up at the portrait: there had been flesh and blood depicted in those crumbling inks and now there is but bone. And he wonders, if briefly, if he has taken the wrong turn in this business.
Until now, that is. If a Symbol can trap a god--
And he turns.
He is unsurprised to see the visitor there.
"There you are. I had half-wondered if you might not show," he says to the younger (or is he? can you call a man with a look in his eyes like that 'young'?) man. "Progress continues apace, as you can see," he says, sweeping a hand towards what has become as of late the room of Timotheus' obsessions. What you asked of me was no minor task... but it should hardly be overlong now."
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
The world seems to shiver when the blue-eyed man looks up, tilting on its axis by a degree.
Academically, as a mind of science, there is nothing objectively untoward about the appearance of the crows in the keep. Though the blackbirds seem all-too-real when they are watching him, a longer study questions their 'reality.' They never seem to have the same number of eyes each time they are looked at, and at certain angles, they can scarcely be said to be there. The direction of energy in the room shifts on his arrival, as if one were to toss a wooden ball onto a drape of velveteen, twisting measurably, were one to care to place a sensor to it. Simply put, the man arriving is not objectively madness given form, but a derangement of energy lattices focused around a seemingly indefatigable corona. However, as the walls begin to twitch fingers they had not had before at his passage, it can be difficult to tell where simplistic terms like 'energy' end and those like 'ghosts' begin.
The man in grey is haunted, but by what is something that remains to be measured.
For the moment, he is unarmed as the nameless commissioner pursues his attention to the sweep of Timotheus' glories, pale eyes tracing the sweep of the magus' hand. He is, for a time, silent, reflecting on the tomes and parchments of the madman hard at work. His eyes slide across the pages shattered with inspirations and distractions alike, ancient formulaic compositions with no defined endpoint or terminus. If he understands more than he lets on, it would be hard to tell. Trying to read his mind is not the safest route one could take with him.
"Was it your wish that I never return," the man replies, calm to his elder's provocations. "That the work you embarked upon be something that you could abandon ... never to complete?"
His words are hardly a counterpoint. The younger of the two is hardly one to spar in that method. Instead, he moves by Lovelace, to his tables, his arrangement of work and collections of research, of the sort that normal men may spend their entire lifetimes gathering. "The world that is has been unkind to you in turn, and we fight for the scraps that remain. But much remains at the table for those that were left behind. Above all, it isn't I that demands of you 'everything.' It is a matter of only time."
The agent's fingertips trace over the tomes, but never actually touching them, as if madness were a fragile thing, wont to wither at the slightest touch.
"But is it time you need," he asks. "Or is it that you're not inspired enough yet.."
<Pose Tracker> Timotheus Lovelace has posed.
He had tried at one point to take proper study of the birds. But as observation had overtly failed, it had been another part of this parcel that he had to abandon. No matter. The gains he has made in recent days (weeks? months?) have more than made up the difference. If it hadn't been for the insight he has gained, he never would have found that
it was possible to lock in
time
power
eternity?
The room is hardly the only thing that tilts on its axis with the arrival of the man Timotheus can only name 'the visitor'.
Sketches dance across pages. Partial Symbols, glyphs not fully realizing the power that they are meant to channel and trap.
To look overlong at one is to grow dizzy and faint.
"'Never to complete'?" echoes the magus, tapping his cane the once as if to punctuate the statement with his feelings on the matter. "Hmmph. Hardly. I would be an utter fool to cease this work now. The work must be completed! What I have uncovered here would be a masterpiece in itself... if not the prize I seek." He turns, watching the man step up to the table, his single dark eye upon him.
The world has been unkind. He has given up much in his quest. He has lost much. The edge of the scar that peeks out under that eyepatch suggests a mere portion of what he has lost.
"Indeed. For those who have little future remaining, nothing remains forbidden. ...You understand me like no other."
It really is just a matter of time. A shame time is his most precious resource.
"If you could but grant me eternity, I would move mountains. ...As it is, I make do with what time I have remaining," the mage grouses, grimacing as he speaks. "Still. What I have learned here may assist my arrival at my own goals... in time."
That sole eye of his narrows when the man speaks of 'inspiration'.
"And what, pray tell, would grant me 'inspiration'? No, what I need is time I scarce have."
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
"An idea that we disagree on."
He doesn't move from the assembly of books and parchments. As decisively as the idea is written off, there is no change in his pitch to even recognize the man's derision. With the kind of halting elegance that seems to take far longer to act than it really does, the man with no name flips a single page of a single book before him. He's not facing the magus, but the page is cast in a faint blue light, one the magus may or may not place as the man's mad blue eyes.
"In truth, the imperious flow of time belongs to the world that passed us by, long ago."
There is a distinct 8kHz buzz audible in the air, tangentially related to the faint one or two degree shift of balance in the floor. Timotheus may understand that the headache-inducing sense of vertigo's source is almost entirely related to the man in the grey coat. "Moments surround you," that man tells him, as his eyes flit across the relation of the pages to the still fresh inks on the parchments. "Like all other things in this senseless world that is, they betray us."
"But ... those moments, one astride another on and again in uninhibited saturnalia, are not linear."
There is a sensate beat in the flow of the world. Crows flutter across the room, as if they had never done so before. The sound is there, but the action might as well be an assembly of shadows and ghosts. He enters through some iteration of the room somewhere, some iteration of the room that exists at 180 degrees offset from the world as it is, a dark shape with piercing eyes. He meets another ghost, a wizened thing with a cane, gathering around knowledge. The translucent, shadowy parallels propagate at whatever angle one wishes to view them at, ideas of conversations once had winking in and out of existence, almost in tune with the faintest saccades of the eye. Ghosts, disappearing as quickly as the eye can focus on them.
"Despite their desperate wish, those moments are subordinate to 'perception,' and 'perception' is subordinate to the ancient songs, as all things are," the nameless agent explains, opening a leatherbound glove. From it, an idea blooms. It is more appropriate to say it smoulders, the scintilla of a thing not yet in existence, slowly gaining relevance. The scrawl that dances in his hand is an obscene light in itself, a mad shape that has some relevance to the scrawl in the pages that the agent stands in front of, save that it is written in a language that has not yet been invented, on a geometry that does not exist. The seams in the text split, bloom, reorient, and fit together as they go on to grow. "And perception of a moment is nothing but a memory," he continues, watching the mad thing twist and writhe in the air. "A memory is an objective truth, perceived by the mind, of a given 'reality.' A person decides which 'reality' they wish to agree with. In one reality, they fail, over and over again, and are treated to the harshness of being forgotten and left aside. In another, they accept that a world in which they are left aside could not be a world that 'exists,' not truly."
The younger man turns towards his contemporary. The mote of information has grown into a mad black clawed sprawl beyond him, bleeding across and into the edges of shapes and corners of the world so fine that the eyes would water trying to make sense of them. "Did you think that the world that is ever had any primacy over the world that always was?"
He never lifts his eyes to the magus. The mindless edges of ghostly black begin to bleed as if cut, but the living scrawl does not go in was one might expect of a living thing, following channels that thread into nothing, the wounds in the black opening, folding, and draining away into nothingness. The lenticular shades of madness quiver along with the heartbeat. The agent moves his hand ever slightly, and no matter how many times you look again, there is only the singular iota once more, a shining, glorious thing among the ghosts.
"Inspiration occurs only in one moment, a moment in which a person realizes an objective truth. That truth may be the nature of time, or it may be the scope of a god. But astride it, every other moment fails to matter. All of it, subordinate to the memories of things that once were."
When the man in the grey coat finally lifts his obscene eyes to look towards Timotheus once again, his faintest smile is the only thing that doesn't threaten an immediate searing tilt into mania. "How many times do you think we have spoken?" How many times will he accept the thread that is offered?
The man in grey offers the scintilla of an unknowable world, the shape undulating in unseen axes between them.
"You can be one," he allows. "Or you can be many."
<Pose Tracker> Timotheus Lovelace has posed.
Dismissive, the magus waves his hand. "Disagree all you like. I am applying all that I have to your conundrum; you should be thankful I even took your case on... as fruitful as it has been," he finishes, tacking on the last statement begrudgingly.
That page is washed in blue. It takes Timotheus seconds too long to realize... that it must come from the man's eyes.
And then...
...the world drifts onto a knife's edge. His one eye half-squints; pain blossoms behind his skull. It's him. He knows it to be his doing. And yet the thing that stays him from putting an end to this -- even beyond any sort of business agreement -- is that undeniable need.
He must know. He must make this secret -- for it must be a secret, in some form -- his own.
"I... need time," he says again, and is surprised at the sound of his own voice: rasping, as if he's been screaming. But how can he have been screaming?
The world dances along the edge of the knife... and slides down along it, fluttering as if it as been slit into two disparate halves. He can see the world as he looks about him: the world layered over atop itself. Again, and again.
How many times did the knife cut?
His gaze, his single eye, turns again on the young man. "What are you saying, you..." Timotheus utters, before his attention turns to that... thing, that obscenity in the man's hand. It doesn't obey any law, even as fractured as 'law' is in this filleted reality: it is its own thing.
It is terrible.
It is pure.
Timotheus listens, in a technical sense, as the young man explains: that there is no such thing as a set reality. That there are many such worlds: that only here, like this, can he see and appreciate them for what they are. But he only listens in a technical sense. For him, the world might as well have narrowed to a singular point. He fixates only on that thing in the man's hand.
Is it his own hand that reaches out for it? Or is it someone else's? One ancient gnarled finger nearly, nearly brushes against it.
A single tear streams from the corner of the old man's one eye. To look upon the edges of this thing -- this madness, this Symbol -- is to be brought to tears, after all.
A shame that he only has the one eye from which to weep.
"Show it to me," he says, his voice little more than a rasp. "Show it all to me. I must see it... more closely. More closely... than this..."
It's horrific.
It's glorious.
It possesses all the answers he seeks.
"I will... be many. I will be many, and more!"
He moves his hand, trembling, that last inch for the quivering chaos in the man's palm. It feels as if it takes an eternity.
<Pose Tracker> Isiris Shango'Ra has posed.
In the worlds that they walk, there is a great secret, one hallowed in the sands of the ancient wastelands. This secret is the one that is unquestioningly understood by any who have ever denied the natural order of things, who have ever looked at the world and doubted, if even for a vanishing moment. That secret -- the mere knowledge that it exists, is the only truth that unifies those who were left behind. The ancient memory without a name, the power that has sank beneath the horizon. That is the unifying truth that is offered.
The ineffable shape undulates along axes long forgotten by terrestrial mathematics, shifting and changing in eye-watering ways that the mind cannot quite make sense of, hard edges finer than an idea sliding across and along one another into one another across and along one another. The mechanism itself is what bores the fruit of the aging magus' attention, and though the one that bids it move still speaks quite nimbly, when looking on the abominable machinery his words recede into the background. The thing that he explains is itself quite simple, were one to look at it from a thousand angles at once.
And so the madman is given the opportunity to do so.
The harsh buzz refracts along angles and tones that jumble together quickly the closer one comes to the agent and his miracle. Reaching into the hyperbolic shape is not like resting one's hand on a simple cube. The closer Timotheus' wizened hand reaches for the shape, the further his arm twists, separates, splits. The sensation of looking upon it is not unlike looking through a kaleidoscope, if every iteration of each reflection in each facet was occurring on a slightly different timescale. In some lenses, Timotheus is reaching towards the shape. In others, he picks up the book. In others, he thinks better of it entirely.
In some, he has already laid hold of lightning.
The man in grey's hand, the one that previously held the shape, lowers to his side, fingertips moving slightly by the pockets of his coat. "It is the capture of inspiration that I entrust to you, that shining, infernal notion that makes everything elementary," he tells the magus, "This power is the sole charge of genius, of a mind that cannot be fettered by natural law. This is why I require your assistance."
By the time the man in grey speaks, the ghosts surrounding them have become real. Each world is an ephemera of something entirely new, an experience, a version of this exchange, as it becomes quite clear what the madness agent has to say. The scriptures, fresh and new in the book, are not familiar to Timotheus. But they are familiar to him as he is writing them, at a 130 degree angle from where Timotheus grips onto the shape with six arms and ten hands. 72 degrees from there, Timotheus speaks to the agent directly, having turned him aside to work on his own. 1888 degrees from that, Timotheus speaks to himself, standing where the man in grey is when he first initially spoke to Timotheus.
"However, how many times you experience this moment.. 'the moment of rapturous breakthrough...'"
The aging magus that Timotheus speaks to is a man not wholly different from him. But when he reaches up to the new type of covering over his face, he peels it away, sliding open a fresh, brand new eye, brightly colored, and ringed with so many sigils, glyphs and ephemera that the runes seem to go on forever deep into his cornea. He opens it, and the eye glows an abominable shade. He holds up the Seal, a black, livid thing that seems to crawl in his palm. His mouth tightens dismissively, as if the entire world were trivial. He opens his other eye. Then the next along his head. Another, in his hairline. Another, dangling from his ear like jewelry. Another, in his cheek. Another in his collar. Another, in the back of his throat. Another, in his forehead. Every one with different sigils, every one with different ideas. Every one a different inspiration, a different answer. Timotheus looks at Timotheus from the precipice of a barely audible song on the horizon, the nature of that unearthly hum. He looks at him, with a hundred eyes. And they all glow preternaturally, awfully, painfully, agonizingly blue.
"That is under our control alone."
By the end of it, it is impossible to determine how many times Timotheus spoke to the man, or when first he actually spoke to him, or if he currently is speaking to him right this moment, or when he is done. None of it matters.
<Pose Tracker> Timotheus Lovelace has posed.
He touches the sigil.
He has not touched the sigil, and instead thinks the better of it. In another instant he's turned his back to see to the shelved tomes for a reference point. In yet another he refers to his research and takes a more measured approach.
In another, he throws caution utterly to the wind and claims the shape fully.
All of these things happen.
None of these things happen. In the sigil, Timotheus sees his own death. And Timotheus sees his own salvation.
"This is... inspiration?"
This is inspiration, a single moment. But doubled quadrupled octupled--
It becomes more than just a single moment. Timotheus understands now. He understands with pristine clarity what has been granted to him. The symbol he seeks--
And in a fashion, time.After all, once you spin off inspiration like an eternally reverberating note, a reflecting dancing between two mirrors, what was once limited because unlimited. He has enough time.
Because he no longer requires 'time'.
"Yes. Yes...! You have done it. You have granted me all that I require!" the magus says, looking upon himself and upon himself and upon himself. He turns to himself, who turns to himself and turns to himself. Working together with himself, there is no end to what he might accomplish--
And he can see, clearly, the shape that the Symbol must become.
How passing strange. That covering there. Is that one that he now bears? Timotheus regards the man in grey, or rather, regards himself.
He barely blinks when the mask is torn away, revealing the expanse beneath. Indeed, Timotheus reaches for his own face, as if to similarly divest of his coverings -- to relinquish the false for the reality beneath.
But perhaps the inspiration that comes from the man's flesh can really only come from him. Another line. Another striation.
Another wavering line in an iris, blue against a sickly otherworldly blue. This man is a marvel of marvels, a hideous and perfect blasphemy of existence.
And Timotheus finds what he needs and all that he requires upon the man's flesh. What songs might his bones speak of?
No. Tonight he has inspiration aplenty. And it will take all of Timotheus
every single one of him
to unravel its mysteries.
"Soon. You... I will have our answer soon," says the wizard, as he begins the great work.