2021-05-18: Into a Peaceful Life

• Cutscene: Into A Peaceful Life
• Cast: Ruth Pauling
• Where: Northern Zoara - Siddim Canyon
• Date: 2021-05-18
• Summary: After being stopped from making a terrible mistake at Halim, a former Domain Master finds their place of rest has become a place of rest of a different sort. This cutscene follows some time shortly after 2021-05-08: The Stains of Time and precedes any other scene taking place after.

The mid-day sky above Siddim Canyon was empty. The air was dry. The sunlight cast its oppressive judgmental light against the shimmering view of a valley experiencing a heat wave. This small part of Northern Zoara could boast a small reprieve from the decaying land surrounding it when it rained. Enough vegetation clung to life along the rocky cliffs and the river beneath to give the illusion of safety from the world around it.

An illusion that changed hands, the irony at the time lost when the most recent owner of said illusion embraced the seclusion of Siddim from the rest of Zoara.

Thirteen years ago, it was violently shattered by atrocity.

Today... she wasn't sure how to describe it, other than it felt apathetic to her presence. Blue, empty, dry, oppressively bright, and hazy to heat she typically did not feel.

It added to the complicated mass of feelings that always churned within her, at a time where she wanted to return to a place where they would churn and twist in ways she found preferrable.

Calm, it might have been called, but that became a relative term.

When the world around her reflected that concept more wholly... ironically, it felt further away than ever.

The gnashing, wailing Earthbound Dead were no longer there to 'greet' her. The entire village was bereft of the roaming dead at all, as if they all had managed to depart peacefully for the journey to the Garden of Toldoka in her absence.

The running rivers were free of the faint laments of things that were lost and never could be again, leaving only clear running water she did not partake in.

The surviving chapel to Granas had seen someone take shelter at some point, but she didn't have it in her to go see if they were there, or if the nebulous 'they' were all right.

The surrounding wildlife no longer possessed their unrelenting fury, nor did they pay her presence much heed. They used to visit her while it rained, and she would keep company with them. Now... a part of her doubted they would.

The farmland she maintained possessed a fresh, clean air that took her aback, brimming with health where it once struggled - but her pen had become the home solely of a blindfolded cockatrice (who was bereft of the previously described fury beyond its innate capacity for being a horrid little beast).

The only thing left for her that looked familiar was that dilapidated fortification. As she has in the last few years, she took her perch there.

It only looked familiar.

It felt like she was visiting it for the first time, even as she knew every contour and every step. Pushing back the alienating atmospheric apathy to her presence, she knelt piously with clasped hands at about chest level with a bowed head, a Granasian rosary wrapped taut around a forearm almost too large for it.

It seemd an incongruous appearance for that accessory. She looked every part something that would have worn it in mockery - a large-bodied, stone-skinned grotesque of stereotypically demonic features. A monster, to an outside observer. An inky purple mist surrounded her, filled with echoes of her guilt and despair.

Her guilt and despair of being far more well-acquainted with what heartless monsters look like and do... and are. Every time she came here, she visualized it. She relived it. She didn't want to forget, lest she do a disservice to those who should be here in stead of... them.

She was not able to visualize it with the acuity in which she grew familiar. The sounds of panic and ARM fire. The scent of blood and flame. The feel of... whatever awful bile had to exist in one's breast that allowed one to do the things the heartless monster did, for it wasn't a heart.

A numbness followed within.

A sense of something loosening underneath, as something rustled...

The stone underneath her gave out.

A high-pitched shriek followed, having found herself suspended only by grace of her taloned feet where the derelict fortification's battlements were not yet poised to collapse. The posture itself was not wholly unfamiliar - that was how she chose to sleep, when surrendering to the subconscious as nearly all living things need to.

The structure's failure, metaphorical as much as physical, reiterated the initial sensation: it only looked familiar. It was no longer her place of simultaneous rest and unrest, as if it were poised to dispose of her.

The amount of weight she carried on her person made the idea she could stay suspended suspect, at best. Between her own mass and a large sniper rifle ARM, the surviving structure struggled.

The rifle started to slip from its bindings on her back, slipping bayonet blade-first towards the ground. Her tail grasped it as the blindfolded cockatrice inquisitively stood underneath, and her eyes widened. She was about to hurt them--

No, she already did hurt so many of the creatures here. Port Rosalia, she was told, she did 'something.' She always enjoyed the company of the local wildlife whenever it rained. She had a lot of unkind things to say about the place after having overheard another tragedy tangentially related to those who profited off of Celesti's fall.

So many of them disappeared soon after, and she wondered if she scared them - or if, somehow, she got them hurt. Here she was, about to hurt another, as long as she stayed suspended there. As blood rushed to her head, her heart raced with the guilt that embodied much of her.

Guilt, that begat despair, that begat defeatism, that begat a different perspective.

Those who still lived in suffering today were not here.

Those who Elise hoped to reach with her dream were not here.

Those who shackled the surviving Celesti territories were not here.

The answers to whether there really was virtue and kindness in someone whose only gifts to the world are pain and suffering, if such could ever exist... were not here.

A tear started to escape an eye, filled a cloudy violet, to water the earth with an emotional poison.

Her sole wing brushed her face, rather than let it fall. She faced away from the blindfolded cockatrice, and made the effort to rise.

It was laborious, and fraught with more sounds of loosening stone. Only when she was able to grasp the surface, tail-first with the rest of her upper body following some moments later, did her former perch further disassemble.

She ran across the length of the battlements, back out to the muddy road atop the canyon walls that led to it, as a cacophony of collapse crashed about.

An inquisitive series of snarling clucks served as the (unfortunate, to most) reminder the cockatrice was only mildly perturbed by the events, instead of wounded.

The thoughts she had did not bring her much peace, but it did bring her back towards the drive that saw her take sojourns from Siddim to begin with.

She wanted to be where people were suffering. An instinct, an urge, a /will/ - her mind buzzed with awful thoughts in her own voice as to how she could /make/ some, as if searching for acceptable targets within eroding reason.

The anger of what happened at Halim bit deeply into her grief. She wasn't going to accept having people tell her she was already kind. She wasn't going to accept having people tell her others deserved blame instead of... her. She wasn't going to accept the idea of younger people having to live the consequences of her sins. She wasn't going to accept anyone talking down to her like they understood what was going on. An unkind, fanged smile escaped her as she walked down the path, ideas aplenty about how she'd do just that to them. All of them! The world felt like it started to dim.

Animals fled in alarm as she passed their territory - even the warring snake and mongoose both broke their battle to the death in her presence, and she gasped at the sight of it. The fear tickled her heart, and tugged a string.

As she passed the chapel, she remembered what she was told - the way the 'likes of her' could best serve the Light. Her hands trembled as she took her sniper rifle between her hands, and her gaze fell upon the Granasian rosary still about her right arm. She wasn't welcome in His house, the guilt drained into her chest, but... that wasn't going to stop her from doing good by the Light, now that she could.

She passed by the river, and found herself humming a distant tune from memory. She wanted to sing it, but a young heartless monster couldn't... then, because... that didn't matter now, did it? Her mind's inner shouting decreased as she thought about so much before that was taken away or lost because of the lack of a heart, by her (to hear it from those who accosted her at Halim, mistaken) reckoning. (She wasn't going to hear it from them, but she was hard of hearing to start.)

She trekked through the village, seeing there was nothing left there - even after she took everything from them. She took in a breath, as a weight settled within her chest for... everything, for she kept them from the Garden of Toldoka for so long.

Siddim placed that burden in her heart one last time, as she first sought. As the shouting of venomous, hateful, destructive urges grew quieter, she internalized a truth: Siddim wasn't the only place she had to answer for.

She had to answer for all of Zoara, and she wasn't going to let those who accosted her at Halim stop her from giving back the only ways she knew she could.

Someone believed in the worth of someone like that... and she believed in the worth of Elise's dreams. It all settled her back into the once aimless emotional ebb and flow she embraced as her new life.

The emotional miasma of contradictory feelings that followed her dispersed about her path, but not in enough concentration to be anything more than a curious faint whisper - settling where it did as mild, passing discomfort that blended seamlessly within the atmosphere of a village destroyed by the Celesti Civil War.

With one last heartfelt prayer in blatant contradiction to the ill will she harbored not long prior, Ruth Pauling's presence at this place would only be a lingering echo to haunt the pages of history.

There was suffering everywhere, and she would be there for it.