Rants of someone devoid of sleep and searching

Monday, March 15, 2010

Caspien Pt. 2

He looked down again, examining the glowing forearm on his left, realizing it wasn't his arm that was radiating. There was a symbol glowing....a sun with a face embedded in the middle. When the light pulsed, the symbol moved, rays around the center flowing as though there was a breeze in the room. He reached out to touch the now smoldering surface, but when he touched the center of the sun, there was no burn, just shock. His body raised off the ground, levitating for a moment before collapsing in on itself with a searing pain digging into his left temple. He hit the floor hard, clutching his arms to his head, screaming for something, anything to make it stop. The larger of the two strangers approached cautiously, moving within arms reach of the man but still keeping his distance.

"Are you alright?" He whispered, an almost metallic tone barely projecting from him, but the man did not answer. All he could see was white.....all he could feel was shock and pain. Then all at once, his mind opened to the feeling and the pain became more focused, more deliberate. A pin point of pressure dug into his temple, feeling as though it was picking a lock, when suddenly, the imaginary door in the man's brain opened and the pain vanished. He could see himself in long yellow dress robes bearing the symbols on his arm. The vision seemed so real but just as soon as it had arrived, it had left, leaving a strange iron taste in his mouth. The vision did give him one thing.........he knew what the sun was.......it was the breath of life.......the creater and upholder of the good and just......and he was its radiant servant. He was a radiant servant of Pelor.........the god of the sun.

"Thank You, mighty Pelor, for giving me this gift of rememberance." The man spoke quietly to himself.

"Who is Pelor? What do you remember?" The stranger said trying to stand up to full heighth but coming in contact once again with the ceiling. The man never realized before just how big the stranger was; almost three feet wide, probably close to seven feet tall. The stranger easily dwarfed the man and the accented stranger but did not have an overwhelmingly intense presence. He mearly seemed interested.

"Pelor is the god of the sun, and he has shined his light upon me even in these troubled times. I know what I am, why I have these symbols. I feel a connection to something. Im not sure exactly what it is but it feels otherworldly. It must be Pelor." The man began to speak with such unabounded ferver that it caught even himself off guard.

"Pelor......hmm," said the huge stranger in front of him. I have no idea of what you speak. One thing I do know is that we must find a way out of here."

The man raised his arm again, now brimming with light, to the wall, searching for a crease or any sign of an opening. Both of the strangers behind him moved in sync to his side. The man examined his newly revealed partners, struggling for another glimse into who or what they were. The larger man didnt appear to be human.......his eyes were black but he barely looked to have skin. It was almost bark in texture. The smaller man was older than both of the others, but not elderly. He looked more worn out than anything else. The man took him in but stopped suddenly at the small strangers chest; there was a wound......a gaping wound in the shape of an "X." It still looked fresh, as though it had been done recently. Dried blood was caked around the outside of the punctures which spread almost completely across the man's torso. The area was blackened almost to the point of crispness, appearing to have been cauterized after the initial trauma. Their captors were thorough.

"Noticed that, did you?"

"What happened to you?"

"Well if I knew that, then I'd be a lot better off then the lot of us."

"Does it still hurt?"

"What do you think, son? I can barely move at this point and time, and when I do too quicly, the skin peels back and this happens."

Pointing to his far right side, the man could see that some of the skin had fallen away to reveal a fresh stream of blood, tracing its way down the man's narrow form.
"Come here for a second, " the man said to the stranger. He placed his hands together and muttered something quietly to himself. The stranger could only make out one word; Pelor. As the man lifted his head from prayer, the stranger noticed that his eyes were now a blank slate of swirling white and bright orange; his pupils had vanished. The man extended his hands, placing them on the strangers shoulders and instantly with contact, the stranger felt a surge of energy. His chest burned momentarily but then dulled to a exquisite warm feeling, flooding the stranger with reinvigorating adrenaline and he felt the wounds on his chest stitch themselves together, as if there were thousands of tiny hands threading needles through his skin. When the man stepped away, his pupils returned, and he smiled at the stranger.

Looking down, the stranger could see that all of the wounds had closed up and the singed skin had disapeared. He felt great and although a large scar remained on his chest, the pain was gone.

"I thank you for that, as does my body," the stranger said, laughing quietly to himself.

"It is nothing. Now let us find a way out of this room," but as he said these words, there was a huge crash behind them. The large stranger had thrown a fist through the wall, sending granite and marble everywhere. He pulled his hand back through the hole, unscathed and did it once more until there was a makeshift door smashed out of the rock.

"I felt a slight temperature difference in this panel which led me to the logical conclusion that there was another passage opposite this wall."

The man approached the large stranger, taking the huge arm into his hands and running his fingers over the wood or metal plating on hsi wrist. The word, Lawbringer was carved into it.

"Lawbringer, huh? Name maybe?"

"No, that doesn't sound right," the large one said but he immediately ran his fingers over the word. Instantly, he was screaming, holding his hands to his head. The man knew that look. he went through the same thing just moments ago. The huge stranger rose off the ground just as the man did, and then collapsed in on himself.

"My name.......my name is Dagon. Brother Nikolai Dagon," he said shakily. As he looked up, there was a flicker in the dark area where his eyes should have been, and then there was light....a green light, faint at first, but brighter as the seconds ticked by, until his eyes were glowing fiercely.

"Well Dagon," the stranger said cautiously. "You mind telling us what exactly you are?"

"I am........like you. I am.....human." Dagon's voice changed from that metallic sound to almost a whisper. He sounded like a scared child.

"I dont think that is entirely accurate my young friend," the stranger continued. "You have no flesh like we two do. You have no eyes, to be quite accurate, and you just punched through what looks to be half a foot of solid granite. You are something else entirely, my friend. A construct of some sort, it would appear."

Dagon began to examine his body more closely and then dropped his head in apparent defeat.As big as he was, he appeared to shrink before them in outward appearance.

"This isnt helping," the man said, quickly stepping in to salvage the situation. "Thank you Dagon for finding our escape route. Now shall we wait here until whatever placed us in this mess comes calling, or shall we exit with haste?"

His voice seemed to light a fire under the other two who pulled themselves together and made their way to the hole in the wall. The corridor was pitch black again, and the light the man's arm was beginning to fade. When he passed the threshold into the hallway, the light cut off. The man tried time and time again to recreate the light but it was to no avail. They were once again plunged into blackness and aside from the faint green glow of Dagon's eyes, there was nothing. Down the corridor, there was a bright red glowing pin point, not casting any real outward light, but beckoning them to approach. As it was the only course of action at this point, they three moved cautiously down the hallway, toward the pin point....toward the unknown.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

New Story from the world of Caspien

It's so dark that for awhile - just how long he wasn't sure - he thought he was still asleep. The blackness was overwhelming, the silence.....deafening. He could hear heavy breathing on either side of him but could make out neither shape or size. His own limbs ached from what felt like months of unconsciousness on this hard flat surface, and as he moved and stretched them, his joints cracked, his muscles and tendons popped. Felt good.....felt alive. But why couldnt he see. Placing his hands to his eyes, he felt for any sign of injury, but he appeared to be intact. His hands returned to the floor, pushing himself up into a sitting position. His fingers remained on the floor for a few moments, trying to discern possible details about this eerie place. The floor was smooth and cold. He shivered at the feeling.

Granite or marble......must be.

He could tell from the pressure on his.......his naked body? Nothing was covering him. No clothes, no undergarments.....not even a blanket.

His eyes were starting to adjust and he was no longer chasing away unattainable streaks of light from his vision. He was shaking worse now, the edge of the unknown creeping over his already cold frame, overtaking the cold feeling and replacing it with slight manic terror. The room, as far as he could make out was small......very small. He rose to his full height now, but nothing changed. Almost dizzy, he stumbled forward towards nothingness, arms raised in hopes of finding something.....anything. Anything to give him a better grasp of his surroundings. His legs weren't working right. He must have not used them in awhile. How long was he out for.....or worse......was he actually unconscious?

Am I dead? Is this the afterverse, the space between living and dead? Limbo.....

As he felt blindly for anything, his hands at last touched the freezing wall. Another marble surface. He could tell from the touch that this was polished. He felt up and down the wall searching for anything and hit his hands on the ceiling abruptly. The room, he discovered, wasn't very big. He couldn't even stretch his hands out completely above him before flattening them on the stone surface. He began to feel to the left and right on the wall and found that, scultped as it was, there appeared to be a seam every so often, giving him a mental image of huge stone squares lining the room.

There must be a door somewhere.......find the right seam, find the way out.

Through all this struggling, the man lost track of the breathing that stopped behind him and as he moved silently along the wall, a presence unknown to him spoke.

"Finally awake, I see. I was wondering when someone else would come to."

The accent in the voice was striking. Thick but with an air of knowledge and intelligence. The voice sounded from a corner opposite of the man, who in light of this most recent development, had stopped searching. He still heard heavy breathing.
So there are at least three of us.

"Where are we and who are you? And what has happ..." blurted out the man but the stranger with the accent cut accross his questions with a quite, indifferent, simple statement.

"Calm down son, calm down."

Son? the man thought. But the instant he heard the word, it made sense. The man sounded much older than he himself did, but there was no telling without visual confirmation.

"I am sad to say that I cannot tell you anything. You know as much as I do it seems."

"So you know nothing then?" The man's head was swimming. He began his search again but it was becoming fruitless. As he rounded the second wall and headed towards the stranger, another voice called his attention away from his task.

"What the hell happened? Hello? I thought I heard voices."

This voice was much deeper than either his or the stranger's and he appeared to have the same accent as the man himself, causing the stranger to seem that much more distant, as though he didn't belong in this unknown world with the two of them.

"Its alright, my boy, " the stranger cooed again. "We are all awake now."

"And how many is all of....." The voice moved in the dark as the man stood up quickly....too quickly, and smashed into the ceiling. "Shit......this ceiling is so low. Are you having trouble too?" but already the man new this was no ordinary person. If the room was only about a head taller than he was, this other voice had to belong to a veritable giant.

"There is only three of us in here, my boy, but hopefully we won't be in here much longer. You there," he called to the man who had begun his search in earnest. "I have already searched as you are now. There are no doors.....only seams."

I need light.......I need light.......I need light, thought the man and no sooner did the thought emanate from his brain than did his arm explode into radiating, brilliant yellow. Like a miniature sun, the light illuminated the entire area, reaching even into the corners of the small room. Both men in the area threw up their arms instinctively to hide their eyes from the brightness but he was not deterred from this brilliant light. It felt right, as though this was just another part of himself, not unlike his eyes or hands. The stranger stood up abruptly, hiding one eye from the light, but the man did not miss the blank orafice on the left side of his face. He was missing an eye, and where one should have been was just an empty socket.