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Solivar
Guardian - Lore Master

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re: [RP] Interlude: The World Between

The world around you flashes white.

Color bleeds from everything -- the walls, the floor, the jewel-bright glass of the windows, the bedclothes and the curtains and, for an instant, the only bright, living, vibrant things in this in-between world of oddly pale shadows are yourselves and the arcs of dark power crackling around and through your stricken comrade.

Then you begin to fade, as well.

It is slow at first, color leeching away at the extremities, suckling gently at the substance of your spirit-body, stealing away bits and pieces of yourself, the things that make you who and what you are: your memories. The name of your best childhood friend, what your favorite wine tastes like, your first love, your first heartbreak, and before you know it, you have been swallowed entirely, subsumed into the painful brilliance and the shadows that offer no comfort, without sense of who you were or what.

You are in the Crossroads, the words are sourceless, voiceless, echoing within you at a level beyond sound and you know them to be true. His Crossroads.

You see it as though from a great distance: Quel'Thalas has fallen to an army of the dead. The ruin of Silvermoon still smokes gently beneath the dark and moonless arch of the sky, its spires blackened by the conflagration that consumed its heart, its streets washed in the blood of its defenders. The Scourge holds what little life remains -- the iron-bound wheels of the meat-wagons gouge the stone of the city's streets and the abominations pulling them groan under the weight, the dead, and the nearly-dead, and the entirely-too-alive shackled and dragged together to the same fate. Their screams come to you as from a great distance: cries of pain, of fear, of ann'da, minn'da where are you!, of desperation, pleas for help or for mercy, neither of which will be answered. The Sunwell, violated by the champion of the Lich King, has given birth to a perversion of both life and death, the necromantic birthing-fever that follows spilling poison through the land and its people, slaying those too weakened by age or illness or injury to survive its touch, weakening and tainting those few who still live. The black vein of its power pulses through the heart of the city, cuts across the length of Eversong's eternal summer bringing an autumn that will never end with it, into the hills below the Thalassian Gate, where the armies of the Lich King's champion and Quel'Thalas' ranger-general met in battle for the first time.

A road. A road of corpses -- both the rotting remnants of the Scourge and the fallen defenders of Quel'Thalas. A road you cannot refuse to set foot on, a road you cannot refuse to walk. It calls to you, to the essence of your being, a place where life and death are meeting, have met, will meet again.

You feel it the instant you touch that road: a summons deeper even than the call of essence, of purpose, the singing thrill of kinship, a voice you have not heard in years beyond measure, barely a whisper.

In the hills above the abattoir of the forest, the scar of the Lich King's power, the Scourge are laboring among the ruins of a quel'dorei border manor, beating down its walls, grinding its gardens under dead feet, tearing the trees up from the roots. The undead husks of nerub'ar skitter among the wreckage, tending those unfortunates still alive, bound in cages of web and necrotic toxin, mewling in pain and twitching feebly. Children. Many children. Occasionally one is cut loose and carried with obscene tenderness to an altar hastily erected of white stone, carved in the high liturgical language of the Nerubian priestly caste, and lovingly tortured until its cries and movements cease, adding its blood and soul and anguish to the threads of darkest magic being woven in this place. You can almost touch their souls as they tear free of their fleshly prisons and reach out for the paths between life and death -- almost. The Nerub'ar acolytes of the Lich King's unholy worship are swift, and loath to lose even these sad little scraps, and snatch them away with talons of shadow and despair.

Despair. Despair. Even here, in the place between all things, you feel it. Its essence is etched into the very bones of the world, etched in the blood and suffering of the innocent, focused by rune and glyph and necrolith into the very heart of the temple taking shape high on the ridge of the hill above the butchery on the valley floor. And it is from there that his sweet and long-absent voice sings to you, a whisper from far away, and you drift toward it, drawn because of yourself and in spite of yourself, to the place where life and death are meeting, have met, will meet again.

He lies on an altar of dark stone carried from the roof of the world, stolen from one of the profaned temples of Azjol-Nerub, and it has already drunk sacrifices beyond measure, its blood-runnels worn smooth and deep. He cannot move -- the strands binding him at wrist and ankle are fine as cobweb and stronger than steel, cut deep into his flesh from earlier struggles. He cannot scream -- the strands that cover his mouth hold back both his prayers and his cries, denying him a weapon and a release at once. He is neither deaf nor blind but he sees and hears nothing -- nothing that the ones who bound him do not wish him to see, hear, feel. The sigils etched into his flesh with blade and hot metal and the blood of the murdered innocent ensure that, a binding and an invocation, an offering, an invitation -- he sees nothing but the deaths of those he swore by his blood and honor to protect, feels nothing but their final agonies and their dying despair. He hears their cries of pain and grief. He hears their pleas for help and for mercy. He hears a sweet voice whispering endlessly to him in the deep places of his mind and soul, from which he cannot -- can never -- turn away, whispering (It IS your fault...), whispering (Trust is your weakness...), whispering (Hope is an illusion...), whispering (All that you know will fade...), whispering (You will be alone in the end...), whispering (You cannot save them, child...), whispering (You cannot even save yourself...)

The world around you flashes white.


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Solivar
Guardian - Lore Master

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re: [RP] Interlude: The World Between

REF: For the gang who were upstairs at the Silvermoon City Inn on Thursday. ^_^


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Meton08
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Joined: 09 Dec 2009
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re: [RP] Interlude: The World Between

Nice...was this a vision of Solivar's?
Solivar
Guardian - Lore Master

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Joined: 18 Dec 2009
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re: [RP] Interlude: The World Between

...By way of a first-person omniscient POV observer, yes. ^_^


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