SolivarGuardian - Lore Master
Joined: 18 Dec 2009 Posts: 906
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re: Something Missing
by Solivar on 2010/05/25 1:51 pm
It had been a near thing -- too near by half.
Do you hear them? The voices?
He had, for the briefest of instants, allowed himself to know relief: someone else heard them, too. The voices, the endless susurrus of whispers, the souls of the dead crying out from the places where the last of their mortal life bled away and what remained was anchored, unable to find a release of their own making, helpless to move beyond the instant of their deaths. Oh, yes, he heard them -- from the instant he had risen from his own impermanent ending, they had been a companion more constant than any other, those lingering echoes of life that called out to him, knowing he could hear. Before, it had not troubled him. They had not troubled him. They were nothing, after all, but raw materials for preparations that required ectoplasmic residue at best, a puling irritation at worst, a constant, subliminal nails-on-a-slate whine of unending need.
Now?
Now he had to fight the urge to listen for the voices he knew.
That Dharkoth and Shaixne heard them as well was, in retrospect, not entirely surprising. They were both warlocks, after all, and the stuff of souls their medium of trade with the powers they commanded. That Shaixne was untroubled by it was also not surprising; mad though he sometimes seemed, Shaixne was at least graced with peace in his destructive malevolence, and directed his violence against those who would do the brotherhood harm. Dharkoth...was not so fortunate.
Kill them. Kill them all.
For an instant, there on the Scar, Dharkoth's voice had held an echo of the Lich King's own -- the command that had put both Lordaeron and Quel'Thalas to the sword. And, in that same instant, he found he at last had the strength to resist it -- to refuse to feed his rune-marked weapons the blood and lives of those most dear to him, the comrades and friends who had accepted him into their ranks. Bitter irony, then, that refusing to visit death on them had proven to be the path of least resistance, least temptation.
Call them. Take them. Make them your own. They are your army, the weapon you wield in my name.
He had woken with those words ringing in his mind, shaping him into what he was to become, defining the purpose for which he would exist, the manner in which he would serve his king. Some waded hip-deep in the slaughter of whole nations, bathed in the blood of their lord's enemies. Some ravened among the living like wolves made of night and death, with tearing fangs of winter, the better to let those lives run free. And some were subtle, slipping past the lips and beneath the skin, turning blood to poison and breath to icy fire, minds and souls to fever-wracked wreckage and flesh to a prison, a prison easily commanded to spread death far and wide. His gift, the insidious death-plagues sleeping in his blood waiting only for the magic that called them forth, the power to flay souls from their flesh and enslave both. And he had. Oh, he had. There were no lack of voices among the earthbound, restless dead that howled his name, knowing him their murderer, their defiler.
Call him. Take him. Make him your own.
So close -- he had begun calling the magic before he could think of a reason not to do so, the binding circle etching itself into the barren, poisoned earth of the Scar, reaching out to envelop Dharkoth entirely. And it would have been so very easy -- Dharkoth's will was already in tatters, his mind fragile. Easy to finish tearing him, finish breaking him, rebuild him stronger, better, more controlled, to repair everything wrong inside him --
Make him your own.
Shaixne was just as broken in his own way, mad and seething with barely contained rage, a fury that would consume him and likely anyone nearby when it finally became too great for him to hold in his twisted soul, the rotting shell of his body. And Dayari with his child's mind made of equal parts tactless innocence and unthinking cruelty, his bloody, deadly hands, his reflexive deference to those stronger than himself.
Make him your own.
Meton...oh, that would have been sweet. The best of all. A true brother to call to his side, to have at his back, to fight and kill beside. Angry, bitter Meton, whose soul was consumed with a wrath that wrapped around how he loathed what he'd become, hated himself enough to seek his own death in the destruction of all that he despised.
Make him your own.
It would have been so easy. And standing there, with the power blossoming within him and reaching out to wrap its tendrils around them, it had felt right. Right to reach out with it and take them, to undo what they were and remake them in accordance with his own will, to make them his own, to be one of five again, bound together by ties of blood and magic and brotherhood, a single perfect weapon.
It had taken more will than they would ever guess to resort to physical violence, to beat Dharkoth half-senseless and drag them both off the Scar before he did something he would regret forever. Or how close he had been to doing it, and how sickened with self-disgust that he had nearly yielded to that temptation, to violate the minds and souls and wills of his brothers in arms, his friends. Meton had questioned his willingness to deal in death -- but death at least had the chance to be clean. When he could still call himself a healer, he had known that death was sometimes a mercy, a final blessed release. And it was the only true gift he had left to give now.
He wished to say that to Meton, as they sat companionably together next to the fire in the Filthy Animal's common room, bathed in warmth and light and the sights and sounds of life and the living. It had been on the tip of his tongue to tell that deadly, volatile brother everything, to confess all his sins, and accept whatever judgment Meton offered in return. But, in the end, he did not -- could, in truth, not bring himself to it, for one reason: that smile, small and knife-edged and mostly hidden by the shadows of his helmet, the first he had seen from the man. There was hope in that expression, no matter how quickly hidden it might be, hope and trust and brotherhood and he would do nothing to harm that. Nothing. It was something they had both lacked for far too long.
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