You have been taken by the Mists

Author Topic: Alcohol, Witches, Pistols, and Hala... The Tales of Neville Uffington.  (Read 1054 times)

UilliamNebel

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   Hopping up to the ledge, silver leather bound journal in mouth, Sabbat the Midnight Cat sat it down on the window sill to read. Her pupiless yellow eyes even in the midday Port-à-Lucine Sun glowing. How she hated it here, she hated her homeland of Barovia as well, but this place with its pomp and pageantry, and sunny late spring days annoyed her to no end. Nudging the journal open with her nose she stretched then cuddled up for a nice little read, her pure ink black feline form curled about the book.

   “Dear Journal, it happened again this morning.”

   Almost right away Sabbat had to suppress her urge to giggle. Neville’s dramatics were to be savored like fine cognac. Best to let it build as she read, till she came to the apex of it.

   “I do not understand this, her name was Gennifer,”

Rolling her eyes, Sabbat simply thought on how they all seemed to have such pretentious names.

“and she is a young lady of some aptitude in the mystical arts. She is in Port-à-Lucine pursuing degree at the university in the sciences arcane. And she really does sound rather gifted.”

Here Sabbat couldn’t help rolling over onto her back, meowing with utter scoff. For if Gwenn, Jen, oh whatever, was a model for the type of arcane student the University produced, it was a miracle that any could summon fire, with matches.

“Gennifer also comes from a well respected family of Mordentshire.”

‘Oh well respected Neville’, thought Sabbat, ‘Like the type of respectful who stays up with a man she just met on the street, past midnight, wearing the gentleman’s silly hat as they act out a rather disturbing bit of mistress witch and man slave? Quite right Neville, she is what Mordent female grace and class are all about.’ A crackling hiss escaped from Sabbat as she finished her thought, amused with herself.

“We met in the evening about dusk having nearly run into one another as we both were in hurry to be out of the slums. I coming from the hospice, her from a trip to the firearms factory for a school study. At once when we apologized to one another for near colliding, we made pleasant company, birthed with her glowing smile and ink well bottomless dark eyes that she laid on me.”

Rolling her eyes again. ‘Oh please Neville... Stop putting these common girls whom will have you on such pedestals. She was rather pretty, if pretty can be applied to those a tad plump, and by that I mean obese, for a horse, soon to give birth. I also think the poor sow was unaware that she appeared to be wearing a dress that looked like she had been caught in a wrestling match with a curtain...And the curtain won’ Again a self amused hissing laugh erupted out of Sabbat before she then pureed with content at her own cleverness.

“After walking the Quartiere Publique and Savant for some time engaged in quite stimulating conversation, we rather brashly retired for a night in a room at the Governor's Inn. Mind you I conduct myself as a gentleman, looking for no sort of, uhm, satisfaction.”

‘Oh I am sure you don’t man slave Neville, at least not until your mistress witch commands you to...’  It was almost too much for Sabbat as she nearly rolled off the window’s ledge with purring laughter. Catching herself with her claws before she completely went over the edge, she went to read more as she climbed back up to her spot.

“But yet, things went well, at least I hope they did. And in the morning, all was fine, just as the last. She was still there, a smile to greet me as we woke still in bed together holding each other. And as before I set out to go fetch us some food for the morn“

A blood thirsty hiss came from Sabbat. ‘Oh, and then my fun started with her dear Neville’  Still recalling it all, Sabbat scratched at the wood of the window frame with a pathological fondness for the memory.

“As the last, when I returned, she was gone. None of my possessions taken, Sabbat still asleep in the room on the couch, but of Gennifer’s things there was a few bits of her garment remaining as if she had suddenly come to some awful realization of what she had done spending the night with me, and had hurried off”

Sabbat licked at her lips, she could still taste... whatever her name was.. blood. Oh how fun it had been. First pouncing on her as she laid in the bed. Then raking her claws across the silly girls bare back as she tried to get her gowns back on. Than the chase from the bedroom to the small hall. The most amusing thing to Sabbat was how after her ankle was bit, the clumsy girl fell forward on her own dress, and smashed her nose broke and front teeth cracked on the hardwood door out of the inn room.

“I hope I may understand what it is that I do, that makes such fine ladies feel a need to go without so much as a goodbye after we seem to find such, well, potential for more in one another.”

Here Sabbat could read no more.. It was Neville’s usual loneliness expressed. All wanting to meet the one for him, yadda yadda, yad... Sabbat would have none of it. Despite her utter revulsion for Neville and his childish romanticisms, she did love him, in her own way. Perhaps it was the hijacking of his familiar ritual, as Midnight Cats were want to do, that did it. Or perhaps it was when he had saved her life after that Vallaki scum child had tried to murder her... Too bad for that brat and his little sister that the job was botched. Regardless of how, Neville was Sabbat’s bounded one now. And the last thing Sabbat would tolerate after she was finally out seeing the world, was some silly harlot catching Neville’s heart and tying him down someplace drab and boring.... Oh no, that wouldn’t do at all... And with a gleeful purr, Sabbat went to place the journal back again, for she would get no small amusement out of seeing to it that Neville was always her’s alone.
« Last Edit: May 14, 2013, 01:04:54 AM by UilliamNebel »

UilliamNebel

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‘Dear Journal,

   I am not a very good Halan I’m afraid...

   I do not doubt for the most infinitesimal of a moment that I have been gifted. That for some reason by the Caregiver’s reasoning I have been charged with the intuitive understanding needed to comprehend witchcraft and the Weave. And that with this ability rest a responsibility on my shoulders to ease the suffering inflicted on those about me, to do what I may given the imbalanced mechanisms of this world to maybe even for mere moments alone, bring some balance to another being’s passage through this life against the heavy tide of dread and gloom that travel more so than even the Mist.

   And yet...

I drink and partake of mind altering brews, snuffs, and powders,

I engage in debauchery,

I sometimes say cruel things I wish I rather did not, mostly when engaging in the above mentioned mind altering substances,

I pretty much am a lech, going back to the point on debauchery, and ceaselessly lust after women,

While I feel charity and common respect for my fellow sentient beings (well, most..), and do feel great empathy for all those whom suffer through the world about me, I do not as other clergy within my own faith and others look to sacrifice all I might to no end in a crusade....Such is irrational to me, and as dangerous an extreme as the vileness of a zealot to evil.

The most troubling to me, of all these however, is I do not feel guilt for any of these rationally called character flaws. I feel remorse certainly, regrets many, but only to the specifics of the act done by my knowing choices, that which propagates some suffering on another. Though this is almost always an unintentional, and hardly set out for, consequence. I however feel absolved by the fact that the majority of my acts hurt no one, are between consenting folk under no duress, and generally are quite exotically blissful affairs, or roaring fun.

But what of where I find myself now, Barovia, waiting to die or meet with horror.

I aid Sister Miuo as much I might. I share her passions to form Coven, despite our growing distances on how. And her growing apart from me to look elsewhere which I sense. I am very much am intrigued to learn more of Sister Sadie, to help her in learning of Barovia and to find her path. How I wish I could do more to aid her, but as a near disastrous episode with wolves showed, I am no Vanquist. (How I miss my beloved Brother so much. More trying, but brighter days were those we shared.) Perhaps also I may be reunited with Sister Anne as well, as she is said to still be about Barovia at this time. For love of country, my beloved Mordent, does it bring me great joy to be with her and have some of the youthful lightheartedness that was ours at the hospice where we learned side by side under the Sisters.

And then there is Tess... the great never was, should have been, and could never be. Despite my fondness for her even now.. well. What is a man to say when that which he craves is also surest to undo him? And the greatest danger is he may welcome that nihilistic course? 

As I said though, I am not a very ‘good’ Halan in so many respects. People think me foolish for my drunken exploits. Others find me not so useful to their ends, as I can not vanquish a loup garou in a single blow. (Let me have working pistol though...) And even though I have slain a hag, I must admit that my broad set of skills has made me less the warrior, and less the mystic that many seem to demand. My nature to go slow and steady, to not face more horrors of the night than needed, seems to leave me viewed as a whelp in Barovia, especially Vallaki. And my wish to be unseen, unknown, and unimportant to go about my work more freely wins me few companions as well.

How I pray to you Mother Hala, Great Caregiver, that I soon be given leave to flee this brutish, uncivilized, unsympathetic land, forever caught in a loop of its own ignorance. I ask that you see my thread in the loom of the Weave not severed so soon.... For I love life, woman, song, drink, joy, pistoleering (Damn your prohibitions here Barovia), and culture... And I wish to see such again in the wondrous lady of our age which is Port-à-Lucine.'

UilliamNebel

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'Another entry, but what is the point?

Halan's, outside of Port-à-Lucine, in the lands I have traveled since leaving Mordent are a dying faith. While there are caring, generous, and brave individual Halans about, as a body of faithful in a Coven, they are dead. And no faith can endure long as a chain of scattered impossibly isolated islands. In clusters, remote from one another we survive, as solitary individuals we become a group in its last days.

I don't think Sister Miuo believes this. As she seems to find it possible to from within Vallaki look to raise a Coven. The Sister is however far more gifted in her accomplishments to working the Weave than I. So perhaps this is an omen she has been blessed with, or just another sign of my own lacking for being a Coven leader.

In truth, I do not want the position. While I wish there to be a Coven, I know I am perhaps not enough of the force of personality to lead. And would happily let another more capable Halan take it.

In far greater truth, I often now think of just walking down that peaceful stretch of the Avenue of Progress to find a quiet spot, and when there take my pistol out and shoot myself in the head...

There I have finally put the thought to paper, and no longer denied it to myself. I now, sober a few days, accept my drinking is a way to just dull my pain from an agony which has been filling me. Despite my love and solace I found in my faith, I find this existence, in this unbalanced world of suffering to have given me a cavity within. And the rot of it is spreading through me, growing with each observation of how futile it is to resist the dread, horror, and lure to care for nothing other than ones own petty wants which this place of Mist seem to whisper of in ones ear constantly as they live and breathe.
Between my recent stay in Vallaki, and being assaulted by a raging maniac with a torch who tried to set me on fire in the Mist Camp... I see little that leads me to find the endurance left to believe that this worlds great evils of indifference to others lives and well being shall ever become less.

Hala, help me... I persist, but now grow weary, so weary.. While I believe fully in my faith, I harbor great doubt in myself or my place in carrying out its work.
I feel myself called to that quiet spot.. I think it is best I begin my arrangements to see to it... being done correct.. and of little trouble or worry to others.'

UilliamNebel

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[Written out in Low Mordentish, in an excited scrawl.]
   ‘I have come upon something... Something wondrous, beautiful, and beyond anything I could have ever imagined.

   If knowledge of the self is one’s salvation, then surely experience of the divine is an embarrassment of riches. But of it, how may I put it in word, how may I take that moment of sweet, utterly blissful gnosis, and with but the mere words of man share such... I dare not hope to accomplish thus, for that is the awe that makes it mysticism. The exact message sent is for the listener alone, and no other’s ears. But despite these irrevocable circumstances of a man’s spiritual existence, I shall try to lay down what I might but for my own reflections later.

   It came upon me, as I did the daily work of laying to rest those whom had expired under those blessed Sisters of Compassion’s care in Port-à-Lucine. The Sisters do all they can for those who can benefit from their mercifully given services. However as many fall to illness, neglect, and the horrors wracked on the body and mind by a short life of squalor in the slums, there are those whom must be given final service and laid to rest. For a Halan such as myself, this is a matter of two points. First, it is a decent and kind thing to do and does push back suffering's tide, to acknowledge that a life matters and to give it what dignity is possible by a proper burial. The second is the far more practical matter of the restless dead, and those stirred to unlife by a necromancer. Therefore burial rites are a necessity to deny darkness, and wizards of evil intent, access to a steady supply of would be servants.

   It was as I finished for the night, and headed back to the hospice that I was put upon by an awakening. Walking along the cobblestoned roadway of the avenue of progress, barefeet, new flowing robes over me, and a heart heavy with empathy for the poor, the wasted, the lives of misery that were laid to rest in the earth, I finally was given peace.

    For one moment, which even now the sense of complete lucidity I fear I shall never experience again, there was a complete sense of being a strand as it was worked through the Mother’s looming of the Weave. All was the strand, and the stand all, the ‘deception’ of the self was neither disproved, nor shown true. Only my misconceptions of what wiser witches and warlocks have with but these same futile words tried to tell others as plainly and simply a thousand times before. It was an instant and it was an aeon,venturing everywhere and yet remaining right where the feet stood, I was Neville Uffington in truth for the first time and yet learned that no such person has or would ever exist.

Oh sweet Hala, how I wish I could recount such without sounding as if I engage in a sophistry of word’s meanings, or the ‘cheap’ metaphysical rantings so often used by cultist to sway the weary with no understanding of philosophies and their long suffered quest for truths. It is these complexities I feel that make the Halan not one to preach their faith. For do we not cheapen it, make it a product of the world to seek converts to with when we make high promises of dubious credibility on the hereafter to the faithful if we do so as the Ezrites have? We do not pretend to know more than we do, and we fully acknowledge that many of our positions are on faith alone. For what else can they be built on when spirituality is so far outside a mortals ability to grasp and comprehend by logic and provable phenomena that the natural philosopher would seek to test?

   I must rest my mind for now, for delusional fantasy stirs in me from the spiritual experience I have had. A man’s senses and reason are but a thimble in their capacity when such as an ocean of true spiritual experience is forced into it. How does one not drown if they try to swallow it whole?