Curse the Darkness -- Kymil Lornenil

[TheFury]

They were ill-notes in a sad song. 

The Silvanesti’s thin lips twisted into a snarling smile as his own soundless sounds, his own imperceptible rhythm, became all-consuming, overpowering the faint whispers he always heard when he came out this far into the damned obfuscation. He spun one of his blades in his hand, the stomping of his leather boots on the ground echoed in the voices of a thousand blades of grass.

The undead in front of him were discordant, shambling, somehow something still less than the suffering sycophants and psychopaths he routinely spoke to. Rats had keen ears, when they wanted to hear. The dead were forever so.

The steel of his blade spun into the first shambler’s chest, a grotesque squelch coming as he tore the weapon back out, letting their disturbance in the web of his rhythm guide him--a vicious greatsword swing moved over his head as he ducked out of the way, a quick jump back saving him from another’s downward flail. His foot swept out, his heel using the momentum from his motion to crush the creature’s reanimated, weakened knee. It fell, and his blade quickly followed it, slicing its throat up beyond repair in a quick motion. He tumbled forward over it, before rolling to the side out of another flail strike and springing to his feet.

The last was already on its last legs, so to speak, but none had fallen yet. The elf hissed, sidestepping the flail one more time and reaching for the rhythm of his heartbeat. The thudding in his ears started to echo, started to cascade, screeching louder and louder as he fed it. He wove it into the song already echoing around him, stealing the voices he could feel beating at the inside of the skulls of the undead, bound by the necromantic magic animating them.

He bound the screams, forged them in a fire of suffering, tempered the sound in cries for justice, for mercy, for revenge--focusing the cacophony of voices that added their timbre to the Silvanesti’s song--and unleashed it in a ripping, tearing torrent that rent the necromancy, burning through the ritual with the fury of ill-fallen dead.

The undead stopped in their struggles at motion, and Kymil Lornenil let the beat of his heart fade to its normal soft bathump. He sighed, quietly, padding over to the remnants of his campfire and shooed encroaching fog away from it with a billow of his tattered cloak.

A few strikes of flint against steel and it started again.

He sat down with a thump, slumping against a nearby tree and tugging worn green fabric around him. He’d meditated here the previous night, the undead wandering in sometime in the early morning. Maybe. It was hard to tell.

As the music faded out of him, the dampness faded in. Even Silvanesti eyes couldn’t see farther than a scant 20 feet out here, and the fog clung with a cloying, insidious wetness that infiltrated everything. But it was worth remembering that the dank feeling was everywhere, if you knew where to look.

It was in his sister’s bones, forever praying, never to be answered. Or perhaps her prayers had been answered, and this was her freedom.

It was there when he had turned his back on the drowess, walked away rather than let the mist seep into his soul. She hadn’t understood. She couldn’t. She clung, just like it did. Just to something a little faker, a little less real than him. Or maybe he was an image of the Mists, and her goddess was the reality.

It was there when he had given Syndra her violin lesson, watching, waiting, even as he had ignored it in the hopes of reclaiming some part of him from its damp grasp. Some part that he had cut off far more effectively than even the blademaster could with enchanted adamant, rather than let the Mists pull him in by it. Still, the Mists were here, and the other Silvanesti hadn’t heeded his warnings. Or perhaps he was scared of letting himself hope, and cloaked it in paranoia.

It wasn’t worth thinking about. He respected--in a strange way--the passion and belief of outlander priests, of knights still holding to their oaths. But there was only one illusion he believed in, and it wasn’t the one that either Syndra or Ulviirala thought.

The wind shifted, meaning the Mists had changed around him again. But he remained.

This was the only struggle that mattered. For him, or for anyone.

He was reduced to an illusion of him, a bare flicker, nothing for dew to cling to. A form that ran from light, for fear that taking it in would burn him away to nothing; that hated darkness, for trying to rob it of the scant life that gave it sound and fury. And against that phantom was the Mist that sought to steal away his being.

He persisted in defiance of it, and because of it.

His hate for the Enemy shone through his fingertips and eyes, and it gave him substance and meaning.

[TheFury]

It was a new obsession that drove him to this precipice.

The Mists descended off the side, marked a gentle tip that rapidly became something far sharper--treacherous ground, easily missed. Old, natural stone bridges marked the way across it, worn by shifting winds and changing grounds. They were slick with the moisture in the air, made ramshackle by time. Luckily, phantoms could not give into gravity’s fell grasp. Worn boots did not lose their purchase on smooth rock, for they--and it--were only an illusion.

This far in, it was easy to believe so. It was easy to believe that the slight, wan spirit that struck down vampiric knights and took their teeth was no more real than they, when they faded into mist. Perhaps he could jump and believe he could fly, and by so believing take flight. Or perhaps he would fall, and be finally consumed by the Mist.

This far in, his song had a strange resonation. Perhaps there were many dead, robbed of their voices by the shifting ground around them, that could do little but add notes to his song.

This far in, it was easy to lose track of time and self.

And yet, in the shadow, the worn slip of a ghost had a singular drop of color that split it from the faded grey that surrounded it. A blue rose rested on the edge of his tattered mantle, pinned there some time past. A cerulean reminder of reality, somewhere out of the twisting madness of this place.

He held to it, in times of mania.

Strange that it should be so similar to the bloom that symbolized the man he once considered his ultimate enemy. Stranger, perhaps, that he valued the thorn that had produced it more still.

He should think that wasn’t so strange, in truth. To say the identity of his people had not been influenced by the Black Rose would be a stark lie, and one that served a foul purpose. Nor should the value of thorns be dismissed. If he wanted his people to survive, they would have to embrace the tenacity of thorns. The ability of briars to grow in places where gardeners would fain they die, to scrap and scar those who would pull them up and deprive them of their hard won vitality.

Despite this truth, the rose gave him hope. For while the thicket grew in horrible chaos, with a singular jagged purpose of mere survival, one of its sharpest thorns still produced the beauty of a rose bloom and pinned it to the mantle of a ghost.

[TheFury]

Resurrection was a curious philosophy.

The Silvanesti had felt something pulling him back to consciousness four times now, his gasping breath coming back into his chest whenever the fickle hand of whatever power his ally called to separated him from his chorus and forced him into his wan flesh once again. Few he knew hadn’t felt the rasping inhale of the restoration of breath. And yet, many still lacked that which was the most important aspect of life. Passion, belief, the ability to see beyond the stark, despairing reality that the senses perceived and into the illusion of meaning that granted color and purpose.

Kymil had asked many people what he considered to be the foundational question, a simple one that had no real answer: What separates the thinking man from the hungering, simpering beast? The collected answers were as varied as the people who had given them. There was only a single wrong one, in his mind, a denial of the central precept of the question: to claim that there was no difference.

For him, the answer was the ability to believe in a difference. And from that original, paramount thought, all other illusions and beliefs flowed. To deny the question, as many did, was to deny life and meaning. To deny the question meant death of the soul.

But all this was beside the point: that the miracle of returning to life to the body did nothing for the soul beyond rebind it.

How was it, then, that his soul had recovered from the wounds he had inflicted upon it? How was it that his identity returned, the phantom of his body resonating again with restored emotion? How did his fury, which had never stopped, never stooped under the blows of horror and dread, finally succumb to a faint whisper of hope? The shout that followed tore the rest of it away, pushed it aside for love and desperate fear for another.

He had lost what sustained him. But in doing so, he had regained some part of himself he did not realize he’d missed, a part that his continued sustenance had demanded he destroy.

And he was desperate. While as different as any two could be, he had warned the sun and the spider equally of the dangers of gullible hope, of believing what you most wanted. More than anything, he feared that the thorn that pricked his fingers, the rose whose scent graced his air, would shatter and prove to be nothing more than yet another trick of his tormentors. Yet, his treasure stayed in his hands, and claimed to solely be his.

And moreover, she claimed that she had yet more to give him. He would have been content with her tenacity, with the rose she’d pinned to his mantle. But there was a simple lesson taught, one that she saw in a clearer light than he did. The past had its lessons, the dead had their wisdom--but there was no power to enact them, there. Perhaps he was their blade wielded, their lent strength combining with his, but brandishing his song in mere defiance only ensured that he, in his own way, would never move on.

So he had attempted to teach others where the steps of his people had faltered. The human sorceress, the elvish knight, the interested scholar. There were lessons that could be learned from the past that would help them now. Not all were as intuitively aware of reality and how to survive it as his druidess half-cousin, but perhaps they could still avoid the same mistakes the Silvanesti made.

And there was still more, reason enough to return to the beginning, to a fading homeland. He was no longer a ghost, for no ghost could create new life. He had no reason to curse the darkness, for in purest pitch, from the angry memory he was and the tenacious fool his thorn could be, a future came, blooming with renewal and true resurrection.