Private Tales Kingdom of Mud

A private roleplay only for those invited by the first writer

Selene

Lady of Dusk
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Soon after the events of Necromancy By Any Other Name and That Whisper in the Night, set in the dream-like landscape of Mind and Loch.



Long Selene wandered through the night, but the dreamscape around her did not get any less barren, nor the horizon any closer. She gave up and found a rock to sit on. One could get fatigued even in the realm of the mind, if they weren't careful. It was then that the figure from before misted into being in front of her, seated in midair, one indistinct leg crossed atop the other as it floated there.

If power won't do, perhaps you want the truth
,
it said, though nothing on its face resembled a mouth. I can show you what happened that night.

Flames licked up from the stone and burned around them, but instead of the high alpine cliffs, Selene found herself in alabaster halls, ancient tapestries and animal trophies smouldering to ash. A the end of the hall stood a young woman, ringed by the fire, shouting only for her words to be swallowed by the hungry din.

Selene grit her teeth and stood firm against the painful image of her younger self, fabricated as it was. "How could you know so much about me?"

Mm, I've had quite a lot of spare time on my hands lately, to watch you, and your whole little Order. The shadow chuckled again, a sound that emanated far from the source. They don't call me the Everwatcher for nothing, after all. The figure spread its sinewy arms out. Well, what do you think? You won't use those eyes of yours, so why not give them to me?

Annoyance flicked across Selene's features. She did not respond, but shrugged the heavy cloak of starsilk off her shoulders. In a sweeping motion, she spun it round. The cool sheen of fabric enveloped her, smothering the flames and the alabaster walls, that fabricated image and the shadow that brewed it gone from her view.

Its terrible, echoing laugh remained a moment longer as the scene in front of her turned to smoke and starlight. The cloak lost, above her now was the deep blue of night sky, under foot the low tide of mind, a thin mirror of water stretched and rippling into eternity. Selene was left alone on the plateau of her mind once more, but now her resolve was sharpened. Now she had a name to hunt.

Everwatcher.



Bebin Theros
 
Sanity's silk had come undone.

So small a tether there to hold the Pursuant of Dusk to the waking world. And he could feel it still. That most frigid snip. The snap at he back of his skull, as a blade, as cold as ice undid that fragile guard that let him find his way back through this place of ink and sunless sky. The Loch. Without any color of its own, safe for the pitch of crushing depths. Now he was but adrift. Set loose too fly through that shapeless place.

Instinct would have one draw breath.

Suck in the atmosphere through the mouth in desperate gasp.

Instinct was a memory most ancient. Inherited and honed across generations. It came from ages long past. It had but one concern. To survive.

Instinct was a memory carved into the very marrow of the skull. But memory, that unreliable narrator, was a product of the mind. A ghost that crawled out from the lightless spaces between the matter grey. And memory, like an old friend who only had your best interest in mind, would agree with instinct. Memory would have you believe that the sensation, which flooded down your throat and in through your nose left you deprived of breath, was, in actuality, water. Frigid and cold, it choked.

To the untrained mind, a desperate gasp beneath the black mirror of the mind's Loch would feel like drowning.

Blessings then, that the mind of the Pursuant was not just trained, but carved and tempered by those immaterial waters.

Syr Theros would let the Loch in with each of his compulsory breaths. His body still, his inner mind slowly came to rest. It found a position of balance as he went on, drifting through that timeless space. Not wholly a part of the abyss, but so filled with its substance that it kept him aloft as he sailed through, hands together at his chest, fingers twisted into the seal of the that pursuit which he found himself so lost in.

Memories flashed before him as he melted into the darkness that was not just there behind shut eyes, but all around him. Far flung distant things that danced beneath the light of countless stars. Fires licked high their golden tongues, hungry for more as all the village burned. His hand ran red with another blood, knuckles flexed about leather-bound grip as pain stabbed deep its needled claws into his side.

What good had his strength done then?

All the sky turned and spun and flashed as night bled into day and the mountains turned to woods. A sword crossed with his curved tulwar, long and straight and well made. "Good," Syr Thero said behind whiskered grin, before he pushed away the sword and swept in with a quick cut.

The tulwar did not bight. But Demiex's eyes were wide all the same. "How, but,"

"You are too rigid," Syr Theros instructed, and pulled his weapon away from the neck of the younger man.

"I have the reach advantage!" The young knight sworn said through a half laugh. "I could have sworn I had you at a safe distance,"

"You have good eyes, Legault, but trust too much in them, and a clever foe will use that against you,"

Legault stabbed the point of his claymore into the earth, and rested his weight upon a hilt for a moment. "You used mind magic then, Syr?"

Bebin grunt. "No," he turned and strode away from the younger man.

"Hm... misdirection then?"

Bebin turned and lifted his curved blade above his head, the forward angle of its run and the posture of its wielder left the impression of a serpent, raised and ready to strike. "Let us see what your eyes will glean, Legault."

The young dusker huffed, and lifted up his sword once more, posture tall, the full tang of his heavier blade long before him.



Selene
 
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The surface of the lake was silver pristine, but below was a sinking depth that chewed at Selene's ankles as she trudged forward. She knew that some masters called that depth their home, swam in it like one would in pellucid waters. But to her it had always been - and would always be - muddy.

The heel of her boot stuck firmly, refusing to lift free of the sinking force. She tugged, and the depths tugged back. A second tug, and her foot came loose, but not the boot. Toes skidded into starry muck as she stumbled to find her balance.

"Ugh," Selene breathed as she twisted round, grabbing her other boot and flinging it some distance away. It sank, slowly and with attrition, until only the ripples it made upon the surface of the Loch remained. Even those dissipated after awhile, as Selene continued her trek on bare feet.

The stars above and below began to blur. A flash of a shadow against the light, dark wings bearing news of death. Leyik passed over once again, and she squinted up through the sunlight to see him. Above her, branches swayed gently in the breeze, birch leaves and evergreen needles rustling, each with their own unique cadence.

Merrycourt had caught up to her already. "Master Hawken was right, you do like to wander." Her eyes were bright with a smile. "Captain, don't you think its time to head back?"

Selene turned to greet the dawn knight, but stopped short. In Merrycourt's heart was a foul blade, stained black and oozing. Selene stepped forward and reached for the hilt, but it was Demeix's hand who pulled it out. Corruption crawled up pale skin, eating and eating until only hollow outlines of the world were left.

"Why didn't I see it?"

"See what?" Demeix asked her, looking over his shoulder, blade held in hand and posture ready for anything. The sun was shining again and the world had color. Selene was seated in the shade of the woody meadow, a book in her lap. And there was no Merrycourt. "Captain, don't tell me you're fooled by Syr Theros's trickery, too."

Thick in the memory, Selene moved and breathed that older self. This was a path already tread, words already spoken tumbling out of her. "It's no trickery, Legault, and you won't get the answer out of me that easily."

Except, of course, she was not a memory. No starsilk cloaked her shoulders, her feet were still bare, hem of her robes wet from the waters.
 
A voice, discordant, rippled through the air.

It had been there. Yes. She had been there.

And still he stepped forward. Sword quick to test and show threat as feet shifted and weight moved with balance. Demiex moved back. Eyes wide, arms stiff as he jerked the weapon up to meet the blade, the beak of his longsword held firm and out. But where he thought his point would score, he found Syr Bebin, stretched and curved and fluid, his sword's curved stream still gleamed.

Another jerk of the wrists, another step back. Distance kept, he swept the sword across, but Bebin met the steel against his bracer's plate. His block choked the swing, and before Demiex could shift again, the Pursuant wrapped his arm about the great-weapon and drove his point toward gaps in plate.

The point of the tulwar pressed under Demiex's armpit. The young knight's eyes were wide. He smiled and tittered nervous. Bebin yanked the greatsword away from his pupil's center of gravity as he pressed in his own sword and drove the weight of his body forward.

Demiex fell hard on his ass, and Bebin was left with the greatsword couched under his arm.

"He was never our strongest warrior," Bebin grumbled as he stared down at the younger man.

A fit of coughs through the clouds of smoke. "Ah," he said with a bright smile beneath his scrunched shut eyes. He rubbed at his pain with one hand, and braced himself up with the other. "I'm just a coward I see,"

Bebin smiled. "You think too much," he sheathed his own sword. "You've not yet learned to trust your arm," the Pursuant offered out his hand to the younger man.

Demiex opened his eyes, bright and blue as the stars that shined around them, he smiled as he slowly came less there. "That's why I trust so well in others, Syr Theros," he grabbed out to his mentor, his form turned turbid before hands could clasp about wrists.

Like so much silt, the boy swirled and swept and settled as the world around them turned to mud. His eyes looked to the other who lingered there with him. "You are not wearing any boots," he huffed, and there was a soft smile beneath his whiskers. He studied the Captain for a moment longer. His chest ached and tender. His eyes came shut.

"I am adrift, and yet you are here," he shook his head as he stood before her and all the pitch that did surround and all the stars that did twinkle and blink in a glittering sea. Above and below.
If only you were one of the many lies that lurks within this mirror, Selene, his mind near leaked. His eyes came open, and he looked at her anew.

"Contact with Demiex was made," he reported, his posture taller, straighter as he looked to her. "In the Loch," he added, and a rueful curl of the lips turned up at one corner of his lips. "He severed my anchor to the waking world," there was almost a hint of pride in the Pursuant's voice, but it was something he quashed. "I do not know how long I have been... lost, yet I have not been pulled apart by those things that hide here," he looked her over once more, and nodded.

"Yet you have lost even your cloak," there was a worry in his voice. A realization of the weight that bared down on them both. "You are being pursued then, Captain?" He smirked. "How grim,"

Selene
 
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When the light of the forest turned to ink in water and only Syr Theros was left behind, Selene was startled, but the man's voice soon put her at ease. Who else would begin such a peculiar meeting with a mission's report? Surely this was Bebin himself, and no residual detritus welling up from the Loch. Yes, reliving the same memory at the same time could cause two discordant animas to align in the Loch - others had written of this phenomena before, though it was rare.

He spoke of Demiex, and Selene did her damnedest not to remember the night she had learned of Merrycourt's death, the night she had given the order to pursue the killer. Had Bebin volunteered himself for the quest, or had she asked it of him? 'Best not to think of that now,' she shushed herself. Not in a place so primordial. One never knew what might show up to feast on a memory like that.

As Bebin straightened his posture, Selene pushed herself up from her seated position and strode across the water on - as he had remarked - bootless feet.

"Certain things only slow oneself down in the water. Though, you already know this well," Selene said, then nodded towards the Loch Pursuant. "If we stay here any longer, you may even see me lose my skin." She spoke lightly, but there was a strange quirk to her features, brows furrowed but briefly.

'You are being pursued then, Captain? How grim.'

It began to rain. Barely noticeable, only a drop or two echoing across the starry surface of the flats, causing the light to ripple imperceptibly around them. Selene looked up to the cloudless sky, and a wet drop fell right on her nose. She blinked it away. Was this her own moody bout, or Bebin's? With the two of them occupying the same pocket of the Loch, it was going to be hard to tell.

Selene was still looking up at the starry expanse above as she spoke. "I left Osuin and a squire in the Spines," she admitted, the memory of her body a faraway thing. And Perorin, though a ranger for hire would hardly stick around and wait to die on her orders, so she wasn't as worried about the elf. "We found something terrible up there, and it overcame me."

Lowering her gaze, Selene leveled it at the other Dusker, not fear glinting in her eyes, no, but a coldness that held out little hope of being warmed. "Have you ever heard of a creature that can move through the waking world and the Loch at the same time?"

Bebin Theros
 
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Something terrible.

The words echoed in his mind, as if each drop of rain that did strike the mirrored surface of the loch caused it to sound out in thrumming and rippling whisper. A sound underneath the previous utterance. Partially there and incomplete as it went on with each new splash of dissonance.

It was raining. The Pursuant of Loch managed to hold true that shared state. It was raining and Selene spoke of evils he knew too well to be true. Just as he had then as they stood upon the river's banks.


"Such creatures," he said as he remembered the ceremony. How the Master's Ashes had been spread across the waters of the ever flowing stream. "Are rarely cited in record," he looked to her then. At those pools of black that looked on at trickle and roil of rushing waters. "Reserved for legend, and myth, and yet," he cast his eyes out to the flux.

How fitting. That it had been raining that day.

"And yet, we know this to be a falsehood," he said more firmly. no longer feeling the steady trickle of the rain against his skin, though he could still see all those droplets bounce against her skin. The spray mixed beneath her eyes.

A glimmer in the grey heavens. Pale white with a center of absence. Bebin grit his teeth as he looked up and beheld a terrible eye. And he could not move, but felt the earth beneath his feet begin to give way. A great shuddering and shaking as sand turned to silt and great clouds of murk billowed about the Pursuant and his Captain.

They fell deeper still.

Selene
 
"Bebin!"

Silt drifted between them, the landscape unrolling itself even as Selene ran forward. She reached out both to grab at Bebin's sinking form, and to lunge scowling at the things which drug him down. Many hands rose from the Loch to grab at the Pursuant's ankles, and she thwacked them away with her staff, but they grabbed at that too. Wrenched loosed from her grip, her staff sank into the deepening muck. She stumbled forward, and with her, Bebin and the rest of the realm.

No surface below her feet.

No air to breathe, no light to see. This was the crushing depth of the loch, a place so easy to drown in. She remembered that day, too. Her Master's ashes sinking to the bottom of the stream, mixing with the silt, indistinguishable. On a shaky tree branch, Leyik perched, and Selene threw rocks at the squawking bird.

And yet, we know this to be a falsehood.

Her arm was wound back to toss another rock. But what was in front of her was not Leyik. It was a hermit crab looking thing, blue legs poking out from a shell carved with runes. Lowering her arm, Selene dropped the pebble, and it drifted slowly to the ground, wobbling lazily as if it were underwater.

The crab twitched its antennae, and stroked its face with one of its hairy claws. "You do not belong here," it said.

Bebin Theros
 
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Bebin's form turned, slowly, in aching bursts and pops and breaks, to scales and sinewy length as his eyes went reptilian, burned as blue as the waters of a grotto that caught the moon's light, and his body, whiplike, thrashed as his mouth bore bright fangs against those things that dared drag him down with a feral hiss. His head, more monstrous as the binds of his turban came undone and long dark hair poured out, struck down like a spear against the mucking hands that grabbed and dragged.

Down. Down.

A body crashed against him as his fangs sank into so much silt. Warmth of some form. Other and outside his own, and as they sank, his thrashing ceased.

There he stood again. Turban unraveled, hair a cascade wild across his shoulders.

"It's not his fault," Bebin remembered saying to Selene then, as he watched their Master's familiar, bob and call out from across the river. "He mourns with us, Selene," he put a hand upon her shoulder, in gentle reassurance. "Feels just as powerless and full of poison,"

And there too was his grip as they stood before a denizen of the Loch.

You do not belong here,

Bebin brought his hand back to his side, and stepped forward, his mane, normally so tightly kept beneath cloth wraps, flowed loose about him. His eyes, still shimmered with ripples of Loch's light.

"We seek passage, oh wanderer of the depths," he shut his eyes and bowed his head to the crab in respect, the ebb of his magicks diffused into the currents. "For we are lost, and know not our way,"

Selene
 
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Bebin's hand clasped her shoulder, warm and grounding. Her own reached up to pull his fingers a fraction closer to her heart, but she stopped short, letting him withdraw. This memory was her burden, after all. She would not drag him down with it.

Eyes still hot with unshed tears, Selene watched as the Pursuant greeted the denizen of the Loch before them. Blackberry curls rolled about with a bow of his head, tossed by the currents much as the lochlight emanating from his crown did. Could this be the first time that she had seen Bebin with his hair down? Some better circumstances, and she would have lingered there in that thought, imagining the touch and smell of it while such a rare sight was before her.

Selene found her hand was still pressed to her chest. Pulling it away, she came to stand next to Bebin's side where he faced the creature. Budding blue eyes looked upon the two knights. The crab clicked its crab's maw together, seeming to chew through the request Bebin had made of it.

"Stay lost," the hermit's spirit responded at last. With a shift of its hefty shell and spring of its hairy legs, it pushed off from the rock, spurting away through the Loch. Already, it was disappearing from view as it's voice echoed through the waters.

"It is safer that way."



Bebin Theros

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Silt and slick stirred as the spirit spit out its secret and sprung away.

Bebin's eyes followed the hermit as it flowed through the murk. They gleamed blue and silver and were traced by the light of that place they both stood within, as his coils of curls and strands swayed in the stream.

"Permission to give chase, captain?" his voice asked and echoed through temporal waters.

Stone and brick and feint light painted upon the uneven surface of that ancient room. No candles, for her eyes were so strained by the light of fire. The glow of dusk, the glow of tourmaline light, pink and blue and purple as it shift and changed with the feelings of the room, refracted by crystals and globes. Like a sea at sunset, eternally fading before the last rays' dance of warm candescence. Mingling with the silver of the moon and the stars of long night.

He stood before her then too. Save he faced her then, a mask of stone upon his features. Not now. In the now he turned to her, and looked to her true, even as those old words came from his mouth.

"The trail is not yet cold, and I am best equipped to deal with him," how that stung then. As it stung now. He smirked. Did he smirk then too? At the irony of it all. At the irony of his being cast down into the dark by one he held so dear. "I refuse," he choked the words down.

What did he refuse?

His own failure?

His short sightedness?

His blindness.

Selene
 
"I refuse--"

Selene closed her eyes against that inevitability, breathed in a long breath of what wasn't air. She could feel the memory swirling around them still, as mist does on a field at dusk, barely perceptible when one was in the middle of it. She had heard these words before.

She knew what was meant to happen next.

Opening her eyes, Selene looked to Bebin. At her pursuant, so ready to draw his blade against the dark, so ready to step forward and go into the Loch once more, even as these emotions bled as wounds between them.

"No." A crack through the memory, a new current of wind rustling the field. "This, time, you will not go alone."

Loch, her weakest element. Long had she avoided this domain, out of nothing more than a selfish sense of self-preservation. No more. Reaching up, Selene unclasped the fasteners that held her robes together. She shrugged out of the first layers, discarding heavy embroidery and glinting medallions until her arms were bare of weight and her legs were free to move.

Down to her smallclothes, she climbed the rock that the hermit crab had perched on. At the top she looked back to Bebin, comet-tail of tattooed runes twisting along with the curve of her spine. "Forgive me if I stray," she said. "I am a bit rusty at this." Then she took a step off the rock and fell from view, cushioned by the weight of the Loch, swimming then instead of sunk to the bottom.

At the mercy of the currents.

Bebin Theros
 
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Wide eyed, Bebin stared at the vision before him. Selene, stood before the abyss, cloak abandoned, boots forgotten, robes removed. She stood up upon the rock and looked back to him.

Forgive me if I stray.

He shut his eyes and bowed his head to her. "Nothing need be forgiven, Selene," he gave, and opened his eyes to watch her step from the stone, and set herself in the drift of the depths.

Sword in hand, the Pursuant of the Loch but strode through the mire at his feet, his own boots pulled free. He reached the rock and sheathed his blade. A hop had him sail some feet up before callused fingers and wide palms found holds and toes dug in to the face of the rock as he worked his way up. Muscles pressed down to push his weight up, and the Loch carried him further than he would go on his own. Till his feet kicked off, and his hands stroked through the water with practiced rows.

It was open water between them. Not but that inky space that was the Loch manifest. She moved slowly. Clumsily. But she lead, all the same and the bright tail of her comet runes streamed ever forward. Pull by pull. Kick by kick. A shape set to fluid locomotion.

When a dark shape came. Sleek, it hovered beneath his Captain. As if her very shadow. Bebin snarled as he swam forward. Whole body whipped with the motion of a kivrin's kick. Scales started to pop through the skin of his neck, up the sides of his face as his eyes turned a burning blue and lost their human gaze.

His body whipped, s shaped and he cut through the water as he jet forward.

Ten tentacles spread wide their netlike grasp and sought to snatch up Selene, when a silver fang flashed, and steel brandished sliced through three arms at once. Bebin reared up and bared long fangs as he hissed his warning. His cordlike body went on with its winding flow, and his hair spread wide about his visage like a cobra's hood.

The six eyed loctopus sprayed them with a thick cloud of ink, and ever darker clouds swirled about them. Even burned.

Selene
 
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...ever darker clouds swirled about them. Ever burned.

Above, through the surface veil of water, fires burned orange in the night sky. The shouting of the townsfolk as they gathered buckets from the river was muffled. The heat and the noise of it all choked out by the current of water that lay above Selene.

What was that clouding black, obscuring her view? It was her own blood. The realization washed cleanly over her, more vibrant than the pain that ached in her side. She ought to be drowning, another choleric thought. Selene found that she could breath. She did not move, and the current did not sweep her away - something else carried her now through the water. Deeper below her than the riverbed went, in the murky silt, a silver-scaled beast swam unhindered.

No, the scales weren't silver. They were the bluing tint of blackberries rolling down the vine.

Get away from here, Selene came to her senses for but a moment. You don't want this memory. It was hers, nothing to do with Merrycourt or Hawthorne or the Everwatcher or or any other one of Anathathaeum. Hers alone.

The clarity of that plea faded. Arms and legs struggled against the river's pull. As the breath left her lungs, Selene went back to drowning.

She didn't know of the loctopus tightening its grasp around her mind, nor of its poison inking through her veins. All that Selene could see and feel was Prathil, her home, burning to the ground, and her brother's sword lodged solidly in her gut as she plunged deeper into the cold river waters.

And the great fish spirit who saved her, doomed her. Segale of the Long Branch.

Bebin Theros
 
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Strands turned to scales turned to spread hood that helped push the water with the fluid movements. Dynamics that saw the blackberry shine of each segment of plated skin ripple through the abyssal light that peered through poisoned clouds. Curls of caustic cruelty, as whiplike arms snapped and wrapped round the singular form.

Yet the cold river flowed, as it plunged deeper into waters, wrapped body round her who sank so deep in that darkness. The serpent's head reared up, its hood splayed wide and bright, near-luminous blue were those scales underneath, with patterns, two above and two below of dark ringed eyes that stared deep against the stare of that wretched tentacled fiend. Fangs bared. Venom dripped.

Dare not interfere. The serpent warned. And the loctopus jet back, eyes narrowed with the glow of their reddish light, diffused across a body whose skin seemed to dance with the very light that spread through the thick murk. A spread of mantle and a retraction of arms sent the amorphous creature propelling through the dark.

Serpent that he was, Bebin, the Basilisk, snapped out in its wake. As ink bodies twist and swirled, mote met scale sent pain pure through thick hide.

Flames licked all around. Embers rode the wind. Thick clouds curled then too. With steel in his hand. There was nothing he could do.

Selene
 
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The world of the wake dragged her ever deeper into the river Wda, distances that no human hand could pull her out of. A silenced part of Selene knew that she was dreaming, reliving, recreating the memory of that night. That part of her could not speak yet, and it only stirred restlessly within her bleeding gut as she sank between the silver scales of the river spirit.

The foundation stones have been loosened, and the blood of my captors spilled. Now I am free to shed this corruption like a skin, Segale spoke to her. Child, for this act, I will give you one scale from my back. Speak your boon and it will be so.

Selene reached her hand out to a coil of the spirit. It swirled around her, more a shape than a beast. The water no longer felt cold, and the dark no longer limiting. She was losing consciousness. What sort of boon should a dying woman ask for? Life seemed the obvious answer.

The great spirit's coils flashed past her in a flurry of movement, rolling further away. As it disappeared back into the murk, a single scale was left behind. The scale, round as a third moon, glowed with lochlight. with the last of her strength, she swam towards that scale, clutched at it with numb hands.

And at the bottom of the river, Selene made her wish.



She came to on the banks of the river. The sounds of fire had died down, now only a crackling ember as townsfolk sifted through the rubble of their ruler's fallen estate. Coughing up water and silt, Selene rolled onto her hands and knees. She found her movement was not impeded. A hand searched her side for the sword and the wound that had been there, and only found tattered clothes and smooth skin.

Around her, the bullrushes and flowering moss was dry, desiccated of life. Selene caught her breath and inhaled. Strength returned to her, the power of the freshly laid curse lifting her as she rose onto her feet. The circle of blight around her grew, withering more of the river bank. That silenced part of herself opened its eyes and saw the Loch for what it was. Selene stood doublingly in one place, the young girl standing in the rubble of her village, and the Captain, comet's power upon her crown.

She turned to Bebin, who was there, because this was a dream, and she wanted him to be.

"The sword," she said. "I keep dreaming of swords." Selene motioned over to an empty patch of air, that looked no different to the rest of the landscape. "Do you mind, cutting us a doorway just over there? I can't think with all this smoke in the air."

Bebin Theros
 
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An abyssal blue was the serpent of Bebin's soul, and it raced in the currents of the many eyed creature's wake. Tongues and tails of the poison cloud touched and burned across the ebon plates and those spaces between each glossy scale. No moons, but the shadows of stars. Valleys between ripples and waves as all the body surged forward, coiled about one deeper still.

Steel was in his hand once more. Scales gone. Hood of flesh turned to curls and strands once more, wildly dark even as all the dream around him burned. Memories mixed. Past lives, long lost, crackled and hissed in hellish company. Villages, beneath the same moon, and cloaked by the same stars. Yet the fires burned different. One amidst the lands of the Vale, the other along the hills far and to the west. Traitorous flames, all the same.


"At your command, Captain," Bebin said with a bow of his head.

He stepped forward, the silver crescent of his blade alit with the golden red of fire's dread. His lungs filled with breath and he lopped three quick cuts with pushed out breaths. From the burning dream of fire at night they emerged to the burning dream of day's light.

Another village, turned to rubble. No great grey stones about gilded woods, but sandy rubble, amidst a field of ash. Bebin stood there as he had stood before. Hands red, black smoke caked about the creases of his sleepless eyes. No hair so long, but cropped short, and all around, the dead.

"A sword, yes," he said, present voice passed through passed lips. "I had a sword then too,"

Selene
 
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Her lashes stuck together as Selene blinked against the daylight, still wet from the river. A hand came up to shield her vision, and through splayed fingers she saw huts of a western frame huddled low along the horizon. The sand under her feet was strange to her, and so too the man next to her.

This was still Bebin, yes, but younger and more unsteady. If Selene could see herself, she would have noticed the same: her hair short and fuzzy, her eyes a warm brown, no dark viscera clouding her gaze. She felt as if she were stepping out of the Valen forest for the first time, as if this world was hers now. A journey never made. Theirs were two pasts - never fated - mixing now in the waters of the Loch.

Selene stepped forward, but found the soles of her bare feet heating up. She hopped from one foot to another, then broke into a painful jog to the twisted form of a nearby tree, more snag than alive. She stood in the shadow of its truck and dug her toes below the sandy surface to find darker, smoother earth beneath. She took that cooling moment to look at the village lost, its wounds still fresh.

"Even the ground here feels wrathful,"
Selene said. "Bebin, don't tell me this is where you grew up..."

Bebin Theros
 
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A smirk cut across Bebin's lips. "Is it so hard to believe, Captain?"

The harsh sun beat down on them. The earth, dry and powdery beneath bare feet. Unfamiliar to his present mind. Yet, known to the mind of his past. The old sensation. The sting of it. He had thick skin neath his proud feet, used to walking across such unforgiving earth.

Bebin looked down at the wide based roots of his stance, his feet. Spread his toes and felt the sandy dirt tickle there in between them, where so often boots now covered and mashed together those oft neglected bones.

"Funny," he said. "How the absence of something helps us understand its importance," his dark eyes looked up once more and he turned toward the tree, and saw the vision of his captain. Of Selene.

A dream amidst a nightmare. A possibility he knew impossible. She, free of black stained curse, and he, still so marked by his own failures.

He looked down at his ashen hand, and at the curve of steel still gripped there in. The tulwar of his people. How different it was then. How heavy it felt in his hand. How it craved violence. Called for action. A path he knew he would take. For his fall had not happened here.

His fall.

His eyes cast up to the hills beyond the village. "Captain," he said with a sharp smile, and pointed up and behind her.

Where the hills had been but moments ago now stood but a blanket of sand swirling clouds. Murk of the floor, set to stir. Amidst the curtains and rolls and curls of mud, like jagged rows and cliffs, a terrestrial shell did emerge, from which rivers of silt did cascade and fall. There, beneath its expansive dome, appeared a singular eye, cloistered between two defiant plates.

The eye glowed bright and silver-blue, a moon so charged with cosmic light it shimmered and shined pearlescent and all seeing in its luminance that bled the false light of dreams away, and turned the world around them back to the bottomless blue of the Loch.

"The Deep Seer," the pursuant said with whispered reverence.



Selene
 
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"Funny," Bebin said, and for a moment, she was under the shade of her forest, looking out at Bebin, a shadow of the young Pursuant standing next to him. "How the absence of something helps us understand its importance."

The image of Demeix disappeared into the wavering heat. Bebin pointed at something behind her, and she turned at his word. A swirl of sand, headed their way. It rolled over them, and Selene shielded her eyes against the batter, expecting hot wind. Instead, a wave of cooling current rushed over her, and the muted sound of water in her ears. She looked up to swirling mud and rolling dunes, a soft world save for the craggy mountainscape that had unburied itself in front of them.

No, not a mountainscape, but alabaster shell cascading in terraced ridges around a single pearlesque eye.

"The Deep Seer," Bebin said in awe touched voice.

"The Eye of Enki,"
she echoed the sentiment, drawing upon that older, god-crested name.

Selene stepped forward towards the great spirit, and she was as she always had been - dark eyes looking upon the bottom of the Loch with new strength. The hem of her starsilk cloak stirred in the currents, and she found her staff was in her hand once more.

"Children of the Loch,"
The Seer spoke, and its voice echoed through the water as if from every direction. The eye looked down upon them, knowing, wise. Sorrowful. "You should have stayed lost,"

There was a familiar blue sheen to that eye, and Selene saw in it, the spirit of the hermit.

"O great Seer, we seek your wisdom," Selene announced. She held her ground, even as a second current of mud pulsed out from the celestial oyster. "An enemy hides in your realm, one who seeks to destroy us."

Bebin Theros
 
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His heart was a vortex. A draining swirl of all he carried. His past, his present, the future he laid his life down for. And it lead him here. It lead them here, to this most clouded of depths.

Bebin let out his breath in long cool exhalation. The mud beneath his feet stirred, clouds billowed out in dark curtains as his curled tresses flared outwards about his head like an aura that showed the flow of the currents around.

"There is but to hide, and to be found, Children of the Loch. To be hidden, and to be sought. Hide. Hide in the mud. Hide in the past that cloaks you so. Or die in the now." The Eye of Enki looked at them for a moment that seemed to stretch out into eternity, and so too last for but a pull of false breath.

The past.

"What lurks in the past, oh Fathomless Seer?!" Bebin called out. "What hides there for us to find?!"

The sorrowful eye, like a sea of stars in and of its singularity, gazed upon them still.
"Three as one, one as three. Falsehood and Truth. Life. Death. Promise." Its eye came shut beneath its great shell. "Hidden, for what hunts you, hunts all. For fear of being hunted." The eye began to fade. Began to blur again. Phasing into the colorless depth of the bottomless Loch.

Bebin grit his teeth, the flowing strands of his black mane shift in how they stirred . "Something else approaches," he said grimly, and turned to face the shadows they had put at their backs.

In the water, dark shapes gathered and swam. Eyes of red, like weeping scars, opened here and there, in but blinks. Shimmers and reflections.
 
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Afraid. The great beast of the loch, the deep-seated seer, was afraid. In its eye, the lifeblood and the color of dreams, countless secrets of the past were played out. Countless possible paths for the now and future to take, and it saw death in all of them. If there were other futures to see, it closed them behind the bulk of its great shell, disappeared into the sand.

Something other than the great spirit's absence disturbed the waters. Bebin sensed it before she did, turning to face the dark shadows that approached them. Inky black figures that blurred together, crawling at the edges with clawed tentacles, a bulk of movement separated only by the multitude of eyes, crying out red trails of light as they shifted and vied for space.

Selene longed for her staff, or her sword. She readied her hands instead, palms poised to cast.

Then, came a current of color across the dark waters. A long, elegant shape swam between them and the inky shadows, neither serpent nor fish. Blue scales flashed with iridescent lines of gold and pink, as two slender arms reached forward.
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"Begone, beasts of corruption!"
The figure commanded. The shadows squirmed in response, tendrils lashed, and eyes blinked their burning tears. "You will not tarnish this sacred place."

Between her hands, a round eye shield of fire formed, and burned without heat. It grew, and lit the outline of the kivren woman in gilded glow. The shadows cowered at the sight, scattering where the light exposed them, until there was no place left to hide.
 
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Bebin, stood tall, muscles coiled and read, until the bright flash of guardian light blinded him as it did the creatures that swirled about the shadows just beyond the edge of their vision. Where the darkness turned curtain, and the currents pushed and pulled the sticky silt of the mind. The bottom of the Loch. The dredge.

He covered his eyes, as a drunk might the sun, and blinked, his wild mane still splayed about his form, still sensing and feeling the shift in currents.

Gone was the Eye of Enki. He need not see to know that. Before them, he thought as his eyes realized that there was no light here that could blind him. That here, his eyes could see as far and true as they always could. Even bathed in this light. They knew it to be a false light. A light that could blind them no more than the ground beneath them was true soil.

It was the Loch.


"Seabearer," he said with confident grin. Saw the shadows drive away. His hand spun his sword, the blade fang down, and the Knight of Anathaeum changed again to that great beastial serpent. Long and shimmering and strong. Its large wide eyes as blue and brilliant as sapphires that refracted star fire.
 
The maddening light gave way to familiar shapes - a dance of blue fins and gilded scales joined by the spiral of black iridescence, as Bebin rose to meet the Seabearer. Selene could only look upwards in admiration as the two greeted each other, sunk to the bottom as she was.

"Bebin," the kivren responded, swirling round to to face the great serpent. She rested her hands on the sides of his broad head, smiling proudly at the Loch knight with sharp teeth. "Look at you, how you've grown."

Her powerful tail pushed her a short distance away, so that she could look at the two of them. "Though I dread to see you both here. Has something happened to Astenvale?"

"Not so," Selene responded. "But we fear it might. Something stirs in the Loch. Something that can affect the physical realm."
 
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"We have both been cast into the depths, Master of Sea and Flame," the Pursuant reported. For long had been the dives he had made in his youth. Days adrift, with but the silk of his sanity tethering him to the waking world beyond. "I, by our pupil and protégé," he did not say the word he wanted to say, for the wound was too deep. Stung too fresh across his heart. "Legault Demiex,"

His head tracked the serpentine body of the great Kivren, the Queen of the Unquenchable Flame.

"Captain Selene has encountered an entity, a being, a thing we believe is... the Everwatcher, the nemesis of old, locked away in the loch" the very thought seemed to stir the waters around his great form. But he let them go still. "He seeks a way out, has found... form, and corrupted at least one of our Knights," he still refused to believe Demiex could be turned so easily.

But Merrycourt was dead. And it was the boy's own greatsword that had cast him adrift.
 
Viviane the Seabearer drifted effortlessly as Bebin explained all that they knew. Her red hair flowed about her as a wave, or a flame. She nod her head once.

"Yes," she said. "I know of him, the Everwatcher. And I know of the things you do not speak of." She closed her eyes, lowered herself some in the currents so that she was at a level with Selene. "You have found a sword, the Blightdrinker. It was once of Dusk. And you have lost someone... someone I cannot see any longer..."

"Before he left, Demeix," Selene looked away from Viviane, her wide yellow eyes too great to bear. "He killed Merrycourt."

The kivren tilted her head up to look somewhere they could not see, the halo of her hair shifting in the currents. "No, I can see Merrycourt," she said, her voice far away.

Selene kept staring at the silt. Who could it be, then? Hawthorne, did the Blightdrinker take something from her old master on that day, keep him from the Loch? She couldn't bring herself to ask, a swirl of something dark rising up in her chest.
 
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