Where does the mind wander when its been physically separated from the body? When the anchor has been severed, and the soul is left to drift in the sea between worlds, cold and dark and devoid of any but the most twisted forms of life? What does it see, what does it experience as it floats for eternity without the home it has always known?
A tale of horror, a journey through every misdeed and every sin that had ever been committed in one life. For many, it would be a short story - long by their standards, but to one such as this woman it would be been but an eye blink, a blip in history.
Memories of the
cities she had razed in fire, calling down the Justice of Angelique at one time, and the fires of Barnabas' honor at another. The memories of blood running through streets in rivers, the discarded corpses of the innocent laying in piled heaps where they had fled, met with soldiers, and died. Died in their hundred, in their thousands. Tens of thousands.
Cities reduced to smoking
ruins, tendrils of smoke wafting away from shattered timbers and crumbled masonry, streets littered with the dead and the dying, the one silent and accusing, the other moaning and praying to their God or Goddess of choice, the pleas falling on deaf ears. The air tinged dirty brown, the sun a red stain on the horizon through the ever present pall of smoke drifting across a war-torn land.
How to quantify dissolution? How to describe a world where fires rage unchecked, the Gods and Goddesses laying in pools of their own filth, blood from gaping wounds gouged into holy flesh mixing with the shit of their followers and their own pristine selves? The Temples were cast to the ground, their stones cracked and blackened, the priests that had manned the circles and guided the rituals nothing but bloated corpses ringed in swirling flies. The father and the son, locked in death with the mother and the child and their wide-eyed disbelief. A world where even the stones would no longer abide, and the great quakes wrought of the Fall of the Gods brought everything -
everything - to ruin.
Guilds, cities, fortresses, cathedrals, mountains, islands...everything. Washed away in seas of fire and water and ice until almost nothing lived, and those that did were forced to flee that world if they could.
The end of the
Sidhe as a civilization, the end of the time when they had raised a banner to seek power, to join hands in camaraderie and pursue a single uniting goal.
The visions were lashes against a scarred soul, beaten over any number of lifetimes. Forced again and again to see things that most only ever saw once, if they ever saw them even one time in their short, simple lives. Faces and names out of time - friends, enemies, lovers, their features blurred at the edges by the scouring effect of time itself. She tried to call out to them, to call them back from the abyss they had fallen into, fallen away from her to leave her alone and plodding on in one unfamiliar land after another, forever a stranger.
One by one they vanished into the mists of time. Killed, or simply slipped away, forgotten or forgetful of the world as it had been, and of the people they had known. Daughter and mother drifting apart, until the gulf separating them was too vast to be bridged. Scholars holed in their Spires, mired in their own pathos until the bitter, acidic regrets of years gone by ate away first at their souls, and then at their minds.
Forever a stranger.
How to deal with looking back into the cavernous reaches of time, and seeing the once proud brought so low? How to deal with the never ending decline, the continued slipping into total dissolution? How long would it be before everything that her people had achieved at their height became lost, obscured by the denigration of their fall?
It was an answer that had eluded the ancient sorceress for years beyond counting. The soul might wander, occasionally, but it always found its way back to the mortal shell, the the anchor that kept it in a world that was decaying and that no one but her could understand or see as such.
She opened her eyes.
Sweat gleamed on every inch of exposed flesh, and she could not help the faint tremor that rattled a frame that seemed unmarred by the passage of weeks without waking. Or, at least, she had not melted away as
humans were wont to do. The blankets were damp with her sweat, as if a terrible fever had finally broken. She stirred, feeling weaker than she could ever remember, and realized that was more or less the truth. Holes in her memory did not permit her to recall how she had come to be here, or what had happened. The terrible pain in her body, though, told the tale well enough.
The sound of laughing children was distinctly out of place, and she suffered from a terrible moment of recollection, there and then gone. A sobbing gasp as she attempted to move, to throw off covers that seemed to weigh nearly as much as the bed itself, and the agony in her joints and muscles that were punishment for the attempt.
"What...," she managed to croak, finally. Lank hair, knotted and tangled, framed her sweaty face as she searched with her eyes, barely able to move her head even. "Draedmyr...?"
