6th Cylus 718
It’s a simple question, Fiona. It’s an easy question. It’s the question that you rarely get a chance to verbally articulate but nonetheless you live it all the same. It’s the question that kept you up at night in the orphanage thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking through the hunger and cold but never saying those four words, and it’s the same enduring question that continues to plague you even with a roof over your head, clean sheets, and every base need satisfied.
It’s the question that drives the nameless God we all worship. It’s the nameless God the blasphemer and the anti theist and the pious pray to whether they know it or not, and it is the nameless god that endows us with the strength to carry on.
It’s not Ilaren or Lissiria or Syroa or Faldrun. It’s not Aeva or Aelig or Ziell or U’frek
It might be Delroth.
It simply is this:
What do you want?
What do you want, Fiona?
You wanted to be respected. You wanted a nebulous goal with no structured means of achieving it with no fixed result in sight. You were an orphan that would have taken the tiniest shred offered to you without a moment’s hesitance, seizing upon anything that would have gotten you to an semi-acceptable endgame: dancer, healer, merchant, business owner, clerk.
The twenty percenters in life. The made-it’s who could claim they won the Game of life.
Compromise, compromise, fuckin’ compromise.
You don’t want that nebulous respect anymore.
Their respect means less to you than their lives and their deaths. Their respect, when necessary, is just another means to an end for survival, one you desperately wish you could rid yourself of the necessity of.
Their respect, frankly, is sickening.
The idea that anyone could look at you and think: I Could Be That If I Work Towards is a greater insult than any swear, any vulgarity, any passive aggressive slight thrown towards you. It belittles your potential, reduces your experiences to be a formula to be tried and replicated, and and challenges your uniqueness as an individual. In fact, it’s an insult to both the object and the giver of respect; to find yourself a copy, to emulate without innovation…
No, you don’t want respect. You don’t want anything as unreliable and as co-dependent as that.
What then?
You want to be feared? Feared as Vuda is to those who understand his true nature in the grand scheme of Etzos? To be feared as Neronin is feared everytime he walks in broad daylight? To command terror as Noth does that you harbor suspicions that Empathy is in play with that crippled bird-thing? Or is the fear you wish one on a more grander scale: the sheer, creeping panic of being a dragon on a hoard of gold, threatening poor adventurers and treasure hunters to wake up and loose killing fire at any moment?
Maybe.
But then again, maybe not.
You would rather hide in shadow than be the lurking shadow itself. You didn’t want to be bogeyman or monster - You just wanted to be left alone in the dark while others fought the dull battles you couldn’t be arsed to do yourself. You wanted the fear without a face or a name to attach to it, a creeping force that called but could never be called.
Not yet.You weren’t there yet.
What else did you want?
You wanted nel - but nel was a necessary evil, a personal insult to Transmutation and, on a broader scale, to Magic itself. The idea that a power that could transplant any Quality it desired, to take the best bits out of it and push it into any other solid material could so utterly fail because the value of the thing was inherent in the social and the psychological instead of the usefulness was damning. To be so completely defeated by the symbolic, by an agreed upon medium of exchange with value far below-
Do you have no pure want? No desire you hadn’t tossed aside or warped into something else?
Did you want Etzos? No, that meant you was responsible for them all - and they were needy, insufficient imperfections bundled together, waiting for a death that wouldn’t come soon enough. You wanted Etzos itself as much as you wanted to eat food, which was to say: not at all. As a younger woman, you did recall saying you wanted to save Etzos from itself, to eliminate poverty and cure ignorance. As someone else in the present time-
You saw it as a testbed at best; a case study that served as a monument of how to be better than every other god-infested city out there and yet still so utterly fall short.
You saw it as a prison for yourself and everyone else.
Yet another insult: your shackles, real and symbolic, tied you to a place you had grown to despise so completely.
Did you want love-
Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.
You could feel the stiffness of your unamused laughter written down somewhere.
Let’s not get absurd.
Your attempts at companionship had resulted thusly:
An amicable break with a childhood friend who was only perceived as more monstrous because he chose the wrong spark, because you had the fortune of hiding what yours did to you than what his did to him. He raised corpses, stole souls, and rotted the world. You infused the world into objects, governed the very building blocks of the world itself, and degraded everything you could lay your hands upon.
You both worked because, as individuals, you… didn’t.
He just lost the option to hide it anymore.
You pray -non-religiously- that the same wouldn’t happen to you before you could throw off the mask too.
A second relationship with a wingmate of the Etzori army only worked for the same reason. You wanted to experiment, the wingmate wanted… you always suspected she was lonely. Distant. Away from reality that kept her hollow inside. You suspect it didn’t end sooner because they both saw it as a competition of sorts, both didn’t want to be the one to throw in the towel first and admit that-
Whatever. It was done.
The third?
You killed the third.
Tracked him into a forest behind Foster’s, engaged him in a mage’s duel that destroyed your entire Transmutator’s regalia, stabbed out his eye, carved a wound into him that must have spilled his guts if he weren’t made of stone, and slit his throat. Even with the help of those Seekers, he surely wouldn’t have survived those wounds.
Surely.
It was a disgusting thing to have to rely on someone, to admit that you, alone, were incapable of surviving in the world, that you lacked the skills to stand tall as an island in a sea of co-dependence.
Just another necessary evil to the world.
Just another necessary evil to a world built for the needy to huddle and the self-sufficient to be dragged right in to keep them company.
So what did you want?
A teddy bear? A carriage? A home the size of a mansion? A mountain range? A workshop of magical artifacts? A key that could unlock any lock? A library of the world’s most ancient arts? A telescope to gaze into the stars? A, a, a, a, a-
Yes. yes, you could have said at any age that wasn’t 21 arcs old. Yes, you would have said, giving up nearly anything to claim any one of those except for now.
Even the stated goal of freedom from the Etzori regime felt hollow: you’ll never be free of the world. You broke one shackle and found yourself chained to even greater ones. You will never be free so long as your feet were planted in Idalos-
But there was a place that wasn’t Idalos.
Your gaze turns to Emea and you don’t care whether it is the song of the spark edging you on, or your own desires leading you to this conclusion, or some twisted combination of both or neither:
You want it.
You want it despite the fact that Nightmares thrive beyond the horizon, waiting to invade at a moment’s notice. You want it despite the fact that you remember yourself whining about it, bitching about it, claiming to want to stop the floodgate but you don’t really want that, do you? Each brush with a Nightmare beast is a brush closer to Emea beyond, to a place where the dreams give way to another reality.
An honest reality.
You want that so much.
You also want to settle your affairs before you go just as much:
Every vendetta repaid.
Finn secured in his little life in a broken city; a gestating sprout that will one day surely join her where she was headed… so long as she kept the other defiance spark raped into him in check. She had an idea of what to do-
Everything prepared for her brief, inevitable return to a reality you despised, to a reality she sometimes couldn’t believe was real.
Just one more step, sang the spark. Just one more step up the ladder you could feel but didn’t know how to take.
Yet.
It’s a simple question, Fiona. It’s an easy question. It’s the question that you rarely get a chance to verbally articulate but nonetheless you live it all the same. It’s the question that kept you up at night in the orphanage thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking through the hunger and cold but never saying those four words, and it’s the same enduring question that continues to plague you even with a roof over your head, clean sheets, and every base need satisfied.
It’s the question that drives the nameless God we all worship. It’s the nameless God the blasphemer and the anti theist and the pious pray to whether they know it or not, and it is the nameless god that endows us with the strength to carry on.
It’s not Ilaren or Lissiria or Syroa or Faldrun. It’s not Aeva or Aelig or Ziell or U’frek
It might be Delroth.
It simply is this:
What do you want?
What do you want, Fiona?
You wanted to be respected. You wanted a nebulous goal with no structured means of achieving it with no fixed result in sight. You were an orphan that would have taken the tiniest shred offered to you without a moment’s hesitance, seizing upon anything that would have gotten you to an semi-acceptable endgame: dancer, healer, merchant, business owner, clerk.
The twenty percenters in life. The made-it’s who could claim they won the Game of life.
Compromise, compromise, fuckin’ compromise.
You don’t want that nebulous respect anymore.
Their respect means less to you than their lives and their deaths. Their respect, when necessary, is just another means to an end for survival, one you desperately wish you could rid yourself of the necessity of.
Their respect, frankly, is sickening.
The idea that anyone could look at you and think: I Could Be That If I Work Towards is a greater insult than any swear, any vulgarity, any passive aggressive slight thrown towards you. It belittles your potential, reduces your experiences to be a formula to be tried and replicated, and and challenges your uniqueness as an individual. In fact, it’s an insult to both the object and the giver of respect; to find yourself a copy, to emulate without innovation…
No, you don’t want respect. You don’t want anything as unreliable and as co-dependent as that.
What then?
You want to be feared? Feared as Vuda is to those who understand his true nature in the grand scheme of Etzos? To be feared as Neronin is feared everytime he walks in broad daylight? To command terror as Noth does that you harbor suspicions that Empathy is in play with that crippled bird-thing? Or is the fear you wish one on a more grander scale: the sheer, creeping panic of being a dragon on a hoard of gold, threatening poor adventurers and treasure hunters to wake up and loose killing fire at any moment?
Maybe.
But then again, maybe not.
You would rather hide in shadow than be the lurking shadow itself. You didn’t want to be bogeyman or monster - You just wanted to be left alone in the dark while others fought the dull battles you couldn’t be arsed to do yourself. You wanted the fear without a face or a name to attach to it, a creeping force that called but could never be called.
Not yet.You weren’t there yet.
What else did you want?
You wanted nel - but nel was a necessary evil, a personal insult to Transmutation and, on a broader scale, to Magic itself. The idea that a power that could transplant any Quality it desired, to take the best bits out of it and push it into any other solid material could so utterly fail because the value of the thing was inherent in the social and the psychological instead of the usefulness was damning. To be so completely defeated by the symbolic, by an agreed upon medium of exchange with value far below-
Do you have no pure want? No desire you hadn’t tossed aside or warped into something else?
Did you want Etzos? No, that meant you was responsible for them all - and they were needy, insufficient imperfections bundled together, waiting for a death that wouldn’t come soon enough. You wanted Etzos itself as much as you wanted to eat food, which was to say: not at all. As a younger woman, you did recall saying you wanted to save Etzos from itself, to eliminate poverty and cure ignorance. As someone else in the present time-
You saw it as a testbed at best; a case study that served as a monument of how to be better than every other god-infested city out there and yet still so utterly fall short.
You saw it as a prison for yourself and everyone else.
Yet another insult: your shackles, real and symbolic, tied you to a place you had grown to despise so completely.
Did you want love-
Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.
You could feel the stiffness of your unamused laughter written down somewhere.
Let’s not get absurd.
Your attempts at companionship had resulted thusly:
An amicable break with a childhood friend who was only perceived as more monstrous because he chose the wrong spark, because you had the fortune of hiding what yours did to you than what his did to him. He raised corpses, stole souls, and rotted the world. You infused the world into objects, governed the very building blocks of the world itself, and degraded everything you could lay your hands upon.
You both worked because, as individuals, you… didn’t.
He just lost the option to hide it anymore.
You pray -non-religiously- that the same wouldn’t happen to you before you could throw off the mask too.
A second relationship with a wingmate of the Etzori army only worked for the same reason. You wanted to experiment, the wingmate wanted… you always suspected she was lonely. Distant. Away from reality that kept her hollow inside. You suspect it didn’t end sooner because they both saw it as a competition of sorts, both didn’t want to be the one to throw in the towel first and admit that-
Whatever. It was done.
The third?
You killed the third.
Tracked him into a forest behind Foster’s, engaged him in a mage’s duel that destroyed your entire Transmutator’s regalia, stabbed out his eye, carved a wound into him that must have spilled his guts if he weren’t made of stone, and slit his throat. Even with the help of those Seekers, he surely wouldn’t have survived those wounds.
Surely.
It was a disgusting thing to have to rely on someone, to admit that you, alone, were incapable of surviving in the world, that you lacked the skills to stand tall as an island in a sea of co-dependence.
Just another necessary evil to the world.
Just another necessary evil to a world built for the needy to huddle and the self-sufficient to be dragged right in to keep them company.
So what did you want?
A teddy bear? A carriage? A home the size of a mansion? A mountain range? A workshop of magical artifacts? A key that could unlock any lock? A library of the world’s most ancient arts? A telescope to gaze into the stars? A, a, a, a, a-
Yes. yes, you could have said at any age that wasn’t 21 arcs old. Yes, you would have said, giving up nearly anything to claim any one of those except for now.
Even the stated goal of freedom from the Etzori regime felt hollow: you’ll never be free of the world. You broke one shackle and found yourself chained to even greater ones. You will never be free so long as your feet were planted in Idalos-
But there was a place that wasn’t Idalos.
Your gaze turns to Emea and you don’t care whether it is the song of the spark edging you on, or your own desires leading you to this conclusion, or some twisted combination of both or neither:
You want it.
You want it despite the fact that Nightmares thrive beyond the horizon, waiting to invade at a moment’s notice. You want it despite the fact that you remember yourself whining about it, bitching about it, claiming to want to stop the floodgate but you don’t really want that, do you? Each brush with a Nightmare beast is a brush closer to Emea beyond, to a place where the dreams give way to another reality.
An honest reality.
You want that so much.
You also want to settle your affairs before you go just as much:
Every vendetta repaid.
Finn secured in his little life in a broken city; a gestating sprout that will one day surely join her where she was headed… so long as she kept the other defiance spark raped into him in check. She had an idea of what to do-
Everything prepared for her brief, inevitable return to a reality you despised, to a reality she sometimes couldn’t believe was real.
Just one more step, sang the spark. Just one more step up the ladder you could feel but didn’t know how to take.
Yet.
