Dream thread, details of Volanta here are not real, nor do they reflect what Volanta has been, was or ever will be...
Through moonlit streets, a procession followed along behind the torch-bearer. Grand stone edifices stood at either end of the lane, towering over the people who walked in lines. They were gathering to the temple of Vri in Volanta. Light snow fell to the slate-covered streets, melting before they adhered. A western wind swept through the streets, carrying with it the ocean's breeze. All the while, torch-bearers guided the procession.
They traveled through the gate of Sorrow, into the grand thoroughfare and a full avenue, allowing a lengthy and robust procession at high funeral times. The street led from the Sorrow Gate toward the Halls of Remembrance. And from that Hall, one could navigate the catacombs, and come out the other end. There at the end of the tunnel, traveling up above ground once more to the necropolis' courtyard.
Here is where the mourners emerged at the end of their procession. They wore the gray clothing of grieving for the one who'd passed. Among them, an elder gentleman stood tall, his hand on the knob of a cane. He wore a long-tail jacket, with slacks, hard leather shoes, a linen shirt, and vest. The suit itself was of navy velvet. The inner lining of a lighter periwinkle. On his head sat a silken hat.
He moved along the procession, greeting those who'd come to pay their respects. Woe grasped each hand as he passed them by, "Thank you for coming." He would say mechanically. His monotone and deadpan expression never changing for anyone.
After greeting the first few mourners, he went over toward where the coffin sat on a dais. Once there, he lowered his head and meditated on the life of the one who'd passed.
Murmurs spread throughout the crowd. It was said that the son of Labrae, Woe's nephew, Sintra's grandson, was being laid to rest, having lived to a ripe old age of eighty. While many didn't question the mode of his demise, there were whispers that it had arrived by treachery. Woe didn't know about those rumors. His favorite nephew had died, and yet here he stood, unable to cry for him.
One of the mourners came right next to Woe as he stood beneath the raised sarcophagus. The woman patted him on the shoulder and whispered words of encouragement in a language he didn't understand. It was said that Wicker drew a full circle in his life. Many men and women he called allies from all over Idalos. Yet here he lied, for all the treasures of human company, none of it would follow him to the next world.
Woe couldn't sense Labrae anywhere near. Yet he saw the crows perched atop the stone gargoyles who watched over the necropolis courtyard. Woe sighed through his nose, bowing his head once more to the sarcophagus. Then he stepped away and went to mingle with the rest of the crowd.
He saw few enough faces that he remembered. Yet, among them, he saw... could it be? Was it Professor Doran? The elder mortalborn thought he saw Doran, looking as young as the time he promised to lend Woe tickets to the theatre!
Woe hobbled up toward him as quick as his feet and cane would carry. He clapped the other Professor on the upper arm, and gave him a subdued smile, "It's been too long, Professor Doran? You... haven't changed. Not a bit since we first met... Did you know Wicker, then?"
“Chancellor, do you really think that you should?” one of the guards that had accompanied him all the way from Viden asked, his discomfort with the situation at hand obvious. Besides the breach of etiquette that what the son of Ziell planned on doing constituted, it was simply not wise. This was a foreign country, and there were people out there that could even cause a swordsman and mage of great skill and divine blood harm.
Even in this day and age he was not entirely without enemies.
Doran momentarily turned around and looked at the man before he curtly informed him, “I need to. I owe Wicker at least that much. Wait for me here.” With that he exited the carriage in order to join the long line of mourners, alone and unarmed. Just like the people around him, he was dressed in grey, a dark grey, bespoke suit, and a dark grey cloak that was trimmed with silver fur, among other things.
The style of his clothes clearly marked him as a foreigner though.
Wicker’s funeral was one of the largest he had seen in a while, he observed, and he had already attended far too many funerals in the more than five hundred arcs that he had been alive. There had been a time when he would not have cared about the death of one of Sintra’s descendants as much – he had been rather ambivalent towards the Immortals once – but the centuries had made him realize that it was better to join them than to fight a fight he couldn’t win.
“At least he lived a long life”, one of the mortals around him, a human woman remarked softly once they finally stood in the courtyard and looked at the coffin that contained what remained of one of his most talented students. He didn’t share her opinion. To him, eighty arcs were little more than the blink of an eye. Wicker had been gone too fast.
The gentleman that approached him – one of Wicker’s relatives, it seemed – looked familiar. It took him a while to remember their meeting, a century and a half prior. He had not thought that the Webspinner would still be alive, after all that time. He looked old, the alchemist decided, while he had not aged at all. The son of Ziell still appeared to only be in his early thirties. He was tall, his skin was devoid of wrinkles, and he didn’t have a single grey hair.
In fact, he looked better, healthier and stronger than he had back then. He had hardly ever used his divine abilities since he had left the battlefield at Treid’s Tomb, and Syroa’s blessing had made sure that he had never fallen ill and recovered from injuries far faster than most.
“Almost a hundred and forty arcs, if I remember correctly”, he spoke – he had stopped trying to hide what he was a long time ago. “I had not thought that I would ever see you again. Wicker was one of my favourite students. I’m not sure how much he told you about his time in Viden. If you’d like, we can talk after the funeral”, he offered - Woe might want to know more about his relative's life, he realized - before he added, the tone of his voice that was usually quite cool softening noticeably, “My condolences.”
Woe, meanwhile, had made liberal use of his mortalborn domains. At the age of roughly 170 arcs, he was well beyond ordinary life spans. Those who knew of him knew there was something to his longevity. Fortunately for Woe, he could make folks forget when he had to cut off their association. Few enough people knew Woe or who he was. But then, there was the Mortalborn professor that Woe had met, so many decades ago. He wondered if he could make him forget?
But now was not the time for Woe to indulge such intrigues. Perhaps later, there would be a time.
Woe's hair was whitened with age and stress. Wrinkles creased his face, illustrating a look that rarely smiled. He nodded to Chancellor Doran as he told Woe how he knew Wicker.
"Yes, that is a long time, now that I hear it. Perhaps I kept too busy and forgot that I was supposed to have died around one hundred years prior." Woe gave him a false smile; it was the best he could manage at his joke. The webspinner debated internally whether to confess his relation to Wicker. In the end, he supposed if he thought it better that Doran forgets him, he could do so. So he nodded, "Wicker was my nephew. So I take it he knows much of what he learned about medicine and alchemy from you then?"
The crows gathered up around the gargoyles of the necropolis cawed and cried as the mourners filed in, taking seats at the stone slaps that lay before the altar. Woe signaled for Doran to join him on one of the benches at the front. A space reserved for closest relations and family friends. There, he would sit upon the hard seat, grunting as he lowered himself onto it. He clutched his cane as he did so, careful not to go too quick about it. His hip had been giving him no end of trouble, after all.
They were quiet for a few bits, while the priest of Vri droned on about the constant cycle of life and death. His speech was nothing special, more or less the same as any that was said at literally any funeral. A short supplication to Vri, then to the soul of the departed. Very standard stuff.
When he finally finished, the priest looked to the crowd, "Is there anyone who would say words of our dearly departed friend, Wicker Crebain?" His eyes scanned the crowd before settling on those in the front row. Woe had his speech ready, but he would wait till last, as the closest relation to the man in question.
Sintra's Son turned to Doran then, and quirked a brow, "You're more than welcome to say some words if you'd like?" Nobody was putting Doran on the spot, necessarily, but someone would soon speak if he did not. Woe wouldn't hold it against him if he wanted to keep his relationship to Wicker to himself.
“Perhaps“, the alchemist agreed and smirked barely noticeably as Woe mused that he might simply have forgotten to die before he inclined his head slightly. They both knew that it wasn’t true, of course. No human had ever lived beyond a little over a hundred arcs, at least not without divine intervention or the use of a blessing. He decided not to say that out loud though. Now was not the right time to discuss Woe’s unnaturally long lifespan. Woe was grieving, and the alchemist was not entirely lacking empathy or sympathy.
“He did learn it from me, at least initially”, he confirmed, noticing that Woe was still speaking of his nephew in the present tense. Apparently, the Webspinner had a hard time coming to terms with Wicker’s death. He understood that, to some extent – Wicker had been exceptional in several different ways– although he would never slip up like that.
He followed the Webspinner to the benches at the front, somewhat surprised by the gesture. Woe was moving slowly, he observed, as if his legs were giving him trouble, but he did not comment on it. Some people didn’t like it when you pointed their physical ailments out to them. Instead, he sat down, with his back straight and his gloved hands folded in his lap, schooling his face in a carefully neutral expression as the priest droned on about the cycle of life and death and how everyone would die one trial.
Such would never happen to him.
He had successfully managed to escape that cycle. He had escaped it for over half a millennium and maintained his youth and his strength while doing so, and he had acquired items that would ensure that he would not have to face his father and be judged by Pier and Pre if worse came to worst, but simply join the living once more. Death was not always inevitable.
He had not planned on saying anything, but simply wanted to attend his funeral and pay his last respects – he was not related to Wicker. When Sintra’s Son turned to him, he nodded and rose to his feet without hesitation in order to step forward and address the crowd though.
“For those of you that don’t know me”, he spoke, his voice loud and firm and clear – he had never had any problems speaking to a large number of people. “My name is Doran, and I currently preside the Academy of Viden. Wicker was one of my students, perhaps even the best student I ever had. I first met him sixty arcs ago, when he began his studies. I wasn’t sure about him back then – I was unfortunately somewhat narrowminded. Of course, he proved me wrong.”
His voice was tinged with a hint of wistfulness as he said that, an unusual occurrence for a man who still felt very little sometimes.
“Wicker finished his Letter and his Certificate in but a season and completed his Diploma in half the normal time. At the end of the first arc, he started to work as one my assistants, but he soon became a colleague and, eventually, a treasured friend and companion for over two decades. Some of you may recall the fracture that opened in the Cold Mountains in 805. Wicker played an integral part in its study.”
“When a terrible plague struck Viden, he did not hesitate to risk his life in order to find a cure. The advancements that he made in the fields of medicine and alchemy were nothing short of extraordinary. Wicker never had any children – I think it was something that he regretted from time to time, although we didn’t talk about it a lot – but his legacy lives on through his inventions and the people that he saved with his cure. They have children and grandchildren now, all because of him.”
He stood there for a moment longer, looking at the crowd and especially at Woe before he inclined his head in order to return to his bench and eventually listen to the other speakers.
Woe listened patiently, and gratefully, as Chancellor Doran proceeded to inform the mourners how he knew Wicker. As he did so, Woe reflected on his own past with his nephew. How Labrae had given him to Woe, when they finally met in Cylus of 772. She never told him about the father, didn’t say much at all. Only reminding Woe, when he expressed apprehension at adopting Wicker, how she’d grasped and turned his hand when the Webspinner had held a knife to his own heart. At the time Wicker was given over, Woe’s life was without purpose, drifting from one place to another never to be remembered by a soul that took note of his passage. A conscious choice on his part, but a hard one nevertheless.
Then Labrae gave him her child, no more than four years old, hardly old enough to travel, and certainly not old enough to be permitted by the Yari to leave their city. They did try, though, to their credit. They never reckoned that Woe knew a way underneath the northern wall, where it’d collapsed almost half a century prior. There, he found a passage filled with the bones of the fallen of the demonic invasion, carrying him beyond the wall before the Yari could be alerted.
They made their way from one city to the next. If they weren’t harried by the Eternal Empire’s foot soldiers, they were accosted by Etzori Inquisitors. At times, even other Webspinners sought out the child of Labrae, seeking to bring him back into the fold of his grandmother.
Woe had long since left the Webspinners behind, himself. He abandoned them in their hour of need, in Etzos, during the rise of the faction that would much later become the Signalist Inquisition. A group of anti-immortal fanatics that didn’t stop with burning the worshipers, children, and marked of the Immortals, but took their crusade to Magic-users. Bedeviled by hypocrisy, the foot soldiers and Signalist Inquisitors failed to realize that among their leadership were mages, mortalborn, and marked.
In the conflagration of global conflict, mages, marked, and other mystics became once more hunted and reviled as they ever were in Andaris and the Duchies of Rynmere. Most city states, if they didn’t destroy Mages upon detection, would require them to be detained in squalid asylums and fed vile toxins that, while disabling their sparks, also robbed them of their mental faculties.
Only those who could afford a ring of paradigm were spared from the hunt, or those powerful and wily enough to conceal their nature. Woe, using Attunement, was one such person, capable of hiding his nature. As he attuned to Doran, he could see he also was a mage of some ability. He felt the raw ether running through the Chancellor. Interesting and serendipitous that they should find themselves in the same city.
As Doran went on with his speech, recounting Wicker’s deeds and life and legacy, Woe reflected on Wicker’s role in his own life. He brought him up to be better than he was. He had been many things, a vagabond, a torturer, an executioner, and a slave. None of them flattering or impressive. Yet, as he listened to Wicker’s accomplishments, he realized he’d been at least one decent thing. He’d been an Uncle, raising his nephew so that he could be better than Woe ever would be.
Woe never knew much about his life after Wicker and he parted ways. They hadn’t done so on the best of terms. And so all of it came as a surprise, it struck to his core, enough that he felt a swell of emotion threatening to engulf him. Yet he held a iron fist over the threads of his heartstrings, and refused to cry. It wasn’t for him to cry. This was Wicker’s moment and he wouldn’t spoil it with his tainted tears.
Doran’s speech came to a close, and Woe’s emotions drew taut, threatening to snap and fray at their core. Yet he was able to maintain composure, and nodded thankfully to Doran. He whispered to him when he sat down, “Thank you, Chancellor. You don’t know how… proud it makes me to know what kind of man Wicker became.”
More people came up and said a few words, announcing their transient relation to his nephew. Until it came time for Woe to tell his bit, which of course, given his emotional state he wasn’t and would never be prepared.
Yet, he pushed on his cane so that he could stand, and walked over toward the lectern. Once there, he addressed the crowd.
“I only knew Wicker in his younger years. It only came to me recently that a great Doctor had died, and when I heard his name, I could scarcely believe my own ears. Yet I knew in that moment it was my nephew, Labrae’s son that had finally met his end.”
“He was always a bright and prodigious child, curious and attentive, compassionate and giving. All qualities that I’m sure served him well in his life as a healer.”
“Labrae gave him to me when he was but a toddler. She didn’t say much when he was given over, but I knew then she meant for greater things for him, than to live as a webspinner. Perhaps she’d grown tired of the endless intrigues, the pawning off of children she’d raised from her own nursery by our mother’s cult. I don’t know what finally broke in her that she decided to make a break with Sintra…”
“My old kin, the webspinners, have not been friends to mortals, or indeed Idalos as a whole. We have caused untold harms and unleashed terror wherever our feet tread. We’ve torn families, companies, friends, and entire nations apart. And for every misfortune we’ve reaped, ten more have gone unpunished.”
“I will never pay my debt to the world, even if my soul is torn asunder, and denied even the peace of the Beyond.” Woe pointed behind him, at the sarcophagus that held Wicker’s ashes. “But here lies an innocent, raised from darkness and given to a worthless vagabond. His life paid for the survival of untold millions, just as mine and the Webspinner Cult has destroyed many fold more. But let us not sully Wicker’s name by uttering the name of my former, vile kindred in the same sentence as him.”
“Wicker Crebain has died, but as the good Chancellor said, though he had no children, his legacy shines as an exception to my family.”
So saying, Woe stepped down from the dais, and rejoined Doran on the front benches, where he took his seat. He said nothing for a long while, just trying to get a hold of his emotions before the black center threatened to engulf his heart. As he sat, the choir of the temple began to sing their dirge, for the fallen healer.
Unlike most, Doran didn’t fear the mage hunters, even though he had allowed the spark into his soul over a hundred arcs prior. In fact, they amused him to some extent because they failed to realize that some of the most prominent members of their little organization were in fact mages. From time to time, he even considered taking action against them – they were a bit bothersome, and he was confident that he would be able to handle most of their leaders easily, even if they managed to disable his spark – but then again, they did have a point.
The arcs and his initiation into Transmutation hadn’t changed his views of mages. In fact, he thought less of them than he had ever thought before now that he knew what it was like to harbor a spark, what the risks were and how magic changed you. In his opinion, most mages were dangerous, hot-headed fools that had no self-control and gave in to the temptation of flaying far too easily. They knew next to nothing about their nature, what the spark was and what its goals were. They were barely even able to explain why their ether did what it did.
Of course, he didn’t dwell on that topic or the unpleasant, but unfortunately occasionally necessary Ring of Paradigm for more than a couple of trills now. Wicker occupied most of his thoughts. He had thought that he had become indifferent – over the arcs, countless friends had come and gone – but Wicker’s death affected him. He had been exceptional in every single way. He missed him, he missed their conversations, their shared research, the letters that had arrived on his desk several times a cycle without fail, even after they had parted ways – in his later arcs, Wicker had taken to travelling.
When Woe stood, he wondered if he should help him – he looked weak, and he appeared to be in pain. The other man did manage on his own though, and the alchemist leaned back again in order to listen to his speech, occasionally furrowing his brow barely noticeably as there were some aspect of his old friend’s early childhood that he had not been aware of until now. There were a lot of things that he wanted to ask Woe, but doing such at a funeral was inappropriate; besides, some things shouldn’t be discussed in public.
“So, you raised your sister’s son nearly from the time that he was a baby. I didn’t know that”, he remarked as the former Webspinner took a seat next to him again. His tone of voice was polite, and the expression on his face was calm even though what the other man had said had surprised him greatly. So, Woe was mortalborn. He had not suspected such when they had first met. He had merely assumed him to be yet another Webspinner.
“You did pay your debt though, to some extent at least”, he spoke and met Woe’s gaze. He didn’t mean to comfort the other man; he was merely stating what he thought was a fact. “You laid the foundation for everything that happened. If you had not raised Wicker the way you had, he might never have become such a great doctor. Besides, we’ve all done things that we regret and that haunt us to this very trial.”
His tone of voice softened a hint as he said the last sentence.
The Chancellor was unusually conciliatory, for him anyway. For Woe's initial impression of the doctor was that he hadn't much in the way of empathy or warmth to give. Woe didn't doubt he meant his words, but to Woe it seemed a strain to say that he was responsible for the way his nephew turned out.
"No, if my Nephew thrived, it was in spite of me." Woe said, "I didn't make things easy for him, and, I have wronged him. I took him from his mother, his real family. Perhaps Sintra would..."
But there was no sense in completing that thought. He'd parted ways with the Webspinners long before, though he still considered himself as such.A rogue Webspinner, with not a friend in the world in or outside of the cult. His only saving grace was that he could navigate the lattice of society, and at need make people forget who he was and what he'd done. It was a serious boon at times, although the sheer number of times he'd used it had aged him, where he ought to live forever.
The time may come soon when he'd need to settle down somewhere, in a place where he could be reasonably protected.
But for now, he was just another vagabond wanderer.
"If anyone is to take credit for Wicker's greatness, it is the man who taught Wicker everything he knows." Woe inclined his head toward Doran, "A terrible childhood is no excuse for bad behavior, as experience would have it. Nor does it set the stage for greatness. Greatness needs cultivation, from the barren soil of humanity."
Again waxing poetic, call it a habit of Woe's. Dealing in vagaries and pretty, empty words. "He came from darkness, but it took a ladder to bring him out of it. That's where you came in."
The Chancellor was indeed unusually conciliatory – even after all those centuries, empathy and sympathy were things that didn’t come easily to him - but then again, Wicker had been an unusual man, and one of the few people in this world that he sincerely missed.
When Woe insisted that he hadn’t made it easy for his nephew, and that he had thrived in spite of him rather than because of him, he didn’t reply immediately, but simply looked at him for a moment, furrowing his brow fractionally.
He decided to not argue with the other man, not at his nephew’s funeral, not when he was grieving and when they were surrounded by so many people even though Woe was wrong in his opinion; such would be inappropriate.
Instead, he inclined his head, as if he agreed with him, at least in part, before he spoke, “You didn’t take him from his mother. You just talked about how Labrae gave him to you and that she might have meant for greater things for him. You were supposed to raise him.”
He was not trying to make Woe feel better; he was merely stating what he considered to be facts.
Unlike Woe and unlike the majority of the people around them he had no problem with praise and compliments, but neither did he bask in them. When Woe more or less stated that he was to take credit for Wicker’s greatness, he nodded rather than disagreeing.
“I did teach him everything that he knew, or at least most of it”, he confirmed, noticing that Woe still referred to his nephew in the present tense, as if a part of him were unwilling to accept that he had moved on. It was a kind of behaviour that he found peculiar, a slight character weakness.
“Let us not talk about who was a greater influence on him and who wronged him though, at least not today”, he continued. “Today should be about him, and not about us.”
Unlike Woe, the alchemist didn’t wax poetic, and he did not speak empty words either, but only said what he actually meant and what he believed in. Both of them had played a part in Wicker’s life; without either of them he might have become a very different man.
Woe wanted to answer Doran with a mechanical response, the sort one hears at funerals, weddings and gatherings of that sort. The bride is beautiful, the groom is dashing, the man or woman was beloved by all. Yet whenever the breath occurred for him to speak, words didn’t spill out. He was beginning to remember that this was a dream, and the realization was enough to awaken Woe.
The scene of Volantis melted before his eyes, the stone edifice he’d never seen, shimmering and bubbling until it collapsed into obscurity. Wicker was gone from memory, having never existed. Woe only met Labrae but once, and then she’d been a spindly and tall woman, with red eyes. More alien than mortal. Not the sort to go cavorting with her own webspinners, her own children.
Woe found himself shaking in his seat, until the gray and white hairs fell from his face, to reveal a black beard and head of hair, only recently having gathered salt. He shook, until the weakness fled from his bones, until the force of his shaking was enough for him to stand straight up.
He lifted his body out of his bedroll, coming to sit upright in the middle of a misty forest in Mid-Vhalar. The torturer arose to the waking world, dressed in his freshly dried linen gambeson, leggings, boots, and gloves. He remembered where he was. Living like a bandit in the wilds of Ne’haer. He was being guided through the wilderness by the wild boy, Toutouye, who was likely foraging for food.
Woe rubbed his eyes, reflecting on the dream. It was a strange one, that couldn’t be denied. That Woe should age and Doran not? Woe an Uncle, Labrae a mother? There was more to this dream than simply ill-digested beans or rabbit. The torturer only wondered what role Doran truly had to play in it.
This couple sentences "But here lies an innocent, raised from darkness and given to a worthless vagabond. His life paid for the survival of untold millions, just as mine and the Webspinner Cult has destroyed many fold more." Was beautiful and sent a chill down my spine! I wondered throughout the whole thread "was there really a nephew" and how much was true, only to find not not much other than some weird connection with Doran.
Doran
REWARDS
Knowledges:
Loot:n/a Injuries:n/a Wealth:n/a Renown:n/a
EXP: 15 XP not to be used for magics
PLAYED TO SKILLS?
none used, so yes!
COMMENTS
I thought throughout this thread how strange dream threads must be, I haven't done one yet, to be making things up out of the blue. You did great though, very detailed and left me wondering how much was the truth. Turns out there WAS no nephew, hmmm if there was I would have believed it! Doran also looked fly af in his outfit yo, I could see it perfectly in my mind's eye.
