Private The Sound of Falling Sand

[Arcturus Dinn]

The sands billowed and pooled on the edge of the horizon, buffering up against a sky unviewable. Each step he took was punctuated by the satisfying crunch of dunes underfoot.​

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Having come from the edge of the storm, Arcturus now found himself burdened with more sand than he knew what to do with. For what had seemed to stretch on for weeks he'd been trapped within its swirling grasp, forced to witness visions of events past and future distorted by inertia and the general malice of this realm beyond realms.​

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Arcturus had been thrust from Realspace many moons ago, on the dawn of the Sith Eternal's collapse, and since that day it had been the Nether he'd called home. He was not unfamiliar with the senseless and chaotic nature of this place, the hellscape not meant for the eyes of the living, for he had trod these paths before. He knew of the dangers, and the threat to his life with each second he lingered, and yet despite that the boy felt little haste when it came to his departure from it.​

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All he had known beyond this realm was gone. Why shouldn't he remain where he knew what to expect? Or rather, knew that he would be surrounded by the unexpected. There was some small comfort in the simple act of knowing, after all. No, he acted not with haste but with lethargy; Arcturus Thesh quite enjoyed this sequester. It had permitted him to meddle and dabble, to alter and shift the projects which fumbled to the forefront of his mind. The desert had been something new to explore, something new to harness, and upon experiencing all that its tumultuous sandstorm had to offer he'd decided he needed some of it for himself. Sand to distort reality... Sand to bring about visions... He'd had to have it.​

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But there was more to it than that. The visions he'd witnessed within had set in motion another purpose for the boy. Whether a true prophecy or a mangling of the past he'd experienced within this twisted grotto of death when last he'd ventured here he could not say for sure, but either way it had brought back a reminder of one among many who had been lost that day. Of one among many who had been left behind. The others were still faceless, even within that great storm of fate, the others were inconsequential. Already gone from this realm. But the one...​

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Well, Arcturus knew his quest.​

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Time shifted differently here, he had found. Was it mere minutes since he'd exited the storm, or hours? Days, perhaps? Either way he found himself with firmer ground beneath his feet as he walked onward evermore. Soon dirt gave way to grass, and then grass to mud. He'd reached the bank of some great and curving river, and within it found familiarity. The waters themselves were murky and held the swirling form of inexplainable substance. To look upon it brought despair rising up within him like bile, for he soon recalled his previous run in with it. Ghastly souls called this place home, an ever moving road for those with no end to their torment, and as he stood there gazing upon it he felt certain he could hear them calling for him.​

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The boy might well have succumbed to the call, too, if not for the sudden sound of wood thudding against the shore. There a boat now lay, bobbing languidly in place as its silent conductor beckoned him aboard. His own ferryman across a river of death, with sickly green lantern held aloft to stave off spirits most incessant...​

 

[Seydon of Arda]

~Past the Living Pale~
~The Remit of the Dreaming Dark~

The sky was the colour of muted memory, a grey overcast of roiling holo-screen static, threaded with pitch-dark cloud-banks ceaselessly baring curtains of rainwater composed of fractious nightmare run-off and the stuff of torturous dreams. Unreal lightning, black-light forks stuttering like a broken holonet screen, fell incessantly. Fell and struck treetops draped with inky lichen and curtains of colourless mnemonic moss, that caught fire the hue of digital artefacts, an unsightly 3-D layer overlay of red-blue colour that stuttered tongues of flame and rendered them ghoulish and hallucinatory. A hellish tree canopy of dream-dark deciduous forest waved like sea-froth in a hurricane, tossed and clutched by delusive dreamscape gales born out of the gestalt of innumerable black fantasies. In here, the worst of the galaxy's unconscious distilled, found form, and haunted a limitless wilderness comprised of unpredictable landscapes, mountains that formed and dissolved within an eye-blink, crags that seemingly reached the limits of atmosphere before dissolving into muddy fog-banks of black flecks and deep, bland fog, reconstituting in the next instant as a chimeric amalgamation of numberless, hellish vistas. The forest, however, was an odd and almost maverick constant. It wove and entrenched it's presence whenever the Dreaming Dark grew stable enough to host its endless woodland. And in the black shadow of time-calcified tree trunks and boughs, nameless, vague things born out of sleeping horror stalked and scavenged.

Winterfang arced in Seydon's grasp. One hand throttled tight under the cross of the sword-guard, the other gnashed close above the pommel, levering its weight through snap-cuts at shivering 'unthings' coalescing out of the dream-mire. He cut and sliced in through a shape like a man composed of spider-cracked glass panes, sprinted on, through gaps in between obsidian-barked tree boles. Another stark white-out flash of neuro-lightning. The Dreaming Dark thrown up in stark relief, the shadows opaque and impregnable, grass like stalks of frost shattering under his boot soles. His breath hung on thick, gelid air. Seydon ground his insoles against tarry earth and pebbles, reversing momentum, striking out an Entling boiling with fire for blood, reversing again, Winterfang held close in a pirouette-parry. Utilized the twist and torque of his hips. Seydon swung, bit Winterfang's percussion-point down across the mass of a tendrilled nightmare comprised of smoke and the despair of dying men. And then he was off again, loping in long, measured, precise strides that made Seydon stroll faster than most human's could run.

His chronometre had broke. Its small crystalline-screen strapped across the bottom of his wrist was spidered and chipped, its digital readout marquee a banner-roll of fractured data that, sometimes, found a voice in the Dreamscape and screamed up at Seydon. He stopped to lean against something akin to a tree trunk, its wood tightly wound spools of oily paper that transmitted a smell like sulphur. Time and continuity were anathema in the Dreaming Dark. It's rules matched those of the worst nightmares, utilizing psychic underpinnings to draw up phantoms, draw up things that hurt you the deepest. He'd turn about, find an unthing wearing the face of a loved one, their atonal shrieks stitching together memories of words into harrowing denunciations. Seydon comprehended the Nether was a membranous mirror; copying and reflecting sentient unconsciousness, devouring the matter of dreams and according to the emotions of those said dreams, threaded together messy constructs that were only tenuously sewn with 'rules'. He couldn't guess the span he had spent killing in the Dreaming Dark's woodland sprawl. His potions were spent, save for a vial of Black Xander's Decoction. A single bomb remained; Silvertine, silver shrapnel flecks and a hellacious hallucinogenic compound that disrupted a Sithspawn's Force connection.

Seydon flexed the tendons in his hand, let Winterfang's tip rest in the iridescent moss. Exhaustion caked his bones. He was very tired; felt as though he'd spent a year without sleep, robbed of sustenance, living off adrenal jolts kicked in by the threat of ceaseless combat. It scared him that if he stopped too long, he'd melt into the Dreaming Dark and join with the untold hordes of Cthonic unthings. He touched at still-tender ruby scabs sunken over cuts and flesh wounds taken across his shoulders and forearms. He'd heal; provided he set the bone right, he could walk away from a broken femur in a week's time, none the worse for it. A Dunaan's hyper-metabolic power, healing factor jacked past human molecular limits. Trial of the Waters, Seydon thought. That long sleep, dying endlessly, the alchemic solution and surgeries. He looked up at the roil of lightning-streaked thunderheads and thought of perdition. The wolfshead medallion strung from his neck twitched, then bobbed and shook against his sternum.

"Wind's howling..." Seydon muttered, stepping off the paper-birch's root ball. A skinless, eyeless hound, haunches taller than a Wookie and with a maw composed of burnished chrome, came bounding through a wither-copse. He cocked Winterfang into guard, emptied himself of thought, and drove forward to kill it.

Arcturus Dinn

 

[Arcturus Dinn]

As the water sloshed against the bow of the lazy riverboat, a sound rose up from deep within the boy which had not been heard in some time, that malignant melody which had driven him this way and that since last he'd ventured unto this place. The machinations of the Force were not something he claimed to understand, but this he did know in some capacity by now. It was leading him on toward his goal, a ghastly chorus that echoed through the strands of time and pulled him forth. Whispered words of madness coalesced behind his eyes, as that sirens song started up once more. The voice of a woman lost to a storm not of her own devising.​

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It left him feeling restless and out of control, at the behest of the ferryman's languid approach. Seconds were stretched into feeling like hours, and more and more the wails of those who traveled the rapids below joined with the contemptuous symphony and threatened to pull him under. It might have been faster, he argued, to swim along with them... It might have been efficient. One heavy thud cast by the end of the ferryman's forcola roused him from a fate worse than death, wherein he found himself leaning over the stern of the boat mere inches from the frothy surface of the water.​

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He pulled back, the boat rocking in response. Arcturus found himself sitting upon his hands, restraining himself from any other life threatening decisions. The further along the river they traversed, the harder it was to ignore the more insidious aspects of the Nether. He tended to remain within those regions which were - on a surface level - innocent. They sapped him of his will all the same, distorted his reality sure, but they seemed less nefarious in nature. Of course in this planescape nothing was ever truly free from threat. The Nether had a way of sinking its claws into you.​

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Time was incomprehensible; eventually he wound up on another shore. It might have been in the blink of an eye. It might have sapped a decade from his lifespan.​

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Arcturus disembarked, paying tithe to the ferryman who began to round from the riverbank to continue on his leisurely way. More souls to carry, a task with no end. The hairs on the back of the boys neck prickled as that familiar sense of familiarity gripped him once more. He should rest, stave off the chill which was setting in. He should turn back, return to warmer shores. The landscape around him was decidedly different from whence he'd started, trees blackened and scorched dotted the immediate vicinity, at first scattered but thicker as he followed the barely visible trail held within.​

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It culminated in a grove, and therein that inky oilspill of a bubble writhed and spat. What little of the other side he could deduce was hauntingly hostile, every fiber of his being fought to avoid it, and his feet made some progress of their own back toward the riverback no longer visible over his shoulder. His eyes, though, remained transfixed upon that shifting surface, where the deepest black imaginable mixed with colours he never knew existed. The melody gained in volume until it barraged his every sense, its lofty tune continuing on to the beat of his thumping heart.​

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He swallowed, whetting cracked lips that demanded the sweet relief of sustenance, and forced himself to put one foot in front of the other. It was like walking through quicksand, each step fought back and tried to hold him in place. He could turn and leave, he could end before he'd truly begun.​

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The ring upon his finger began to burn; Arcturus slipped it off, deposited it within his pocket, and then stepped across that inky threshold into the coldest cold and the deepest dark.​

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Seydon of Arda ​

 

[Seydon of Arda]

A shift. Seydon felt it, intrinsically. It may have only been the minute tremor of a single sand particulate hitting the bottom of an hourglass, but the Dreaming Dark was akin to a frayed neuron ganglion: it took the little sensoria and rebroadcasted it a hundredth-fold. Arctic winds stirred the blood-dark foliage. He stopped in the shadows of a wildly bent willow and peered back over his shoulder. A range of crag-toothed mountains, their snowcaps flickering like a broken lamp, dissolved into cyclopean clouds of staticky ash. The gales took hold of the ash and grit, whipped it across the serpentine canopy, peppering the bleak woodlands with greyed-out 'snowfall' and drops of thick, near-resinous snowfall.

He shivered, hairs standing up across the backs of his scarred forearms. He reached into a belt pouch and freed a small touch-worn box of wroshy-wood, flicking it open to gaze down at a compass face. The Korriban Compass was a Rave Merrill relic, one of the few extant samples of her once legendary alchemical knack. Under the glass, four tritium-treated needles spun independently, one supposed to lock onto local magnetic north for guidance and reference, the others keyed to track local Force phenomenon. Whether creatures, artefacts, or nexuses. The more powerful the signal, the more the needles acted in close concert, dialing in to shepherd Seydon towards his prey. The Nether rendered the north-lock needle useless and the prevalence of shifting Force eddies and unpredictable local 'hotspots' had the remainder spinning erratically.

...Save, Seydon noticed, for one. Sweat beaded on the skin of his palm. He snapped the clasp back over the compass face, flicked it open once more, giving the the compass-case a solid shake for added measure. The third needle, its metal blued to a kind of indigo, shivered while attempting to re-acquire the scented signature. It flickered east... South-east... A hair off north... Finally spinning about and stopping on a midway point between south-and-west. He reoriented, pausing to loop the compass-case round his neck on a thin leather cord, where it bobbed and struck against his Dunaan medallion. Winterfang still grasped close in hand, he set off.

The Dreaming Dark operated according to mercurial rules, the most predominant being it operated according to nightmare logic. Terrain was inconsistent, punishing, the atmospherics no less wild, a gamble between skin-shredding gale-storms, pungent acid-fall that stewed and cooked the half-real turf, hurricane blizzards that coated everything in its path with hoarfrost and ice-rime, before thawing in-between heartbeats. Paired with creations that would have taxed the most depraved Sith fleshsmiths to match their horror, born out of dreaming sins and terrors and anxieties that dripped into the Dark and congealed into stalking atrocities. But Seydon felt a subtle ripple wash through the ashen undergrowth. Something, an Other, outside the Dreaming Dark's purview, had become inexplicably present. He rechecked the compass heading; the indigo-dial still held firm, the other needles slowly pulling towards its bearing.

The earthen floor under his boots turned soggy. Seydon fought against tripping, pulling his legs up from the sudden mire. His hand disappeared through a stone when he tried leaning out for balance, sent tumbling over onto his side into a brackish pond. Thin, mud-shot water suddenly turned very black and very tarry. Air was bubbling out his nose. A thousand ice-cold hands clawed with talons of iron groped at him, choked and restrained, were trying to drag him down into the lightless pits. Blood rushed and pounded inside Seydon's ears, his free-hand reaching and taking grip around Winterfang's hilt. Sparks of Force Lightning channelled down its silver-plate steel, struck and arced out into the pitch-tar mire holding him down. Long limbs belonging to featureless bodies with smooth, dripping skulls flailed in an approximation of pain. He felt a sudden release of pressure on his torso. Seydon clawed up, forcing his boots down until they struck something halfway solid and breached his shoulders free, into arctic-chilled air.

With an effort, he half-crawled, half-swam out of the pit and pulled up onto a bank of hard, almost-chitinous moss. More unthings, attracted by the struggle, attracted by the 'Other' that had come and invaded their province, were coming. Writhing between the tree boles. Seydon snorted bracken and tar from his nose before closing his hand around his last Silvertine bomb. Thumb struck the flint, lit the short, bright fuse. It soared from a long throw and tumbled once through a fence of sedge. He watched a tiny star flare up in the shadow and burst forth lingering clouds of bright silver flecks and a frost of Force-dampening dusts and chemicals. The Dreaming Dark was briefly abated, but only here where the tar-marsh was very rapidly reforming into fields of lichen-mantled basalt columns. He stood up, blinked against fatigue and checked the compass hadn't been lost. The dials still shivered towards (relative) south-southwest.

The interloping presence that'd breached the Dark might be only another terror born from somewhere else in the Netherworld. Seydon didn't trust instinct in a place that actively betrayed expectation. But his gut felt something in the monotony of chaos and nightmare discharge had been disrupted, and that alone begged investigation. Quite suddenly, pushing his way forward onto a long field of sallow grasslands pierced through with obsidian formations, Seydon felt another thought strike him. He could not remember the last time he witnessed a dawn or dusk.

Arcturus Dinn

 

[Arcturus Dinn]

He entered that despicable place with little left on his person. Sand harvested from the storm had been deposited upon the shore before he'd even stepped foot upon the ferryman's riverboat. Most of his prized possessions had been lost upon Korriban during his departure from that place. His golems were roaming the vastness of the Nether, most of which had been formed during his tenure there. No, Arcturus had stepped into the lion's den with just his dainty sith blade and his lightsaber for company. Neither ring would be of any use here, they did not count.​

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Without fail he always reached for the dagger before the saber. When last he'd been here he'd done the same; this time was no different. He was afforded a few steps forward unaccosted, as the realm adjusted to his unexpected arrival. The quiet before the storm. All the same he slid the blade from its sheath and held it between his fingertips, poised and ready to loose it into the first thing that moved.​

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Though the shore of the river had held a chill which seeped deep within him, crossing the threshold of the oilspill had set his bones to chattering. He could not stave off the shiver, and the cold permeated every fiber of his being. The very air itself felt damp, and after just a moment had passed perspiration settled over his skin, leaving him pale and clammy. It took his eyes longer to adjust to this newfound reality, as the greyscale landscape unfolded before him. Slowly but surely trees melded into existence, and mountains jutted off in the distance. They grew with each passing second, then one of the peaks crumbled and joined with the other.​

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Nothing remained in a constant state. Everything shifted as soon as it gained semi-permanence. It had been different last time, he'd been focused on Noelle Varanin and her wellbeing. They'd been accosted from the start. It had been a blood bath. This time it all creeped up on him as though carefully measured. Had he mistaken one oilspill for another? Certainly it felt that way.​

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The tiny hairs on the back of his neck prickled to attention, alerting him of the pressing darkness just before the first of many beasts swarmed in. He regretted depositing the ring into his pocket almost immediately; he'd take the burning of his finger over the brutality of these shadowy fiends any day. But it was too late to turn back time.​

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Dagger darted forth, loosed from his fingertips, as the first of the lot leapt. It arced through the inky figure, rending it in two, before rematerializing in his hand. It was a quick process to be sure, if you were to look at it at face value. But against so many, one blade was not enough. No matter the pace of its recall. One dagger could not hold off a relative army.​

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Hazy fumes seeped up from below, threatening his sanity with each panting intake of breath he took. Dagger shot this way and that, his body acting on pure instinct alone, but the circle was closing in; he reached for the curved hilt of his saber, igniting it with a snap-hiss to light the immediate vicinity red. It was a strange dichotomy, the red against so black a backdrop. ​

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He could have sworn the colour waxed and waned, at times appearing to meld with the greyscale as though the Dreaming Dark refused to accept its very existence...​

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Seydon of Arda​

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Commotion ahead, where thickets of broken thorn-wood and ragged elms clutching to stony earth parted. There was light, Seydon saw: fell, limpid, a pale glow suffusing the close run of oil-streaked overcast clouds agitating overhead. He pushed against a rapidly decomposing tree bole and rushed forward, out onto a span of matted grass-fields. Onto the treeline edge of an everlasting steppe, an aching vastness so featureless and grey-black mottled it left the impression of walking across static made solid. Seydon breathed deep, caught and held the air in a trap below his belly. Cat-eyes picked through wafting fog banks, at dark unthings capering and cavorting around a mannish outline cutting and thrusting with something gleaming in their hand. Ears pricked, listened to the hammer-pulse of a hurried heartbeat, to the drag and rush of their breathing. He sniffed and detected motes of skin-salt, old and well dried vestiges of hair wash. All compass points dialed in toward them.

His medallion rumbling in protest, Seydon shut the compass away and sped forward in a dead heat. He crossed the mile-span in a blink, Winterfang clutched with the pommel close over his hip, it's blade-tip angled for the charge. It struck in and plunged through the unreal spine of some nightmare, a towering amalgam of meat and stone and corroded iron, the face bursting open as if under pressure from the bolts riveted into its disintegrating skull. Through a haze of ash and oily fog, Seydon finally saw the Other. A young man, with a well-boned face and full, pouty lips beneath a tousle of auburn hair, skinny and long-limbed though shorter by half-a-head. He'd a dagger thrust out between his knuckles, a short fighting knife with a broad flat etched with arcane ideograms and Sith glyphs. Seydon could taste its alchemical tang on the wind.

There was a short beat, regarding each other in the small, semi-calm nucleus of the enclosing melee. Seydon was allowed a moment to utter: "Who - ?" before he was killing, lancing through some monstrous thorax before whipping Winterfang high and relieving another Unthing of its semi-corporeal skull. He cut close, cut neat, elbows drawn back from swiping blade arms and chain-whips that, perhaps less than a heartbeat prior, had been intestinal tract a beast had clawed free of its own belly. Parried through a dozen hacking lashes and replied with punishing counter-strokes, smashing down an Unthing that hit the blotchy soil and erupted into char. The air was choked with atonal shrieks, screams that stuttered and broke, a stridulate white-noise that strangled at their senses.

Low and spider-limbed, an Unthing cross of arachnid, centipede, with a carapace of smooth gore, chattered rapidly towards the young man's ankles. Seydon came out of a dodge-roll, hand extended: a fierce gout of pyromantic Force-fire shot from his fingers. It died, balling up in a twitch of smote legs, licks of flame eating into it's shell.

Arcturus Dinn

 

[Arcturus Dinn]

The distinguished art of Makashi was never intended for so many at once. It was a gentleman's form, a duel of fate; it was not made to hack or slash at targets so innumerable that no end in sight could be seen. Where one fell two more seemed to bubble up. His saber did seem to have one advantage, though. The beasts shied back from the glare of its light, and they seemed far more susceptible to the bite of its blade than they did the dagger he threw upon instinct each time he felt its leather wraps back within his grasp.​

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No, in moments such as these forms taught in a classroom would never quite be enough. It was too hectic, too fast paced, too unpredictable. They were building blocks only, and to stick too closely to them would mean folly. Gone was the duelist inherent in the boy, instead a brutalist was born. He stabbed and thrust and parried those sickly fiends, slashing this way and that in an attempt at maiming as many as he could with each swing of the oddly weighted hilt.​

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Closer they crept.​

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Closer.​

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He could smell them, he could feel them, they were all that he could see. They clawed at him, tearing cloth then flesh with their insidious maws. He hacked off unintelligible limbs and heads with skulls that made little sense in existing. He shook off their grip, kicked those who scurried to the ground, and held in each and every scream which bubbled to the surface. Insofar as rescues went, this was in truth the most pitiful of them all. He'd barely crossed the threshold, been met with the first hurdle.​

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Already he faltered.​

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The darkness crept in in more than one sense, his mind succumbing to the thoughts he'd fought so hard to suppress. Here they were given a foothold, a bandstand. Here they were all consuming. His body was acting on autopilot now, flailing limbs, burning all that came too close to his ruddy blade. His body clung to life; demanded it.​

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Just as despair all but ate away at his psyche, another entered the ring. Arcturus felt him before he saw any evidence of his prowess, and hope reignited within him. It pushed the boundaries of depression back from his core, though all niggled on the edges all the same, and reinvigorated him into battle. They shared just one glance when the stranger stumbled into the heart of the circle. One mere glance that told him everything he needed to know.​

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Arcturus did recognize him. Not by name or station, barely even by appearance. He'd felt him before though. In this very place. And that confounding symphony had all but dissipated at his arrival. How fitting indeed for the one he was fixing to safe to come to his aid. How the turns tabled.​

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One word was uttered between them, as the shadows now pushed forth with twice the effort. No longer torn between surveying and taunting two entities their focus was needlepoint.​

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"Arc---" he didn't even get a chance to give his name, though he doubted that was really what was meant by the half uttered question. He plunged his lightsaber through the core of a blackened beast, rending it through its center until it landed in two pieces on the ground before him. It seeped into the very earth, and reconstituted itself alongside another.​

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He had forgotten that aspect of these beasts... He'd forgotten the most important part.​

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"They won't stop," he balked, straining against their advancement. "We have to push ba--ahhh!" This time he didn't throw the dagger, he pressed it deep into the skull of the one who had bitten his leg, turning it to finish his point. With a slight limp he started to step back the way he had initially come from. The monsters at his back seemed all the more intent on stopping him than those he'd previously been facing.​

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"Push back. The edge is near..." He'd barely taken any steps before the horde had fallen upon him. The edge of the bubble had to be close. It had to be. They just had to survive long enough...​

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Seydon of Arda ​

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Something akin to hope caused a shiver to sweep up Seydon from his foot soles to his spine. It was a threadbare, cold sensation, the touch of a wet icicle on frayed nerve-endings, so much uncounted time stretching him to the breaking point suddenly, tantalizingly, coming to an end. If, if, Seydon knew, they could forge a retreat to the edge of the Dark Dream and slip away. They were caught in the belly of the Nether, the Dreaming Dark unyielding to the notion of its prisoners extricating. The overcast blazing overhead, like a holovid on thrice-fast forward, seemed to discolour. Seydon groped for a moment of breath after cutting Winterfang through a parry, glancing up. Thunderheads bright with scarlet and crowned with arcs of chaining lightning swelled heavier and heavier above. Cyclopean shapes cast back-lit shadows against the bulwark of storm-walls.

He put himself close to Arcturus back, covering their retreat, backpedalling half-blindly as Winterfang arced and slew. Innumerable lines of attack, vectors of approach, a pursuing seethe of indescribable abominations relegating Seydon to hazardous defense work where he couldn't spare a counter-stroke. Couldn't command the rhythm. Combat was a staccato rhythm, broken only when the shabby tempo paused as Seydon thrust and killed something on the end of his blade. Ichor tarnished the length of Winterfang, sopping burning rivulets that ate through the tatters of his gloves. He winced, now bowed slightly. An unseen paw had struck out, sank and whipped a handful of claws across the back of his skull. An arm of smoke briefly coalesced into a crude spear, punching into the meat of his hip.

With blood-flecked teeth clenched in a grimace, Seydon rallied. A lightning two-stroke counterattack severed the spear from its owner, then raked Winterfang's tip deep through the smokey bone and greyed-out meat of its sternum. He jammed a palm over the wound, managing an inefficient staunch while his Dunaan healing-factor hurried at stemming the worst of the blood flow. Winterfang lost some of its finesse, locked into a high-throttled grip under its cross-guard. He cocked its edge round, managing a tight guard, resorting to back-step pirouette's to keep himself out of reach and stay in range of Arcturus's retreating back. Caught his off-hand round the smooth burnish of Winterfang's pommel, executed a stinging selection of cross-cuts, striking with the step, weaving back and forth along the central line and hewing limbs, skulls, bodies and viscera free as they stumbled headlong where the limits of the Dreaming Dark were ratty and weak.

"Close!" Seydon called over the fighting din. Arcturus' lightsaber was a bright fan, cutting into something that had interrupted his stride. He jousted Winterfang through a body-trunk, ripped its edge left, stepped and cut and took another Unthing through its shoulder down to what might have been a leg. The air stank close with innumerable rank odours. Exhaustion was a red-edge at the borders of his sight, hair sweat-logged and matted in filthy lanks, and he thought of the possibilities of a hot refresher stall, a close shave, and time enough to recollect himself and sew back together the things that had come apart in his soul. Things that made him a man. He slapped a blow away with the blade-flat while still slicing forward, splitting a fleshy thing down to the bowl of its groin. "Are we close! Kid!"

To emphasize it's displeasure, the Dreaming opened a slit in the fire-red clouds. Lightning fell out, fell and forked through soiled and dirty air, blitzed close to them into the earth. Light flashed like a blink of the sun at close-range, a sequel of ear-cracking thunder following hotly on its heels. Grey soil and clay-wrapped stones pelted down on them. Seydon staggered closer after Arcturus, loosing a frost-wrapped and concussive Force-push behind him, walloping some Unthings off their heels, freezing others in brief cages of ice. Just ahead, he thought he saw a simmer in the air, like a kind of heat-haze fermenting off the ground and occasionally blinking with motes of rainbow-light refracts. Was that it...?

Arcturus Dinn

 

[Arcturus Dinn]

He could have sworn he hadn't taken this many steps after entering the Dreaming Dark. He felt as though he'd been fighting for an eternity, each dropped body marking a mere millimeters worth of progress toward puncturing the swirling bubble of thick oil that kept them entwined in this place. It was painfully sluggish. The same tree had been to his right for nigh on fifty swings. ​

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Was it the same tree?​

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Arcturus couldn't look at it long enough to gage the answer. On and on they came, as though the beasts were falling like rain from the thunderous skies above. In comparison to the other living being in this place, his attacks were pitiful, his progress like that of a child learning to walk where the Dunaan ran. More than ran, he eclipsed the boy's abilities entirely. Like ant in the face of the mighty sun.​

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He wouldn't apologize for that though. Each downed construct of this murky land was a win in his books, each downed construct meant another millimeter closer.​

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Lightning hailed down from above, and with it pebbled rain that left sinking welts across his skin. Blood trailed down from atop his head, and out of the wounds inflicted by the beasts themselves. His body had almost become numb to it, at times he barely even noticed he had a latch on until he took a step and felt resistance.​

​

The dagger had been forgotten, returned to its sheath. By this point Arcturus had both hands on his saber, and was displaying traits of a Djem So practitioner though he'd never once been taught the how's of it. Hacking, slashing, raining the blade down upon them. He cut through their ranks as one might approach butter with a warm knife; he didn't even really see their forms anymore. They sort of melded together in his vision. One thick mass to push through...​

​

His newfound companion spoke up, asking if they were close. Arcturus glanced over his shoulder, his gaze momentarily joining the Dunaan's in surveying their approach to the edge. Nothing looked familiar, but then everything here had a tendency to change on a whim. Before he could answer his attention was snatched back to the rear of their escape.​

​

Viscera pelted his face as he crushed the head of his immediate pursuer with a tightly closed fist and the reactions of the Force. Then it was back to the lightsaber; he preferred that, much less messy when it cauterized the wounds. Not that beggars could be choosers, or anything.​

​

There were no further lulls through which he could steal a glance at their destination, the Dreaming Dark was really fighting back. Trying its best to claim the two of them for its own. To add them to the infinite army at its disposal.​

​

And yet despite all that he knew the answer anyway. The symphony had started up again... It had struggled to penetrate this land, but now its strained melody could be heard on the edge of his mind. "Nearly there," he assured the other man.​

​

Nearly there... If he lasted that long. Pelting stones, strikes of lightning, bloodthirsty demons. So much could go awry between here and there.​

​

Seydon of Arda ​

 

[Seydon of Arda]

The Cracked Gate looked appropriately anti-climactic. They'd flogged themselves into a half-jog, half-vaulting march that'd woven them across the heaving steppe, addressing sudden thickets that bloomed up from underfoot, holts of spiralling greatwoods that suddenly planted down in their way, hill crests that slowly bubbled up and granted the world a kind of curvature. Twice now, the earth had jawed open and ejected vast spars of twinkling obsidian, the stone blackly opaque save for nebula clouds that floated behind the rock gloss. All the while, the Unthings harried their every metre of progress. When Seydon risked a glance over the throngs gnashing just out of Winterfang's reach, what little blood was left in his cheeks sank away. The Dreaming Dark rendered its vision of a horizon as a knot that made the bowels quail, all across it lathed with a rippling carpet that slowly defined itself into a wash of innumerable nightmares given liquid form.

"Pox on it!" He spat and guttered fire from his hands, blasting a clutch of naked dream-things into cinder and motes of unreal char.

The tearing and buckling of stone and earth piped them down a kind of gulch. Claws of ill-coloured crystal awned overhead. They caught and bent the light, producing fractious colours and fractal reflections impossible to describe in human words. Seydon had downed the final droplets of Black Xander's decoction and tossed the emptied vial. Had difficulty remaining on his feet, keeping in the dead run, the draught working his metabolic and endocrine systems into a torrid frenzy. Wound healing sped along and provided a brief 'second-wind', but the process of enduring the poison was a toil in of itself. He didn't dare pause. Struck out over his shoulder when he sensed an Unthing bound up to close, utilizing loose, over-reaching hammer-strokes to bat them off their feet or stalks or claws. At times, Seydon would bound a pace before Arcturus, tackling anything (and anything being the only operative, descriptive word) aside that threatened to break his companion's sword-guard.

Ahead, the unsteady gulch narrowed into a toothy defile. It forced them single file through passages barely wide enough to squeeze by at the shoulders, and the pervading threat of the defile simply shifting inward and crushing them was sickeningly heady. Seydon blinked falling grit out of his eyes, arched his spine away from a shelf of sharp granite. The granite then turned porous, turned to dust, the dust sweeping past their cheeks and turning weird helix structures on the wind. Nearly there, Seydon recalled. ...But then, he noted, he and the boy felt suddenly...

Alone.

After an intermittent beat, the light falling and swelling only to ebb away again in a mockery of dawn, they exited back out onto the white-noise steppe. Behind them, the defile sloughed away and was gone. A perfect, ringing quiet filled the air between them, the silence of a blood-warm womb. The cold hadn't abated. Seydon inhaled it deep. Let the frigidity ache inside his ribs. They stood where the edge of the Dreaming Dark was furring, breaking up, paradoxically losing its consistency in favour of another. A single tree, limbs bare, stood immobile in spite of the sharp tears of wind that whipped round them.

"...Look," Seydon said. He was caked in blood-grime. He tapped Winterfang's pommel against Arcturus' hand, pointing at a shimmer that hung below the tree's lowest branches. It was a rippling; the trembling of a pond face, or a mercury pool, a too-lustrous pane of something semi two-dimensional. His eyes couldn't perceive it's angles but those he could threaten to bend his wits. The ripples transitioned with a jerk into webbed cracks, the angles still wrong. Bites of dislocated sound echoed out of the 'unmirror' hovering off the ground beside the petrified tree.

"...That it?" Seydon asked softly, wiping viscera from his brow. The quiet was beginning to ache inside his ears.

Arcturus Dinn

 

[Arcturus Dinn]

Close. So close it pained his ears to hear the screeching score of the serendipitous symphony as it erupted within him. Ignore it, he tried. Dismiss it, he couldn't. Instead it underlined each cut of his saber, thrummed with every slash. Each head which rolled to the ground chimed and every beast which rose in its place bellowed.​

​

Distracting... Oh so distracting. He closed his eyes, against his better judgement, for a moment. Just a moment. Focused. Breathed. Pushed it down. Back into the fray just as quickly as he'd left it, narrowly avoiding a decapitation of his own. Instead the tips of their claws raked at his throat, barely skin deep, as he kicked them back.​

​

A kick did little though. He had to follow through with a well placed shiak to the face. Straight in, straight out, leaving a gaping hole behind. Arcturus couldn't admire it for long. Their slow crawl had somehow picked up its pace, and now he felt just shy of sprinting. It was so close.​

​

Yet the Dark wasn't done with them yet. The ground opened up before them, hills formed and cracks splintered. Great trees folded out before them, crawling to the blackened sky, and still the beasts came. More of them now. So many...​

​

By the time that the canyon pressed in on them Arcturus was dead on his feet. Blood had seeped into his clothes, both ruddy and black alike, and fatigue waxed his muscles something fierce. His vision was failing too, though that might have been due to the steady stream of blood which had long since overwhelmed eyebrow and eyelash to defile his eyes.​

​

He couldn't keep it up much longer. The symphony began to crack as the scar around them pressed further into his mind. Maybe it was easier to fall back into it. Maybe he could hold the line... He'd be of more use that way, surely. Holding up their progress so that the Dunaan could be home free. Yeah...​

​

Those walls faded as soon as the thought came to his mind, disintegrating into dust and revealing the exit point once more. Slowly but surely he became aware of the beasts' retreat. Slowly but surely he realized they were just on the cusp of freedom.​

​

The man bade him look. The tap of his pommel against his hand bade him listen. He glanced over at the swirling, bubbling oilspill and felt unabashed relief wash over himself. Nothing but an open field stood between them and it. He could practically taste the river on the other side. They could reach out and touch it.​

​

Could it really be that easy?​

​

The Dreaming Dark seemed to flicker and crack here, as though its hold on the realm was stuttering as a result of being at its own bounds. That would explain the retreat.​

​

"It is" he replied, through cracked lips.​

​

So close. Arcturus hung back a moment. Waited for the Dunaan to embrace his freedom.​

​

Seydon of Arda ​

 

[Seydon of Arda]

But what laid past the ripples coiling weightlessly in the air? Realspace? Another, further borough of the Netherworld? He couldn't recall precisely how Ashin Varanin led them double-file into the Dreaming Dark; just snapshot imagery, stepping in under black thunderheads, into a wall of bone-aching cold, flashing Winterfang free to give Ashin space to find and retrieve her wife. The Gate was a terror. At once hopeful and bleak. Seydon thought he saw little splashes of iridescence paint the shimmer, like an oil-slick pulled skein-tight across some invisible force flexing against the air. In spite of himself, there wasn't strength left in his knees, his bowels felt watery, and a tight band was constricting against his ribs. Hope and terror, he knew, the hope born out of reclaiming a want for freedom and the chagrin of fear in case he erred. The Netherworld held preference for errors.

The boy had stepped away and was regarding him. After a beat, Seydon interpreted something wordless transmit between them and offered a little nod. Strode up to the Cracked Gate. He thought it's proximity would elicit dread or any equally dire response in his soul. It only hung there, tepidly unreal, wafting a cool air that smelt spring thaw. He knelt a moment, picking a sizable stone out of the earth and flicking it at the Gate. The stone slipped through the slack haze-coils and vanished, rippling out of sight and seemingly existence. Seydon forced a thin dollop of spit down his parched throat, standing and taking a closer pace forward.

"Just step through and that's it?" He had to ask. "But where's it gonna go? It gonna take us outta here? If there even is a 'here'..." Seydon scowled.

The Nether was a glaring gap in his knowledge base, one he'd try rectifying if – if, always if – he escaped. His guild's expertise laid in noeticism, the foreign and the alien and the unnatural things and anomalies that rose on occasion, usually in response to spiritual stimula. Primarily, Sithspawn and the like; monsters and wraiths that oozed out from beneath beds to haunt and prey on the living. But it was a repertoire based on certain physical, psychological, super-spiritual sciences, systems that had concrete laws that gave Dunaan the edge in exploiting them. The Netherworld was precisely like a dream: highly interpretive, absolutely no continuity, and nothing was certain.

Damnit, Seydon thought. Nothing for it. He exhaled a thin breath, made certain his scabbard buckles were still in order, and stepped in through the Gate.

Arcturus Dinn

 

[Arcturus Dinn]

"Not quite home," came Arcturus' gentle response to the Dunaan's query. The other man seemed hesitant to approach that portal, as though afraid it was all some trick of the eye, or a trap laid down by the Dreaming Dark itself. He couldn't blame him for that. He'd been trapped here for so long that Arcturus had been expecting to find a husk. To drag back some fallen entity that didn't even remember itself. Instead he'd found a man still as strong as the last time he'd seen him. The only other time he'd seen him, he supposed.​

​

How he'd managed it, he couldn't claim to know. Arc had almost fallen at the first hurdle this place threw at him. The would be saviour becoming the saved. He didn't fail to see the irony in that. ​

​

"But not here, either."​

​

Somewhere better. Somewhere that rest was actually possible. Compared to the Dreaming Dark, the bank of that winding river was Iego herself, a relative heaven. Maybe Iego wasn't the best planet to think of... But it was said to contain angels, wasn't it? People liked angels, right?​

​

Arcturus let out a short breath, unable to hold in his own anticipation. He wanted out of this realm and into the next. In fact, he was quickly coming to realize, he wanted out of the Nether entirely. Back to Realspace, where Force knew what awaited him. The notion of finding out scared him, he couldn't lie, but hiding away here for an eternity wasn't the answer either. Then he'd definitely be returning to ghosts for friends.​

​

For a moment he thought the man wasn't going to cross it. Maybe he'd have to go first, to prove it was fine. Maybe he'd have to drag him kicking and screaming over that threshold. Maybe... But maybe never happened. After tossing in a stone, the Dunaan made his approach.​

​

And then Arcturus found himself alone in that oppressive place. Unlike the man before him he did not dawdle. He did not ponder what awaited him on the other side. He rushed forward, as quick as his feet could take him, and practically dived through the bubbling surface.​

​

The other side ignited their senses with colour and smell intense. Bright greens and blues, yellows and pinks... Flowers sprouted up through the grass, and through the grove the river ran. A river of souls, but a river no less. The quiet din of the Dark was replaced with a whistling wind and skittering creatures in the underbrush and overhead. None of it any less sinister, of course. But more palatable to be sure.​

​

Arcturus collapsed to his knees. Unlike the Dunaan he couldn't heal his wounds so quickly. He couldn't tell where their blood ended and his began. At least his mind was freed of that incessant song. At least pieces of him still remained.​

​

At least he'd gotten the other one out.​

​

Seydon of Arda ​

 

[Seydon of Arda]

The river wound serpentine along banks gravelled with sand like polished gold. Light was sunny, skies clear and not quite blue, an idea of what true-blue could look like. On an impulse, Seydon fell back onto his rump and hurriedly tore his boots and tattered socks free. He sank his toes into the river embankment; it was cool, akin to feeling melting ice through a bit of washcloth. The sun sat still as a fixed, fuzz-edged orb, in a place that was timeless without devolving into tediousness. At the embankment edge, the river lapped and babbled with the gentility of an ancient brook. It was an essence, Seydon realized; the water a great amalgam of souls passing through. Nothing torturous or obscene like what the Dreaming Dark dredged up. Only this, a great ribbon, the water pale like moonlight, glinting like Winterfang's silver plating, ushering its unrealized charges along. To where?

"Who knows..." Seydon heard himself mutter. Too deep, that. Metaphysics was heady stuff. Everyone seemingly had their own answer to the greatest questions defining the nature of life, death, and where the living soul factored into it all. He didn't want to ruminate on the unknowables. Didn't feel qualified. He felt his elbows sink into the gold-sand, then his backbone, shoulders next, finally laying back his head. A pleasant breeze tickled hair over his face. A hammer of weariness fell on him, like the weight of a lead cape. Spast but when had he last time to simply shut his eyes and drift? Time enough to pick out scents of grass and fern, verges of hooded sage, the acrid earthiness of tree bark, wood sap, listen to minute stridulations of insects picking through the undergrowth? It'd been a black, bleak mood that possessed him to stay behind in the Dreaming Dark. To try and die. Seydon loosed he hadn't been aware he was holding and pushed back up onto his palms and haunches.

"Firstly..." Seydon said. His voice croaked; in need of water, tea, honey, any sort of brew. Outside of the Dreaming Dark, internal physical chronometre's had resumed function and reminded him of sustenance need. In spite of himself, his stomach loosed a Rancor chunner. Seydon hawked a ball of spit, remembered where he sat, and drove the lob back down his throat. The moisture was unsatisfying. "Firstly... Thanks. I don't know you're name, but thanks. ...Secondly, where is this now? This what they call 'elysium'? Can't be..."

Arcturus Dinn

 

[Arcturus Dinn]

There was a silence which lingered between them, but it was not uncomfortable or unwanted.​

​

For one it had seemed like a rebirthing, a stepping back into life from so long in the throws of death. Arcturus watched as the Dunaan approached the river of souls, went so far as to sink his toes into its steady throws without a care in the world for what that might do to him. The same river which had threatened to pull him under just lapped around the man's ankles, though. Far less sinister now than it had seemed upon the ferryman's raft.​

​

The boy raised a hand to his throat, touching sensitive skin where neck and shoulder met; marks of bared teeth sunk into his flesh, he could feel the crookedness of it all with his fingertips. He exhaled through his nose, pushing down the sickening, dizzying sensation which had risen up with him at his feeble touch. Hand fell back into the ground beside him, fingers clutching on to strands of grass like a lifeline.​

​

If he never had to gaze upon that oil slick portal ever again he'd die a happy man. Twice now it had almost devoured him alive. Twice now it had sapped him of all save the fainted remnants of himself. Slowly he'd start to feel better, he knew, slowly he'd return to himself. But in the interim? The boy just wanted to collapse. Succumb to that fatigue so heavy on his soul.​

​

He closed his eyes. Granted the Dunaan time to recalibrate with the world around them without his thousand yard stare boring a hole in his head. Without meaning to he lay down in the grass, back set to the portal and face toward the river. If not for the steady rising and falling of his chest it might have been easy to mistake him for a corpse. Pale and bloody. But his breathing continued on.​

​

How long had passed before the other one spoke up he didn't rightly know. He felt as though his eyes had been closed for a thousand nights, and yet when he opened them to regard them the fatigue had not waned even a little. The single word hung between them for a time, before he followed it up with the remainder of his words. Arcturus pondered the question more so than anything else. He'd made it his business to better know the Nether since their first scrape with it.​

​

After trying and failing to right himself into an upright position, he opened his mouth to speak. Viewing the world from a strange angle as he did.​

​

"That's the River of the Dead," he said, without gesturing toward the obvious body of water. "We're not yet out of the Nether, friend, but the way out holds little in comparison to what you just braved."​

​

He rolled over slightly, forcing his palms into the grass and utilizing them to push himself up. Back to a seated position. His head swam, but at least he could see properly again. "The Chasm of Passing holds a rift back to Realspace." A slight frown set over his expression. Arcturus knew he wasn't quite ready to leave yet, but that didn't mean he'd deny another the chance to do so.​

​

"I can take you there. To the rift. I don't know where it will spit you out though. It has to be better than here though..."​

​

Anywhere was better than here.​

​

Seydon of Arda ​

 

[Seydon of Arda]

"Anywhere's better," Seydon agreed, finally driving himself to his feet. He'd torn his thinning socks into strips of cloth hank, knotting wraps around his ankles and where he knew his feet liked to chafe best. Next, pulled on his boots. The heels looked hob-nailed, the toe-end likewise, the throat and front-rear quarters holed from acid splash and tearing. His attire was ruined. Save for the treated leather and buckles holding his blade-scabbards in place, virtually everything about his person required replacing. Yes, he thought, but with what capital? He'd come into the Nether on Ashin's behalf poorer than a beggar.

"So which way?" He asked. Seydon had tried consulting the Korriban compass; as ever, the dial-points meandered, swinging round lazily under the compass-glass. One needle kept a consistent lock on the boy; no surprise if he kept alchemical kit or apparel, few that drew a lightsaber went without at least some item, however innocuous its appearance, as a kind of assurance. He gave the compass a little shake, observed the needle-points briefly scatter before resuming their erratic if slow sways. The compass snapped close.

"...Seydon," He added, after a blink. "I'm Seydon, if I hadn't said before. What's your name, kid?"

Arcturus Dinn

 

[Arcturus Dinn]

The Dunaan read his mind, and voiced the same thought aloud. Arcturus simply nodded his response. Better, yes, but even knowing that it still wasn't preferred. Not for the Lorrdian. Not yet. He needed a little more time to think. A little more time to steel his nerves. Not to mention gather up all the scattered projects he'd left en route to the Dreaming Dark. If indeed he could even retrace his steps.​

​

Perhaps they'd be lost until some other found them. Perhaps they'd end up being sold by some scavenger. If so, let them. Most of his musings never came to much of anything in the end anyway.​

​

A query was raised, and he redirected his sights to the man. "If we follow the river, against it's flow, we'll come to it."​

​

He only knew what he did because of some of the others who had taken the journey this way on the hunt for Spencer. He'd made sure to find out all he could about the entrances they'd used, beyond just that he knew of on Korriban. Still couldn't remember where this particular one led, of course, but he knew they'd entered from the Canyon. That was enough for him.​

​

"There's another that'll spit you back out on Korriban," he stated. That was the one he'd taken, and the one which had brought him back after the fact. "I... I'm not sure if that would be the smartest choice, though." He frowned, memories swirling up of the day he'd felt it all collapse. "I don't think there's much of anything to aid you there."​

​

Another pause. He tried to recall it all in his mind, as best he could. It was difficult, because he'd been pulled in this time. He hadn't crossed any threshold he could think of. "I think they're near one another. I remember seeing a Spire when I came through from Korriban. That's near the Canyon."​

​

That left it all in the Dunaan's hands. Did he step into the unknown, or try his luck on Korriban? Arcturus couldn't make that call for him.​

​

When he gave his name, Arcturus nodded. It was good to give him a name, even his vision hadn't revealed that to him. "Arcturus," he replied. He didn't bother with the surname. It wasn't even really a surname anyway. None of his names were real, he'd simply claimed them for himself. He doubted he wanted or needed the full name.​

​

He pushed himself up to his feet. Wobbled a little on the spot, but steadied quickly enough.​

​

"Come on," he offered, with a tip of his head in the general direction, "I can take you there."​

​

Seydon of Arda ​

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Korriban. Desert world. Necropolis, Seydon thought. Even Dromund Kaas wasn't so suffused with the legends of the Dark Lords, where the Dark Side taint ran deep enough to sully the bedrock. The only flora were drywood scrags clinging to exposed rock, dredging sustenance from rivulet moisture veins slowly seeping between sandstone pores, and thinned copses, fell-shadowed thickets, of petrified spiral-beeches and other dead hardwoods. Fauna were three-eyed and three-clawed ravens, packs of semi-sentient jackals, a handful of indigenous serpents made further hardy and lethal by environmental corruption, and of course, the apex, hyper-predatorial Sithspawn. Dregs leftover from prior regimes and abandoned whenever Korriban was inevitably evacuated in the face of an Alliance or Mandalorian invasion. Korriban was inhospitable, evil, and unapologetically hostile.

Seydon's smile was thin, a little toothy, and wholly dangerous. He shifted the weight of his swords and adjusted their strapping for the umpteenth time, out of unconscious habit. Korriban he knew. Korriban he'd harrowed. Korriban, he'd planted his boots onto the dry steppes surrounding the Valley of the Dark Lords and ploughed headlong into Terentatek dens and wrym nests secreted beneath the tomb cornerstones. Under upturned Sith noses, Dunaan made quiet excursions to thin local 'spawn numbers, simultaneously harvesting hide, bone, organs, fluids and poisons necessary for their own potion work and armour fabrication. Not a necessarily exclusive tradition, but even the Dark Lords were ignorant of the innumerable pathways woven into the stones they'd anchored their thrones to. He pulled his gloves, now fingerless, tighter back across his knuckles.

"Arcturus... Arcturus," He said, turning the name over under his tongue. He'd remember. Seydon walked up the embankment, gave the surrounding hillsides and misty vales riotous with flower-colour and emerald green foliage a lingering, final gaze. A kind of paradise, juxtaposed with the mercurial River of the Dead, awash with the shadows of floating souls. Innumerable ghosts. Lingering as they did, he heard or imagined he'd heard faint sounds between the laps of river water. Washed out, dislocated whispers. Sometimes, a thing would shine bright in the deep of the river. Brief, short-lived, but it would shine before dimming into a hasp of smoky shadow.

"...We'll go back along the river. Walk against the flow, like you said," Seydon said, pointing toward the uplands, the river disappearing amid hillside curves and wind-tousled shrubbery. "Korriban's not the best but I know it. I'll make it work, one way or another."

Arcturus Dinn

 

[Arcturus Dinn]

He'd made his decision known, and frankly Arcturus was surprised by the results. Korriban... He'd chosen Korriban. Maybe if Arcturus had been a little more knowledgeable on where the other rift led his choice might have been different, but he hadn't been privy to that information. Just where they'd been spat into. Where some of them had returned through.​

​

Arcturus took a moment to inhale deeply through his nose. To savour the air which had felt so lacking in the Dreaming Dark. To set it to memory, lest their journey along the river sullied that freshness. His lungs burned, longing for more, but he could only breathe so much. With the back of his sleeve he wiped away some of the residue from his face, paying particular attention to the region around his eyes, then nodded once.​

​

The boy didn't really say much as he approached the river once more, glancing along it for any sign of the Ferryman; no such luck. That would have been too easy. Instead he did as he had initially suggested, and began to follow it upstream. Glancing over his shoulder once to ensure that the Dunaan - Seydon, that was - was following.​

​

"I imagine you're hungry," he stated, when the inky portal had disappeared from view all together. "There's usually something worth foraging. Taste leaves a lot to be desired in this place, though." Bland. Sometimes bitter, or sour, or downright disgusting. It wasn't a realm meant for mortals, after all. Life was not supposed to thrive here. Yet small nuggets formed here and there all the same. He wondered if he'd have lasted very long without it. Maybe he'd have been forced to return to Realspace much sooner, without ever helping Seydon to the exit.​

​

There were creatures too, of course, but they were hard to find. Only some of them were fruitful, others reacted as those in the Dreaming Dark did, disintegrating into nothing once cut down. Some were just pure spirits through and through. Nothing really to be done there. Those that did exist, and could be used for sustenance, were often hardier, and reeked of the Force.​

​

Likely creatures such as they who had wandered on in, and found themselves trapped. With so many tears in Realspace, what with all the wars and death, it wasn't beyond the realm of possibility.​

​

Seydon of Arda ​

 

[Seydon of Arda]

A cramp in the meat of his stomach threaded little notes of pain throughout Seydon's midriff. He massaged the ache best he could, kneading and rolling the backs of his knuckles into the leather-tough skin. Imagined, a little unwillingly, the succulence of that first enjoyed meal outside the Nether's remit. Granted, that required subsisting off Korriban's miserably frugal wastes until he secured transport off-world. Another issue he'd solve, in good time. First, leave the Nether. Second, survive that necropolis. Third, check the course of his compass and repossess his thread of destiny. One challenge at time, he ruminated. One at a time. He idly regarded the shape of Arcturus' shadow, following him up through a clutch of wooded knolls.

"If it's all the same, I'll wait," Seydon said. The air under the shade tasted sweet. He longed for a full wineskin, a mouthful of spring-tap water. The boughs overhead began to bow and easily wave with the winds that drew up from... West? The compass, save for its bearing on Arcturus, uselessly gave no accurate headings. The sun was immovable and he imagined that, in this place, there was no night. So the wind came from where it issued, he decided, did so regardless of any respect to traditional cardinal points. He caught a small leaf-blade spinning freely out of the canopy. It was bright as jade and almost as translucent. Running his thumb along the splits of photosynthetic veins, its consistency felt like delicate stone. In the next breath, the wind came again and took the leaf back up into the boughs.

They came out into the sun. Further roving hillsides, akin to the picturesque holo-pictorials sculpted in the master-class digital schools still thriving in the mid-rim. Perfect, Seydon thought, but not too perfect. The Nether had enough sense to stitch in a bit of asymmetry, a shade or splash of imperfection or ugliness, to suit mortal perception. They hadn't strayed from the River Dead; a trail somewhat like an animal run had worn the grass bare up along the lip looking down onto the river embankments. Arcturus' steps seemed sure and languid. Seydon kept pace, a few metres behind, giving his guide appropriate space. The Nether seemed to make every creature that entered want to be alone with their thoughts. What course had brought the boy here? What course would see him out? He'd the bearing of a shaman, a mediator between the living and dead, but was self-possessive, locked into his own specialties.

Everything's a mystery here, Seydon thought, the grasses dyed with gold edging from the sunlight. And everyone's left to navigate their own purgatory. For the first time in decades, he thought of old, dead Shev Rayner, and wished he had the old raider's haggard, sour humour and flinty wisdom to draw on. They trode on, keeping the River Dead in constant view. Ahead, it seemed to froth like rapids, the waters darker and more tempestuous. He called up to his guide.

"Seem to have some clue about this place," He said. "If we find the river Source, it'll be just another crack? Like that gate back in the 'Dark'?"

Arcturus Dinn