Private The Sound of Falling Sand

[Arcturus Dinn]

The trudging of his boots on the slightly sodden earth which marred the riverbank became the beating of a steady drum which kept each step in time. A sun shone down on them, though its true source was of much mystery to the boy who had seen this same realm shrouded in far more mystery than it possessed in that moment. He'd traveled that winding river alongside Spirit and Girl in search of her mother, and there it had felt much more muted and grey. Why did the Nether see fit to brighten now? Had it even brightened at all, or was its natural state just so stark a contrast from the Dreaming Dark that it seemed such a way?​

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Questions he had no answers for, in truth. The Nether was an entity unto itself, it had little rhyme or reason and it flowed with seasons nothing alike those they'd come to expect, changing at its every whim and prickled emotion. He spied some dainty creature on the opposite bank, just a snatch of black as it dashed from river to underbrush; long ears floundered in its haste. As he walked adjacent to its roost he monitored it for any further showings, though suffice to say it didn't wish to humour him. All else felt still. Eerily so.​

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The Dunaan's question caught him off guard. "I can't claim to know," the boy answered truthfully, a painful reminder of how much of this realm remained a mystery. "I don't know if this place has bounds, or if it just..." A furrowed brow pressed his expression as he pondered it. "Keeps going..." Would it generate further horrors should one reach some perceived edge? How had all of this come to fruition in the first place? Though he knew not the answers, he was grateful for the thoughts it brought up. Unlike his companion, Arcturus enjoyed musing the metaphysical.​

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"Do you think any's tried to find out?" No doubt a pointless question, the answer to which could only be theorized. Impossible that they'd ever know for sure, but it had come to his mind now and he'd felt the need to share it all the same. He hadn't the chance to think on it much more himself though when the world around them began to shift. It was a slow change to be sure, noticeable first in minute aspects of the landscape. Gone were the dainty florals which brightened up the vicinity. Craggier it all became, 'til the grass beneath their feet became the outlier. Sharp rocks jutted up, embracing them within a fractured valley, and those which protruded from within the river's rapids took the shape of disfigured skulls.​

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For a moment, Arcturus did not doubt them to be precisely that.​

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Though it had been seemingly slow to encroach, in that he hadn't really noticed the changes as they came, all at once it surrounded them. In fact when he took note of it, and turned to face from whence they'd come, he saw none of that greenery save for the toughest of grasses which leaned more grey than green. None of those wildflowers, just withered copses. Even the river seemed paler, the souls within more visceral.​

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He gave his companion an odd look. This was more the River of the Dead he'd recognized. When he turned back to the path ahead, he made sure to keep his eyes averted from the rapids. They'd find no peace within it, no soothing calm or cool touch. "We're in the long stretch now," he stated, hands sinking deep into pockets fraught with fraying holes, "If we make it through this, we'll be home free."​

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On the other side of the Valley of Lies the canyon stretched, separated from one another by that meandering river. Arcturus could not recall the length of this desolate place, though, he could not recall what horrors lay within. He knew only the dread it sent through his core.​

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Seydon of Arda ​

 

[Seydon of Arda]

The vale had come upon them with disquieting suddenness. Seydon felt ripped from a strolling dream, sun heat replaced by a vague mildew warmth that offered nothing, a feeling of moss and lichen clinging to his bones, rot chewing at his musculature. Illusory, all of it, testing his limbs with an odd flex as they ventured down a low incline into the wide vale basin. He drew out Winterfang as a precaution. The mist tendrils creeping free from beneath lairs in the rock shelves surrounding them cringed from its silver-plating, its alchemical steel-core. Good, he thought. Let whatever's present hate the sword. Fear it. Even if they don't fear us, they can stay scared of Winterfang.

Now, as in the Dreaming Dark, the Valley of Lies began deploying a few firsts of its arsenal. A colourless fog surrounded and plunged them into an opaque world of cotton-mist walls and glassy light. Visibility was curtailed to a handful of metres, whichever the direction. Seydon was forced to press closer to Arcturus' back, the pair slowing to navigate closer near the soul-river. The waters had given up their pleasant babbling for harsher 'thwacks', like ice colliding with stone in deep winter. Like Arcturus, he tried keeping his eyes to the patchy gravel and navigate by touch and that vague sense of close proximation. Again, he snapped open the compass. Again, the compass-face and its sensitive needles were useless.

Again, he shut its clasps and let it hang like a stone from his throat. Touched the metal of his wolfshead medallion... Cold. Cold enough to sting on contact. Always an ill sign. Their boots crept over islands of bristly grass surrounded by polished river rock. The pebbles themselves were oddly sloped and smoothed, some given mandible protrusions, others jawless, but Seydon noted it now: skulls. A million on million skulls, great and minute, the dark windows of their lightless eye-sockets turned upward to regard their intrusion with damning enmity. To say nothing of the river itself...

"More venom then ghosts in that water," Seydon grunted. As they ventured, voices began. Initially only thin, dissonant wails, with words scattered into mono-syllabic utterances. They made no sense, just ghostly, transient, and blessedly momentary. A relief compared to the swelling murmurs that began conveying off the soul-river. Seydon forced his head down and away, tried to stop up his ears. Don't look, he thought, for feth's sake don't look. A terror was on his soul, full of anxiety and haunting, haunting anguish. Don't look. It's their voices, it's her voice, but it cannot be. It isn't. Don't look, Seydon repeated in mantra, embarrassed at himself for being so unmanned. So fragile. At times, the river played back little piecemeal memories. He jerked to look up at Arcturus, see if he heard those perturbing recordings. But the boy looked shrunken, hands jammed deeply into pant pockets, doubtlessly concentrating himself.

In time, the mist parted though the voices and derelicts of memory nipped their worn heels. Seydon dared himself and looked up; the soul-river ribboned still into higher country, up through a pair of vast, skeletal boulders nearly wedged together at the naked brow but for a narrow seam that cracked between them. Dark, mercury-grey froths and liquid sprang from between carved, basalt-like teeth. The light seemed more muted in the heights, as if it were swallowing the lambency. Seydon cocked and rotated his wrist, turning Winterfang in close, concentric figure-eights. Its edge sang as it cut the air. For a moment, the voices quailed.

"Hate this place," Seydon heard himself say. "In the Dark, it just wants to kill you. This place, it makes you wanna detest yourself. ...Let's get up where those boulders are sitting. Looks as though that's where all this misery springs. Maybe where there's a convenient rift to get the hell outta here."

Arcturus Dinn

 

[Arcturus Dinn]

This next leg of their journey proved just as silent as the former, and yet it was borne through comfort and relief. There was an edge to it, an uncertainty which lingered on the edge of their peripheral. That gnawing doubt which burrowed into their guts and held their tongue for them. Enough effort was being put into resisting the call of that River and its inhabitants. Enough effort into walking on. To talk would be a distraction. To do anything more than trudge would be a waste.​

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So trudge they did.​

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A thick fog rolled over the bowl of the valley, it hung over him like a sodden blanket and its chill set deep within his bones. Hands buried deeper into the pockets, shoulders hunched to try and keep what few layers he was wearing in place.​

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He felt the Dunaan's presence closer then, as their vision became obscured beyond just a few feet ahead. It was a small comfort to know he was not alone, but a comfort all the same. Perhaps it would keep him from the watery depths of a river which had already sought to claim him before. A new task presented itself to the boy, to maintain an even distance from his companion. To ensure he didn't succumb to it either. A heartbeat would be all it took, one single moment in time which lured either one beneath the surface.​

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What awaited them there he did not know. Some other realm of horrors? Or would it simply drain away the very soul from within them? Would their skulls join the rest..?​

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"Stop it," he whispered low enough that it was obviously directed at himself. To keep himself in check. The fog was arguably more oppressive on him than the voices which washed up from the riverbed. Any voice which called to him was one that was unknown. Unremembered. There were dead in his past, of course, same as any, but the memories of them had long since been erased. A point of contention for him, sure, but in this moment perhaps a luxury not afforded to most others. An easier way to avoid the river... Barely. But something.​

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No, the mist that clung to him sapped him of his strength and sanity, and left him all the more sunken than he had already been. ​

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Behind him Seydon muttered frustrations of his own, and at first the boy paid him no heed. Let him say what he needed in order to survive it. Let him utter whatever came to his mind to keep his sanity. But then he realized a suggestion was being posed. He turned his head just a touch, so that he could see the man out of his peripheral. Muttered a quiet hum of agreement.​

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He wasn't sure he could handle much more than that. Not right now. Not in the thick of it.​

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As with before, he led the way up the ragged path that brought them to the frothing top of the river, the cause of all the rapids. It hadn't seem so steep atop the ferryman's boat, hadn't seemed quite so oppressive. Up and up, it seemed to go on forever. Where the larger skulls lay, boulders these in truth. Out of the valley's bowl and onto higher ground.​

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The mist began to ease up, as though they were rising above the clouds, and the air lost some of its thick, mugginess. A new view was afforded to them, and in the distance that lengthy spire rose up toward the petulant sky above. Beside it the chasm. Both options right there before their eyes.​

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"Are you set on Korriban?" he inquired again, now that it did not feel quite so impossible to draw a breath. "I have felt the collapse of its governing body since being trapped in here... There may be little there to help you off world." It was his choice, of course, and he would not dare ask again. Arcturus already knew that the path they walked now would not be his final here in the Nether. He'd find another way out, when he was ready. With that in mind it shouldn't have worried him where the other ended up. It was none of his business.​

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Seydon of Arda ​

 

[Seydon of Arda]

"It's sort of the devil-you-know," Seydon replied. He eased a scabbard strap over and was massaging a bit of lividity, leather having bit and sawed into the skin. They stood on a bare stone shelf, out of the reach of the miasma and that damnable river gurgling its tauntings and obscenities, peering out over further polymorphic dreamscapes. A slash of chasm cut into the earth. A tarnished spire that'd once been stately brooding over the un-world. Avian flocks, perhaps figments, perhaps refugees stuck lost in the Nether, busied the spaces between high, silver cloudbanks. The spire drew the eye but Seydon felt himself contemplating the significance of the fault-rift, dug in to the landscape like an open scar. What was the underpinning here? The representation? Which way to Korriban?

"There's always a ship making landfall on Korriban. Scavengers, pirates, treasure hunters. It's a carrion world and carrion will come, have their fill of what remains of its marrow, then depart. I'll find passage offworld, rest assured, whether they want to take an extra passenger or not. And if my luck runs thin, which it tends to!" Seydon chortled, arching his back enough to sound out a wet sequence of pops and cracks. He was still strong, volatile, powerful in body. But no one was immune from traces of age. "If I have to, I'll wait. Subsist on what Korriban has on offer, like the other carrion. But I'll keep an eye on the horizon. In time, probably quicker than you or I want to admit, someone will come to plant their flag. No galactic power can resist the psychological import of claiming it. Korriban's useless in a strategic sense but there's governments that relish the idea of holding Korriban up like they've got the Sith by the gonads.

"All that's left for you and I," He said, partially in a murmur. "Is figuring out where that rift is. Sounds like you came through it, once upon a time." He consulted the compass for the umpteenth time and was again treated to the dials floating useless inside the glass casing.

Arcturus Dinn

 

[Arcturus Dinn]

The devil you know... Yeah, Arcturus reckoned that made sense. Why risk it all on the unknown. If he was happy with Korriban, well maybe not happy but willing to make it work, then so be it. They'd head toward the Spire, then, not the chasm. Close, but separated by a great flatbed of jutting stone. The only positive the boy could find was that they needn't scale the Spire itself in order to reach the Rift. It was on the outskirts of it, in truth. The thought of ascending those crooked steps again made him stomach reel, in fact his face took on something of a clammy and muted green look when he looked upon its jutting visage in the distance.​

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He did not wish to relive the images that wretched place had conjured up. Not now, not ever.​

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Away from the valley below with its murky mist and wailing spirits, Arcturus was surprised to find his companion far more lively, far more chatty. Indeed, in the coming moments he spoke far more than he had for the entirety of their long journey thus far. It was an unexpected though much welcomed change. For his part, initially the boy just listened. Took it all in. Seydon hadn't really needed to explain himself any further than phrase the devil you know, yet he opted to all the same. Arcturus hummed in agreement, and nodded at all the sense he made. It was true, Korriban was always something of a hotspot, always something vied for among the masses.​

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Soon enough talk turned back to that rift. Arcturus gestured absently toward the Spire. "It lies over yonder," he explained, deciding against the instinct to return his gesturing hand back to its pocket. It didn't feel quite so necessary now that the end was in sight. The craggy surroundings of the chasm melded into a grassy meadow wherein the Spire itself sat, and as luck would have it they would have only brief cause to step upon the former. They might have avoided it entirely had they any real desire, but that meant navigating the Garden of Thorns.​

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He'd always avoided that place. It looked so bristly and uninviting. Lush and green sure, but it was a labyrinth unto itself.​

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Between them and it was more of the same river. Once beyond the Valley of Lies it was not quite so malicious in appearance, returning more to how it had been upon their exit of the Dreaming Dark. Still filled with spirits, of course, but in such close proximity to the Chasm of Passing it was far more peaceful. In truth, the Chasm was one of the softer places afforded to them within this place. All the same no bridge seemed to span it.​

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"We'll have to find a way across," he stated. But there was still some ground to cover before they reached the river's fork. "We've time enough to think on how, though. Come on, the worst is behind us now friend. The end is in sight."​

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Seydon of Arda ​

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Impossibly, the chasm seemed to stitch and cut through the stone outcroppings and rock spars forever in either direction. It'd played a queer focal trick on approach, appearing as ordinary as a seabed rift before 'stretching' out the nearer the pair trod. Again, Seydon found himself peering round at angles his mind could not fathom, spots where the lines were broken and re-soldered with nodule-beads of logic made solid. It thankfully resolved into this more palatable scenery, bare granite pleats, shields of quartz and fieldspar, that spanned on infinitely with the chasm itself. Seydon dared a glance over the precipice: a second infinity, the rift boasting no bottom he could detect by eye. Here, the compass dials had finally stilled but were still less-than useful: each needled was frozen to a point and refused to budge, welded in place by whatever unseen forces governed this space. Seydon paced away from the chasm-lip, in thought with arms tucked in close akimbo.

"Seems like another riddle," He said, looking back over his shoulder. "How do you get over something that can't be crossed?"

He tried spying for a tree or bole with enough height and girth to take their weight while spanning the rift, finding only sparse groves treed with whip-like willows and tall, stalwart, but unsuitable larches and skinny firs. No loose stone shelves he could heave, with some effort, over the span. Seydon then started striding along, keeping Arcturus in view lest the infinity of the thing separate them for all time, looking for spots where the rift inevitable narrowed. Three score meters... Another consultation with the dumbed compass... East. He picked east and marked the spot with a mental signpost, retreating back to Arcturus and venturing another sixty meters in what was presumably west. For all the weight of its gulf, the chasm exuded an odd note of serenity. Seydon found its muddy reaches and immeasurably vast shades of mote-scattered darkness as deep and imperturbable as a still grave. The weight of his swords, Winterfang and his brother Razorlight, clung across his shoulders and spine. The silence and rocky tranquility made him feel very old. An urge to lie down and simply nap for all time became almost overpowering. Seydon blinked, then struck a finger and thumb to certain points along his neck. The resulting nerve pain woke him up. Sharply.

"Arcturus." He waved the boy over, back where he'd found a narrower choke along the canyon's edge. "If we don't figure out something else... How's your jump?"

Arcturus Dinn

 

[Arcturus Dinn]

The Nether was a strange and incomprehensible beast. It was at times all too large and unnavigable, yet also there were moments where it seemed to be passed in the blink of an eye. As they set off down to the river's fork, and toward that vast chasm, it certainly erred toward the latter. With nary a passing thought capable of rising within his mind they had crossed toward the gulch, as though spurred on by some maddened spirit that saw their swift departure from this place. He turned back in so perplexed a state, while Seydon marveled over the gorge.​

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At his back now lay the river. He peered down at his boots, and saw little evidence of their crossing. Apparently his companion had not taken note of it either, it was as though one minute they were stood atop that relative waterfall and the next they'd willed themselves into existence before their last great hurdle. Dizzying. This place was dizzying.​

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He turned back toward the man, and watched as he paced this way and that, stopping only to tap at and observe the compass around his neck. The boy did not immediately comment on their apparent riddle, instead he felt himself drawn to the precipice and the calming serenity held within. When last he'd been here, he hadn't crossed this chasm. He'd met with then strangers Kal and Noelle Varanin at the bank of that great river; he'd barely even taken note of this place. It had been there of course.​

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Just another trick of the Nether.​

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Though he supposed they had taken the path through the Thorns. And he had merely skirted along the outside. Right now, as they looked around at its neverending presence, he could not fathom a way around it. Could not comprehend a way from river to spire without crossing the gorge. They had done so... But the Nether did not will it to happen again. With every passing second that Chasm seemed to grow in size, until he felt certain it might open up the ground beneath his feet also to swallow him whole.​

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The Dunaan's call of his name snapped him from those thoughts, dark even with the serenity which pooled out from below. Realizing how close he had been to the edge, the boy took a solid step back before turning toward him. Hurrying to where he stood, observing the shortest distance as he did, Arcturus was met with yet another question. Only then did he realize his lack of a response to the previous. This place was playing tricks upon his mind, he felt as though he was losing track of time entirely.​

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"My jump?" he inquired, piecing together the puzzle left for him by Seydon. Could he jump it? With the Force at his back, he felt certain he could... And yet what if this was another optical trick? What if it was much farther than it seemed? "Do you think it's that close?" he inquired, relaying back the question without first answering the mans.​

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"If it's as narrow as it appears, it should be viable... If not?" It didn't bear thinking about. That Chasm seemed to have no end, and he wasn't so sure he could handle the sensation which came with eternal falling.​

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Seydon of Arda​

 

[Seydon of Arda]

"Do you think it's that close?"

The remark crashed in on Seydon's logic. He kept his expression locked still but his gut rolled while his wits forcibly reevaluated their grasp on the Nether's secret underpinnings. Or, lack thereof. He wordlessly gestured them away from the Chasm's saw-edged precipice, once more regarding their problem. How to traverse the impossible? Arcturus had struck it on the nail's head. There was no use trusting the Nether to operate according to realspace principles. If he was correct, the whole of the realm existed as a nebulous gestalt born out of the collective dreams of of a trillion on trillion sleeping imaginations. And like the fae-logic of sleep, the Nether resembled the laws of the waking world but did so the way a carnival mirror reflected your image: still yourself but distorted, pulled, shrunken or fattened to near bursting.

He had a thought. It scalded him with its simplicity but it was worth an attempt. Seydon snatched a pebble-rock from under a granite shelf and approached the Chasm's edge once more. Dared a brief glance down; past the edge, infinity stretching into earth-hued murkiness, darkness, and the call of sweet, dreamless sleep. Looking back up, he cocked his arm back and tossed his rock. It sailed high and swift for approximately a solid metre... then began acting very curiously. The rock shivered as if caught in something gelatinous, slowing for a beat, before – impossibly – stretching into a smeary ellipse. Seydon bit down on his tongue; like watching a kid fool about with a cheap holo-image manipulator, resizing and reshaping things but without adjusting resolution to compensate, creating things with stretched, almost broken pixels that were muddy and without detail. The ellipse-rock floated briefly, until it's farthest end had about touched the Chasm's opposite side. Then it shivered like it had again caught in something sludgy mid-air and snapped back into a mere oblong stone. The rock sailed on, striking and skipping across the far Chasm landing.

Seydon repeated the feat a half-dozen more times, experimenting with stones of weird shape and profile, while Arcturus watched and, he was certain, working to hold back his laughter. Trying to catch this little 'cheat', see where it faltered or failed. But each flicked rock would fly, distend where they found the 'break' in space, and clatter away on the Chasm's far side. The 'break' only existed in a rough two by two meter tunnel between the narrow points along the gorge. Either side, his stones would soar, arc, and then fall into oblivion.

Nothing for it, he thought. Before Arcturus could raise objection, Seydon aligned himself with where he believed the mid-air 'break' lied and bit his boot-toes into the stone. Sped off, in a dead-heat sprint, calculating for the necessary speed and angle. The edges of his boot soles found the edge of the chasm, cocked down as his legs folded, and then drove up in a piston-jump. He'd cleared perhaps a meter of space... Then hit the 'break'. He momentarily juddered in mid-air, slowed, distended to the point of ripping apart. His back heel looked locked in place while his forward toes elongated on and on 'till they neared close the opposite Chasm shelf. For a second, an unearthly long beat, he hovered over the empty expanse of the rift. In the next, he 'snapped' forward, condensing back together, hitting and rolling over the lip of the far edge.

His face was grey as clay. Seydon wasted no time and ignored the dictates of dignity. Simply hurried on foot and hand, behind a long spar of quartz jutting out of the granite and fieldspar, and violently retched.

Arcturus Dinn

 

[Arcturus Dinn]

In witnessing Seydon's response to bridging that Chasm, Arcturus paled and wondered on the necessity of his own crossing. He was there now, right? Just a stones throw from the rift - no pun intended, this was not a time for humour - surely the Dunaan was capable of finishing their Odyssey without him. The boy brought little to the table, after all, especially now that the expanse of the Nether had been thwarted. The boy shook his head.​

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He had stood by and watched as the practice runs were carried out, and though his companion had expected humour there lay only grim fascination within him. He enjoyed the experimentations, seeing how far the Nether could be stretched and manipulated at the simple tossing of a stone wrought from the edges of that Chasm itself. The would be scientist in him reveled in it, in fact.​

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Even knowing that it would work though, even having seen for himself the man standing - well, crawling really - on the other side, he dug his heels in. Now that the excitement of his prophetic vision had waned, now that the adrenaline forged within the Dreaming Dark had fled him, and the anticipation of reaching their destination had concluded, there was nothing left within him save that cowardice he'd shouldered since his youth. A cowardice which had seen an end to all he'd known.​

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He didn't remember its origin in totality, but that blasted Spire had revealed snippets. A fractured alternative past that might have been had he been more brazen and bold. An uprising, a stop to the ensuing carnage and slavery he'd known. An exhale through his nose. He couldn't do it. He shouldn't do it. He wouldn't do it. It was folly. It was suicidal.​

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Boy stared at man. One timid step back was taken. He could hear the beating of his own heart racketing through his mind, all colour drained from his already pale skin. It was madness... Every muscle in his body fought to restrain him. Fought to hold him in place. He looked tense and sore and stuck in the mud.​

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Then he closed his eyes. Balled his hands into fists. Arcturus' muscles primed, and then without warning he pushed forward and leapt...​

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Seydon of Arda ​

 

[Seydon of Arda]

"I hate the Nether," Seydon said, in a low sub-vocal to himself. He didn't observe Arcturus journey over the gorge; heard his boots scrape over stone and dust, heard the rush of air, the sickly moist 'pop' of the distension and stretching, the subsequent crash of the body reconstituting into its whole and upright form before the boy landed in an ill tumble. He stopped his ears up in case the boy experienced similar illness, not wanting to revisit his own. There'd been nothing but bile at the bottom of his belly but the experience of... of... Instantaneous eternity, each atom of him pulled in all directions simultaneously before gnashed back together... Had thrown his homeostasis into riot. His body demanded some succour, anything to calm. And so to alleviate the extreme disorientation had resorted to the tried and true vomiting methodology. Seydon's throat still burned from acid-flux.

But they were across. With finality, he turned his back on the Chasm of Passing and looked on. Rocky shrubland and long steppes of broken, mineral-banded stone spars eased into familiar river vales and long, smooth glacial valleys peppered with verdant forestry and grass-fields the colour of perfect green. All of it sweeping upwards towards the flanks of a glittering tower of multi-hued stone, inset with delicate glass tracery and arcade-like trimmings spiralling upward toward a staggered castle peak. The Spire Arcturus mentioned. More landmark than destination, the rift he sought somewhere about its haunches in the dells and hollows surrounding.

Close. Seydon massaged under his eyes, rubbed his nose-bridge and ran breathing exercises to reestablish his centre. Close but not yet. The Nether worked insidiously to undermine his guard with its dream-logic. He couldn't anticipate whatever myriad strangeness and potential logic-ambushes waited between them and the rift, he could approach it with a Dunaan's care. Seydon forced his rhythm to slow, embrace calculation. Next to nothing in resources save his swords and physicality, strength, senses, and limited gamut of Force disciplines. Little in the way to detect potential threats until, like in any dream, they landed virtually in their laps. It was vulnerability. He didn't like it.

"Come on," He said at Arcturus once certain the lad had recovered from the Chasm ordeal. The experience of spatial distortion-dilation, the slam and clap of getting torn everywhere and then walloped back together, took its fierce toll. Only under duress, fierce duress, would he dare put them through that again. "I still need you, kid. You gotta show me the last bit of the way."

Arcturus Dinn

 

[Arcturus Dinn]

It was as wretched as it had seemed upon observation of the other. He felt all at once as though he were being torn in two, nay three pieces. Pulled and stretched and smooshed, by the time he reached the other side of that gorge he did not feel entirely whole, or at least he felt as though he'd been put back together all wrong. Stomach up by his throat, lungs displaced this way and that, a pressure behind his eyes that made them feel like they might simultaneously pop.​

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Everything had been stilled in that moment of suspension betwixt launch and land, and the feel of it was haunting. For a boy so often out of pace with time, to have it so blatantly messed with left him feeling disoriented. He fell with a clatter against the rocky ground on the other side, and felt all remnants of air knocked from within him. He remained that way for a second, maybe more, mouth open but incapable of drawing a breath. Then he gasped.​

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Was that it? Was it over?​

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It took a moment for his stomach to unknot itself, and in the process the boy retched. It took more out of him than even he had realized, and as he leaned over in the middle of the act he wrapped his arms around himself as though fighting to keep himself in one piece. Everything was coming undone for a moment, everything threatened to tumble free.​

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Seydon permitted him time enough to finish reeling. There was a thick line of sweat marring his pale face, skin clammy, and that same sickly, dizzying feeling lingered for longer than he'd have liked. Eventually though he found his feet. Gaze sought that tower, and though it appeared close he knew how deceptive it was. The Spire was tall and winding, so tall that to stand in its shadow was to block out the sky above. He'd traipsed its many steps upward to the visions at its top, he'd seen what it had to share.​

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He would not be making that mistake again now.​

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It was the Dunaan who set him back into motion again, who professed a use for him even now. The boy wiped away the sweat from his brow with the back of his sleeve, then forced himself onward toward that final destination. Not long now, he told himself. Not long now... The only blessing was their surroundings. Lying as close to the Chasm as it did, this particular region was unexpectedly peaceful. It came with its own demons, of course, but they were far more serene and lingered within the gulch itself. Spirits of those who remained incapable of passing on, but who meant little ill will.​

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The Nether, after all, was a place for the dead. Any dead... All dead. Not just the maleficent among them.​

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All the same Arcturus kept his head down. Their journey might well have taken months for the harrowing it had done to them, time was impossible to track in such a place as this. They'd certainly traveled quite the distance. With the end in sight he felt that fatigue rising back within him, straining his muscles and slowing his pace.​

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He had to pick up his pace...​

​

It wasn't until shale turned to grass that he looked up. The tower was larger now, more formidable against its backdrop. Beyond it a labyrinth of thorns and shrubbery lay, and within that demons were said to roam. But they would not make it to that place, that was not their destination. Instead he led the Dunaan toward a spot between Spire and Maze, an insignificant spot in truth. There was nothing which denoted it as what it was, the landscape while green was sparse around it. A few flowers. A tree or two. But as they drew closer Arcturus knew it for what it was all the same. He felt compelled toward it.​

​

He paused. Turned his head toward the man. Was it really over? For one of them, at least, Realspace awaited. For the other further loneliness and more of this wretched space. For a short while longer, at least. Long enough to make peace with it. Long enough to regather those things lost. Seydon, he supposed, classified as such. Lost... But not for much longer.​

​

"We're here," the boy finally stated. Hands once again found their way into his trouser pockets. Sinking deeper than before, as though he could bury all of his reservations within the holey cloth which cradled his hands. Of the Rift, up close as personal as they were it appeared only as a shimmer in the air. There was no beginning or end to it that could be rightly deduced, it simply was. You could see right through it to the Garden of Thorns in the distance. See right through it... But not walk. To walk would spit you out into the desert wastes of Korriban.​

​

That thought had him turn to face the man directly.​

​

"When you get to the other side, you might find remnants of supplies left behind from the team that entered here, however long ago that was now. Whether any of it is still good I cannot say. All the same, if you journey beyond that camp, in the direction it lays from the Rift, you'll eventually come upon something of civilization. Insofar as Korriban has..." A pause. His gaze shifted temporarily between man and rift, as though he couldn't quite settle on who to give his attention.​

​

It was calling to him, begging for him to walk on through. He ignored it. Seydon had his gaze again.​

​

"I wish you well on the journey which awaits you beyond, on the last leg of your Odyssey, Seydon. Though most would doubt your tale of surviving the Dreaming Dark for so long, know that at least one in the Galaxy believes it to be true. Go now, with your mind still in tact, before this place takes any more of you than it already has..."​

​

Perhaps one day they would meet again. Fate had never been so kind to Arcturus, though.​

​

Seydon of Arda ​

 

[Seydon of Arda]

"Arcturus."

A little shape tied with a thong of leather gently flew through the space 'twixt them and landed in the boy's hands. The Korriban Compass, it in its battle-scarred wood housing, a thing of alchemized durasteel and glasteel, nthmetal and select Force crystals, deceptively intuitive in the right hands and calibrated against unnatural and alchemic phenomenon. One of perhaps a handful fabricated in Rave Merrill's secreted laboratories, the alchemist and her troves lost, a lifetime's wealth of hard won secrets distilled into a scant few artefacts. It'd been a gift, for services rendered. He missed her when the memory came on thick, when he'd time enough to savour those long sessions tooling with various leathers, hides, bones, and other endowed viscera. Rave Merrill, in her butcher-aprons and elbow-gloves, spattered from head to toe with gore flecks, smiling. Seydon blinked away the memories and watched the boy's eyes dart from compass, to him, and back.

"You ever find yourself on the Other Side, that'll help you along. In more ways than you think. It's special," Seydon said, backpedalling towards the Rift behind. "Don't lose it. It's yours now."

He saluted, turned on heel and hip, shoulders forward, and marched on forward through the Rift's glassy shimmer -

-

A tunnel. Ringed with light and colours lacking human description. The Edges furred darkly. A crescendo sound. A whistle of wind and gale, shriller than any hurricane scream. Cacophonic. Bright, so bright, that he could see the webs of little vessels under his eyelids. Seydon opened his mouth to cry out but the scattering checker-boards of white and black stole his voice, his senses, and finally his wits. He hurtled towards a point of spinning colour and -

-

Flew somersaulting out onto a rough flat of scattered dust drifts and slags of pyroclastic jetsam and fieldspar. Seydon scrabbled, kicking out, catching his boot-toes into purchase on the stone and slashing his fingers against the bare rock. One fingernail broke, trailing a weep of blood. Finally, he skidded to a halt. A beat. He released a thick cough caught in the pit under his belly and hacked until the trembling note left him. The Dunaan allowed himself to roll over onto his spine and rump, eyes momentarily shut. The weight of trueness, reality, took a moment to readjust to. All of a sudden, he felt aware of the thrumming in his minuscule blood vessels and heavier arteries. Aware of the tautness and strength in his musculature. The alchemic strum of his chemical and endocrine systems jogging their hyper-accelerated functions. Aware of his faculties, razor sharp, senses dialed to a hundred, able to scent and taste molecules out of the air while detecting trembles in the mantle so many leagues away.

He loosed a heavy belly laugh. Oh, but he felt alive. And it was sweet and unadulterated, untainted, just a magnificence of simplicity that came with simply being. For once, for very once, the dragging onus on his heart was absent. Perhaps, yes, it would return, time to time. But like his swords, once the svolten rhyolite found their winter-bright edges, he'd be ready. Seydon pushed up with his palms and vaulted back onto his feet.

He'd landed within the confines of an old wind-etched cavern. True to Arcturus' description, pilfered crates and a handful of ruined bivouac tents were rent and scattered about the space. He toed through emptied foodstuff packaging, crushed lentil cans, torn emergency water ration packets with marks of teeth and claw moulded into the plastic. Little in the way of supplies, but no matter. Seydon couldn't keep the grin off his face. He breathed in, to the edge of bursting, lungs tickling from the dry air. Exhaled and felt so very light for it. Tuning his ears to the echo profiles in the cave, he turned on the hovering Rift shimmer and began climbing up through what felt like an old, well-smoothed lava tube. Saw through the twilight dark with enhanced eyes, the tunnel monochrome but colourless and bright, the walls ribbed but rough, patchy enough for even hand and footholds. Gradually climbing along the steep incline that brought him up out of the dark and into a shallow clastic grotto.

It opened along a scant cliff-face. Shaded from a dread-sun glowing stark and malignant yellow tints across a broken vastness of tortuously rocky sand dunes and obsidian hills. In the distance, hazed by heat and leagues of separation, were broken knolls accented with petrified woods and the raw-toothed profiles of insidious mountain ranges that bit angrily at the blue-black sky. It was cloudless and brilliantly austere. The heat already soaked a thin sweat out of Seydon's chest. Fell winds carried along gasping whispers belonging to dead Massassi legions and threnody-esque howls that accented the occasional sandy gales. The final roars of dead, impotent Dark Lords trapped inside lost mausoleums buried away within vanished necropoli, either obscured under long, stony dunes or glassed and destroyed from innumerable orbital bombardments. He felt unseen glares stab out from the long panorama. What Seydon had not imparted to Arcturus was the world's predilection towards a kind of... haughtiness. Planetary character. Korriban, possessed by a sense of dire regalia and dead splendour lost on most Dark Lords. Seydon snorted, certainly lost on Kaine and his ilk, who only ever found worth in things that bore their own likeness. ...Then that too struck him, a rediscoverd sense of humour, no matter how sardonic. The sheltered deadness surrounding him on all sides only accentuated his own sense of life.

By sun-shadow and a trick of thumb and fingers against the horizon, it was perhaps an hour following local noon. He considered staying within the grotto and awaiting nightfall. But a restlessness had taken his mood. Though his boots were nigh-on disintegrating, at a lack for every conceivable ration save for his physicality and the comforting weight of his twin-swords. On an impulse, he touched a pair of fingers to his lips and then tapped them against Razorlight and Winterfang's pommels. The slumbering war-things asleep in the alchemic steel stirred, heightened by their master's mood. Blood, he felt, give them blood. Let it be the lethal and awful things, the terentatek and Hriss-dragons, the 'spawn of arrogant fleshsmiths and stupid Bleak Lords. Seydon felt himself agree.

He backed to the far wall of the grotto, braced, and snapped into a run. He needn't climb down. His toes touched the edge of the cliff drop and propelled him out into dry, hot open air. For a very long beat, he flew. Then gravity, offended, clutched at him and plummeted his figure down towards the dunes. Seydon tucked up legs and limb, rolling for the last handful of fast-passing metres, and landed shoulder-to-sand at the zenith of a lower dune a dozen metres out from the cliff-face and the tiny grotto-mouth etched into its sand-blasted rock. Rolled end-over-end before a minute tug of friction gained enough brake to allow him to unfurl and leap back to his heels. He was off, then. Sprinting up down the dune face. Out and away into awaiting wasteland reaches, into labyrinths of molten stone and Sithspawn dens. Winterfang was loosed from its scabbard, and it glinted a stirring silver blaze against the glare of the sun.

~Fin & Theme~​

 

[Arcturus Dinn]

The call of his name had his head snap toward man, just in time to catch sight of the item loosed toward him. It fell into his hastily outstretched hand, buffered from anything remotely akin to impact damage by the slow descent of the boy's grasp. Without opening it he knew it for what it was, he'd regarded it solemnly each time he'd caught sight of the other man tapping at it, searching hopelessly for some worth in its perpetually shifting needles. The Netherrealm it was not made for, but beyond the Dunaan assured him it would do its magic.​

​

Little time was left for drawn out farewells. Neither one of them would have wanted such regardless, their entire Odyssey had been one long farewell to this most insidious of realms, and in the kinship which had formed alongside winding river and skull-tossed landscapes so too had their departure from one another already been realized. It was inevitable. Necessary.​

​

Even so when the man crossed that threshold, when he tumbled free from Hell and into a realm so joyous by comparison, the boy felt all of his composure quick to crumble. All that had kept him on his feet since first crossing into the Dreaming Dark, all that had forced him onward in their at times resentful quest, evaporated so keenly it was as though it had never existed at all.​

​

He faltered then, slumping down to the ground below onto knees that ached and folding forward into the grasses surrounding both Rift and Spire. His body demanded an end to his exhaustion, his body demanded respite. And through his mind it knew that this place was the only one he was consciously aware of in all of the Netherrealms that could 'safely' facilitate such. Rest now, it urged, against every better instinct he held. Rest...​

​

Arcturus succumbed to those musings. Lay at the foot of a bridge that spanned realities, he slept a dreamless sleep.​

​

Fin​