A Glint in the Darkness

[Seraph]

[This post is a part practice piece, part prologue. It takes place in the present time of  Alexa Moroveston's character's whereabouts. I don't know the exact time line if there is one, but it is well over a hundred years since the events surrounding the Sword- and the disappearance of Drake, known later as Seraph when he attacked Nicolaskaya and her kin under the Sword's influence. The exclusion of his name in the read is intentional. Where he is currently trapped is assumably inaccessible to most, though it is an open RP regardless. If you would like to enter it, and you have questions or ideas, please feel free to PM me to discuss them.]




Nothingness...


Nothingness is a word most take for granted, so adrift in lives where every second is laden with surroundings and substance. So few understand. So very few. How could they?

How could they know the absoluteness of eternity's maw spread wide before them until they themselves crumpled prostrate before it, crushed inward by an oppressive vastness so profound that it threatens to grind away what little sanity mortals come equipped with. Add to this a blackness, perfect, unbroken, such a darkness that ones eyes might as well not exist. There is no light of hope far above at the surface to claw your way up to. There is no surface. There is nothing.

Nothingness is a word most take for granted.


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The man screamed, it was ritual for him now. His mouth opened, teeth bared, and he screamed. He shouted out into the nothing until he had expelled his lung's capacity for the thick, painful "air" of this place, and he listened before he caught himself. One could not give ear to the void. There was nothing to listen for, and it only made it worse. He'd been floating here for how long? Sky-clad (If there was such a thing as a sky here) and alone. He licked his lips, chapped, gods how he thirsted- a pain like endless fire in his throat, an exquisite melody against the steady drumbeat of hunger thrumming in his gut. To attempt to guess at the passage of time here was laughable. An eternity it was... he felt. Years, he guessed, but truly who could know? He sucked in another lungful of the thick, syrupy air and prepared to scream again when he heard it.

The man stopped, lungs burning with the desire to exhale and he did the one thing he knew better than to do. He listened.

At first, nothing. Desperate pain welled up inside him to accompany that in his lungs, but still he listened. Deafening silence, but... like an invisible comet the first creature streaked into him, sending the pair cascading across the endless expanse. The man's breath exploded from his mouth, his scream this time in agony in lieu of frustration as the two tumbled headlong in a tangle of limbs, wings, claws and teeth. What else, he vaguely wondered in that strange quiet place in your mind that casually considers notions during violence, what else did these things have? He could never see them, just hear their terrible screeching, and feel their ravaging tearing. A second creature slammed into his back abruptly and he felt something wetly crack.

He'd be joined by more soon, he knew, and he smiled. Such was the intent of his screaming after all. To get their attention. They would over the course of the next several minutes devour him bit by bit. He would know agony, he would die. Again. But the sound, glorious sound, the presence of so many creatures... it was divine against the abhorrent nothingness. Such rapture to no longer be alone! Sure, he would scream his last and "die" for an unguessable amount of time, only to find himself floating endless and alone again. But it was a way for him to retain his sanity. Through this chaos, pain, blood and blessed noise, he would break the maddening silence if but for a short time... and a price.

Gasping as his collarbone crunched in the mouth of one of the ravenous creatures he felt two more latch onto his torso. Shaking off his reverie, with balled fists and a resurgence of will he began to fight back... twisting, kicking, pulling and snapping. He'd once been a great man, a grand warrior, if only he could remember his own name.

Like a swarm of wasps, they closed tighter in around his defiant form. He had to make it last, he had to make the pain stay. Despite his plight, cyclic and dreaded... nothingness waited with the patience of eternity, he'd be returned to it's cold embrace soon enough.

The man felt teeth close around his neck, and managed a swift and creatively profane curse before he felt his windpipe crumple and lifeblood run free. "Too soon.." he blearily thought, now numb to the countless mouths chewing and tugging at his limp body.  He'd been a great man once...

The sounds began to fade as his mind slipped into a long, empty tunnel. The familier feeling of death pulling at him. And then once more there was nothing.

Nothing.

[Seraph]

He would not remember it. But he dreamed. Though his physical body fattened the extended stomaches of a thousand creatures, he dreamed. In this dream he was whole again, in the lands of light and sound. He stood staring with open awe upon a great scar in the distant horizon shaped like the sprawling black castle it was. So immense was this building, it was easily visible even through the endless sheets of punishing rain that bore down oppressively on the world, pummeling it with wind and water.

It was so familiar. So very familiar. The man closed his agape mouth and at long last tore his eyes from the castle.  The landscape between was a sea of corpses and few of them human. Dragons, ogres, and orcs. Bent and broken hydras, tribes of scorched goblins, giants torn asunder. Familiar. Monsters.

"It's what you do."

The solitary man whirled in place, water cascading around him as he stared with wide eyes from rain swept gully to corpse ridden mound through sopping, unkept hair.

"Who is there?" He demanded to the night, his own voice cracking and weak. He found the sound of it filled him with disgust. He called out again. "Show your self!" But he found only more gory piles surrounding him. Something small and white in the distance caught his eye and he immediately tore off towards it. Though he could not discern exactly what it was, something about it bore an intense dread into him. With an almost crazed, loping run he splashed through the muddy ravine, fighting to keep his footing in the thick, blood dyed slop as various parts of unidentifiable creatures floated past.

"They were monsters too."

The man, waist deep in the swiftly moving mud and water came to a halt despite the sucking of the mud at his legs. He opened his mouth in horror at the two bodies slopped against the hillside together, limbs tangled as if roughly dumped. "No.." He managed, repeating. Babbling. "No... I didn't do this." Even now, eyes dead and hauntingly staring, white dresses dirtied and torn like the flesh beneath, the pair was beautiful. Haunting perfection on their porcalin features. He stumbled in the ravine water, reaching numbly out at the hillside. "No...."

"They were monsters, you did what must be done, and must be done again."

The voice was coming from inside him. He realized that under the murky, muddy water his hand solidly gripped something. It seemed to anchor him against the current, the cold. The more he focused on it, the more it seemed to give him strength.

"Yes..."

The voice was cool in his mind, urging, like a patient mentor. He lifted his hand upward, the blade surging out of the water at his behest. The water steamed away on it's dull, black surface, and he stood mesmerized. So familiar. He squeezed the black leather binding of it's handle and wondered aloud as he raised it to the sky. "Who are you?" No light seemed to reflect upon it, no water seemed to hold. He realized with a start that the blade was the origin of the voice, and almost dropped it when it replied.

"Who are you?"

The man, shivered in the rain, alone but for the castle and the fields of dead, and stared at the blade in confusion.

He didn't know.


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Later, after many more such dreams of darkness and violence, the man finally awoke. Naked, alone again in the void, he heaved a heavy lung full of the syrupy air into a sigh. He'd been dreaming, but he couldn't remember what about. Bitterness enveloped him... and he floated again in silence.