Defined agony, desperate longing, hellish existence, and unending rage. Those are what I should feel, but I don't. I think, sitting across from this girl who's face is simultaneously have intense nostalgia for and the urge to remove it, burn it, defile it, yet all I can muster is an intense apathy. My rage has drained away, my sorrow resting in the earth with the dead, I am empty. I'd rather be a monster than a shell, monsters can be rescued.
But I forget my purpose. I must leave and I must help this girl, two counter imperatives. The latter that I might unsheath my burning agony, the later to quell the same force. I am sanity, I am madness, I am dark, and I am light, a duality straining against each other. Am I Job, tortured? By asking that do I resign myself from the comparison?
"Then said his wife unto him, Dost thou still retain thine integrity? curse God, and die"
There they stand, the beach outstretching in every direction save for that where the waves beat against the white sand. The teal dressed girl kneels down, shivering hard, though no wind blows.
"Get up," Seeker commands plainly.
"I don't..." She says with a physical shudder, "feel."
"No, no you don't. Your body is no longer within your control. You move, but you are chained." He walks slowly towards her, locked steps with hands hidden away in his long, black coat. "You lost the battle," he says placing a hand on her shoulder, "you best steel yourself to fight the war."
She struggles to stand, legs weighed down as if a thousand pounds were strapped to her shoulders. "You'll get more used to the feeling of being a spirit in some time, incorporeality certainly feels alien for the first few hours."
With a grunt she heaves herself upwards, her mind trying to grasp the combined feeling of crushing weight and of not having any solidity at all, an apparition inside her own mind. "I can see," she says with heavy breath,"two things." On the outside the moon still hung high in the air, Star, or at least her body, stirred from bed. She tries to stand out of bed but falls roughly onto her face. Star, at the beach, rubs her eyes roughly, trying to rectify her duplicitous sight. "It's just, ah, strange."
"I would think you're seeing the world through the eyes of Passions. I brought to life your parts as thoughtforms; you must tread carefully with them, as they're more dangerous than they initially seem." The tall man starts to walk, but the scene changed around him, rather than him moving through it. They stand back inside the stone library, her mind personified.
A moment passes in strained silence, Star too distracted by her visions, Seeker bearing a vile grimace. The Star on the outside changed clothes (the long way before climbing up into Marco's bed, taking the role of a large spoon despite her size. This, predictably, leaves the real Star blustering. "What is she doing? That's just, just, wrong."
"She's spooning, I believe. She seems rather intent on it too," the man says dryly, mostly interested by the entire affair.
"I see that!"
"Hardly worth thinking about. There are better things you can waste your effort on, such as reclaiming your body." He sets himself down into the stone chair, heads falling as he looks up into the blackness of the ceiling. "This place is drear," he says slowly, "doesn't fit you." He raises a hand, the ceiling giving way to a night sky, clear and bright, stars dotting across it in uncountable numbers.
Star looks up at the celestial display, the tiny dots of light bright and clear across the sky as if it were a perfectly clear night. She stands, her mind forcing herself to either see one thing or the other, parsing her perceptions out. "Who are you..." she asks, struck by the beauty of his creation.
"You've asked before," he says calmly, "I'm a dead man."
"I don't care about the metaphoric you, who are you?"
He frowns, his face turning pensive, thoughts rattling about inside his skull, almost loud enough for Star to hear. "Have you ever thought about who you were? Really thought? Asked yourself 'why am I here, what purpose do I have?'. For a long time, I thought I knew the answer to that question. Nothing. Life is meaningless and void, all you have are those around you and the joys you can make for yourself and those you love. But, I no longer know. My time in hell has given me perspective, and knowing more has one unavoidable consequence: you realize how ignorant you are. Do you really want to know who I am?" The scene shifts once again, the cold cobblestone floors melting to hot, brown sand under foot, dunes mounding up in moments larger than either of them. Star looks down and find that she's missing, well, everything asides from a perspective is missing, as if she were merely floating eyes perceiving the world, or a camera streaming the video to where she actually was. "This is Harenam," he says slowly, the word being pronounced as are-ay-num. "I was born here, in more than one sense..." He walks briskly to the large city in the distance, a metropolis of limestone and sand, water flowing in grand canals irrigating a farming network around the stately capital.
They reach the place in moments, crossing a mile of desert 'till they face a structure of grandeur. People sat on the steps into the Parthenon like building, the whole structure scaling into the heavens upon its hilly mount. Those about the building chatter, sit and read or simply devote their minds to elderly men, pontificating on the steps. The people were much as those in the other world, their skin a dark olive hue, their hair almost all dark shades of brown and black, save for the elderly who bear whites and grays. It seems this place held many such old men, often the frail-looking men commanded the attention of a swath of young pupils. They speak to them not with arrogance, or even from a place of greater wisdom, but from an equal standpoint, asking question, explaining answers, giving full and complete reason to their rationality, and, when things were brought which they could not answer, as rare as such a chance was, they conceded. No insult can be brought against those who shunned pride.
"Welcome to history. A history of a devil and a fool." Seeker walks forward, Star's perspective being pulled with him, her incorporeality an odd and distressing feature of the dream she inhabited. He takes her to a peculiar teacher. He spoke with a crowd of those much closer in age to himself than the others. He, appearing with fine lines of age across his face marking the years, lacked the deformities that came in the latest years of life. He stands with a straight back, enunciates with consistent clarity, no sentence interrupted by hacks and coughs of the failing body, and his eyes lack the cloudy covers that other rabbi had, forcing them to walk alongside a guild. However, other deformities stuck him. His skin, pale wrapped itself in heavier clothes than most, sheltering itself from the harsh desert sun, and his eyes hold blood red irises, his hair a silky, long white train reaching to the small of his back. The man, by no means young, but by no means old, held the attention of a smaller group of students, his lesson discussing the nature of the world and of the forces which inhabit it.
"We," he begins, "exist in a world of wonder and mystery, the things outside of ourselves and that which lies within ourselves are both exponentially greater than what first comes to mind. The world, principally, acts on consistency and reason, for all things, there is a cause. Take a cart sitting atop a hill. How would one consider that cart was bought there?"
"By a horse or a man," one of the students chime, his group far younger than many of the others, the oldest maybe fourteen and the youngest no more than ten.
"And how did you reach that conclusion?"
"The cart couldn't, of its own will, force itself atop a hill."
"Exactly, the cart lacks any agency in the world, it's a victim of cause. Now, as you're watching this cart, no many near it, you watch is begin to roll down the hill, rapidly gaining speed until it reaches the flat lands below, where is slows back to a stop. What caused this chain of events."
"Well, it must not have been secured, and simply rolled down."
The man smiles, "but why?" The children look to each other, one speaking up.
"Things naturally tend to go downwards."
"To an extent, that is correct. In fact, though, it's more complex than that. All things have innate to them a force exerted without the will or intention of its bearer. This force merely exists, and its exact reason is unknown, but we can quantify and measure the variables which most directly affects it. All things attract all other things with a force, an action that takes something from its current state of motion into another, as all things tend, not downwards, but to stay in their present state of velocity, based on their mass and their distance. While the distance from the center of mass of our planet is hundreds of times greater than the distance from me to you, the sheer mass of this great rock so outstrip us that it pulls all things on its surface down towards its center; it is only the force the surface exerts back on us that we do not tunnel our way to the center of this celestial ball. This force, gravity, exists, along with other forces, within the world. It is one we know much more about than others, though I would like to talk about a property of our world you are all already acquainted with." He holds out his hand, a small flame-stoking itself into existence, flickering lightly before dying out. "We call it magic," he says setting his hand to the side. "For centuries we've used and manipulated its properties, but still, we've only scratched the surface of its power. It seems that all things, that is to say, all matter, hold within it great energy. Living things seem to be able to harvest that energy. There is, to an extent, certain aptitude towards magics, a natural element which predisposes those to its power, but anybody can learn and even become a master of it. Some speculate this is no more the difference than a child learning to read faster than another, simply natural aptitude, some argue there is a biological barrier that gives some a leg up in the race as if they metabolize the energy in the world with greater efficiency. In truth, it's all merely speculation. We know we gain this power from matter."
"He's half right, I suppose," Seeker interjects, the lesson going on. "Matter and energy are no different from one another save for the state in which they're presented. This is how a mage might create a spire or a sculpture in the image of his fancy, or change the composition of hydrogen gas into helium. Turning energy into matter and taking the matter into energy. It applications focused by something unique that comes from true intelligence. It's where the consistency of the world ends, and the consistency of the mind begins." He sighs, "in any case, this man was, at one point, who I was. No longer, though, are we the same individual, to much time, to much experience between that man and I, no more alike than an infant to a conqueror. Not even our bodies are the same." The class was continuing as the seeker spoke, starting to explain fundamental principles of magic. Some of it sounded familiar to Star, things she found in her spell book, others were more alien, such as the use of "grounded spells" or runes.
"When did he become you?" Star asks, her voice ringing in the full illusion.
"Watch, and maybe you'll spend enough time trapped in this hell to see. If not, then it'll remain an incomplete story, inconsequential, perhaps, but incomplete. Watch on."
The scene shifts away, the sun falling over the horizon over a few moments, the world rolling forward at a rapid pace until the steps, which bustled with minds in the day, sat bare against the clear skyscape. Once again the world moved around them, the pair remaining motionless ghosts as the very planet itself shifted to a new perspective.
The insides feel cold, the stone halls lacking sufficient heat to keep themselves warm as the dessert nights drop the temperatures to distinct chills. The room that comes to them, however, holds a flickering fireplace crackling with a few charred pieces of palm wood, keeping the small stone office a cozier temperature. The younger teacher sits at the desk, pouring over a series of scrolls and printed manuscripts held together in pristine leather bindings. His own notes lie scattered across the table, a worry on his face. "It doesn't work," he says, his eyes gazing up to a peculiar outsider, having pale, but not white like the teacher's, skin and adorning himself in a black robe. His eyes shine in the firelight as if they were jade hunks.
"But it does, isn't that the most peculiar thing, don't you think? Something which ought not to work choosing to, in fact, work regardless. But I already told you that in our first meeting, of course, those years ago you seemed keener on scoffing at me." He leans back in his chair, rocking it back and forth with his foot, the wood creaking rhythmically under him.
"It took a lot of time to even gain access to the plans of the runes... They shouldn't function like they are written. I've done small scale work, tested them thoroughly. They would function only for a short time without additional energy what than the sun could provide, and the plans say these should be self-sustaining, requiring no large powering runes to function."
"That past's true, but what's powering them isn't the sun's energy. Your father had a knack for playing with powers out of his control, served him well, made him wiser, stronger, and gave him creations beyond which normal magic could ever create." The man smirks, his mouth curling into a cat's smile, "most people find that his sort of studies should be punished, harshly, but it takes a very clever man to do the deeds of a devil."
The younger man grits his teeth, "I don't appreciate you tarnishing my family..."
The conversation goes on circularly, no ground gained or loss as the frustrated teacher fought with too much obstinance to concede and the sitting figure to confident in his correctness to take the argument seriously. "Such a petulant man," seeker says as the scene freezes, the forms returning to darkness, leaving the room empty. "That was me, that imbecilic teacher who thought himself great. I decided to prove that man wrong... I would look at the designs first hand, prove that, even if the public records were false, his father brought water to the desert."
Star stepped forward, feeling like a person again as the sight of her arms and legs returns to her, as well do the sights of a fight with Hannibal. Seeker lays himself into the chair, leaning himself back just as the figure did. "My name was Arthur, but perhaps Icarus would have been more suitable, no, hmmmm... Icarus refused his bounds, I was merely a prideful child. How can it come that a society so enlightened in the arts of magic and science held such ignorant concepts as family honor."
"I can see how this ended," star says taking the teacher's seat, Arthurs seat. "What did you find. When you looked at his inventions."
"Who, might be a better question. I found three men. A man who died, a man who would die and a newborn." The scene shifts again, inside a sewer, of sorts, but the air and water clear and clean. The pair walks along the path of stone, one of either side of the rushing canal. "That man," she says pointing to the shadowy figure, "I met him. He would die in only a few short years, and I met myself, as I perished." The figures seem to speak, but the words didn't matter, it was possible, as well, that Seeker didn't care, or didn't remember. The walk through a low door, ducking in through the small hole.
Behind rests, a man, skin blacker than pitch, chained down into the pool and water pours out from his skin. A look of agony braces the beast, his red irises barely visible, his pupils dilated. And his screams. The monster broke out in harrowing shrieks of utter agony, but they subside as the water stops flowing. "You brought him," he says with a breathy tone, "you brought me his son?"
"Of course," the figure says, throwing back his hood, long black locks falling out to the small of his back. He raises a hand up, a white aura raising up, a speechless Author rising with him.
"Y-you're a demon! What is a vile creature doing in here!"
"He's quite observant, isn't he," the beast breathes out, a long tongue licking his lips. "Hmm, I need something from you Arthur."
The man flicks his wrist, pushing the teacher close to his nightmare. "Get away from me, why do you defile the sanctuary of my father, his masterpiece with your presence!"
The beast laughs, his voice echoing unnaturally, "you think your father found out how to do this? No, he was clever, but not brilliant. Your precious father used a demon to do his work, he enslaved me with a farce, trapped me here, promised me your blood in return. Instead, he chained me with his blasted magics. I need his blood to break it, which just so happens that your putrid body will do." He smiles maliciously, "but I only need a little. Just enough to break the curse, no more than a drop or two. No, I won't kill you, there's far too much agony I could put into you for me to simply rend your flesh from your bones." He opens his hand, filled with grizzled spikes lifting to rake across the teacher's arm, leaving it bloodied as he screams out. "Such a fool," he says, the chains breaking, "you should have let yourself be content."
The image stops there, the library fading back into reality, Seeker taking a seat in his chair. "What happened next?" Star asks, looking at the empty room.
"Genocide," he says in a detached, uncaring way. "I inadvertently brought about the mass genocide of my race. The beast flooded the water with toxins. It took only a few hours, but eventually, everyone was left dead. The beast decided that the only fitting punishment for me was to curse me to feel the suffering of all who shared my race. For those three hours, my mind was awash with the pain of an entire city-state painfully dying." His voice was unwavering, solemn, as if to remember the dead, but lacked the twangs of guilt or sorrow. "Their deaths were meaningless, but it wasn't my fault. I only hastened the inevitable. Some season he would have escaped and destroyed us, whether it would have been that generation or one later down the line, it would have been my father who damned them."
"Who was the man, the one that tricked you," Star says as she takes a seat across from him, her mind turning, perplexed by the nonchalance of Seeker.
"A power hungry fool. He died at the hand of the beast a few years later, his contract running up. None of that matters, though. All of that lies in the annals of a dead civilization, forgotten. Too long in the past, for it to weigh on me, there is more recent dead to grieve. What matter, though, is that my agony forced a sort of ascension. The beast slashed my throat after the last of my brethren had fallen and left me to die in the same chamber he had been imprisoned, awash in a pool of water and blood. In that pool, feeling the pain embedded in my very soul, hating myself, hating my father, hating that demon, I was reborn. It wasn't flashy, there was no ceremony. I passed out, then I woke up. I woke up inside the room where I died for the first time."
Star flinches, suddenly drawn away from the world of her head, the girl nearly falling out of her chair as she's startled. She watches the long blade of a soldier puncture Alexander, the Seeker, through the stomach. "Ah, you've just been." she trails off.
"Stabbed? I remember that I've been stabbed quite a few times. No scares, though."
Star looks on blankly, her head turning about in the fortress of books as she peers into the waking world, watching the scene play out, Marco's stupid heroism pushing to the forefront.