#and an eldritch horror voidsent moved into her head next

[therovingstar]

Was replaying a certain remake the other night and got to the chapter that basically plays itself like a horror game, and subsequently got ideas about Odzaya and her relationship with all things supernatural and/or spooky. Cue another mini essay.

I’ve played with the idea of her being scared of ghosts; at the very least, she is not one for interacting with spirits. The irony of that is that she’s kinda predisposed to it; I talked briefly during my meta post about her, Sadu, and Magnai that she was originally slated to be the next udgan of the Malaguld tribe, which basically amounts to her being the spiritual leader, tasked with communicating with the spirits of the Steppe. Kinda like an oracle. It’s not something one can learn to do; it’s inherent, something one’s born with (unless they become khagun), and often tied to one’s magical ability, which Odzaya always had plenty of, so it was no surprise when she was discovered at the age of ten to have the ability to hear vague disembodied “whispers” that hinted when trouble was coming or when a particular spot of land was ideal for the tribe’s next temporary settlement.

(I headcanon that it’s not actual voices that are heard, but rather the aether of the land and the spirits tied to it asserting themselves in a way that can be understood by the right “listener.”)

The thing is, Odzaya didn’t like it much. Felt like feathers or flies periodically brushing against her horns, only it was a sensation inside her head, meaning she couldn’t just swat at it to get it to go away, the reality of which made her a bit unnerved. It was also near-constant. Gods know it could be helpful (for charting routes, determining weather patterns, etc.), and even soothing (alone out there on the plains, hunting or collecting herbs and hearing the breadth of it all like a heartbeat). But by the time the position is of udgan was offered to her at eighteen, she’d given up her healer’s path and convinced herself being a warrior would be more helpful for the tribe (and less heartbreaking, personally).

So she rejected it; a selfish decision, made for perhaps immature reasons, but one she was firm in making. She actually went so far as to kinda shut herself away from the land and spirits, even, so committed was she to the idea that if they were actually useful and legit, her people wouldn’t be dying almost daily in the veritable war zone the Steppe was at that time. To even give them her attention seemed like joke; to formally commit herself to a life of “talking” to those voices day in and day out? Nah.

Fat lotta good that did her, considering her future as the WoL; between Hydaelyn, Midgardsormr, Fray Myste, and Ardbert*, she ended up bonding to a number of other spirits/essences, anyway. Add to that the fact that she eventually rediscovered and fully recommitted to her healing roots (a huge choice that would, ironically, do much in allowing her to heal from her own past hurts), and even more presences moved in as a result: the Elementals, the fairies, the freaking stars themselves if she “listens” closely enough. These days, her head’s home to no less than a dozen different “voices” trying to get a word in on any given day. Most of them fortunately tend to be on the quiet side, but it definitely doesn’t escape Odzaya’s notice that the fate she was trying to avoid ended up finding and nabbing her anyway, only on an even larger scale. Add her also being khagun, meaning it’s now part of her duty to “listen” to the Steppe, and she’s come pretty much full circle.

Fortunately, it’s not as bad a fate as she thought it would be, even if the cosmic irony chafes a little; maturity as well as her experiences abroad have prompted a greater appreciation for her natural spirituality, as well as a certain reverence for all the energies making up the world. The “chatter” can still get kind of annoying, though, some days.

All that being said, in terms of her relationship with ghosts/spirits/apparitions overall: I don’t think they creep her out, so much as her already-significant, somewhat unwilling relation to them prompts her to kinda keep her distance out of principle. She’s got a veritable tribe living in her head, already; she’s not trying to attract more members.

*😏

[chrysalispen]

Prompt #8 - Clamor

AO3 Link HERE

Content warning for body horror, setting-consistent aetheric corruption.

===== 

They'd tried to seal the wound but they were too late. His palm pressed against his side yet again, tracing once more the claw marks that had torn through carbonweave and pierced steel made brittle with an overabundance of dark aether. One of the Cloud's minions had slipped his guard while his focus lay elsewhere.

Stupid, he thought, for such a little thing to pose such a serious problem- but there was no help for it. He was only one man, after all, and he had no gunblade here.

It was difficult enough defending the clones, let alone himself.

He was on watch again while his Allagan companions dozed, the three of them sitting back to back to prevent any ambushes. After a moment's deliberation, he removed the service pistol with its short bayonet from his belt and placed it upon the cold tiles at a short distance: just close enough to use it should the need arise.

Ignoring the burning pain that lingered in his ribs, Nero tol Scaeva stared into the opaque wall of black fog.

==

Time had no meaning in the Void.

There was no need for it here, and any semblance of forward movement into the future, of 'day' and 'night,' had bled one into the other until all that mattered were those brackets of ominous silence between sleep and wakefulness.

More appropriately: sleep and the sense of danger, that there were starving voidsent within his range of perception meaning to feast upon their aether. He could always, always sense them coming before they could attack. The creatures understood this after a few cycles of fruitless attempts, and they hovered at the edge of his consciousness, their yowled frustration a distant hiss of static noise like a transceiver with a lost signal.

For once his third eye (still in perfect working order) was good for something.

==

He was so, so cold.

Darkness ate slowly but surely at the edges of his sight while he slept: tunneling and narrowing each time he opened his eyes, until all he could see was a thin sliver of violet-limned space. His entire frame shook uncontrollably, extremities dulled and frostbitten, a dark violet he couldn't feel-- just like the claw marks that had ripped at his torso.

Frozen blood or crystallization, he couldn't tell.

One of the clones was saying something to his counterpart, who stood over him with a worried frown knitting her brows. He thought he should understand this tongue, at least somewhat- he'd studied it in his own free time at the Academy, after all. But his mind - torpid with aether sickness and the chill that had sunk itself into his bones as surely as any Ilsabardian winter - could not manage to parse the syllables quickly enough to grasp their meaning. They slid from his memory like fine grains of sand and were lost to the wind.

There was a deep and throbbing ache in his joints and his stomach twisted at the thought of eating any of his rations, even as a sharp and desperate hunger pang gnawed through his midsection. Something smelled toothsome and unbearably tempting, and it wafted about Doga's slender frame as the Hyur moved to sit next to Unei once again.

Slowly he eased himself back from them, the pistol in hand, until his back was flush against what he supposed to be a wall of some sort.

"Nero," she said finally, this time in Common, "will you not join us?"

It was their aether, he realized. He could smell their aether. He could taste it. They were full of sweet, lovely living aether and his jaw ached from salivating. His throat bobbed, the act of swallowing a torment, as if it were lined with broken glass.

He tore his eyes away to regard some other half-ruined edifice with a careful and studied indifference as if their concern mattered not a whit.

"I can keep watch just fine from here, thank you." A quick mental inventory of their brief encounters with the local voidsent and he would able to make his calculations, a task much more easily completed now that he had placed himself outside their reach. The fierce clamor of his stomach receded somewhat and his teeth ached a little less.

Shrouded in the darkness, Nero tol Scaeva opened the pistol's chamber and counted. There was one bullet left.

He shut his eyes and slept.

==

He was dying.

The world was black and noise and hideous and he was dying----- no.

He was changing.

Heat and pressure in his fingertips, twisting his hips, his legs, his spine: something eldritch and hideous shifting just under the surface of his skin, something inhuman, something that was nearly as painful as it was pleasurable.

His screams ripped from the depths of his chest, teeth aching as they elongated. Carbonweave-gloved hands clenched and spasmed, wicked black claws slicing through them, his bones warping as dark aether ate through him, corroded what was left of his soul until all that remained was that mindless and ravenous hunger.

His third eye opened, petals of flesh stretching and closing, then stretching again as keratin became black and gelatinous, a yawning abyss,

and his last conscious, human thought before he turned upon the cowering, horrified clones to devour them was

they didn't save me of course they didn't save me wasn't important enough wasn't good enough never good enough never

Black.

Hunger.

Hunger.

Hun----

~*~

Nero tol Scaeva awakened to the sound of his own screams.

Eyes opened and shut wildly, he could see nothing at first, nothing but darkness, and it set the panic animal in his head to yammering. The sound of his breath shuddered in his ears, ragged and hectic, and it took him several moments to realize that the cloying copper taste of blood on his tongue belonged to him - he'd bitten down on his lower lip in the extremity of his night terror.

He was shaking not from bitter cold but from his own fear. His fingers, knuckles aching from the force of his grip, clutched a handful of the bedroll.  

Legs trembling like a newborn lamb's, he clambered to his feet, gripping the corner of a nearby sandbag for purchase. A brown standard bearing the emblem of the Immortal Flames fluttered weakly in the cold, damp currents of air that stirred down here, amidst the smells of ash and stale water.

The spires of the Crystal Tower gleamed far in the distance, on the other side of Silvertear Lake, backlit by flashes of ozone and levin from the unstable crystal formations Project Meteor's disastrous end had left in its wake.

He checked his timepiece to see that the hour was still very early. The war games would begin apace come an hour or so after sunrise, but for now, he was quite sure that he was the only man not abed.

Which was just as well, he amended with a grimace. His undershirt and smalls, damp with cold sweat, stuck unpleasantly to his body. As he was already awake, he decided he might as well make his way down to the lake to bathe, start a cookfire and make coffee and break his fast, then resume his search.

Another day to search for the greatest Allagan prize of all, slumbering somewhere beneath this very battlefield. Another day, to tuck his memory of that sordid business in the Tower securely back into its dark and heavily guarded drawer until time eroded the terror to a dulled edge.

Another day not to consider what had very nearly befallen him.

[dellebecque]

The Storm

I said I’d talk about this, and here it is.  Please note: specifics are subject to change, especially as some of the subjects herein are ill described with currently available lore.  If you don’t want spoilers for Merrick’s personal plot, or are not interested in the deeply weird shit and would prefer to interact with him as just a normal guy, read no further.

The rest of you?  Enjoy my own personal eldritch horror.

Imeru-Kur, the Storm of Storms, Lightning Wrath, the Death That Brings Life, would have stood at Oha-Sok's right hand for the calamity of water had it not been slain by the conflict between the White and the Black. Perhaps it inspired Oha-Sok; perhaps it's death, an unthinkable thing to an immortal being without flesh to pierce, moved Oha-Sok to choose the flood. We cannot know the mind of an elemental, as we can barely know the minds of other men, but it would certainly be poetic.

As the waters receded practitioners of White and Black found themselves in close cooperation, forced to peace for sake of simple survival. Some found themselves of like minds, and for two survival was not enough. They had not learned the lesson the elementals meant to teach, of non violence, of peace. While their brethren birthed a new art two ancient houses of Amdapor and Mhach offered their staves and their minds to the work, but bowed together their heads, vowed to join their houses to seal the fledgling peace, and to guard a secret.  They would not sit quietly and abide the next Calamity; they would bend their entire line towards cultivating enough power that their sons’ sons might stand against the gods themselves if necessary to carry their fellows to safety.  The scion of a house of Amdapor knew where the remains of Imeru-Kur lay slowly dissipating, and the scion of a house of Mhach knew keenly how to trap the power of a being made purely of aether.  They would return, and bind it to their joined blood and will as the Mhach had entrapped voidsent.

To Imeru-Kur the binding is a blessing and a curse. With its essence trapped the dissipation stopped, aether held together by will and crystal. And yet it cannot live, forever trapped in the moment of death.  The family buried the crystalline remains of the elemental in the foundation of their new home in Ala Mhigo, but while Imeru-Kur has a dim awareness of the surrounding area it cannot truly interact with the outside world except through the will of the descendants of those who bound it, unleashing its infamous wrath in their most closely held magics.

While all of the children of the house of Stormcaller possessed of sufficient magical prowess can draw upon the Storm, most experience it as a mindless source of power.  Historically a small few were closer to it, knew its will more intimately, and for many generations this deeper connection determined who held the seat of the house.  But the greater power granted by this deeper connection came with a price, the Storm in its eternally dying agony lashing out at the host of this connection, at the same time desperately needing them for any connection to the world.  It drove them slowly mad, or ripped them asunder aetherically, and eventually the house buried the knowledge and forbade its members to cultivate this connection.

As it changed the men and women it watched the world through, so too did the ineffable mind of the elemental change.  With only a mortal organ through which to view the world it began to know mortal desires, and as it loathed the family for trapping it, it loved them for saving it.  In those early days it watched through the eyes of the founder of the house as her Mhachi husband’s bound voidsent ripped itself from his body, and the image has never left its mind over the generations.  If they are both beings of aether, why could it not do such a thing as well?  When the family forbade connecting to it so deeply, though, all chances vanished.  The Storm has been alone with its unending agony for over two centuries.

Until desperation and instinct called it up again, and bound it surely as any.  The Storm wakes, it sees again, and it walks the world when the new lord of the house calls it.  Given a chance, it will be free once more, eternally dying form held fast by the binding but free to do as it wills with no master.