#felt like reality warping to fit into the shape of my delusions and it made me feel like shit lol

[6ebe]

maybe now I’m doing better mentally with my intrusive thoughts I’ll be able to keep watching Hannibal 🤔

[sunriseoverastorea]

Standing Stones

♬ WoW - Dun Morogh

30th Zephyr, 1331

Science is naught but conjecture. We have little to give if we do not wonder, and science is the art of wondering, the urge to explore, the longing for discovery. This was to be my life's work, investigating the boundaries of reality itself, the edge of the Eternal Alchemy, the unknown components on the borders of The All. A wiser being once said to let it be, withdraw from your delusions before it is too late. To imagine that one simple asura, with bravery and cunning, could learn the secrets of the world itself, aboard a ship of simpler scholars and soldiers. Well, we have paid the price for vanity, and I the greatest of all, that I should remain alive, if barely, in this warped husk of a ship. I wish I could describe what I saw, what I felt—there was a great lightning storm, which struck our vessel and disabled us, but it was not what did the great damage within. We fell into a void, is the only way to put it. The world beyond the portholes was black, and thick, impenetrable nothingness, and it seemed that time had stopped. I could not move, not even to breathe, and it felt as if my body was being ripped in a million different directions, my very molecules torn asunder. Indeed, I watched as much happen to some of my crew. They disintegrated, or were mangled into hideous shapes. The ship was cruelly jumbled and reformed, absorbing all those who fell in its path. And at the end of the void was a flash of light, and into it my research assistant vanished.

After the incident, I tossed the bodies overboard, as well as I could. My exoskeleton, along with everything else bound by technology, seemed to have had the life sucked out of it, making physical tasks difficult, even more so due to the unknown wasting illness I seemed to have contracted. Even now, my hand shakes with weakness so that I can barely write. But write I will, as a warning. The Unending Sea plays host to the repercussions of murdering dragons. On the mainland there are merely tremors, but on the ocean, there is chaos. It is as if the Mists are ripping themselves apart, the greatest of anomalies this asura has ever seen. And I will not die happy to know it.

Marea digs into a strip of jerky, tearing at it with her teeth, spraying little crusty bits onto the paper. Gippa must certainly have gone mad—the dead asura, that is. Her name was Gippa the Philosopher, according to her maddeningly dense pages of recollections, fresh out of college, and she really enjoyed drawing foods with happy faces on the corners of her notes. Marea can relate to this. To the rest of Gippa's findings, she cannot, as she is not quite that insane, but nonetheless, something strange happened to the Pact 91st Exploratory Squad while they were scouring the boundaries of the known world.

Perhaps they all caught an unknown illness—Gippa did mention being sick, after all. It caused visions and delusions, probably, made the crew turn on each other, set the ship afire, and only the asura with her superior will and intellect lived to relate the tale, in the best way she knew how. An odd tale, but only a tale, with an inkling of truth buried somewhere within.

Marea gets to her feet and saunters to the helm, where the afternoon sun shines radiantly off the steering wheel. She squints past it, at the cliffs in the near distance. They stretch high out of the water, white-chalked precipices swung gracefully upward into towering crowns. As if a giant hand had long ago splashed into the sea, and where the resulting tidal waves billowed impossibly tall, they turned to stone, and long green grass grew upon them, and fat little black and white birds with orange beaks settled in that grass and in the crevices along the cliff face.

She slips past the wheel and rests her forehead against the windshield, sighing softly as she looks down at the peaceful island. She could spend a long day down there, frolicking with the critters, searching for caves and signs of intelligent life. She could. And she could also contract a deadly disease that causes her to go nuts and burn down her own ship.

An island of madness, or an island of fun? That is always the question. Even before reading Gippa's research, islands had begun to carry a sort of wary gloom about them. All the more so because she couldn't remember what happened on an earlier one, her first stop.

“Is it worth it?” she asks aloud, her voice harsh and gritty compared to the constant, soft hum of the ship. “Do you think it's worth it, Horizon? I wanna meet the birds. They're goddamn cute. Nothing is cute up here. I can draw all the pretty little kitties I want, but it's not the same as having Inigo in my lap. Why hasn't the artificial intelligence of golems been installed in airships yet? I could be having a legitimate conversation with you right now.”

She pauses, cocking a brow as she stares at the empty cabin.

“Holy shit, I need to get out of here. Just one fucking hour. I'm not gonna go insane in an hour. Or I'm already insane and it makes no difference. Take the wheel Marea. Take it and shut up.”

The ship whirs and beeps as it makes a sudden turn towards the island, and the birds turn their black and white faces up to look at it, curious with their beady eyes.

Clouds drift across the sky overhead, gaps here and there in the rain-heavy cumulus letting in patches of blue warmth. Marea creeps cautiously through the grass, long green tendrils feathering around the spiked knees of her boots, and across from her, approaching from the cliff's edge, are the brave little birds, come to investigate the new arrival. They waddle from side to side, like very ovular quaggans, though the squawks they emit are far less adorable, and more akin to the much-loathed seagull's cries. Marea kneels down, holding out her empty hands as if they were a peace offering, and to her immense delight, the birds immediately swarm around her, nudging at her with their rounded heads and nipping at her leather coat with dull hooked beaks. She laughs, sitting back on her butt, and one immediately hops onto her lap, looking her dead in the eye and unleashing a hideous squawk. She gently scratches the top of its head, unafraid for her metal fingers with the strange avian, and after a minute the bird closes its eyes, content.

She roams the island without fear. The birds follow her wherever she goes, a writhing mass of feathered screeches many ranks deep, plus the lap-bird on her shoulder, like the leader of the gang. Her legs ache sweetly, finally able to stretch and move freely in any direction she pleases. The cool breeze carries the crisp tang of the sea, but as she journeys a mile inland, the crash of the waves fades from earshot, and only the wind rustling through the grass breaks the desolate silence. Even with her critters around her, it seems that the dip in the center of the island, a valley between the craggy cliff peaks, is the loneliest place in the world.

Eventually, they come to a rocky foundation. It rises only a foot out of the ground, no other traces of what once stood there remain. In the center of the foundation is a standing stone. No grass grows for a meter around it, forming a perfect circle of dirt. The stone itself has no particular shape, just a vague point upward, perhaps six feet tall. Marea stops in front of it, her bird friend ruffling his feathers anxiously, while the rest of the entourage lines up at the edge of the dirt, unwilling to go further.

She glances over her shoulder at the bobbing heads peeking up fearfully from the grass. “It's a rock. There's a lot of these where I come from.” The birds merely coo at her, as if pleading. Come back, strange featherless bird. This place is not for you.

“All places are for me,” she counters, nodding decisively as she steps past the stone, striding confidently into the field beyond. “Marea goes wherever Marea goes, and the world can take me or strike me down. Me and—Onogi,” she adds, giving her shoulder bird a reassuring bop on the beak. “I have a cat at home. His name is Inigo. That's how I came up with your name. I'm Marea, by the way. In case you didn't make that connection. Marea Sleekfur. And it's not because of my stunning frizzy hair.”

Onogi stares at her, chittering softly. She nods in agreement.

The valley is dotted with stones. She walks onward, and every so often, she encounters more. First two in a line, then three, four, and so fourth—some of them are taller, some are shorter than she, and some have the faintest remains of symbols carved into them. She traces her fingers along faded spirals and pictograph alphabets. She copies the symbols onto paper, records the positions of the stones, and chews on the end of her pen as she becomes hungry. Onogi jumps from her shoulder and flies low circles in the sky, going on ahead of her before looping back, riding the winds with stout black wings.

At the end of the valley, the land pitches sharply upwards as it approaches the far edge of the island, and the jagged cliffs cut from sea and salt. The sun sets as she crests the hill, casting a molten glow upon the green grasses and her pale skin, and upon the last flat expanse of plains before her. She lets out a low whistle at the sight, shielding her eyes with her hand—a great circle of standing stones spreads out in every direction, towering high as castles, glimmering with a strange golden shimmer in the sunlight. An eccentric network of lines has been laid out in dirt, past the first of which not even Onogi will pass.

“But Marea will pass. Marea has no fear,” she says, striding over the ancient ground. “This was a pretty cool adventure, I won't lie. An afternoon well spent. And once I get back to my ship, west it is. West forever. I have to find the mountains, and the horses, and, and...”

She grows quiet as she reaches the center stone, turned black against the heat of the fading sun. She places her feet just so in the dirt around it, and it seems they fit perfectly, in steps shared by a thousand others before her, and she pivots, turning slowly as the distant silhouettes suddenly take shape in her mind. She digs a hand into her coat, tearing out a wrinkled paper from Gippa's notes. She holds it up to the sky. THE ALL, proclaims the scholarly scrawl across the top margin, a network of grids and circles painstakingly laid out with perfect symmetry. A chill runs up her spine, prickling across her shoulders, as she realizes she stands in the middle of the odd motif. She expects the magic to hit her like a brick to the face, a tidal wave that smashes her to the ocean depths and devours her from the inside out—but the stone circle is still and silent, as empty and forlorn as the valley floor. Slowly, she turns to face the center stone once again, and, ever so gingerly, touches her forehead against the cool, damp rock.

The contact lasts only a moment, a short breath, but splitting pain shatters through her head and fills her vision with twinkling white lights. Beyond the lights is only blackness, tangible nothingness, and it fills her with an inexplicable, animalistic fear. She shoves herself backwards and falls into the dirt, scrambling away on all fours until she leaps to her feet and sprints. She flies past Onogi, who crouches down fearfully as she passes, watching her closely until she is long out of sight.

She remembers running from an island before, she remembers the confusion, and the unsettling, heavy feeling in her chest—hunger. She was hungry, and has always been hungry, longing for more from the world that feeds her. Longing for something that will fill the pit in her stomach, the hollowness in her bones. A desire so old and so simple, so deeply buried, she would never have thought of it herself.

She climbs onto her ship, and the flock of waddling birds watches from the distance, huddled in a wary clump. She sits on the floor and she stares at Gippa's drawing, unblinking even as her eyes begin to burn and blur. She saw the void the asura described. She glimpsed into the world beyond Tyria, and there was nothing. True, it was only one vision, one split second of a moment, but still, the sight fills her with fear. With hopelessness.

Finally, after what seems hours, she closes her eyes. She quietly gets to her feet, and tapes THE ALL to the corner of the windshield, where it blots out an insignificant square of the starry sky. What she saw cannot be it—there is more, beyond the white lights and the empty blackness. She refuses to believe that Tyria exists all alone in the Mists. There is something out there, and to find it, she must find the storm, find the void, and fall into the great unknown.

The ship turns away from the island, and glides westward. Fear turns to desperation, desperation to determination, and soon, determination to laughter, as Marea reads and rereads Gippa's account of the storm, cackling in the face of terror.