Skybound
Once upon a time, man lived in prosperity. He built high towers, forged mighty empires, and lived life to its fullest, draining the cup of civilization. No longer a beast of stone and fire, cowering in the wilderness as animals ravened about his abode, he tamed the wild and made its creatures his subjects. He bent rivers to his will, watering fields of golden wheat for his gluttony, and to the skies his temples reached.
But this is not that time. Man built too high, and discovered the power of the gods. Thule and Skarbarand were the two eldest deities, and revealed themselves to man, expecting worship and adoration for the gifts they had given him as he ascended from the mud. But man was proud, and had not seen their miracles, thinking himself the master of his domain. The gods grew angry, and sent afflictions upon mankind to teach him humility. Volcanoes ravaged the landscape of cities and farms, and the earth quaked beneath the feet of man, woman and child. But man's heart was hard; he shook his fist at the sky, and called curses against the powers of the circles of the world. As the world burned around him the wisest and most fell of man's scions dabbled in dark magics, and even as the lands of man sank beneath the waves they crafted a dread spell beyond even the ken of the gods.
And so the world ended, in fire. The gods fell as insidious incantations rent their forms from their strength, and man laughed to see his deities slain even as the last vestiges of civilization died under the apocalypse of magic. To the winds was scattered the earth, rock and stone, water and air, for the will of the divine had formed it, and as they were unmade so too were their creations. Man lost everything, save himself.
That is not the end of the story though; man survived, lost as a sojourner amidst the planes of the cosmos, and into his breast a portion of the power of the divine was taken. His mind expanded, and the spark of creation was given to him, even the ability to reforge the world as it once was. Alone man walked, but not forever, and mayhaps in time he shall rise again to replace the gods he has cast down.
A harsh wind crosses the barren acres of a fragment of what has been, hot and dry as bone. It stirs in the unshaven beard of a man sprawled on the baked earth, and he stirs, strange eyes blinking awake. Jarn rises on his arms from the dusty soil, looking about him in confusion, black hair shot through with salt and dirt. To his north and west the void beckons, an endless nothing fading into oblivion, a sight that is utterly alien to the man. It sends shivers down his spine, almost as if he knows it, but fear fills his veins nonetheless. To the east his eyes then wander, taking in a broken forest of dead bracken and trees parched to ashes by the breeze, and above their forms hangs the livid red eye of the sun, barely risen from the mists and shadows of the horizon. It seems familiar, but distant, as if what he sees is only an echo of what he knew. South then he looks, and the man takes in a darker landscape, shimmering under the rays of day, a field of mud and muck from which steam rises as heat gathers. He is alone, utterly alone.
Far away Aros awakes as well, driven from his dream-lands by the withering embrace of day and heat. His eyes blink open, looking out milkily at the day, the images dancing in their blurry madcap before the windows of his soul that are shot through with decay and fracture. Upon his left hand, towards the rising sun, an interminable emptiness stretches as well- Aros is only a few feet from the end of all land and being, and a chill touches him despite the warmth of the new dawn. Turning, he sees in the opaque distance of the north a plain of deepest midnight black stretching to the edges of his sight, and to the south and west plains of gasping gray dust and dirt much like that he reclines upon. It is pleasant to lay upon the soil, almost as if the earth knows his pain, but the needs of the flesh are ever present.
Upon another vista of the vanished world, or perhaps near at hand, a mind stirs. Tamsyn's gibbering existence begins anew, or maybe even for the first time; the madcap sprites call to her as her eyes open, the voices of the betrayed whispering terrible secrets in tongues she ought to remember in the black just to the sides of her vision. They wait, always they wait, a chorus of the damned that shriek and leap at her when her eyelids flutter closed for a moment. She jerks upwards again, panting, awake fully. Her arms ache, and looking down she notices, or perhaps dreams; a languid line of flickering sky-blue courses like a lazy snake around a rune graven in her mewling flesh, before flickering upwards. Her eyes follow it under wispy blonde brows, and it darts away into some blasted trees that lie close at hand away from the rising sun. Their trunks are still wreathed in shadow, and they creak with the coming of the day, calling warnings in forgotten languages. Glancing about herself warily, Tamsyn notes that away to her east and north stretch expanses of lighter fine sand, and already heat rises from those directions, while to the south more gray dust stretches towards the horizon. Just where the gray begins, a pool of inky darkness is visible descending into the earth, and from it an aura of cool malice spills like fingers of ice.
Equirilius snuffles awake, weak heart suddenly beating a tattoo of panic. He leaps upwards, legs akimbo, pulse racing, but sees nothing but emptiness. Mud seas surround him on all sides save the south, thick tar-soil devouring water and baking under the sun. He thinks, perhaps hears, a sound to the west, a shadow receding into the mire. It may have been like a man, or entirely not- his mind doesn't quite know, and in an instant even the knowledge of the fear disappears. Why was he standing? The gray soil was soft, embracing. If he stepped south for a bit, he could dangle his legs over the edge of the world, look down into the swirling mists of madness that underpinned reality. They waited there, comfortable, welcoming. In the moist clouds and the dark none would ever look upon him again. His hat drooped forwards, as if nodding at the idea, and his aged bones felt weary. Just a bit, a step, maybe three.
Elsewhere Viavee too turned back to the mortal coil- awaking. Or dreaming. A return to the nighttime hours when all was cool and comprehensible. As it always had, it stood in the center of a sea of gray, above which a sun was just rising in the east. In every direction the plains of nothingness spread, of commodious dust and emptiness. It thought, idly, that if it walked it wouldn't matter; only gray was the world, and choking dust, a plane of existence devoid of anything. Here and there in the plane holes opened in the earth, through which tendrils of cloud reached up, hungry. It thought they hungered for companionship, for another spark of light walking as a sojourner. A mover, a thinker, a breather, to take into their clutches and have forever. The nothingness, the empty clouds, they were not unhappy. They simply looked for something other, and it knew it was that other as a haunting tune of jangling notes moved across the infinite gray.
Finally the breeze caresses the dead skin of an animal that had once had a name. It was nameless now, voiceless, a macabre trophy riding on another beast that awakened as the wind lecherously drew moisture from its skin. The animal's name was Selki, and the wolf on his head yawned as the man's eyes blinked open. A terrible yawn it was, a fathomless maw opened into inky blackness, and the man didn't see the vacant eyes that stared out from above his own. All he saw was a suddenly unfamiliar world- but was it familiar. He had never known anything different, after all. Experience formed as the tanned man looked out from under the searching predator's eyes; this was what living was, and all that had ever been. All that would ever be. The void. It surrounded him, on his little spur of gray land, on all sides. Clouds in strange hues that couldn't be described as colors swirled beneath him, around him, inside him? Only to the east was something, not nothing. Something. Light swelled there, a light his mind knew was the sun, a red ball of hatred flaming over a field of black glass blasted and fused by the rage of what he knew not. There he stood, alone on a spur of gray soil, on the edge of an obsidian ocean. And the wolf laughed.
Day dawned. The first day. The beginning of the ended. The new day.
