Post by Kiddo on Jan 13, 2008 2:06:20 GMT -5
Huntress, I threw in the Nightwish refrences JUST for you.
"For years I've been strapped unto this altar.
Now I only have 3 minutes and counting.
I just wish the tide would catch me first and give me a death I always longed for "
much?
It was by a good deal of luck and very little modicum of skill that the pirates came across something in the Gray Lands. After all, the land was in constant shift and tracking skills were useless in a place where there was no ground to track upon, no wind to watch, and sound itself seemed muffled by the ever-present mist. Huntress had taken a band of about five with her and they stayed close together upon entering the Gray Lands.
There had been a small group that watched, staying away from the mist, as they vanished into it. Word had it that the ninjas had already left and so Huntress kept a steady and determined clip. She wouldn’t be outdone by them. Not on her captain’s hat.
After the first hour of searching the group had grown nervous. Huntress wasn’t sure who it was that had drawn their cutlass first but the rasp of steel had quickly triggered a response from everyone else until the entire group, herself included, had their weapons out.
One never knew when the ninjas would run into them by accident, after all.
A few more hours of searching and the group was tired and complaining. Huntress was ready to make sounds that resembled Goosh’s name by use of the blunt end of her saber. To the face. Goosh goosh bleed bleed. That sort of thing. But she instead grit her teeth, reminded everyone that they had a duty to the forum and to the pride of the White Weewoo and to keep looking.
That was when they found something. The mist parted before them, like a curtain being drawn on a stage, and everyone stopped and stared in bewilderment at the sight.
“Dark passion play,” Huntress finally said.
“What?” Speck asked in confusion.
“That’s what this reminds me of,” she said, waving a hand across the scenery, “A passion play is a theater presentation of the death of Christ… but if you listen to the bands I do it takes on a whole new context… and becomes twisted and warped into something dark and dying.”
And Huntress shivered, as if she could almost feel the swaying of the pendulum above her.
The rest stared at the scene before them. It was obviously someone’s construction. Someone with a strong sense of world and purpose and someone who had spent a good deal of time in the Gray Lands to manifest this. It was something that had put down in words, given love, given life.
There were sections of it, fields, woods, ocean, and even a crumbling city in which shadow forms lurked and hunted. And across it all was a pall of decay. There, the fields where a hall stood surrounded by a pike fence. The grass was dying from too much rain, rotting at the roots, and the fence was crumbling and no smoke drifted from the hall’s chimney. The forest was dull and there were blue lights somewhere inside of it, dim and faint among trees covered with blighting moss, decayed and brown. The ocean was stagnant and the stink of salt and dying fish wafted across the bones of what looked to be great ships, although of no design any of the pirates recognized. Like beached whales. No one spoke. No one moved.
“What created this?” Ikkin finally whispered.
“More like what destroyed it?” Huntress whispered back.
She stepped into the worlds, for there were multiple dreams and realities here, and cautiously the rest followed. The stench of decay hit her hard and she gagged, then pulled her bandanna off her head and quickly tied it over her nose and mouth. The rest of the pirates quickly followed suit. Then, weapons drawn, they entered what appeared to be a boundary line between the city and the fields.
The group was on edge. There were things in the city, they could see them. Mist drifted along the streets and the buildings were in ruin, crumbling and falling down among each other. Creatures stalked the streets, sniffing the air, and the pirates watched these and each time one turned near them they paused and waited to see if it would attack. They were monsters, no doubt about it, bigger than a human and shaped like oversized mastiffs, ragged armor decorating their bodies. To their left was the fields and the pirates stuck to the border of this, unwilling to cross onto the city itself.
Then Goosh gave a startled cry and the group rounded to face the fields and the creature that stood before them. Like a human, only a strange luminescent purple in color with darker stripes across its lightly furred body. Clawed with long ears, a pointed face, no hair, and glowing eyes. It tilted its head at them a moment, then simply faded away into invisibility.
“It’s still there,” Goosh said, pointing, “Look. It’s leaving prints in the grass.”
“I think we’d be better off walking on the city side,” Huntress said, trying to keep the fear out of her voice, “At least those monsters aren’t invisible.”
They drew close to the ocean once and caught sight of bodies aboard one of the ships, lifeless. Flies hovered overhead, unwilling to descend, and there was crimson leaking from the torn hull of the ship, as if it were bleeding itself from the torn metal. Or perhaps the slaughter had been that bad. None of the pirates even suggested they venture closer to the ocean.
Nothing attacked them, however, and despite the decay and ruin around them they came to a junction between all the realities that had been formed in this place. Forest. City. Ocean. Field. A nexus of imagination made real and in the center was a bare stretch of scorched earth, a spiral of burn mark circling in to where a slab of stone lay in the middle. The entire area spoke of something old, something ancient, drawn not from the imagination of an individual but from old lore that an individual had picked up and incorporated in their dreams. And there was a person on the slap, laying still like the sacrifice upon the altar.
“There!”
The cry came from the forest and the pirates brandished their weapons, their nerves already on edge from their trek through this strange and seemingly hostile place. But instead of monsters came more humans… familiar ones at that. The group of six stopped, spreading out around the burnt circle, and finally Crystal pulled her scarf down to grin at Huntress and the rest.
“You didn’t get here first,” she said, “We saw you coming and were waiting in the shadows.”
Huntress growled at the ninjas.
“Yeah right,” she said, “How’d you like your journey through the forest?”
At which point Crystal’s smirk vanished and a deeply troubled look came across her face. The other ninjas glanced at one another, as if they knew something she didn’t. Huntress kept her pirate pride in check. Beating one another senseless could wait for a better location.
“I recognized it,” she finally said, “Do you have any idea where we’re at?”
“Someone’s world gone bad.”
“Very bad,” Crystal agreed, “And it’s Kiddo’s. Didn’t you recognize the worlds?”
Huntress shook her head, one of the pirates quietly said, ‘oh’ from behind her.
“The ocean,” Crystal said, pointing, “Is Langley’s Ark. Those ships you saw were skimmers, except it’s like everything has gone bad. There should be fights, ‘mancy storms, and all sorts of excitement. But everything in it is dead. The forest is called Antiel and is a city of lights. But they’re all going out and the forest itself is dying, the trees rotting from the inside out. The field… embodies a lot of different things I believe and might be the most dangerous place as the creatures that may inhabit it do not allow trespassers.”
“There were invisible creatures there,” Ikkin volunteered.
“Then it is what I thought…” she murmured, but did not explain further, “And the city? That too is a creation, but I believe its more than just one merged together. We got a better look before venturing to the center of this place and there’s different styles of architecture tossed about. It’s a mixture of her worlds. But I wouldn’t go inside it… some of her city creations have been bad.”
“Everything about this place is bad,” Huntress whispered.
The two groups fell silent and they all looked to the person laying on the altar. She was covered by a white sheet that was stained to the color of dirt in some places. Old bloodstains. It was Huntress that finally stepped forwards, crossing onto the burnt spiral, and she felt the air around her like it was charged with electricity as she did. The rest just watched and stood ready.
The sheet came off easily onto the ground. Before her lay a girl, half-starved, clothed in the skins of an animal and breathing lightly. She had the ears and tail of a fox… and the wings of a phoenix.
“Kiddo!” Crystal screamed and ran forwards. But the fox-phoenix did not stir.
“What’s wrong with her wings?” one of the ninja’s asked. Huntress couldn’t place the voice due to the scarf he wore. Possibly Stal though.
Huntress turned her eyes to the phoenix wings. Like everything else in this place, they too, were decaying. The feathers were matted and falling out and what were once brilliant sheets of fire were now just dull, broken, ornaments. Huntress was at a loss for words.
Crystal was gently shaking Kiddo, calling her name over and over, and still she did not wake. Huntress shuddered and backed up, remembering the name she had unthinkingly given this place. Dark passion play. That one ended in death.
A horn echoed across the landscape, loud and clear and with the consistency of a clarion call of old, made from a bull’s horn. The wind picked up and Huntress wished she had not stepped into the scorched circle all of a sudden.
“The Hunter has broken his bonds,” a voice whispered.
Kiddo was speaking and her eyes were open, staring ahead at nothing.
“He’s supposed to stay bound away. That was the rule of my world. But the sword is lost, the champions are gone, and so he has broken his bonds.”
She sighed and closed her eyes again.
“Hunter?” Crystal demanded, shaking Kiddo again, “What hunter? From what world? Where’d you dream up this thing?”
“I borrowed,” Kiddo murmured, “For a story I wrote for my mother. And the world took life and now it’s dying, just like everything else. You should go.”
Then Kiddo leapt to her feet, crouching on the altar, and Huntress saw that her spear was in her hand as she balanced with wild intensity, her useless wings stretched wide. No one moved.
“Go!” Kiddo shrieked, “The Hunter and his pack kills everything human in his path and I’m not sure if the rules of the Gray Lands will hold him! The Veiled Lady is turning this place against me!”
“Who is the Veiled Lady?” Huntress cried.
But Kiddo was running, faster than any of them had expected, angling for the border between forest and plains. The leader of the two groups stared at each other for a moment.
“We’ll go and try and circle around,” Crystal said, “We’re faster. You follow and try not to lose sight of her. Right?”
“Right,” Huntress agreed breathlessly.
Then the two groups broke and ran after her as the call of the horn sounded again and the baying of hounds echoed across the quickly rising wind.
"For years I've been strapped unto this altar.
Now I only have 3 minutes and counting.
I just wish the tide would catch me first and give me a death I always longed for "
much?
It was by a good deal of luck and very little modicum of skill that the pirates came across something in the Gray Lands. After all, the land was in constant shift and tracking skills were useless in a place where there was no ground to track upon, no wind to watch, and sound itself seemed muffled by the ever-present mist. Huntress had taken a band of about five with her and they stayed close together upon entering the Gray Lands.
There had been a small group that watched, staying away from the mist, as they vanished into it. Word had it that the ninjas had already left and so Huntress kept a steady and determined clip. She wouldn’t be outdone by them. Not on her captain’s hat.
After the first hour of searching the group had grown nervous. Huntress wasn’t sure who it was that had drawn their cutlass first but the rasp of steel had quickly triggered a response from everyone else until the entire group, herself included, had their weapons out.
One never knew when the ninjas would run into them by accident, after all.
A few more hours of searching and the group was tired and complaining. Huntress was ready to make sounds that resembled Goosh’s name by use of the blunt end of her saber. To the face. Goosh goosh bleed bleed. That sort of thing. But she instead grit her teeth, reminded everyone that they had a duty to the forum and to the pride of the White Weewoo and to keep looking.
That was when they found something. The mist parted before them, like a curtain being drawn on a stage, and everyone stopped and stared in bewilderment at the sight.
“Dark passion play,” Huntress finally said.
“What?” Speck asked in confusion.
“That’s what this reminds me of,” she said, waving a hand across the scenery, “A passion play is a theater presentation of the death of Christ… but if you listen to the bands I do it takes on a whole new context… and becomes twisted and warped into something dark and dying.”
And Huntress shivered, as if she could almost feel the swaying of the pendulum above her.
The rest stared at the scene before them. It was obviously someone’s construction. Someone with a strong sense of world and purpose and someone who had spent a good deal of time in the Gray Lands to manifest this. It was something that had put down in words, given love, given life.
There were sections of it, fields, woods, ocean, and even a crumbling city in which shadow forms lurked and hunted. And across it all was a pall of decay. There, the fields where a hall stood surrounded by a pike fence. The grass was dying from too much rain, rotting at the roots, and the fence was crumbling and no smoke drifted from the hall’s chimney. The forest was dull and there were blue lights somewhere inside of it, dim and faint among trees covered with blighting moss, decayed and brown. The ocean was stagnant and the stink of salt and dying fish wafted across the bones of what looked to be great ships, although of no design any of the pirates recognized. Like beached whales. No one spoke. No one moved.
“What created this?” Ikkin finally whispered.
“More like what destroyed it?” Huntress whispered back.
She stepped into the worlds, for there were multiple dreams and realities here, and cautiously the rest followed. The stench of decay hit her hard and she gagged, then pulled her bandanna off her head and quickly tied it over her nose and mouth. The rest of the pirates quickly followed suit. Then, weapons drawn, they entered what appeared to be a boundary line between the city and the fields.
The group was on edge. There were things in the city, they could see them. Mist drifted along the streets and the buildings were in ruin, crumbling and falling down among each other. Creatures stalked the streets, sniffing the air, and the pirates watched these and each time one turned near them they paused and waited to see if it would attack. They were monsters, no doubt about it, bigger than a human and shaped like oversized mastiffs, ragged armor decorating their bodies. To their left was the fields and the pirates stuck to the border of this, unwilling to cross onto the city itself.
Then Goosh gave a startled cry and the group rounded to face the fields and the creature that stood before them. Like a human, only a strange luminescent purple in color with darker stripes across its lightly furred body. Clawed with long ears, a pointed face, no hair, and glowing eyes. It tilted its head at them a moment, then simply faded away into invisibility.
“It’s still there,” Goosh said, pointing, “Look. It’s leaving prints in the grass.”
“I think we’d be better off walking on the city side,” Huntress said, trying to keep the fear out of her voice, “At least those monsters aren’t invisible.”
They drew close to the ocean once and caught sight of bodies aboard one of the ships, lifeless. Flies hovered overhead, unwilling to descend, and there was crimson leaking from the torn hull of the ship, as if it were bleeding itself from the torn metal. Or perhaps the slaughter had been that bad. None of the pirates even suggested they venture closer to the ocean.
Nothing attacked them, however, and despite the decay and ruin around them they came to a junction between all the realities that had been formed in this place. Forest. City. Ocean. Field. A nexus of imagination made real and in the center was a bare stretch of scorched earth, a spiral of burn mark circling in to where a slab of stone lay in the middle. The entire area spoke of something old, something ancient, drawn not from the imagination of an individual but from old lore that an individual had picked up and incorporated in their dreams. And there was a person on the slap, laying still like the sacrifice upon the altar.
“There!”
The cry came from the forest and the pirates brandished their weapons, their nerves already on edge from their trek through this strange and seemingly hostile place. But instead of monsters came more humans… familiar ones at that. The group of six stopped, spreading out around the burnt circle, and finally Crystal pulled her scarf down to grin at Huntress and the rest.
“You didn’t get here first,” she said, “We saw you coming and were waiting in the shadows.”
Huntress growled at the ninjas.
“Yeah right,” she said, “How’d you like your journey through the forest?”
At which point Crystal’s smirk vanished and a deeply troubled look came across her face. The other ninjas glanced at one another, as if they knew something she didn’t. Huntress kept her pirate pride in check. Beating one another senseless could wait for a better location.
“I recognized it,” she finally said, “Do you have any idea where we’re at?”
“Someone’s world gone bad.”
“Very bad,” Crystal agreed, “And it’s Kiddo’s. Didn’t you recognize the worlds?”
Huntress shook her head, one of the pirates quietly said, ‘oh’ from behind her.
“The ocean,” Crystal said, pointing, “Is Langley’s Ark. Those ships you saw were skimmers, except it’s like everything has gone bad. There should be fights, ‘mancy storms, and all sorts of excitement. But everything in it is dead. The forest is called Antiel and is a city of lights. But they’re all going out and the forest itself is dying, the trees rotting from the inside out. The field… embodies a lot of different things I believe and might be the most dangerous place as the creatures that may inhabit it do not allow trespassers.”
“There were invisible creatures there,” Ikkin volunteered.
“Then it is what I thought…” she murmured, but did not explain further, “And the city? That too is a creation, but I believe its more than just one merged together. We got a better look before venturing to the center of this place and there’s different styles of architecture tossed about. It’s a mixture of her worlds. But I wouldn’t go inside it… some of her city creations have been bad.”
“Everything about this place is bad,” Huntress whispered.
The two groups fell silent and they all looked to the person laying on the altar. She was covered by a white sheet that was stained to the color of dirt in some places. Old bloodstains. It was Huntress that finally stepped forwards, crossing onto the burnt spiral, and she felt the air around her like it was charged with electricity as she did. The rest just watched and stood ready.
The sheet came off easily onto the ground. Before her lay a girl, half-starved, clothed in the skins of an animal and breathing lightly. She had the ears and tail of a fox… and the wings of a phoenix.
“Kiddo!” Crystal screamed and ran forwards. But the fox-phoenix did not stir.
“What’s wrong with her wings?” one of the ninja’s asked. Huntress couldn’t place the voice due to the scarf he wore. Possibly Stal though.
Huntress turned her eyes to the phoenix wings. Like everything else in this place, they too, were decaying. The feathers were matted and falling out and what were once brilliant sheets of fire were now just dull, broken, ornaments. Huntress was at a loss for words.
Crystal was gently shaking Kiddo, calling her name over and over, and still she did not wake. Huntress shuddered and backed up, remembering the name she had unthinkingly given this place. Dark passion play. That one ended in death.
A horn echoed across the landscape, loud and clear and with the consistency of a clarion call of old, made from a bull’s horn. The wind picked up and Huntress wished she had not stepped into the scorched circle all of a sudden.
“The Hunter has broken his bonds,” a voice whispered.
Kiddo was speaking and her eyes were open, staring ahead at nothing.
“He’s supposed to stay bound away. That was the rule of my world. But the sword is lost, the champions are gone, and so he has broken his bonds.”
She sighed and closed her eyes again.
“Hunter?” Crystal demanded, shaking Kiddo again, “What hunter? From what world? Where’d you dream up this thing?”
“I borrowed,” Kiddo murmured, “For a story I wrote for my mother. And the world took life and now it’s dying, just like everything else. You should go.”
Then Kiddo leapt to her feet, crouching on the altar, and Huntress saw that her spear was in her hand as she balanced with wild intensity, her useless wings stretched wide. No one moved.
“Go!” Kiddo shrieked, “The Hunter and his pack kills everything human in his path and I’m not sure if the rules of the Gray Lands will hold him! The Veiled Lady is turning this place against me!”
“Who is the Veiled Lady?” Huntress cried.
But Kiddo was running, faster than any of them had expected, angling for the border between forest and plains. The leader of the two groups stared at each other for a moment.
“We’ll go and try and circle around,” Crystal said, “We’re faster. You follow and try not to lose sight of her. Right?”
“Right,” Huntress agreed breathlessly.
Then the two groups broke and ran after her as the call of the horn sounded again and the baying of hounds echoed across the quickly rising wind.