Difference between revisions of "Fanfiction:V Translanka Magness 1"

Latest revision as of 07:19, 3 September 2005

<11,999 B.C.>
TEMPORAL VORTEX REPORT

-REPORT NO. 1-

[UNKNOWN TRANSFER RATE, SYSTEMATIC DATA MALFUNCTION]
CRYPTIC TEXT SYNCH RESULT - MULTIDIMENSIONAL TIMELINES
CODE - "MAGNESS"
CODE EX. - "CONVALESCENCE OF HOPE"

"There is no hope!" The voice echoed into his mind like a splinter ebbing back and forth into an enormous blood blister long caked in its own blackened sludge, "You will not find-"

"I will." He commanded the voice in a soft dulled tone and strode on into the wastelands of the newly formed and now snowcapped burgs. A chant, a spell, a faint white glow about his head, and then the plunge into the endless caverns of the awaiting abyss...

If you let the cold engulf you, if you become one with it, it cannot sway you. Your body will still grow cold and blue, but you can ignore these things and move on if you don't struggle against it. His blood seamlessly synched with the water around him; it chilled and almost froze as it swarmed within his veins. Eyes turned into unblinking search beacons, casting rays this way and that in the wreckage of the deep.

His weapon was held long and behind him, making him look like a kind of tropical fish or ray with its upturned blade bending and catching the last hints of light from above. Legs and arms stopped, the scythe was brought around, his lips moved slowly, a flare of red light emanated from the blade, and the rubble was lit up, to hi s concealed horror and disgust.

Twisted metals, broken shards of shiny glass-like material, and a fish gnawing on something that resembled a right hand (already missing its index and middle fingers) were only a few of the sights. It was a hand. He could somehow smell the decay and blood under there. Even in the cold of the water, he knew that smell, intimately. It was a part of a former life that seemed far away now, in a distant dream.

There was no time for that. There was never enough time for anything anymore. Again, the voice begged him to stop, "No hope..." It pleaded with the horrible ache of despair, "...Nothing left." This time he chose to ignore it, and he went on.

Three months' time was spent in this same grueling manner. Several hours would pass; he would rise from the depths to a solid chunk of ice and command it not to move from its spot. Upon doing so, he would either rest, partake in the local variety of Salmon-like fish (of which he had detested as a child though now it had a more elegant taste with a simple spell he once watched a sorceress cast...or was it a wizard? he thought to himself), or fight/ignore the voice until one of them gave up for another hour or so.

He finally thought he saw something, a faint glow or light, when he found the ruins of the ominously blackened Water Fortress. But it was not a glow or a light, it was nothing. Neither a scrap of clothing, nor a hint of flesh or bone-and certainly not the ornament the wise men had given her, although the last he had seen it with her the light was fading fast-was found. For all he knew, that jewel was powerless and in the belly of some sea beast by now. Although he knew it had to be otherwise.

Then he noticed it; the decay, the smell of blood. It did not reside in this room, this one room that proved to be, quite easily, the most important room in his entire life; the room where he had lost everything...twice. Now it proved again to be important on some fundemental level. This was another Omen. Not a Black one, no, but one of hope, a White Omen of sorts. Three soundless words escaped his lips, bound for the voice that taunted him.

"There is hope."

There was a way now, he knew. It would be tricky, and he wouldn't like the path, but there it was, plain as the chill that ran up and down his spine when he dived in and out of the icy blackness. Would he need someone like those times before? He didn't know. He'd only know on the way. Like before.

Was this destiny? No, he knew too much about how things worked now (had, in fact, since he was a child) to believe in fate. Sure, some things can be pulled and prodded with wire strings and bamboo poles, but there is no such thing as fate (he remembered hearing someone talking to a Poyozo about this somewhere in his childhood; perhaps it was a dream, or perhaps it was both).

The heavy oaken door seemed to stand without any support. The hinges were attached to nothingness. Upon the door, three words were writ. No, they weren't written, they were engraved, they were part of the door. The edges of the large black letters seemed brimmed with gold. This is what they said:

--- (The Princess) ---

<(Kid)>

The handle was the same type of shining gold that lined the letters. It beckoned to be held, to be turned, to be pulled. He had no choice. His thin hand, gloved in comfortable leather, went to it, held it, turned it, and pulled it as if it were made of paper. A fantastic swirl of blue light emerged and engulfed the doorway. He stepped forward, into the light, entranced with the sounds of wind and rapture that surrounded him.

The blue light stretched past him in great bright folds of azure, sapphire, cerulean, and indigo. He came out of the light and into an unfamiliar bustling place. The blue light faded to a dot behind him. No one in this place seemed to notice this happen. He didn't notice the blue light behind him nor did he notice most of the people. Her hair seemed different, a faded yellow color, and her entire image seemed to fade in and out of view. But her eyes; they were the same sharp color; and they did not fade with the rest of her.

For a long moment, a few seconds, a few minutes, a lifetime? He stood there transfixed, hypnotized, gazing upon this sight. His feet moved forward, but every time they did, she stayed exactly the same distance away. His hand shot out in desperation. His mouth opened to call to her.

The ground was damp with dew. The cool night air was fresh and unsullied to the point of hygienic cleanliness that reminded him of something like Windex. The stars in the sky twinkled more than he had ever remembered seeing them as a child. The truth was that there was more dust in the atmosphere, remnants of "The Destruction".

His skin seemed luminous in the gloom of those hours of darkness as he woke from his dream. A stern look of consternation spread across his face.

"Where was it?" He whispered to himself. He couldn't remember where the door without walls had stood. He couldn't remember what the unfamiliar place it led to looked like, the people there, or the clothing they wore.

"No hope in dreams." The voice said to him, laden with its own sad dismay.

The great and powerful witchin hour was upon him. He dug at the earth beneath the tomb's small stone indicator (no one else would ever know she was there) with his hands and they became caked in the coffee-colored dirt. Every now and then, he'd look up; checking the stars to make sure the hour hadn't passed. Shouldn't have falled asleep he told himself. The dream meant something though, that's why things happened the way they did.

Then he came upon it at last. It was wrapped in a smooth material he knew well (although now smudged with dirt in several places, most of it flaked off the silk as he had broken up the earth). It had been a part of his wardrobe until he had finally come back here. He quickly, though with meticulous care, stripped the cape from the figure before him.

It was a wonderous marvel. The skin was the same creamy color he had remembered from the later parts of his childhood. Before, she had a slightly auburn-colored tone, full of life and radiance. There was almost no sign of decay. It was as if the slimy maggots and worms he had almost expected wished to stay away from the body. Her cerulean hair was fading to white, but had grown a few inches longer since he had buried her. Her perfectly trimmed and manicured nails had also grown out considerably, but the tips remained in tact like a ghost of proper etiquette.

The smell was the same though; the smell of death. There is a base smell to death outside of just blood and decay. It's a soulless smell, the same as an empty attic or crawlspace; a stale smell like woodchips, only somehow entirely different. He did not gag or hold his nose in disgust, but simply took the glove off his right hand as he straddled her waist. With that hand he stroked her cheek lovingly, as if she were a delicate porcelain doll. He said a brief prayer; it too was a phantom of that former life as a child.

"I'm sorry..." The words seemed so foreign to him now. He couldn't remember ever speaking them to anyone but possibly his sister. He lifted her cotton shirt and exposed her stomach, her chest, her long cold, yet still somehow supple breasts. He touched one of her milk chocolate-colored areola and his face contorted into a small frown. It was much closer to the color he remembered her skin being. At this, he readied his scythe, "...I know you would understand...mother."

Those words too had been difficult to say. He hadn't thought of her as such since he was a youth, since before her shift. At first he and his sister had almost thought it was simply grief over the passing of their father. There was something else though. She became a workhorse, almost never ceasing. She still seemed obsessed with the energy transfer, even though it had taken their father from them. He remembered her taunting and laughing at him then; telling him that he too deserved to be bound to the earth with the others whom lacked her own form of enlightenment. This person who took his mother ate away at his very sould and it angered him.

Of course, there was something more important than those base things, they knew, something else that flowed around them; the Black Wind. It never died within him, even when he was sent away, even when he grew to be a man, when he was confronted by the people set out to kill him, even as that great flaming bastard was finally destroyed in his, no, this, very era, right before his eyes. The Wind still raged on. It had reminded him of his goals, it guided him, and after many years, it saw to it that the fiery demon was defeated. It seemed to taunt him at first when he was a child, he remembered, much like the voice was doing now.

Again, there was no time to be reflecting on the past. No time for memories he would much rather forget. Times he'd much rather change. He shook the thoughts from his head and focused on the task at hand.

He had made the difficult journey back past the badlands of snow and ice. He went on even beyond the other, scattered, jutting debris of that ominously dark tower; that dark tower which had brought forth both a terrible nightmare and a fabulous dream when his eyes first lay upon it, floating high above. He went to the New Mountain, not much further to the South. Here, more winds and even more cold assailed him, screaming for him to fall, trying to coax him to leave. Rocks and dust fell upon him; trying to push him back, make him slip, lose his grip, burn his eyes. He would not be stopped by such small forces of nature. It would take a demon with as great power as his own to accomplish such a feat.

Another night fell and another witching hour came upon him. It was then that he found that which he had sought, The Cave of Time. The blue dot of entry-which had always reminded him of a curtain that had a hole in it blocking the sun-was long gone. That he already knew though. He had come back from this place before, after leaving the End.

He opened the pack-he had only just recently acquired after returning-that he had slung over his right shoulder. It was just half filled with various objects: his Amulet, a couple extra changes of clothing, various medical supplies and magical drugs, and many other small trinkets. The two he went for were enveloped in part of that cape that was still wrapped around his mother, who was now safely buried back in the ground.

He opened them with the same gentleness he had used when he touched his mother's cheek. The first was a pale-white curved tusk of ivory-like material. The second now reminded him of some dried pink fruit, like a large unripe strawberry or cherry. It was divided into four parts, and it was encrusted with a dark (was it black?) substance that had the texture of mostly hardened muck or mud.

Foreign, alien, mystical words stirred from out of his voice. He held the murky, mysterious heart in his left hand, the pointy pallid white rib in his other.

"Now the divine hour has arrived...Give my being from this world to...!" At that moment, he struck the jagged point of the rib into the center of the heart. Nothing happened. His eyes remained transfixed on the object before him; the impaled heart. At first he thought the rib was falling out of the heart, and that was what made the enchantment fail. Then he saw that it was not just the top portion of the rib that was disappearing into the nucleus of the heart, but the bottom end as well. It was being absorbed by it.

He stood there hypnotized by the sight until the rib was gone. After a moment, he thought that it again would not succeed. Then it happened. The heart began to throb with new life and vitality. The dark sludge burned off-the smoke attacked his senses-and the heart glowed healthy pink once again. He felt relieved somewhat. Things were suddenly going as he had planned. The beating of the heart intensified and filled his ears with their heavy drumming.

Then it struck him; like that first bolt of lightning that had smashed into him back in his castle when he fought the kid-whom he would later, in the Water Fortress and on Death Mountain, learn to secretly admire-and the despicable frog. He saw it; the electrical surge of power radiating from the heart. It was a sinister dark light, like a shadow. It spread up his arm with zeal and a fever-pitch rate of speed.

More than hurt and more than shocked, he was annoyed. This was a surprise and he did not enjoy surprises. He buckled under the pulsing heart's power and was forced down to one knee. The heart pulsated with a bright red glow that grew with each beat and began to fill the room with crimson light. He was feeling faint. The radiance of the light was getting too bright for his eyes. He was absorbed in it though, no matter how hard he tried to pull his face away, his eyes stuck to that image of the brilliantly bright, ruby heart that was clasped in a death grip in his hand.

He could not endure it much longer; it was sapping his strength, draining his energy, expending his ability, it was killing him.

"I knew it." A faint echo of a voice told him. It seemed so far away, the room seemed so far away. Everything felt so far away, "I told you. Didn't I? There is no hope. Do you think she remembers you? Do you think she cares what happens to you? I'd bet that she's moved on by now. She's found a man to settle down with. She's had children. She hasn't thought about you like you have ached over the years for her. And now you're going to die; and for what?"

"For her, for everything I've lived for, fought for, and even died for." He said through clenched teeth, biting back the pain. He could no longer feel his fingers, his hand was going numb, and his arm was burning in pain, "I don't matter."

"So be it." Another voice, this one delicate, not the other, cutting voice, but much more familiar, loving, affectionate, resonated from within his mind. No, not from within, almost, but no, it came from the direction of his hand, the heart, "Find your sister, my son."

The brilliant burgundy light flashed and flickered into a profoundly deep cobalt blue that filled the room with its own dazzling intensity-it was only then that he saw the resemblance of this light to the frozen, watery depths of that vast Zealian Ocean which he had spent the last seven or eight fortnights immersed within. The Cave of Time flicked out of existence, and all was that vivid blue, rushing past him in every direction. His scythe was seized in his right hand, his pack of odds and ends tucked under his elbow at his side, and the now fading heart was still held-now much more gently-in his left hand.

He continued to watch as his mother's heart quietly disappeared from all existence. A rhyme he had long forgot that his sister had recited at their father's wake came suddenly into his mind. Before even that, their mother had whispered it so softly into each of their ears on their fifth year, so soothingly, like they were still newborn babes.

"Live another day.
Fight another fight.
Struggle against the darkness,
Do it for the light.

If you stop,
Before your last breath,
You're living naught.
You're living death.

So be brave.
Be of sound mind.
Endure life's jolts,
Tolerate the grind.

Live and love,
Forget your hate.
Peace is with you.
Don't yield to fate.

The Black Wind will blow,
And then you will know.
The dark may fight,
But so too will your light."

The blue light was giving way. It was opening up, into another world, another time. Where was it, and most importantly, when was it? Everything seemed so unfamiliar now. The heart was gone, but his powers weren't fully restored. He didn't even know if they would be restored. For all he knew, some evil beasts could be lurking around the next bend. His left arm lay slack at his side. He could still no longer feel his fingers, but the dullness was very slowly, and agonizingly, departing.

In its place, sharp, hot pins and needles seemed to strike every part of his arm, burning straight to the nerves. He let out a small dissatisfied grunt, with a scowl spread across his face, before he passed out and struck the hard surface of the ground. Was it rock, compact dirt, or metal?

There was no time for that. There didn't seem to ever be enough time for much of anything anymore. A trickle of blood ran down his temple and clotted in the light blue hair of his brow. He could no longer tell or be bothered in knowing or not knowing.

If history is to change, let it...

From: Fanfiction