RP:Flashback to a Meeting, Many Moons Ago

Background

This is part of the Kurgan's Run story arc.

This is a flashback to a prior trip taken to the Obsidian Pool, which provides a little of the strange and convoluted history between Caedan and the shattered, aeons-old illusionist Kurgan from whom the Pool was made.

NOTE: the part of Kurgan is here NPC'd by Lucien.

Many Moons Ago

"Don't.." Pale fingers, splayed, reached to her, a gesture of his will that Caedan be plucked from the safer arms of sleep. "Stay with me." There was a hoarse desperation in his tone, an abiding misery. So many years, alone. So many, in the nothingness of the Dark. "You are my beacon." Kurgan dropped to his knees, his form shifting to that larger, more mature exterior she'd glimpsed before. "Please, don't go."

Caedan kept her eyes closed for some time after the plea. The blanket pulled closer, tighter as if to possessively keep her from the Chaos Lord, and it prompted her to shrug out of it, and drag her eyes open. They were met by his as they opened. His eyes held a world within them, and a thousand lives; she couldn't look away for some time. Something outside their immediate walls shifted and groaned and she could feel the building flex as if testing its new-found freedom. "I'll stay." The words came more willingly than she would have appreciated, and she was surprised by her sudden hospitality. "Tell me a story."

Kurgan sank his forehead to the chair's edge beside her knees. His 'thank you' was muffled through the upholstery, and the face he raised to her would seem more solid, less transient, for her agreement. "Story?" Shifting so he could lean an elbow to the cushion, perhaps so chill proto-flesh lightly touched against her folded leg, the once-man mused for a time, his opposite hand's fingers tugging on his lower lip. "Very well." Abandoning his lip, his fingers splayed fan-like before his eyes. "This face. I will tell you the story of the man who wore it. One of them. It's not all that exciting.." Enough, he hoped, to hold her attention. Stop her from leaving him. His hand lowered. "Have you ever visited the well, in the village south of the mage's towers, in Xalious?"

Caedan kept still until his skin started to burn against hers, then quietly tucked her other leg under her and nestled her head into the crook of her arm. Her own fingers mimicked his, tugging on her lower lip with child-like fascination until she, too, abandoned it to reach out, her fingers fitted over Kurgan's own, splayed over his face, but without flesh meeting flesh. "Yes. I've been there. I like the park."

Kurgan's dark-on-dark eyes watched the motion of her hand, his expression unreadable. His voice seemed muted, after that, softer to her ear. "When I was a boy, it was already old. Not many things were, then, but that well is so ancient, people said the first dragon fell down it when it was but a hatchling. Which is nonsense, of course, but by way of giving you the idea..." She'd feel a cold rush of air against her hand, where it was not guarded by his; Kurgan exhaling deeply. "We were the brightest and best of the Tower's apprentices, of any in the history of the place-- and we were not one, or two, but seven, all of a like in age and ability." A shadow crossed his face, at those words, literally darkening his visage a moment before it passed. "Due to gain our full robes, any day. Full of pith and vinegar, as you can imagine. Anyway, it was summer, hot as hell itself, and we stopped by the well to cool off. Now, there was always rivalry among us; though we were friends, we were boys and fiercely competitive in every quarter. It was mostly good-natured. But this day, Lola, this day presaged the next millennium to come, and many after that. For that was the day we acknowledged one among us as mightiest, the leader, the one whom the rest would follow. His name was Einar, and he was a necromancer." Pausing, the once-man raised his head, frowning, glancing about as though something had disturbed him though there was no sound. Slowly, he set his gaze back on the auburn-tressed girl. "The day before, Gilias, the elementalist among us, had set Einar's pants on fire while he courted one of the local wenches. Einar was furious, of course, but showed nothing except mild chagrin until we came to that well, and it was Gilias' turn to lean down, take his scoop of water from the bucket which never did draw all the way up." His hand, larger again than the long fingers he'd worn of late, twisted aside, attempted to close around the much smaller psychic's. "Can you guess the nature of Einar's revenge?"

Caedan was raptly interested in the story -- more than any other she'd been told, perhaps. The ending of this one couldn't be seen. Every other ending had been revealed with a single flicker of a thought from its author long before the story was due to conclude, but this one ... this one with the mind of sentient blackness weaving its plot was unseen. His hand closed over her own, and it would be a few minutes before she felt the strange burning sensation that started as a harmless tingling. "He pushed--no." She shook her head, sending unkempt hair tumbling over her shoulders. "Too easy." Dark eyes flashed with intrigue and she stared into his own, couldn't help but think of Lucien, and shook her head again. "I can't see. He took away his girl?"

Kurgan dipped his head to the back of her hand, lips hovering over that pale skin so the cold of his breath was felt keenly as he spoke, obsidian eyes angled up to meet her own, unless she looked away again. "As I said, Einar was a necromancer. The best; he'd outstripped his tutors in Vailkrin's dark Library months before and, not knowing what to do with him, they'd sent him on to Xalious to finish his term." Kurgan's lower lip brushed across Caedan's hand, and then the once-man lifted his face to level with hers. "Now, consider the well. Unthinkably old, unfathomably deep. How many unfortunate creatures had fallen to its stony maw, over time? Fell, and drowned in its icy waters, or were broken against its rocky walls? Poor Gileas was about to find out." The ravelling building around them hushed, as if it, too, was listening. "Einar cast a spell, of far above and beyond the power of the one cast upon him in the elementalist's jape. And so, lurching up from that murky hole in their tens, first, then scores, finally hundreds, came the slimed, rotting remnants of the well's dead denizens, raised by necromancy’s art. And all the while, Einer’s hand was clamped to the back of Gileas' neck, holding him face-down in the darkness."

Caedan 's eyes glittered. Very clever. Very horribly clever. What man can look at anything the same after seeing the decaying contents of a hellish graveyard? She was desperately entranced. Her eyes closed against the feel of his lips on her hand, the inevitable burning cooled only by his breath, and she opened them only when he paused in his story. "What did he do? Gilias? Did he fight back?" But the information she really sought was what Kurgan did in response; in her mind, it would explain many things. She lifted her head, propped her elbow on the pillow, and splayed her fingers across the side of her temple.

A bitter smile ensued. "He screamed." The once-man's eyes shifted, oil on oil, lending them a strange and hungry gleam while he watched her re-adjust herself. Once the psychic settled, he continued, ".. and screamed, until Jarrock - our enchanter - and I hauled Einar off, his fingers still pressed to Gilias' neck, the skeletal hands of long-dead horrors snapping away as their limbs tore free, still clamped to his robe-front and sleeves. And out of the well, while we held him in an arm-lock and demanded he call them off, crawled bones and lumps of half-petrified flesh, animate and obedient, horrific beyond anything we knew, even with the risks we took." That inky gaze dipped, his thumb-tip tracing softly along the edge of her forefinger. "I summoned the likeness of the cruel and savage man who was at that time the land’s Arch-Mage, possibly the only man Einar still feared in the world. And on sight of that illusion Einar let the corpses fall, a foul collapse of death that twitched and writhed long hours after they should have lain still. Nobody drank from that well for many years. Einar earned a new name, that day, one more suited to his nature. Gilias developed a fear of dark and enclosed spaces he would not overcome for centuries. I..." His rugged featured turned away from her, and Kurgan glanced about the space enclosing them. "I would eventually reap Einar's reward for thus disturbing his vengeance. But not for many years. And oh, the irony of..." Whatever he was to say next was never spoken, the once-man startling, releasing her hand. "What was that?"

Caedan liked, this story, mostly because it had never been told -- not like this. Not even in Tenebrae's memories, as foggy and horrific as they were, had she come across such an account. The psychic yawned into the back of a hand she pulled from Kurgan just as he released it. "Are you scared?" It was a simple question, but the way he started, she couldn't help but wonder -- to suspect -- that perhaps he held on to more than just bad memories of Einar. Maybe he still feared him as well. "Maybe someone's come to bring us dinner." The barest hint of a smile tugged at the corners of her lips, but she sobered with the realization that she was, in fact, quite hungry, and she was stuck in a building made of chaos incarnate, now without an apparent master.

It was less fear than a disturbance sensed across time and space, across the boundaries of dream. Einar.. Eldritch... was gone, sucked into the very Void he'd sought to serve with Creation's demise. It was something, someone else, a presence he could not ignore, which seeped into his awareness like cold flood-water under a door. The boy. The boy was sleeping. He could feel it, and dreaming, too. A voice echoed in his mind, calling a name he'd only learned recently, but which applied to the very woman in the chair before him. "Caedan..." he echoed it to her, dragging himself to a stand, untangling his hand from hers with obvious reluctance. "Stay with me." He had to keep her awake, at all costs. "And I'll tell you another tale, if you wish. Many tales."