• Closed • The New Chaos XII. Ascendance.

[Nir'wei]

Ymiden 7th. The Untold.
Continues from here.

The Untold was a vast place, twisted by Orbs and detritus that Tio's ship constantly swerved and weaved between in ways that no ordinary ship could manage; in order to navigate the tight corners and impossible dimensions they were sometimes forced to strafe sideways, even reverse and go back on themselves. For something the size of a small city, it also proved incredibly flexible, squeezing through spaces that it really shouldn't have... but then again, this was Emea. Nothing behaved the way it should have. Were they conforming to the dimensions around them, or was Emea itself reshaping itself to their whims? Either was equally possible. The more he thought about it, the more it made his brain hurt.

But he couldn't stop thinking about it. About any of it. Emea was a breeding ground of free thinking and wandering imagination. It created unanswered questions with every breath and every answer spurned a hundred more queries. He should have been free to explore and extrapolate, yet there he was, trapped, cycling the same problem over and over again. "Judgement and who, or what, has the right to cast it is a dangerous subject, isn't it." Archailist sat on the ship's railing, tail flicking idly behind him and his back to the blurred wonder of passing infinity. "The simplicity of nature also rules out its equality. The strong are above law, free to do as they wish and impose whatever rule they want simply because of birthright, or chance, just as much as hard work and virtue. Man's law is fair and equal. No man or woman is above its jurisdiction, no crime will go unpunished, yet man's law is only as strong as man's enforcer... those with the strength and the cunning to face the law and win do not fear breaking it, and therefore the unbreakable laws of nature return."

In other words, Immortals were technically above everyone and everything. Those that obeyed the law, did so because they wished to, not because they were actually bound to it by anything other than their own conscience. "Imagine if Pier and Pre heard you thinking that way," Cyshe grinned. The Immortals couldn't hear him here, no matter what he said or thought; here, he was free to say whatever he wanted... and the truth was, he'd been given a lot to think about.

Moseke, supposedly, had brought them all back at the beginning of time because of Lisirra's vengeance. Lisirra had killed them all because she was strong and they were weak, yet Moseke had saw fit to bring them back simply because she wished it so. She cared for each and every one of them as her children, and they must all treat her with the respect and love befitting their mother. It was a story he'd heard spoken time and time again, through celebrations and bedtime stories and all other manner of childhood memories. He'd been swept into it because he'd never known better, believing there was no other path. Mum had grown ill, he'd prayed for her help, thinking she could do something about it. Mum had died, he'd continued praying, thinking she could just revive her, like she had for all her earlier children. He'd grown ill. He'd prayed. She'd never come. Over time he'd stopped praying. A real mother wouldn't have stood aside and done nothing. Wouldn't have even spoken to him, when he appeared in the same room. Should he be more angry with her, willfully ignoring his near-death experience, the death of his mother, the pain and loss and misery? She'd not even done him the courtesy of appearing during, or indeed following his own death. Was this because she had better things to do? Maybe. Because, being the 'mother' of an entire race meant she couldn't reasonably be expected to cater to the whims of every single Sev'ryn? That was what he'd told himself in times of need or doubt. Did it excuse her? Did it mean she deserved death just as much as Lisirra, for causing their deaths to begin with, by bringing them back only to do nothing while they died all over again? Was there really anyone to blame at all, but the chaos of uncaring nature and its own laws?

In the vast unknown of Emea, what made the Immortals so special. Or were there things even bigger and stronger out there in the Great Beyond?

At the end of all this, there was still Faldrun. Qylios' quest. What gave him the right to decide an Immortal's end. What gave Qylios that right? Strength and cunning? By that right, could he turn it elsewhere too? Thetros. Ziell. Lisirra. Vri. Moseke. Aelig. What were the chances they would turn on him before he turned to them? How would the Immortals react to the death of one of their own. Even the good would seek to use him, just as Vri had done, waiting until he was helpless to refuse before sending him on this death-filled quest. Before that time came, he needed to be ready. He needed to be strong. Stronger than he'd ever been before in his life. "You're not alive any more," Archailist reminded him. Yeah, thanks, he thought back. That was exactly what he needed to hear.

"INCOMING!" came the sudden mental yell from the front of the ship, turning into loud alarming-barks as they left Greyhide's lips. The same noises soon came from Myrth, who'd taken Archailist's place at the lookout, and from the other wolves scattered across the ship. Though Vabina didn't look any different from normal, every hair on her body stood stiff and her ears twitched violently, searching for the smallest indication of trouble. She'd need not have worried. There was nothing any of them could have done if it appeared anyway. They'd reached the Gateway.

Upon an enormous platform stood the jagged remains of two curved columns of deep blue glass. They'd snapped close to the bases and left nothing but intricately-carved stumps in their wake, but many of the shards still hung in the air in a vague representation of what it had once been - creating a stretched oval that could have comfortably fit Tio's ship and two more just like it abreast, and at least one more stacked on top to boot, masts and all. It all looked... horribly normal, all things considered. It also looked very, very broken. Perhaps it was just meant to look that way though?

[Tio Silver]

Tio was not hiding in his cabin. Definitely not.

So what if he hadn't stepped foot outside ever since Nir had done that-... that thing to him; used that strange power that'd left him feeling horribly exposed? Why would he to see the myriad of fantastic, impossible realms they were sailing through? He had a goblet of everlasting rum and a very comfy chair. Sitting alone, in the dark, drunkenly mulling over his thoughts was way more fun than anything going on outside. Yes that was definitely the reason he was doing this: because it was fun! Not at all because he was afraid of having that power turned on him again!

Definitely not.

Tio sat in silence for a few trills, hoping he could somehow force himself to actually believe that through the sheer power of effort. It turned out he could not. Damn it. Life would be so much easier if he was somehow able to convincingly lie to himself.

He took another deep swig of rum from his goblet, trying to ignore the fact that it tasted like ash, as did literally everything he consumed that wasn't made of gold. This was all Nir'wei's fault damn it! Okay so yeah he'd been the one to suggest he try using it on him, but he hadn't expected it to be so... that. A shiver ran down his spine at the memory of the sensation, so strong that it caused his hand to spasm slightly and spill a splash of rum on the floor. Even the echo of that strange feeling was enough to cause him to have a visible reaction; not so much because of the sensation itself but because of the memory it brought up. There had only been one time in his life he'd ever felt so completely vulnerable as he had before Nir'wei's power, and now his mind wouldn't stop replaying that damned night whenever he let his mind wonder.

It wasn't exactly an uncommon night: all yludih had one just like it at some point in their lives. The night their parents would tell them who, what, they really were. That the name they called their own, the face they saw in the mirror, wasn't real; that the person they thought they were was just a mask protecting who they really were underneath from the judgement and persecution of the people they thought they were one of. Needless to say it was a difficult night for everyone. For Tio that night had not gone well. He'd always wondered why no matter where he and his mother travelled to they never seemed to quite fit in properly, and for him the revelation that he was a yludih was the answer to that mystery. He didn't fit in because he wasn't real, Tio wasn't real. Tuihobri, the crystal boy from a race of outcasts, was real, and Tio was just his alias. He remembered looking in the mirror at the face he'd though was his and wishing, pleading, to know what it was he really looked like. But no answers had come.

He'd smashed that fucking mirror.

And then he'd gone on to make Tio larger than life: a character so entertaining, so full of vitality, that nobody would ever know he wasn't real! He'd be like one of those dashing rogues from his favourite stories, who stole from the rich and gave to the poor! Okay maybe not the giving-to-the-poor part, but he'd be close enough! He'd gain everything man could ever want: wealth, fame, power-... no, even better than that, he'd gain immortality! He'd live longer than anyone, louder than anyone, so that nobody would even think for a moment that he had not existed! Nobody would ever think that Tio Silver was anything but real!

And then, by some strange irony, he'd actually become real. With a wave of her hand Syroa had broken his crystaline body apart peice by peice and reforged it into something else, a form of flesh and blood. The face that'd just been an illusion had become real, and with it Tio became real. Frightened little Tuihobri had died, and Tio Silver lived. In a peculiar way that curse she'd given him had granted him his heart's true wish.

It was almost funny, in a grim sort of way, how all the curses thrust upon him and the mistakes he made seemed to keep giving him the things he wanted. Stabbing Cassion had resulted in the curse mark upon his eye, but that very same curse mark dragged him into adventures that helped him to master the power of his magical sparks faster than anyone with his low self-discipline ever should. Wrecking Emea had caused chaos on Idalos, but given him a body immune to the passing of time. All the other little curses, like the mask and the gold-eating, had forced him to break free from caring what society thought of him. He'd thought it had all been a good thing: that he was on the path to transforming into the person he'd always wanted to be. He thought he was becoming someone whose existence was undeniable!

But Nir'wei's power had changed that. Nir had been able to see into his very soul, and in doing so Tio had had a sense of his own soul as well. It had not been what he'd thought it would be. It was strange, alien, rotten, broken by madness and diseased by impurities. His soul was disgusting to look at.

If Tuihobri was the yludih, and Tio was the human, then who was he now that he was a creature of Emea? He'd been trying to act like he always had, like the exuberant and energetic Tio, despite how difficult it had become to do so since his exile. But maybe the reason he found it so hard was because he wasn't Tio anymore? Maybe he was back to being someone else hiding behind the mask of Tio again, and he just hadn't realised it until now?

If so, then who was he now?

A cacophany of barking from outside drew him back from the train of thought he'd never meant to go down, and Tio stood up and staggered over to the window to see what all the fuss was about. In the distance he could see a pair of huge stumps of sapphire glass, wreckage of some sort of archway by the looks of them. The styx stream seemed to lead directly to them and then faded away into nothingness, which made it very likely that this was the gateway they were looking for. Was it supposed to look so busted up though?

Thankful for the fact that he could float, since his legs seemed to be strangely wobbly for reasons that definitely did not have anything to do with the rum he'd been drinking nonstop for the last trial or so, Tio glided over to the door of his cabin and emerged out into the open once again. His ship came to a grinding halt in the middle of the two stumps, and Tio looked over to the assembling group of wolves on the deck of the ship below him. He made a pointing motion with one hand to the stump on the left, and a gangplank folded itself out from the side of the ship and came to rest on it.

"This place looks like a mess. I hate to say it, but I have a horrible feeling this gateway won't be taking us anywhere: it's completely wrecked." He shouted over to them. "You guys take the gangplank and go explore the left pillar, see if there's anything useful. I'll go and explore the one on the right."

[Nir'wei]

The huge arc of smashed fragments and chunks hung in empty space like they dangled from invisible threads, spread outwards in all directions like an explosion from within had shattered it. As Tio's ship drew close, it nudged aside some of the pieces, sending them tumbling end-over-end in random directions. One bumped into another, throwing it off-course and sending both pieces into others... it was almost like a game of snooker playing out above their heads as the pieces bounced off each-other. Every collision made a tiny tinkling sound and together it sounded like wind-chimes in a light breeze... eerie, considering even the smallest pieces were the same size as him. "What could have done this?" someone asked. He didn't want the answer. Whatever it was, it had taken something incomprehensibly huge... and obliterated it.

Tio emerged at the same time as the last of Nir'weis pack assembled, drawn by the warning barks. Cold and Squeak appeared with Sage the Maluid corralled between them, looking just as tense and uncomfortable as the two wolves flanking it. Vabina rose to her feet slowly, casting a glance up to the floating man and flicking her tail in clear agitation. The last to arrive was Cyshe, spooling herself together in the air from droplets of water that shone the same sapphire as the ruins of the Gateway. Nir pointedly didn't turn when he heard the captain's quarter door push open, vaguely aware of his presence despite the complete lack of footsteps thanks to his shared consciousness. "I agree. It's blasted to bits. I can handle both pillars though." Tio's casual manipulation of the ship was a stinging reminder, intentional or not, of his power in this place and over him. He said absolutely nothing, but Grey, Cold, Myrth and Squeak disembarked from the ship at once, the former two moving towards the left pillar and the latter two moving to the right. "Did you forget, I have more eyes than you?" Vabina stayed behind, keeping Sage at bay. He wanted that front and center, too. He wouldn't lord it around, but it was a stark reminder that he held an Emean Being under his control. He could hold another.

The four wolves sniffed around the base of the two pillars and the surrounding area, nudging aside sapphire gemstones scattered on the floor and dangling in the air, but it didn't respond to their touch or acknowledge their presence. Nir'wei sat on his haunches, watching the four explore for a moment, then closed his eyes and exhaled, feeling the seven threads of thought spreading outwards in all directions and selecting the most familiar. Let me see. The next time he opened his eyes, he saw exactly as Greyhide did, his Sense of the Wolf activating and giving him a perfect image of the pillar, right down to its scent as the distant wolf sniffed its surface. "The bottom looks undamaged..." Though the dull rocky 'ground' that the two pillars stood upon looked blasted and scorched, the sapphire glass structure looked unblemished by even a single scratch all the way up until the point it snapped, leaving behind a jagged point. Not a clean cut, not at all. He blinked and selected a new thread, suddenly seeing through Cold's eyes on the other side of the same pillar. Blink again, he was on the other pillar. Blink, back to the first. Swapping sight between all four wolves was seamless, his eyes rapidly changing colour depending on which wolf he shared his senses with, until he decided he'd seen enough and looked back to Tio, returning to his original blue shade with a few blinks. Then he remembered who... what he was looking at, and his gaze snapped to Vabina on instinct.

"... If you really feel the need to explore, then fine, but it's not going to do anything. I'm going to see if Sage knows of a different Gateway." Actually, he'd welcome the chance to be alone again. They'd both been better when they didn't need to look at each-other. It felt like every time he looked at Tio, he could see that black, mis-shaped little sliver of something deep in his chest. A brief, fleeting glimpse of Tio Silver. Even though he'd never actually seen a soul up until that moment, something instinctive inside of him said that they were never meant to look like that. This was the thing that he would have to rely on, to make it to the Great Beyond? This was the thing that wanted to atone for the damage it had caused? Now he wondered if the Styx Stream was even a short-cut. Why had Tio offered so quickly to help, if not to actually help... did he intend to break the Great Beyond too, just as he had the Cathedral?

From both pillars, the eyes of wolves threw cautious glances when they thought he wasn't looking. A keen-eyed squirrel perched from the mast and never looked away; Cyshe the water-dragon formed a lazy figure-of-eight with her own body but never seemed too far. Even when Nir'weis attention focused elsewhere, even when he tried to dismiss those thoughts in case they seeded further doubts and speculation, his suspicions were no longer his own, but broadcast and amplified over an entire network. Now, more than ever, they seemed to stare with mistrust, almost bordering on hostility.

[Tio Silver]

It was hard to ignore the furtive glances Nir'wei's pack shot him when they thought he wasn't looking: looks of doubt and distrust, as if they expected him to stab one of them in the back if someone went too long without checking where he was. Logically Tio knew that their doubt was warranted, after all he didn't exactly have a stellar record when it came to keeping his word, but he couldn't deny that it stung a little. He saw so very, very few other people these days, and to be reviled by those he did meet was not a pleasant sensation. Was there anything he could do about it? No, nothing at the moment. Perhaps later on in this voyage he'd have the chance to prove his sincerity, but until then he'd simply have to endure. There were no words that would suffice to bridge the gap between them, and even if there were he wouldn't be able to deliver them without flinching away in fear of Nir's power.

"Understood." He replied tonelessly to Nir'wei, before turning to float away over to the right pillar. As he touched down on the glassy surface he breathed a quiet sigh of relief about getting away from that awkward atmosphere and began searching around for anything unusual. Yet even after only a few trills of searching it became apparent that there was literally nothing else here besides blue glass! There had been a pillar here, it had been destroyed and that was it; there was no clue as to how it could be fixed or where another path to the Great Beyond could be found!

"This is hopeless..." He muttered to himself, idly kicking at a stray chunk of rubble and watching it glide off into the sky to bump around against the other bits of floating debris. What if this was the only way to the Great Beyond, and now that it was gone the path was severed forever? No, he couldn't think like that! Vri had sent Nir here to fix it, which meant that he at least believed it could be restored. If the god of death, the being that probably knew this path better than anyone, thought it could be done then there must be a way! He just had to figure out how. And for that he needed information.

Reaching out a hand, Tio caught a large chunk of the sapphire-like substance as it passed by and brought it close to his chest, focusing his attention fully onto it. He didn't like to do this, but circumstances were leaving him with little choice. As his attention honed in on the substance within his hand he could begin to feel the energy pulsing within it, the power that gave all dreamscapes form and strength. Like all power it was something that could be stolen if one knew how, and he'd picked up a trick or two during his exile. Slowly the energy within the sapphire seeped away into his hands, leaving the material itself to crumble into a cloud of grey ashes as he flayed it of the few meagre drop of power it possessed. There was so little of it, but a little was all he needed.

Looking deep down into the vestiges of his rotten soul, Tio called upon his attunement spark and offered it the stolen energy he had flayed away. Like an old car engine purring to life once more his spark awoke, feeding upon the energy and in return casting its power down upon the pillar. It locked on to the pillar's frequency, ready to listen to the notes that determined just what it was...

And as he locked onto it, something locked onto him back.

Tio grunted in surprise and covered his ears as a shrill whining noise filled his head, the sound of his attunement spark feeding back on itself! But it wasn't just his attunement spark anymore, there was something else! Something had grabbed hold of his spark the moment it had synchronised with it and refused to let go, reversing his power back in on him in order to turn his spark into a two-way connection! And through that connection it was... studying him?

Calm, compassion, determination. The notes entered the forefront of his mind, along with a memory that wasn't his own. He saw two huge pillars of sparkling azure looming up into the sky, twisting around each other in an eternal embrace while the souls of the departed passed beneath them, safe in their care from the horror that sought to prey upon them during their journey.

"The pillar... You're the pillar?..." He hissed out, slowly taking his hands down from his ears as the frequency became more stable and the feedback noise began to fade. Again notes came to him, as if in reply. Truth, joy, acceptance. Was it telling him he was correct?

"What happened to you? Why do you lie in ruins?" Tio asked. This time he did not get an answer right away, until a memory hesitantly surfaced in his mind. This time however the memory was not foreign, it was one of his own.

Potential futures, possible pasts and every conceivable instance of 'right now' coalesced in those brief ticks of the timepiece. Immortals watched and, as Emea crumbled, the fabric of the world itself shook. Alistair moved and began the process of flaying - of murdering - a sleeping being. A being of Emea, in Emea - part of a pair which, when awake and whole, brought about balance.

Tio swallowed, his throat suddenly feeling uncomfortably dry. "The fall of Emea. The blast hit you even from all the way out here." The blast that he had helped to cause. Just like everything else in Emea the gate lay in ruins because of him. There was a flash of more notes, rage, disappointment, disgust, before another silence.

Then came two more. Curiosity. Repentance. Was it asking if he regretted what he'd done? "Yes, I do! I want to make things right, I swear it!" Tio shouted desperately, praying that it could feel his sincerity through his spark. Another pause. Then came acceptance, challenge, strength.

Tio frowned. "What was that? I don't understand what you mean." It believed him, but it wanted him to... what exactly? Challenge and strength? What were they supposed to mean? Another memory drifted to the surface of his mind, and this time Tio willingly allowed himself to remember it. Two silhouettes, humanoid in shape but with an air of something different about them, stood on either side of the Styx Stream and watched as it trailed off into nothingness. They were from two different worlds now, doomed never to hold each other again, yet even so the bond between them would not be broken by something like death. In this world, where concept and reality were one and the same, they could use that connection to protect the others who would come to walk down this path from the predator that slumbered within the Styx. And so, as they reached out to one another from across the stream, two pillars of sparking blue rose from the ground and entwined around each other. Their connection, their trust, would guard the departed as they made their final journey to the Great Beyond forevermore.

"So you're made from the connection between two people? From their trust?" Tio asked. "And if trust was what made you then trust can rebuild you again! I see! But where do I come into this? How am I supposed to make... trust?"

"What do I know about walking skeletons? Well I know they all make terrible self-portraits. Know why? Because their hearts are never in them! Hehehe..." Tio replied jovially, his chuckle at the end dying off quickly under the wolf-man's stern gaze. A little touch of humour, even if it was just an awful pun, never went amiss when trying to calm down a tense situation. "Get it? Because they're skeletons, and they have no hearts-... You know what never mind, I knew I should have gone with the 'skeleton walks into a tavern' joke anyway."

Another memory, and Tio knew exactly when this one was from! That had been the first time he'd met Nir'wei, back on Faldrass when he'd accidentally unleashed a small horde of skeletal animals. So did that mean the key to this was something that involved Nir as well? "Wolves!" He shouted, spinning around on the spot to where Myrth and Squeak were. "I think I'm on to something here! Tell Nir to go stand on the left pillar and make a connection with it!"

[Nir'wei]

He'd said that he would visit Sage to find new directions, but he didn't. The glistening obsidian creature, that had added another two legs to itself apparently just for the fun of it, seemed to give not an ounce of interest in the two pillars, instead struggling to form a horn from the middle of its forehead without removing mass from other parts of its ridiculously over-complicated body structure. No, another deep dive into the creature's scrambled thoughts was the absolutely last thing he needed. He needed... he didn't even know what he really needed. A moment of peace and quiet came to mind, but the chaos of Emea was a beating drum in his ears, constantly pressing at the edge of his thoughts and while he could now ignore it, he could not banish it entirely. In moments of calm, it seemed to grow. Perhaps the stillness of meditation was something of an antithesis to the loud, energetic frenzy. Or he just wasn't good enough to block it out.

The tap of claws on hardwood brought his attention to Squeak, suddenly at his side with a slightly concerned look on his face. "I'm fine."

"No, it's Tio." Yeah, that grabbed his attention. "He was exploring the pillar and started mumbling, even yelling at it... now he wants you to go to the left pillar. Make a 'connection' with it." Had Tio found something that they'd missed? How? Had he already found a way to make a connection?

His eyes narrowed to slits, thinking back to Tio's eagerness to see and hear of Nir's powers. It remained clear that exactly what Tio was capable of, he'd been hiding plenty. At every turn he seemed to have something new slipped up his sleeve. "Congregate on the pillars." Squeak followed Nir'wei as he walked across the length of the ship and down the gangplank at a brisk pace, Vabina sensing his concern and following in tow with Sage nudged along for the ride. "Whatever happens here, I don't want a single person on that ship when it kicks off." Yes, he was taking precautions on top of precautions, but the last time he'd not prepared adequately, it had literally cost him everything.

Regardless, he could quite easily guess what Tio had meant by 'make a connection'. Stepping from the gangplank onto the cracked rocky platform that the remains of the left pillar stood upon, feeling the ghostly silence of the decrepit remains with the same atmosphere as an abandoned crypt, he closed his eyes and waited for the gentle hum to start up in his chest. I need to know more. I need to feel, to understand and comprehend. Let me reach out, let me feel; let me see. At times like these, it wasn't particularly hard to summon up the emotions - the difficulty lay in holding his concentration steady as he approached the pillar's base, tentatively pressed his nose against the cool glass, and exhaled upon its surface to spark the connection and probe its inner core with Disclose.

PAIN.

The worst kind of pain; loss. Absence. It was like he suddenly couldn't feel any of the seven spirits connected to him, and yet even more than that. He was missing more of himself than he'd ever known. Was he even really alive without it? Was--

He yanked himself back from the connection, severing it sharply, but the ache was still there, an imprint that had attached itself to him just as he had attempted to attach with it. Regret. Penitence. He could feel the tingles of them, faint and indistinct, and he knew them not to be his own as he stared into the warped green-tinged reflection of himself in the pillar's surface. Was this what it had felt? Agreement. Well that's pretty horrifying. Shame. Oh gods, no, now he felt shame for insulting it, though trying to send back his own form of apologetic just got a reply of confusion. Nevermind. He still had a long way to go, understanding Emean communication.

"Okay, so... the pillars are alive, great." He pressed his nose against the pillar's surface a second time, and this time he swore he could feel a gentle, deep and heartfelt THRUM of energy hidden under the surface. It might have been his imagination, but the same seemed to come from the other one as well. "And we've woken them up. Now what?" Longing. Oh. Suddenly it clicked. The loss - it wanted to be whole again. So they could help it grow whole! Joy! He almost laughed at their good fortune, right up until he started actually trying to think of how to fix the pillar, and his eyes drifted down to the two paws that now stood where his hands had once been. He wasn't a glassblower, nor an expert in Emean artefacts, living or otherwise. Defiance. Power! Unity. Trust.

When Sage had bitten Nir'wei on the neck, and in his fury Nir'wei had bitten back, he'd experienced something almost like a handshake. A firm grasp, an understanding between two beings and a bond forged between them. It wasn't the strongest, of course, but it was the first. For a brief moment, through the pad of his nose, he felt it again. A handshake, secure and yet gentle, gripping him in its embrace just as he held it in return. Except it was a grip that he could suddenly feel everywhere, with everything. A brief glimpse of a world connected and unified through thousands of relationships, cohesive and connected. Something deep within him swelled immensely at the mere sight of it, fleeting as it was. The strange thing was, he could almost see the network layered over the surface of a worn map, with frayed edges and stains on its surface. Relationships around the world? Or the relationships that make up the world?

Ohhhhhhh.

There was a chime in his head and he chuckled softly, giving the surface of the pillar a lick out of canine instinct, then recoiling at the strangely salty taste. "Okay, okay. I understand now. You need to feed." Well, that was fine. He had plenty of relationships to be used for exactly this purpose! Denial. What? Denial. Why? They were perfectly fine! Denial. Well who then?! Oh. "Hold on a second there." Tio was the one at the right pillar at that very moment, wasn't he. Really? HIM?!

And suddenly he realised exactly how screwed they were. Brilliant.

That was about the last thing he got to realise though. It was as if he'd been gripping a single finger of the pillar's form with his entire being all the way through the conversation; now, the rest of the hand descended, wrapping around his soul and layering around it until he felt gripped in something almost like an invisible, ethereal fist. All over and around him it squeezed. Power. Unity. Control. He held onto those feelings as if he could make them his own. Courage. Alarmingly, he became aware of something else shifting around in his thoughts around that same moment. Had he invited it in, or had it always been there? Determination. Few and far between moments existed between them both, it flicked through casually like a long report after seeing just the summary. Unity!

Two figures, clad in darkness under the sky, whispering thoughts and memories to each-other. It was a romance and a deep friendship. They knew everything about each-other, inside and out. Their secrets and their experiences melded into each-other until they each became copies of one-another, yet each was a combination of the two's features melded together into a new being entirely. Wait, what did that have to do with them? Faith. It was a deep and powerful emotion that almost made him double over as it thrummed through the meagre bond. They wanted him and Tio to do all of this? Acceptance. But they couldn't! Faith. Damn it all.

"I hope you're seeing all of this," he said in a loud voice. "Because I think things are about to get really, really weird."

[Tio Silver]

Tio watched as Nir'wei made a connection with the other pillar, feeling a hum of approval from his one. Good, it seemed they was on the right track then. He didn't see whatever Nir'wei was apparently seeing, but he assumed it was the same vision he'd had. "Alright, Nir's formed a bond with your buddy." He said aloud to the pillar, patting the glassy surface like some sort of cat. "So what do we do n-..."

A sudden wave of nausea overtook him as he felt something pull on his brain, like a long worm was being pulled out of it with a set of tweezers. The world around them twisted and changed, transforming the scenery into a new image, until Tio, Nir and the pack found themselves standing in some sort of ruin. Huge stone walls, dirty and rotten, sprung to life around them, all of which seemed weirdly familiar to Tio.

"I've seen this place somewhere before." He began, trying to place where exactly. "This was... Ah! It's on the tip of my tongue!"

"My nicknames are a better fit than a real name could ever be! For example you wear a lot of fur which makes you look all fluffy, like a cupcake."

Tio whirled around as a voice, accompanied by the sound of multiple footsteps, grew from behind them. Oh he knew that voice, despite the dream-like echo to it. Only one person he knew had such a distinctive unashamedly smug tone.

Himself.

On the other side if the room a party of six people emerged from a staircase: a middle-aged sev'ryn man called Kris, Kitty the slave girl, the mixed-race Amaris, a red-haired man named Arwel, the sev'ryn huntress called Kali'rial, and Tio. Not Tio as he currently was, but as he had been two years ago: unmasked, not floating and far more put-together looking.

"Oh I remember this! This is from my memory! The expedition to the Immortal's Tongue!" His first big adventure! It hadn't ended well, but had technically been a success in that they had prevented a terrible plague from sweeping across Scalvoris. This had been the part where they'd come into the temple and he'd...

As the group of six walked into the room they eyed four pillars arranged in a circle in the centre of the room, each of which had three identical items on top of them: a carved wooden butterfly, a jar of some strange gloop, and a shiny golden chalice. Kali'rial looked at the items with a frown.

"It could be coincidence, but stories from home tell that Lisirra is preceded by butterflies when she is seen. I'm not sure anything here is safe to touch."

The Tio from the past meanwhile looked directly at the chalice on one of the nearby pillars. You could almost see a literal glint in his eye as he eyed the sparkling golden cup.

And then in perfect unison everyone from the memory froze exactly in place, as still as statue. The memory it seemed had paused.

"Umm... Mr Pillar? Why has the memory paused? I remember exactly what I did next, I- AAAHHH!" Tio shrieked in a distinctly unmanly fashion as a bolt of pain rocketed through his connection to the pillar, along with a single note. Rejection. "Alright, alright, I get it! You don't want me to say anything! But why-... oh wait, I think I get it!"

Tio turned to Nir'wei and grimaced. "I think they want you to guess what it is I did next. Honestly I think they're starting us off easy; if you know anything about me at all you should know what I do when told not to touch something."

[Nir'wei]

The closest he could really come to conceptualizing what it meant to stand in Emea, especially such a deep part of it, was like standing inside a living kaleidoscope... which was why what happened next was, for the brief instant that he actually saw it happening, utterly mind-breaking. The fragments of glass floating around the pillar, the last remains of the Gateway, began to rotate and whirl like they'd been caught in a miniature tornado, making sharp whistling noises as they spun on unpredictable axes. The flashes of Emean light refracted through their surface started to warp into dull stone greys and mossy greens. Blue skies marred by clouds, solid ground under their feet with individual strands of grass forming from every ray of focused light. From a kaleidoscope, it created a perfect image. From pure, unrefined chaos, a perfect orderly reconstruction emerged.

"... And there's the weird, right on cue," he breathed out softly.

He'd never seen the place before, but as the figures emerged, he could pick out at least two of them - Tio, first of all, though he didn't look exactly as Nir remembered him without the mask. Perhaps it was just his modern biases that said that he shouldn't really look that handsome. He still certainly sounded the part. Strangely, he recognised another member of the group as well - Kali'rial, right? He swore he'd met her at some point, in a forest somewhere. "Immortal's Tongue... Scalvoris, right?" Perhaps it was one of the few places he'd not spotted from Traveller, then. "What's so important about this memory, then?" he asked, reaching out to stroke one of the stone walls with his paw, if just to feel something a little more real for the first time since his... incident. Of course, his hand slipped straight through, forming particles of dust and unknown sparkling substances sticking to his fur. It wasn't even a hallucination... more like a living painting made of light.

Eventually, the talking and motion of the small team of illusionary humans brought his attention back to the focus of the little story... and he squinted as the memory stopped, the fake Tio staring wantonly at a golden cup. "... Oh for Karem's sake." Starting him off easy? They might as well have started a quiz off with 'what colour is the sky'. "You grabbed the golden cup, and something very bad probably happened immediately afterwards." He could almost see it in his mind's eye, in fact... and with it, a new emotion flooded through him. Peace. A calming sensation, like being briefly immersed in warm water. Despite realising he should probably be angry at that moment for knowing that Tio had once again put many people in danger over his own greed, including someone that he knew, he found himself smiling just a tad. "Sometimes, you really are unsurprising." But good or bad, at least predictability was something he could account for, in some way. No, it shouldn't make a lick of sense that he would be happy having some kind of confirmation that Tio was a greedy, self-centered ass, but... it really was.

Then, it was Nir'weis turn to provide the memory. Shudders ran through not just him, but every spirit around him in unison as the shared sensation rushed through their combined consciousness - slowly dragging a thin worm from their brains and through their noses with a sickening pull, until the end snapped and he sneezed reflexively, spreading whirls of colour outwards in a single ripple across the surface of the painting. Natural stone turned to beams and walls, the grass became ordered cobblestone and the clear sky turned dark; in one moment they'd stood upon open ruins in Scalvoris, but in the next, they crowded the narrow streets of Rharne's Earth Quarter. "... Alright, well if they're starting us off with easy ones, this can't be too hard."

He almost missed it. The figure that suddenly walked between them both, on two legs with a hood pulled over his downturned face. It was him. Human.

Cold, Myrth and Greyhide all cluttered the road ahead and around him, as per usual. He'd never managed to stray far from them even before they'd become a part of his consciousness. He'd been lost in thought, wandering about something important, but then Cold and Myrth sniffed the air, noses raised high, and peeled off into a sprint down the road and around a corner.

Hey! You can't just do that, running off in the middle of a busy street. Honestly, you need to learn some restraint.

Simpler times those had been, but then as his human body started to run after the wolves, something else filled the moving painting. The sounds of crackling and roaring, a smell of ash and burning wood. "Oh. I know what this is." The vision paused just as the source came into view. A burning building, what had once been an inn of some kind, now completely engulfed by burning smoke pouring from the windows and open door. Some of the people out in the street had mouths open and arms raised, crying for help - others stood in numb silence, staring into the flames with grim soot-covered faces. "Yeah, it really is starting us out easy, isn't it."

[Tio Silver]

As soon as Nir gave his answer the scene around them played again, and true to fashion Tio-from-the-past made a beeline straight over to the goblet and picked it up. For a few trills he seemed absolutely fine, albeit slightly annoyed by the other people in the group shouting at him to stop. "Guys, guys, stop worrying, I'll be fi- AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!" Then as suddenly as if a switch had been flipped he dropped to his knees and began to retch in a frankly horrifying fashion as every scrap of food within his stomach fought to eject itself from within him.

Real-Tio however began laughing at the scene playing out before him, and walked over to pat his illusionary self on the back. His hand simply faded through the illusion, but it was the thought that counted right? "Haha, good times! He commented wistfully. "You're absolutely correct Nir'wei: I touched the goblet, and something bad happened." He tapped his chin thoughtfully with his other hand. "Although to be fair to myself doing this turned out to be a vital part in figuring out what was going on and saving Scalvoris. It was this event that inspired me to live by my touch-everything rule. I don't recall a time where it has ever failed me yet."

The world around them burst apart into a cloud of multi-coloured sand and once again swirled into a vortex as it remade itself into a new scene. For a moment Tio saw the particles form into an image of the pillar he'd connected with, and to his delight Tio saw the pillar grow just a little taller. Across his bond with it he felt a note of Joy stir within him that brought a smile to his face. "It's working! The pillars are growing when we get the memories correct! Not a lot, probably because the question was easy, but it's something!"

The dust settled into a new image: a scene of a narrow street in a city Tio didn't think he'd ever seen before. The illusion of Nir, back in the sev'ryn form he'd first met him in, strolled casually down the street, guided by three of his wolves. Tio watched as the wolves sniffed the air and charged forwards, leading Nir to round the corner and stumble across a burning building, when the scene abruptly froze in place.

"... Yeah... Easy..." Tio replied uncertainly as Nir remarked that this was supposed to be an easy question, staring at the rather beautiful still image of the amber flames. Was this supposed to be easy? Sure Nir'wei had some heroic traits, but he wasn't stupid enough to run in to a burning building was he? That was just plain suicidal! He could understand if it was to save somebody like a family member or close friend, but surely nobody would actually risk being incinerated for a bunch of perfect strangers?

Ah who was he kidding? For some strange reason he seemed to bump into the sort of heroically-stupid fools who did this sort of thing on a seasonal basis. "I'm guessing that you ran into the building and tried to save someone." He said at last in the exasperated sort of tone that made it clear he didn't think much of the decision. "Probably waxed some poetic monologue about truth, justice and other heroic mumbo-jumbo while you were at it."



Once again the world around them burst apart into a twisting vortex of sparkly dust, and for a second time Tio felt the painful pull of a memory being extracted to give shape to the maelstrom. Now that he was growing a little bit more accustomed to it he began to appreciate how much the process resembled the yludih biology: a mass of crystalline dust morphing and refracting to create an illusion. When the maelstrom began to settle a new image started to take form; a grandiose library, filled to burst with tacky-yet-expensive furnishings and endless rows of books that had never been opened. In the middle of the library sat a little blonde boy at the edge of a huge table littered with books. He was a very cute kid, strangely feminine in appearance, yet the look of absolute boredom on his face as he vacantly flipped through the pages offset whatever charm he held.

It was the memory of Tio when he was five years old.

A silhouette paced around the table, that of a fully-grown man covered head-to-toe in shadow. The only distinguishing feature he had was the number "56" written across his face in white, chalk-like writing. His mouth moved repeatedly in an endless stream of complex words, but the only sound that emerged from his lips was a dull "blah blah blah" in the sort of muted tones one would hear underwater. As he looked down at the recording of kid-Tio sighing into a book, real-Tio clicked his fingers.

"I remember this! This is from my childhood, back when I lived in Rynmere! By the spirits I'd almost forgotten I remembered this!" Technically speaking Tio was Rynmerian by birth, which he only knew because he hadn't been strong enough to handle the long voyages over sea to other continents until he was seven. Life back then had been so impossibly dull: an endless stream of the ridiculous noble saps his mother wrapped around her little finger trying to make him into a half-decent heir-in-law. The fact that the figure trying to lecture him was reduced to nothing more than a hollow silhouette spoke volumes about the impression he made, for he was nothing more than the number 56 in a chain of over 200 stepfathers.

"... Are you listening to me boy? Focus!" The words of the silhouette gained a very real clarity as the figure noticed kid-Tio's inattentiveness, and he rounded on the child like an enraged bull. "To be a knight of Rynmere is a great honour! They are paragons of justice and virtue! You must study hard boy so that you too may find a place within their ranks!"

Kid-Tio slammed the book shut and stuck his tongue out at 56. [b]"Knights are stupid! I'm not gonna risk myself to serve stuck-up f**ksticks like you all my life! I'm gonna be a thief, and then nobody will be able to tell me what to do!"[/b]

56 reared back in shock, and his shadowed face morphed into a look of rage. "You... You brat! I'll show you what-" He raised his arm up, ready to deliver a backhanded slap across kid-Tio's face.

And then abruptly then scene froze.

[Nir'wei]

It was really, really hard not to roll his eyes as the painting briefly lit up with the sounds of Tio's shrill, near-girlish screaming as Something Very Bad started. He couldn't really tell exactly what it was, or why, but it left chunks of sausage floating in a puddle of bile on the floor that looked and smelled entirely too realistic for his liking, and he wrinkled his nose in disgust, trying not to look at the puddle of liquefied breakfast. "Really? We're here right now because you couldn't resist meddling in something that you absolutely shouldn't." Frankly, he was horrified how casually Tio seemed to take it. What if touching it struck him dead on the spot? It could have happened; nothing saying it couldn't. Yet he still showed no remorse or regret for his actions. As long as they miraculously survived, no matter how unlikely the odds or how much individual and collateral damage they inflicted along the way, survival itself was enough of a victory to endorse the exact same behaviour. How? How?!

Because, well. That was Tio. He didn't approve of Tio's actions and he certainly did nothing to hide that disapproval, but it felt good to at least have some kind of confirmation of exactly who and what he was dealing with here. This likely wasn't the sort of trust that the Gateway had in mind, this understanding and acceptance that Tio was a filthy animal, but... well, at the end of the day, it was still trust. In the brief glimpse between one vision and the next, he caught a glimpse of their power in action; the floating fragments of broken glass were reattaching to the central core, one by one. Even the ones left floating seemed to be migrating closer, gently pulled by its gravity. Just keep going, and we'll be fine.

His lips pulled into a thin line as the next memory paused, Tio answered, and it cycled up again, showing Nir'wei hesitating for a moment to make sure his wolves stayed back before running head-first through the doorway. No waxing poetic, though. "Two of my friends were in there. I didn't know at the time... but I'm glad I made the choice, even when other people said I shouldn't have." Abruptly, something quite horrible came to mind. "It's almost like your touch-everything rule, in a way. You never know what you're going to get until you do it... but if you don't, you might end up regretting it horribly, y'know."

It was an entirely unique and unexpected revelation, but the impact was immediate, bordering on violent. JOY! The statue hummed with powerful energy siphoned from the connection, forged by their memories, and its colours grew in vibrancy and hue until Nir found himself struggling to look directly at it until his eyes adjusted. "I think we pleased it." Joyjoyjoyjoyjoy! Then, once it had finished feasting on the gathered trust, it spun up the next memory, once again beginning from Tio.

They were growing harder now. Digging deeper, from parts they hadn't visited in a while. "Childhood?" he echoed dumbly, focused more on the blank-faced silhouettes with featureless voices. "You had... a very different childhood from what I expected, if I'm honest." Why fifty-six? Why did he get to spend so much time in a grand library? Why did he want to become a thief, when he could have become a Knight? Then the figure raised the back of his hand. Oh. Well, yeah. That kinda made more sense. "I almost want to see you hit the guy first, but... I'm guessing that's not what happened, right?" He didn't know why he was asking, he knew Tio couldn't give him the answer, right or wrong. "You got hit, and beaten, but you decided to become a thief anyway. To spite the people that told you that you couldn't, and so you wouldn't have to listen to them, or put up with their punishment." He glanced back to the paused silhouette, its number the only thing sharp and clear about it. "No matter how many of them there are."

[Tio Silver]

A wide, insufferably smug grin spread across Tio's face as Nir'wei admitted that his decision to run into the burning building followed a similar vein of logic as his touch-everything rule. Even if it couldn't be seen behind his mask it could almost be felt; a palpable aura of conceit that clung to him like a heady smog. "Awww Nir, that's so sweet." He crooned cheekily, as if the sound of screaming and raging flames in front of them wasn't happening. "So what you're saying is that we really aren't so different after all? I'm touched, truly. We're like two peas in the same crazy-ass pod."



Nir'wei gave his guess as to how the scene from Tio's childhood would go, and the illusion around them remained frozen with bated breath. Tio let out a heavy sigh, his mask concealing whatever thoughts might have been showing across his face.

"Oh, so close, and yet so far." He cocked his side to the head questioningly. "Sorry but this whole scene is a little misleading. You think I had some kind of unhappy, tragic childhood? Ha! I'm not the victim of this story: I'm the real bad guy!"

Time returned to the image again and the silhouetted hand of 56 sped down towards kid-Tio, yet it wasn't the only thing moving. At the same moment kid-Tio swept one of the weighty old tomes on the table before him to the side, sending it hurtling straight towards 56's opened legs and crashing right into his mutton dagger. With the pained whimper of a male dog after its fateful trip to the vet 56's attack faltered, and his hands rapidly withdrew back to guard the damaged area. Seizing the opportunity, kid-Tio hopped out of his chair and darted away far out of range of 56's arms. He took in a sharp gasp of breath, and if Nir had even a shred of experience dealing with children his instincts would probably warn him to cover his ears for the catastrophe that was about to come.

"MMMUUUMMMMMMYYY!!!"

The sonic boom that erupted from Tio's mouth shook the room, threatening to shatter the stained glass windows. It was a mysterious phenomenon how children could shout so loud despite having such small lungs, and he had never been anything like a quiet kid at the best of times. Both real-Tio and 56 winced in agony at the sound, hands shooting up to cover their ears from the aural onslaught.

"Waitwaitwait boy! Don't tell your mother I-" 56 began to say, but never got a chance to finish as Tio ran off, still screaming his head off like banshee. Once again the image began to break down into technicolour dust, and Tio shot a wry smile at the back of his retreating younger self before it vanished.

"Neadless to say, mother had moved on to number 57 not three days later." He chuckled, though there wasn't much mirth in it. Through his connection to his pillar all he could feel was the note of disappointment resounding again and again in his head.The swirling dust briefly held the shape of the pillar once again, though this time instead of growing larger a sizeable chunk of the top snapped off and crumbled away into nothingness. "The pillars shrink whenever we get a question wrong!" He realised, looking around at the cloud of dust. Perhaps it was just his perception, but the cloud seemed to have become lighter than it was before. "If we continue to get the questions wrong we might risk destroying the pillars entirely! Then nobody will ever be safe crossing over to the Great Beyond ever again!"