an exercise in futility, rated pg+13 | strong language

[Tenneniel]

caution: gore, angst, heavy cursing, mention of necromancy, violence, blasphemy, etc.

notice: if you wish to join, I would highly appreciate it if you would PM me ahead of time. this is tenn’s first appearance here- the one who finds her has little chance of becoming a friend, however. allies, however, seems a likely thing. she's likely to quite dislike said person initially. for seeing her while weak, you know.

In the depths of Tarlen Forest, lay a corpse.

This was hardly an unusual event - the darkness of such a place led many to their deaths. The remnants of most who died here would never be found; even less of that number would be given a proper burial. Those who died beneath these brittle boughs would, inevitably, sustain an animal or three.

But cadavers don’t often move, not even in Tarlen. Those that do are typically compelled by a necromancer and their dark spells, by pentacles and mutterings, and wicked rituals not spoken of in polite company, or even most impolite company, really. It was dangerous to discuss spells of the magnitude that would reanimate the dead.

There were no candles, no pentacles nor whisperings, no blood sacrifices, nothing. Matter of which, there were no animals. For twenty paces- at the very least- in each direction, the animals stayed away. Those that did venture near would either realize they had prey to chase on the other side of the forest. The stronger willed of these rogue, demented animals would stand, never breaching the perimeter around the broken corpse that twitched slightly, moaning in a voice that was not pain nor sorrow, but a combination of the two, stronger than its components. A sickening sound, it sang shrill in the ears of the dire wolves that stood about, fighting the instinct to flee. Such a sound could emanate from no living being.

Of course, such qualifications do not apply to those that have long ago left the land of the living. The cadaver stood.

The cadaver screamed, again.

The wolves joined their voices to the dead one’s, their blood-red eyes glowing in the darkness as they howled, gazing at the moon they sensed but could not see. Such a thing might go on forever, an infernal cry against nature, against-

“FATES! HAVEN’T I BEEN THROUGH ENOUGH?”

The wind stirred in the trees, almost combatively, challenging the nothing that stood to rail at those who controlled life in itself, who controlled the deities, the mortals, and the contorted trees that stretched to the dark sky from dark roots. The voice resolved itself again, agony in a feminine voice that might have been sweet were it not being pushed to its limits in volume.

“You take everything away from me! Every damned thing I gain! I have died a thousand times for your foolish-fucking-games! I am nothing-broken-nobody! You have sent me to war and to death and every-bloody-fucking-time I think I might have a chance at life, you tear it away! Sick games.”

The voice faltered, failing. The cadaver pushed hair that was far too lively from its face, revealing eyes that glowed with a darkness- a shade, when looked upon, gave the sensory stimulation of blood, but seemed to draw something from the air. A dark light, if you will. A negation that drew from the darkness in the forest around it. White teeth, flanked by fangs, glimmered for a scant moment in the darkness, as the girl- yes, the dead one speaking these words was a girl- screamed again, incoherently, a jumble of sounds and profanities and a sound of agony, primal and unfettered by typical constraints. Eventually, the words resolved themselves again, near the end of her long rant.

“I AM THROUGH. FATES AND GODS OF THIS PLACE BE DAMNED.”

And she dropped, and even the bravest of those animals that had stayed, waiting to feast upon her fled. The broken one knelt on the ground, her fingers curling in the dirt, bringing up furrows of soil and forcing granules into the place between nail and finger. She gave a feeble little sound, a despairing, choking cry. She remained motionless, like that, for a very long time, staring at the mithril necklace that had dropped to the ground as her eyes gleamed red, the necklace that she was having far too much trouble picking up. Her mother’s necklace, the symbol of her mother’s love, and a powerful totem of life magicks. When she moved her fingers over it, trying to lift it and clasp it about her neck, she recoiled, a black burn spreading on her fingers. She watched the dark coloration spread in a band around her left hand, from the place between thumb and index finger to the opposite side, almost at her wrist. It was a thin mark, the width of the necklace chain. Her queer eyes dimmed almost into black at the sight.

Tenneniel At˙ril Delagea watched as the only remnant of her mother and her prior life shunned her, blackening, the metal warping. She tried to save it, ignored the pain in her hand as she lifted the chain, looping it around her hand. The pendant crumbled into ash in her palm, swiftly blown away by the wind. The chain itself, however, seared her flesh with pain, tattooing her left hand with a black stripe. The girl clawed at the mark, her fingernails scratching furrows in her flesh that would heal, eventually. The pain sharpened her thoughts, like crisp winter air, and, dropping backwards and sitting cross-legged, she closed her eyes tightly, searching, feeling.

There was nothing. She could not feel another living soul, nor could she feel the queer tapestry of right and wrong she had tapped into in Lidelas. She could hear only her own thoughts. As shock faded away, she realized there was a problem with that- she could feel only herself. Not even Zenaki. She had not even thought of him- the sensation of loneliness had been so overbearing, she had not been able to perceive why. She did not open her eyes to turn for him, to find his corpse, because he was gone. He must be. Her mind felt awfully small when it was just her, there. Tenn trembled like a leaf in the darkness; empty of the extraordinary senses she had become accustomed to. Panicking, she reached out for the fabric of magic that she knew must be here, wherever here was. She found it, with difficulty, mental phalange frantically choosing a simple healing spell, directing it at more earthly fingers.

Agony, bitter and white, not quite as bad as when the pendant had scalded her but- a different sort of pain, clawing from the inside of her hands out as the scratches repaired themselves. She opened her eyes, watching the process with eyes that had at last reverted to their natural silver. An awful feeling grew in her stomach, nausea and an innate sense of wrongness. Tenneniel tore her concentration away from the spell, gasping. The scratches had healed, yes, but there was nothing to absolve the mark on the back of her hand and palm.

Exhausted, agonized, Tenneniel At˙ril Delagea curled up on the ground, a near fetal position with her eyes gleaming in the darkness. In the darkness of Tarlen forest, she fell deeply asleep, motionless. Again, she could have been taken for a corpse, dressed in rags of clothing that were once forest green, the boots on her feet burned at the soles. She was quite vulnerable, really, and for once in her life/death, she did not care.

[Theldarin]

The forest loved him—and rejected him. In one breath it condemned him and embraced him and he was uncertain what it intended. It had been too long since he walked out under an open sky, night or day. Though here the sky could hardly be called open; the trees stretched between the black loam, sinking twisted roots deep, to the night-shrouded sky. Even the stars veiled their faces, cloaked in nightmare cloud, widows veiled at death.

It had been too long since last he saw them… too many eternal years locked in a stone prison of his own making, a place whose only gates were fear and only bars despair. He could not open the gates or challenge the bars, too afraid of the darkness inside him to challenge the darkness without. He no longer remembered what the stars looked like, except that they were vast, and had taken his breath away. Then again, he had no breath now.

The sensations that filtered through his mind were strange. Sight; it was lighter now than the eternal blackness of his tomb. The stars were hidden but there was an ambient light, a soft glow, with no apparent source but somewhere above in the sky; the moon perhaps, gleaming through a half-hidden crag in the clouds, there one moment and fading away at the next. It was enough to outline the tall and somber trees, and the creeping vines that draped from them in tangled array. It was enough to catch the motion that slid through the underbrush, or flitted in the treetops, or stalked with dangerous intent along the ground. All avoided him. He did not carry the scent of warm, living flesh.

There was feeling, too. The give or crunch of decaying underbrush, beneath his leather boots. If he reached out his hand, the slickness of moss, the contrasting roughness of bark, beneath his fingers. The wind brushing past his face, gentle with deceitfully false promises, whispers of shattered dreams. He listened to it, curious as well at the sense of hearing; listening to everything murmuring about him, whispered dreams and questions.
And there—a cry, lost and soulful, that he imagined might be himself, only he was silent.

It took him a long moment to realize the cry was not only in his mind.

…and Gods of this place be damned.

He was totally unprepared for the feeling that thrummed through him at that condemnation. It rendered him utterly helpless in a way all his self-denial and despair had not… and a moment after the helplessness of that accusation he was filled with a sensation he had not experienced in millennia.

Anger.

And who is she to so utterly encompass and condemn the ways of the great immortals? To defy their powers, and stand in the way of the balance they represent? To shun their aspects and turn against their ways? His hand closed about the hilt of the stone sword he was swinging at his side; the dark iron clinked as it moved, and the ambient light glittered on the cold-beaten surface. He remembered, as if the shadow of a dream, calling out the name of his god, and the light that burned in the air with no apparent source, and the rush of certainty, fortified in holiness, burning out of him like a second skin with a new purpose.

Instinctively he reached out for that two-way conduit, and the comfort and certainty with which it filled him; he searched for a sense of direction, the instinctual motive beneath his ribcage that would inform him of the proper course, of which way he would turn. Instead, he felt as if he were closing his eyes and falling headfirst into a lonely abyss. The emotional pain was staggering. He was alone, utterly and completely, walking forgotten paths beneath a starless sky.

He barred his teeth in a rictus smile, hidden behind the unchanging iron mask of his helm, and his eyes burned with unholy violet fire. There were tales enough of paladins who had abandoned their gods. But who had ever heard of a paladin who outlived those he championed?

What did that make him now? A paladin without gods, a warrior without a cause, a moving corpse of a people long forgotten and destroyed? What did it make him, if not lost? The Lost. It had an ironic ring to it.

The direwolves pacing in front of him growled and slunk away into the night. They only smelled living death from him, along with anger and a desperate fury, and they knew the sensations too well to try their luck against him. Besides which he smelled of iron and stone, rock and dust and darkness.

He stopped only when it was that, or step over the ragged corpse curled between one tree and the next. He stopped, grounding the point of his flint blade, and knew without looking that she, whomever she was, was as alive as he. It was something about the way she was curled in her state of death, and how the trembling fabric of all things that could die wrapped around his fingers, waiting for their necromantic tug, but there was no such sensation here. He folded the fingers of both hands about the hilt of the blade and stared down at her.

“If you want to find an excellent place to waste away centuries in self pity,” he said in a voice like ashes and dust and broken rock, “I would suggest a mountain tomb. Nothing but rock and darkness and the whispered rumors of the drow somewhere far beneath. Millenias pass like moments.” There was no sound; not even his breathing. Why would undead desire to breathe? “Sooner or later though the world changes and forces you out again. Or so it did with me. I wake to wonder – how different is it now than when I first imprisoned myself? Nothing… or everything?”

His soul flitted in and out of his corporeal form, and his eyes flashed like lightning in response to a silent promise of thunder.