Clarity crackled into place like the shattering of glass. Or perhaps like having a wall plug forcibly removed.. or bandgages torn from flashburnd eyes. Perhaps all three at once. Being "hung up" on was an unexpected, and startling experience. Adrenaline surged, and he spun as if struck by an invisble blow.
Behind him the ghosts dissolved, and some tiny trinket momento of each fell helplessly to the ground. With effort, he fought free of Gizogin's grip, clenched his bloody fists, and stared defiantly at the bestially malformed creature. It didn't take a very strong stretch of imagination to connect the daggerpoint exchange between the two being's gazes.
"Doc..." he said flatly. "Catch me."
"What? What are you.." started Gizogin, but was unable to finish. Seemingly without warning, the necromancer's eyes rolled back in his head, and he collapsed like a stalk of wilted celery. The only indication that he wasn't dead, were his pulse, slow breathing, and the sudden subtle glowing of the bloodspattered markings on his gloves. For all the world, it appeared as the necromancer hd just gone into a deep coma. Eyes were unresponsive to light or movement, pulse was slow, and breathing shallow. Shocked, the doctor began trying to find the cause...
*****
To his perspective, the world had lost most of its color. Shimery, silvery and omnipresent light replaced the light of the sun, and the sounds of the battlefield were replaced with dull imitations, as if heard underwater. A deafening symphony of living things assailed him. The grass underfoot sighed in time with the breeze, rising in the chorus of the lifeforces of buzzing insects, and all the other living things around, balanced by the chorus of death, and the singing voices of the dead. This was his absolute limit of what he could bear. Even a teeny bit more, and he wouldn't be able to come back. He was nearly one with the music, almost lost within it, barely holding his own distinction.
Across the field, there was a dischordant, sour disturbance in the music, twisting it into terrible and very unpleasant colors of sound. The enitity that had dispersed the ghosts that had been willing to risk being called back. Everything about the power the entity was weilding was unnatural; wrong. Control. Domination. Dischord. It was the same, and yet the antithesis of everything else around it, twisting, bending, and ruining the sublime nature of proper life and proper death.
It couldn't be silenced... he couldn't silence it... so he chose to drown it, incorporate its disharmony, and by doing so, deny its power. Whatever this creature was, it certainly wasn't thari, and it wasn't properly dead; not a spirit... not properly alive either. He wasn't sure what it was.
Whatever it was, the power it was using wasn't really its own. It had changed in nature profoundly after changing shape. That meant it wasn't *really* a master of life and death, just abusing the powers of one, and ham-fistedly at that.
Clearing his mind, he gathered all the chorus around him, and gently conducted it in new progressions, complex multipart harmonies and cascading rythms reformed to integrate, and balance the disruption of the offensive presense, peeling its control over death away from it, as the force it commanded changed and mutated around it into patterns of denial.
it was almost a dance, like a child does when happy, and hearing a catchy tune. Spontaneous, nearly random, but natural and organic. It made him happy. The seductive serenades being sung by everything --and everyone (weather they knew it or not)-- telling him it would OK if he simply joined in and left the living world behind. It was tempting. So very tempting...
Suddenly, he felt the dischord he was harmonizing out of existence twist, and the lifesong it sang changed again, reawakening him to his purpose for being there. Then a moment later, it vanished.
Fear, sudden impulses of urgency...
The secene ripped from him like a veil.
******
Air filled his lungs and burned as it did so. A blistering red hand mark throbbed on his face.
"That ^$%#&ing hurt!" He yelled at an irate Doctor Gizogin, standing over him and glowering down at him from the half-shelter of the fortress's entryway.
"Don't you ever do something like that under my care ever again!" Bellowed the doctor, slapping him hard a second time. "Now give me those gloves! You're going to the infirmary right now!"
Weird tried to protest, but found himself still too flimsy from the ordeal to fight back, and like taking candy from a child, the doctor easily wrested the two blood and mud fouled gloves from off his hands, and tossed them aside.
"I need you right here, so I can examine you! No more of that 'mystic trance' bullshit, and I mean it!"
"But.."
"But nothing! Infirmary! NOW. 8, 9, take this idiot downstairs, and keep him under watch!"
Weird made a pained expression as the two medical orderly androids hauled him off with all the bruskness only machines could muster, and raised a bloodied, purple and black mottled arm, reaching for the handware that had just been confiscated.
"I'll be KEEPING those!" The doctor intoned triumphantly, snatching them away, as his visage shrank into the distance.
Entering the cool darkness of the fortress, he realized just how tired he really was, and was soundly unconcious by the time his escort had finished dragging him to the emergency room.
[This is sufficiently open ended to permit a *lot* of literary license, but forces the soulsmith doppleganger into a different form, without specifying what. It also takes PJ wizard pants out of the fight.]
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Topic: If Bay Forum were a Mountain Hall, continued... FULL DISCLOSURE (Read 267007 times)