After a moment's respite, Kraka-Tarr continues his lizard tale.
"Right, so, the mortals! They hailed the names of the gods who were banishing the darkness! Procyon and the Spirit! But, naturally, there is one problem with such exaltations, and that is the eternal presence of ears that are all too willing to listen and eyes that are all too eager to observe! The Spirit of Darkest Depths, the terminal spirit of the mortal world, was shocked at this newest development! Empty within and without, exhausted by Dusk and rain alike, he knew only Dark, and awaited its falling on the land of mortals! It was where he was born, and it was where he hid in during the Season of Light, and Dawn was what he feared most as a consequence! His mind stirring like that of a wounded animal, he moved for the first time in aeons!"
"Meanwhile, further upward, Gomeisa was watching the happenings below, his vast mouth agape and his eyes wild! This was not the first time he had observed Procyon do something wildly inappropriate, but it was by far the direst incident yet! For the sake of a simple demonstration, he had disrupted the basic order of the world! Banished Dusk! Cavorted with the alien Spirit of the Earth and the Skies! And from the looks of it, he was becoming dangerously carried away with it! He wondered whether Procyon even remembered what he was doing in the first place, for his interplay with the world was most committed - while the sight of a Dawn as dramatic as this was indeed moving, Gomeisa had to admit, he was much more concerned about his brother, and whether he was not indeed getting himself into trouble that even he couldn't extricate himself from! And so, nervous about the future, Gomeisa the Bleary-Eyed shuffled quietly over to the Great Dog of the Gods, the master of all the nearby stars! Asking him to direct his attention toward the mortal world, Gomeisa pleaded with the Great Dog to help Procyon, who seemed overtaken by a madness more incredible than usual among the Fixed Stars, and to guide him back before he harmed himself, or destabilized the way of things beyond recovery!"
"The Great Dog, it need not be said, was not pleased! Surveying the changes it saw within the world, one thing was clear! This! Was! Wrong! And the Great Dog howled wildly, calling out to the furthest reaches of the void, summoning the Black Legions of the Void! They marshaled from their homes in ancient darkness, clad in the darkest of unknown matter and light, and rode at the call of the gods! To ensure the progression of things, they stormed outward! Whirling through void, the Stars dimming to tiny specks as they passed, the Legions rode down to the world of mortals, the disturbance evident immediately! Procyon, feeling the antithetical power of the Legions from the dimming of his light, turned to the Spirit, now not of only the Earth and the Skies, but also of the Light That Stirs All, Ea. He looked at her, and she knew that she must vanish from the face of the world, for the Legions had come to do their heinous work, and that they sought Procyon! An understanding formed, that they would meet at the Grand Spiral of the Stars, the very conduit of light itself, where Black Legions would not tread and heinous things could not exist, for the light purified all!"
"The Spirit disappeared from sight, and Procyon attempted to do the same, finding the lair of two decrepit Spirits of the Great Rivers and taking shelter within, knowing that the occupants were ancient and empty beyond reasonable help, and that their inner darkness combined with his brilliance would shield him from the predations of the Legions as they upturned earth, flipped mountains and tore great gashes across the land, ones that can hardly be seen after many years, but that nevertheless scar the land, speaking of the unspeakable to all who look! Alas, Procyon burned too brightly, and when the Legions came to tear open the spirits to check their gullets for signs of the god, he burst out in their defense! The Legions, irritated by Procyon's light, yet unable to dim it sufficiently due to its partly earthly origin, decided to bury him in the Darkest Depths with the blessing of their angered Spirit while they could invent a manner of purifying him of this earthly taint! For six full days the Legions worked, day and night, unmindful of the light of stars Fixed and Free, and all the while Procyon languished in the Darkest Depths, suffering, yet surviving, his affinity for the Earth keeping him nourished, his longing for the Skies keeping his mind sharp, his power of the Light That Stirs All preventing the Darkest Depths from making him their own! And most of all, his thought of the Spirit of all three rendering him constant, for his being had a compass to orient itself by!"
"When six days passed, the Black Legions were ready! Their grisly invention, the Voice of the End, was prepared for use - with it, they sought to end the Dawn, and to purify Procyon of his earthly fragments in order that he may be returned to his place! The machine came to terrible life, and you could easily hear the world itself hold its breath as its work began! The silence washed over Procyon, shaking him to his core, pulling and twisting, gnashing and tearing, and he found his light begin to wane! And as the Dark descended, his mind began to go, and his resplendent body withered! The world began to shriek as it saw what was being done, but by then it was too late - the silence and noise, they washed the Earth and the Skies, and the Light That Stirs All from Procyon, rendering him clean as the day he was born in the clouds of creation! Perfect, as the Great Dog intended him to be, unmoving, unconcerned, indifferent! Dim and pale! And it was like this, empty and spent, that Procyon rose out of the pit, and the Black Legions of the Void, their work accomplished, carried him back to Gomeisa, who nearly wept when he saw what had been done to his brother by the beasts of the Legions!"
"But despite this, as it soon became apparent, Dawn had not been abolished entirely! The Legions and the Dog, they were foiled! For they did not realize the most crucial of facts - the Spirit of the Earth and the Skies, and the Light That Stirs All, she still suffused the very fabric of the world of mortals, and while she carried that part of Procyon within her, neither she nor Procyon could truly be bound! And so the both of them, though separated for all time by a distance none could cross more than once in their lives, still live on, in a sense - the Spirit of the Earth and the Skies, and the Light That Stirs All, she moves through the currents of all that is around us, staving off Dusk and Darkness, running forever from the Black Legions that are said to pursue her wherever she goes, creating darkness of the land as well as darkness of the mind where they step just as much as the Spirit moves the Earth and the Skies to touch, to unify in Light and to foster the living as they do so! And Procyon, he dwells in the fields furthest above us, beyond the Moons, the Planets and the Sun, growing brighter by the year as he is heartened by the vitality of the continued Dawn beneath him, and the Spirit of the Lai, the Or and the Ea moving it onward! And someday, when all of us present here will be long-dead, when Braka-Skreek screams across the void with the souls of the living he has pilfered from the purview of the lesser gods, trailed by rumbling, furious Bammu-Biff, perhaps then can Procyon gather his strength and come back to the Spirit! For the Black Legions are, for all their fearsome might, blind as moles, degenerates of the dark, and ultimately of no consequence to anything at all, least of all the affairs of the divine!"
Kraka-Tarr pauses a moment as he takes a deep breath, exhaling slowly and with finality.
"Such is my tale, comrades, and I believe I have repeated it faithfully, much as my father told me to and his mother told him to, and her cousin told her to!" Kraka-Tarr says, then sits down, looking a little exhausted as he sips more of his stale water.
Sit down. That was a pretty long story, after all.
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Topic: New Age Mercenaries II: To the Wild (Read 16039 times)