Be Afraid

[Victor Lark]

29 Winter, 511

Victor closed his eyes.

The darkness was emptiness. Uncomfortable. Lonely. Thoughts like stray threads swayed out into it, filled it with the color of disruption and tugged at it with the nagging interferences of the world. In the darkness, every noise resonated and every thought screamed: memories inspired my memories were clouds in the black, imperfections in the vacuum.

But they could not be ignored.

It was known that pushing them away only allowed more to fill their place. He would drown in the effort when he tried.

Instead, he swam through each occurrence and inclination, each creak of the floorboards or cry at the window, and soon his arms were floating; he was weightless, thoughtless, selfless, and worldless.

There his mind dilated, and thoughts that were not thoughts opened to images that could not be seen in the waking world. He was shrouded in a blue light that was at once hot and cold, and he was walking under it even though he was not moving. He walked between buildings made of faces, changing faces that looked, but did not see; they knew, but did not feel.

He found himself hating them, and his hate was a shock of red on the blue. He reflected on that hate and realized its futility, its inefficiency. It was a thought that would only have occurred to him here, in this world that was not a world, the darkness that was lighting, the emptiness that was filling.

He was swimming, he remembered, and it was in a sea of discovery. He swam past the hatred, the blood-red stain, and moved on.

[Victor Lark]

It occurred to him that he should turn to one of the faces. He should examine it, as he did in the world.

So he stopped, hovered, bent.

He reached out to it, not with his arms, but with some other, invisible appendage. It was a piece of himself that he could not see, but he could feel it deeper than he could feel anything else.

And yet he could not control it as well as he could his fingers. It flailed out in front of him, grasped for the face but did not quite reach it, or reached too far and mingled with it, distorted it, ruined it.

It felt like failure. The feeling frustrated him, and he hated that frustration, and his hatred weighted his reaching conscious. The whirling, groping appendage became slow, and without movement, it began to shrink. Panic enveloped his world of blue stained red, bleak paleness that stabbed his concentration and made him recede from his oblivion...

As he drifted away from them, he could at least observe his efforts and that which had distracted him from them. He saw it for what it was, and then he saw the sea again. He swam towards the blue, away from hatred and panic and distraction.

It was that easy to return to his purpose and his discovery, once he realized it was what he wanted.

[Victor Lark]

He moved deeper, deeper, or maybe it was up. He felt like he was falling, but there was light beneath his feet, and shadows above him. In the middle, the blue embraced him, cold and warm and wet.

More faces floated up around him. He passed them like he passed everything else, fleeting images that observed and were observed, but knew nothing more than observation. He tried to stop at them, to examine them, but they were going in opposite directions, and he missed them.

For every one that evaded him, though, there was another that came closer, seemed clearer. Their noses stretched or cringed above flexing mouths, expressions he identified, but did not recognize.

And as they became more distinct, so were they familiar. They were faces he knew from the world, people and their passions. They were men and women, humans and aliens, Alvads and Sylirans and Ravokians. People he did not remember he remembered, people who had yelled at him or smiled at him.

There was a dead man reanimated, wrapped in blue and talking of medicine. He was patient; he was impatient; he was grateful.

There was a squire girl with peculiar hazel-grey eyes and a scar on her cheek. She was curious; she was confused; she was hurt.

There was an orange-haired boy in roughspun, blushing with intoxication. He was offended; he was angry.

There was Kelvic with sun-kissed skin, her auburn eyes grown wide over a stuttering, slack mouth. She was afraid.

That was it. That was what he searched for. He reached out for her with his arms of intention, his whips of djed. He reached and he caught hold. He pulled her close and he kissed her, because she had what he wanted, and she was going to give it to him.

[Victor Lark]

She tasted like nothing, like he was holding air.

And yet he felt her with his djed. Their auras mingled like blood and water, touched on a deeper level than he could ever know to describe. He felt a part of her, this figment of his memory, this Kelvic; the cat-thing whose name he recalled in the edge of his memory.

Palla was afraid because he had stolen a piece of her. She was his, had to be, because she was also Seven’s. She was his to know, to make afraid, and to fear.

An eternity passed in him, locked on her lips, seeing nothing and feeling nothing and tasting nothing. They were one, but his passion was no more real than it ever was. He pushed himself on her, violated her image and her trust, but he could not find her fear. If he could just find it, he could learn its source, and he could find it in himself.

He searched frantically, with every sense he knew, with every will he could fathom. There was something missing, some tool, some knowledge. Where was it?

He pulled away from her, if only to see, and he lost his grasp on her. She floated away in the dark blue sea, but her face had changed; it took him a moment and a lifetime to realize who it was.

Sophia.

Sophia.

She was shivering. She was dying. She was escaping and he could not save her. She was dying, dying, dead.

And she bled out her emotions until they were no more, and the promise of empathy had died with her.

Something stirred in him. Was it fear? It had to be. He was not afraid by looking like her, or by making her afraid, but by losing her, she who was already gone, gone, gone.

It felt like a revelation. The glory of it made the world spin, the water rush. He had to hold onto it, this thought, this discovery, but he was rising, losing his grasp on it. Up, up, into the darkness he floated. The darkness, the emptiness, the reality.

Uncomfortable. Lonely. Thoughts that were real thoughts, fleeting memories that he could not hold.

He shivered.

[Victor Lark]

The water had gone cold.

It was his own tremor that woke him, startled him from his meditation and flooded his eyes with the confused black of inflating pupils. Concentration’s peculiar ache lingered at the front of his mind as he sat up. The bathwater rang around him, a sudden rush of fluttering chimes. Beads of it raced down his arms and back, darting between raised hairs and startled pores, filling him with the fleeting sensation of movement. He stared forward for a moment, dazed, trying to remember what he had been thinking. He could not quite grasp it with the world around him again, distracting and dull.

He tried to frown, but could not quite bring himself to it, with no one there to see the feat. The flurry of liquid bells assaulted his ears again as he lifted pruning fingers to his face, rubbed the numbness from his eyes. In the darkness behind his eyelids, he saw more eyes, in faces he had memorized so certainly that they probably were not the same, anymore. He saw empty eyes... or they were, before they were afraid. Their color was changing, or maybe indistinct, and they were framed by a face that could not stay still. It was at once a woman with a plain face and blood on her lips, and the next a girl with wild red hair and a quiver on her brow. It was a pair of purple eyes in a stark-white face, but his mind’s eye could not turn those irises grey, could not show him a mirror of fear, only an echo of an attempt of a failure.

He opened his own again, assaulted himself with the tedium of vision. He stepped out of the bathtub, dripping. Djed flailed loosely around him, strung out by a mind that had reached and wandered for hours in silence. It made him feel loose, light, stretched, fragile. Sighing, he gripped the washbowl on the table and listened to the patter of water as it pooled around his feet and looked in the mirror.

What he saw pulled a gasp through his teeth. He jumped, sending the washbowl tumbling. Thick water and noisy bronze dropped onto his feet, but he granted that surprise, that pain, only a wince. There were more pressing matters before him: his face was not his own. Though it was not the first time he had changed himself, it was the first time he really saw it. And it was not a single face, but an amalgam of many. Beneath the slick mat of wet black hair, Palla’s sun-kissed freckles poured over his brow and cheekbones, trickling into Sophia’s wilds-hardened nose and thin lips. Between them both, small violet gems gaped at him from behind silver lashes.

It was the recipe for fear, but mixed and convoluted by a wandering mind and an uncontrolled magic. Victor bowed out of his own sight and rubbed his face with cold, pruned fingers. It was all wrong. How had he gotten this far, learning everything and yet nothing? There was a book in the other room, a gift—or rather, a precaution. He had been reading it, and he could remember. Morphing was what this talent was called. He was morphing, and he needed to be able to control it, just as he controlled them.

[Victor Lark]

He washed his face with the cold, dry oil of his hands, rocked frantic fingers through every bend and corner in his face. Every pore seemed to awaken, every nook open with the numb shock of pressure and djed. The friction tightened his pruning fingertips and warmed the irritation from his face, leaving him with newfound vigor in the task. As he focused on that physical part of him, so did he think even harder; he tried to imagine another face, its every color and contour. There was more than one that he had studied extensively, and not only for the purpose of designing a model, as the book had called it.

He let his mouth hang loose, stretching it down like a yawn as he finally looked up again, pulling at the hard jaw bone and fleshy lips. What he saw there was a face that was somehow larger than his: fuller, happier, and more pronounced. His skin tone had evened into something soft and delicate, one shade darker than pale. His lips pouted and were painted, his cheeks flushed with fashionable pink; his eyes were larger, their lashes longer and darker. The golden-hazel glint of Roxanne’s eyes peered curiously back at him from within the strange, beautiful mask of a dead girl.

Roxanne’s face turned, and Victor examined the angles of her sharp chin, bouncing between left and right. The little gestures seemed to help the charade, but the mind behind it was having trouble fooling itself. Her eyes twitched. Her brow rose and fell and furrowed. Her lips pursed and flattened and smiled and frowned. When he finally faced her forward again, Victor paused to think of something she would do. She smiled at him before he realized that he was smiling too. It was one of her most memorable traits, refusing to be anything but amused with the world. He made her lips coy and restrained, then tossed her head in silent laughter. These were faces she had made when she was gambling, winning or losing, living for the moment, the fun in it.

When he tired of that moment, the act within an act, he realized that she still wore his dripping black hair. It clung stubbornly to his neck but seemed to curl like hers above the eyes, tinged with greedy magic. He ran his fingers through it, pulled it out longer, thicker, and wilder. Within a minute of frowning manipulation, it was the same length it had been when she’d had it cut off that night, the same length it had been when she refused to be afraid, and died for it.

Victor tried to remember what it looked like, or what it would have looked like. He recalled the way her feet tangled in the sheets, the gasp of confused surprise that had escaped from her lips, the blossom of blood and the little moan that followed. His djed happily fed him the memories, urgent and lucid, inviting him to embrace them, to use them. He experimented on her eyebrows, creasing them in the middle and then raising them up. Then he showed himself the whites in her eyes, and made her fine chin tremble.

A moment of doubt troubled him. It was no use. He could not even get the expression right, much less conjure up the emotion it would invoke. But he thought to inhale, and inspiring air rushed deep through her shuddering nose. He leaned forward, watching fright bloom on her face and waiting for it to sink in deeper; he opened his mouth, and remembered what she had said. Then, with a voice that was not his own, he muttered, “No... stop.”

[Victor Lark]

The voice he heard was neither Victor Lark’s nor that of the girl who had died a room away. He should have recognized it instantly, but he did not want to. He held onto that sound, that wad of djed in his throat, and spoke again. “Stop,” he told himself, and the consonants were softer, the syllables hanging from the subtle edge of a mumble. “This is wrong. She’s only an animal.”

Roxanne went pale, the golden hazel of her eyes washed with bloody red. Victor’s body stepped away from the mirror, startled by the sudden change, but in the dark depths of his awareness he knew what had happened, where his aimless djed had lead him. His mask began to match the inflections his throat had conjured; her jaw softened, her cheekbones shrank, and her eyebrows lost their color. His magic clawed wildly at his face as if outside of his control, but he accepted that it moved alongside his mind’s desires. He guided it along with his fingertips, pulling the face like paint onto his head.

He ran a hand through her short crop of hair, and it became the shaggy, oily mop that had hung from Seven’s scalp after that day. Then he shook both hands vigorously through it, so stripping the blackness into feathery white. The Lhavitian’s face was staring blankly back at him; as soon as he noticed, Victor twisted it into the hesitant incredulity that had met that fatal proposal. “This is wrong,” Seven repeated, shaking his head, but his trust and practicality drowned out his panic. Victor’s hands gripped the table in front of the mirror, lunging desperately. “You’re killing her!”

An idea came to him, so sudden it seemed to move him physically, as if it had been thrust upon him by some outside force. He obeyed it diligently, glancing away from his reflection if only to bring his hand up to his shoulder and push his nail into the flesh of his upper arm. From the soft keratin, bright red sprouted into an artificial wound, a mimicry of the damage they had dealt on Roxanne. It hurt as little as a scratch, and yet it glistened like a moist gash, covered in a sheen of blood that would not pour. He watched his skin open in the mirror, eyes like rubies dancing between it and Seven’s face. “Stop! She’s going to die!”

His hands began to shake; his breath came short; this time, he realized, the spasms could not be contained. They were outside of his control, like fear should be...

No. It was all wrong. Seven had suffered from superficial surprise before he had fallen into the embrace of anger; Roxanne had been more despairing than afraid. Neither of them had given him the expression he needed, to feel what he thought he had felt once, and so neither could show it to him in that mirror. It had been useless to try. He looked away from the mirror, at the world outside his mind, losing hope. But just as the tremors in his fingers began to subside, something pulled him back. He had been so close; how could he stop now? There had been one more face in that room, that night. He remembered it more clearly than anything else, now. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?

[Victor Lark]

It seemed his eyes had turned again before he had thought to change them—or maybe he had, and then forgotten. He was forgetting everything in timeless wanting, moving forward without looking back, turning through each moment with only thoughts for the next. From amethyst eyes sprouted pale, ashy skin, the thin bridge of a nose down to its pointed tip. Without his hands to guide it, the transformation was sporadic and sloppy, but still he tried to urge it with his mind alone. Calloused olive fingers held their stubborn grip against the table as the bloody illusion on his arm vanished into the meager muscle of his own tense flesh. Djed shrank from the rest of his body and focused on his face, his mask.

But effort was in vain, the outcome crude and misshapen. Victor’s knuckles were white when he released the table’s edge, and not for any trick of magic. Feeling raw, almost numb, he brought his fingers up and corrected his work, sculpting wet clay on numb bones. Urgent memories guided his hand, his life’s energy, and soon he wore the slender aspect of a false symenestra. He pulled gently on his hair, silvered it and lengthened it, and when he was done his hands were shaking again.

Laszlo flattened his lips over a slack jaw, but the surprise Victor remembered would not mount on those wisps of eyebrows, no matter he tried to bend them. He wrapped his hands around the table again, trying to prevent their tremors with sheer strength of will; only then did he notice how his chin was trembling, too. But Laszlo had not shuddered, only staggered and stared. The ethaefal’s distress was heavy, his fear sunk deep, whether he was Roxanne’s witness or Abalia’s protector. This was inelegant, but it was happening. Victor wondered again if this was his own fear, manifested the way it would on his own face, in his own heart. He needed to push on. He was almost there.

“Wh- what is this...” He dared to experiment, but from his throat emerged Seven’s voice, all wrong. Laszlo frowned, licked his lips, and cleared his throat to try again. The ecstasy of success filled Victor’s mind as his breath came shorter. He was on the verge, skirting the edge of that which he had dreamed for half a year... “What—”

But he could not stop shaking. He choked on his own words, watching Laszlo’s face fall flat and limp in the mirror before it warped into a moiety of paling olive and evaporating white, twisted by involuntary spasms. Victor’s heart was beating wildly; the table beneath him seized with him, so he released it, and lost his balance to the convulsions in his limbs. The ground caught him by the shoulders and tossed him up again, painting fresh bruises on a jerking, writhing body.

Victor did not feel fear, only a deep cold in his gut and an prickling numbness in his nose and fingertips. He tried to speak and heard his own voice gulp and gargle from his heaving throat. Then he heard the door open, and the shining inflection of a too familiar voice. He saw white hands and felt a warm lap beneath his head, and a string of muttering words which his ears could not hold. And slowly his muscles loosed, and his heart quieted, and the black comfort of sleep consumed him.

[Mirage]

The Truth Within the Reality Victor : XP Awarded Acting: 1 Impersonation: 3 Meditation: 2 Morphing: 4 Lores Awarded Acting from Memory Morphing: Faking Injuries The Truth Hidden by a Mirage : Great thread as always Victor. I managed to see justification for all of your requested skills, though I only gave you one point in acting because Victor spent most of is time impersinating. You did a good job in describing your morphing, and it was much easier to follow how Victor's desires were controling the action. All in all, excelent read. Please PM me if you have any concerns.