[The Prairie] Voiding One's Mind

by **Pandaemus** on November 5th, 2013, 4:15 am

8th Day of Fall, 513 A.V.
The Prairie, Sahova.

The sky was dark and the chill air blew through him like an icy ghost. The cold touch of the weather neither hindered his giant nor his need to walk. Such things did not affect him the same as they had. It was his second night on Sahova. The nuits had seemed indifferent to his minor needs. In truth, they seemed indifferent to everything about him. He was neither interesting nor original here on the island of deathless genius.

It was different back in Zeltiva. He had thought his sleeplessness was due to the stress of eminent danger, but here he was not in such danger. Here at least his state of undeath was welcome. But the citadel was not enough to protect him from his own mind, and the lack of sleep was making his mind break. In an effort to stay sane he had decided to take a walk.

As his staff thudded against the dirt path he barely watched where his feet lead him. His mind was so preoccupied with Sahova, the nuits, the judgement, and his future to take in the eerie gauntness of the island. Trees nearby leant over the path and jagged branches seemed to be reaching for the walking corpse, though none really moved towards him.

His stepped lead him through the copse of trees and into a huge, open field. The grey of the grass around him swayed vaguely in the nocturnal mystery of darkness, and the stars shone brightly above. They danced and blinked at each other as if the whole world was a joke only they understood. If anyone could understand the world, it was the stars, or in the least the gods. But sometimes he wondered about that as well. With that silent spike of doubt in his mind he became paranoid. Uldr, mighty lord of the undead, I did not mean it. It was merely a fool’s stray mind abandoning him for a moment.

Pandaemus had been brought up in the company of the undead, and as such was taught to fear Uldr above all others. His loyalty to the god stretched back to his earliest memories. IT was a hazy strain of dark past that was mostly clouded with ugly, fearful rituals. But it stuck with him. Fear has a way of defining the life of that person it leeches onto. Terror was a parasite, and the hardest to rid oneself of.

The dark night sky felt unnaturally open after spending so long inside the stone bound citadel. Pandaemus felt the air swirl against his skin but he did not feel the tingle of living skin anymore. It was his skin, but it would decay. His body would continue to die around him, while his mind, his soul, lived on. He raised his hands and stared down at the skin that was grey in the moonlight. But the nuit new that his skin was grey anyway. The body had been dead for weeks now and was showing it.

Perhaps is he tired himself out he would be more ready for a restful night? If his body no longer needed sleep, and his mind was having trouble not getting any, then perhaps simply tiring himself out was the only option to please both aspects of his entity. But how? Surely he could not sprint through the testing grounds of the island. Simply being out here was almost too risky for the unexperienced wizard. He was a practitioner of magic! Of course he could tire himself out easily. The mage had not used the practice of voiding much, but he could make it a practice session as well as a desperate venture to ease his mind…

by **Pandaemus** on November 5th, 2013, 9:32 am

He began to focus. Every wizard found their own unique way of concentrating on their djed before magics. Thanadoros had taught Pandaemus to picture utter blackness when voiding. He forced his dead eyes closed, hands by his sides. The struggle was to empty his mind of distraction because voiding required an appreciation of the concept of the Void. Nothingness was a very hard idea to grasp when you thought about it. But He had done in multiple times before.

The blackness of his mind was accented with the familiar stirring in his body that signified the his concentration was working to gather his djed. He opened his eye and held out his hands. He stared at the empty space between them. But it was not truly empty, it had air and dust and occasionally a swirl of dirt from the ground in there, not like the voidness in his mind. He began to project the inky blackness of void in his mind into the space between his pale limbs. He felt the rush of something as his djed was expensed into the air. He started with an infinitesimally small black dot of nothingness. This was how he always started his voids.

The wizard grimaces with the effort. Using djed was truly a harrowing experience when not properly mastered. Pandaemus forced more djed into the void and began to spread it wider. The inky blackness was now the size of a miza. Right now, the weak pull of the tiny void was gently ushering dust and small particle into the void. His djed still quaked within him, but not in the dangerous way. Yet.

He poured more into the crafting of his inky disc of nothingness. The world was lost to him. All that was, was the door to nothing. It grew until it was nearly the size of a small plate. He could not move it, and he could not generate a larger pull. He had never really needed to use the voiding much under Thanadoros. But secretly he knew the real reason he hadn’t used it much was his fear of losing a finger. Well, now that his body was dead and he’d have to acquire a new one anyway, it was all relative. The danger was there, sure. But it was not nearly as serious as the prospect of death or maiming. After all, what was worse than being dead but conscious enough to watch yourself wither?

His reflection cost him the concentration needed to maintain the void. It blinked out of existence and he was left in the Prairie with a minor wave of fatigue shaking him. But it was only a minor thing. He could manage more practice. He needed more, for now that he had started he craved to understand more.

by **Pandaemus** on November 5th, 2013, 10:31 pm

The wizard began to void his mind again. The blackness came quicker this time, and the djed within him began to stir more violently. The dark waves of it scared him, like a stormy black sea. It had always scared him. Since the beginning the unnatural stirring of his djed caused a deep seated uneasiness within him that shook his very core. Nothing else, not even the crazed punishments of Thanadoros, could strike that sort of shakable fear. But it was a good thing. The fear was healthy, it kept him from underestimating the very real dangers involved.

He began to use the image of the void in his mind to create a real one between his outstretched arms. The djed was like the ink and the fuel at the same time. He pushed it out of him and into the gaping hole that was his void portal. The inky blackness was, at first, hard to see against the dark blacks and greys of the Sahovan night. But once it grew to the size of a miza its nothingness darkness was very different from the mundane darkness of the Sahovan landscape. Pan’s mind flitted to the pull of the void. He concentrated on the hole in the essence of the world.

Pandaemus felt the pull increase ever so slightly. It was not something he could detect by physical means. It was more a subtle tugging on his djed as it poured into the portal. If he did not concentrate on making the portal bigger, he found he could concentrate on increasing it’s pull.

The air went through the portal invisibly, though a bit faster than it had before. There was not an almost imperceptible current of air wheezing through it. He tried to make the portal bigger while still maintaining the slightly stronger pull. The effort took almost twice as much djed as normal and left the wizard shaken. He let the portal die out and dropped his arms. If he was alive, he would have been breathing hard and sweating. But he was dead, so he just looked up at the night sky.

The wizard felt worn out already. Any more would cause him to overgive most likely. Pandaemus turned and headed back the way he had come. There was definitely room to improve with his voiding, but he felt a breakthrough had been made this cold Sahovan night.