30th Day of Summer in the 514th Year After the Valterrain
Noon in the Prairie
Noon in the Prairie
It was his birthday. His death-day? His undeath-day? It was the one year anniversary of his descent into undeath and the cementing of his fate in the hands of Uldr. He had spent a year struggling to come to terms with the slow, disturbing degradation of his body as well as the loss of empathy he barely felt anymore. He had spent a year losing his humanity.
The corpse walked through a prairie.
Pandaemus carried with him the dysfunctional carcass of his latest ambitious attempt at a golem. It had failed. The directives had been flawed. Pan had done the entire project sloppily. The repetitive animations of the past season under Cid’s tutelage had numbed his mind to a certain degree. The apprentice had slipped up. Now the evidence must be destroyed. As he has exited the Citadel Pan had decided that instead of simply dropping the failed construct in the Prairie he would banish it to the void. It was a good excuse to practice his voiding, he had been neglecting the secondary art in favor of animation. But a true wizard expanded their entire knowledge-base.
“I am a true wizard.” Pan rasped, his voice hoarse from lack of use, and death. The words were frail and pathetic compared to the dark reality of Sahova. The overpowering majesty of it’s deathly power and mystery. A true wizard. True wizards walked the halls of Sahova, cold and eternal in their shrouds of dark knowledge. But he was not one of them.
Yet.
He found a patch of bare earth dried hard and flat after a summer rain. This would do. Pan unsheathed the kris from his belt. He had purchased the weapon on a whim, needing a tool to cut wood for some project. It had worked well enough, but the Nuit had used the project as an excuse to arm himself. It was naive, it was stupid. He was neither physically capable nor proficient enough to defend himself from most threats with the weapon. But it did have a few uses, and it was rather well forged.
Pan watched the sunlight shift across the wavy steel of the blade, sliding almost like liquid over the mirror edge. He knelt, not very gracefully. The tip of the kris began to draw a fine line in the dirt. The blade sired and the dirt was shifted to form a spiral, Pan’s focus glyph and the beginning of an solid glyphing. It was a bit wobbled, but he was satisfied.
The Nuit began to systematically create lines of diamond shaped glyphs, his Pathways, in a cross coming from the Focus. Then he finished forming an outer circle with Barrier glyphs. The end result was not very impressive, but he assessed it would get the job done. The glyph he had scratched in the dried dirt was about three handbreadths wide, quite ambitious for a someone so new to the art.
Glyphing had been a positive that had come out of Pan’s first meeting with Annalisa Marin. She had taught him a bit of glyphing, and in exchange he had explained the rudiments of animation to her. She had intimidated Pan pretty easily, being a far superior wizard. But the exchange had been beneficial to the Nuit on the whole. The glyphing had severely streamlined his animations and on a few instances, stabilized his void portals. He was, however, far from proficient.
As they said, practice makes perfect.
Pan closed his eyes, trying with all his willpower to meditate on the idea of complete emptiness. He felt the blackness in his mind and imagined it was empty of all things. The dirt and the tall yellowing grass of the Prairie were swept away. The Prairie itself diminished to nothing, taking with it the pack of Gibbat dogs barking off in the distance. Even the barks were gone, the air that they moved through sucked away. The particles of dust that drifted past his breathless mouth vanished. Void. Nothing. An emptiness that held only intimidation and danger. The intangibles that flanked all unknowns. The void was the nexus of the unknown.
