Flashback Ruins of Nial, a Certain Time in History (Shouta)

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While Sylira is by far the most civilized region of Mizahar, countless surprises and encounters await the traveler in its rural wilderness. Called the Wildlands, Syliran's wilderness is comprised of gradual rolling hills in the south that become deep wilderness in the north. Ruins abound throughout the wildlands, and only the well-marked roads are safe.

Ruins of Nial, a Certain Time in History (Shouta)

Postby Evalin on November 30th, 2013, 2:53 am

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50th of Spring, 466 AV

Ruins of Nial, Afternoon

A tick of the clock, a ring of another bell passing, such things were important to those who cared for the passage of time. It was an all consuming concept, a thing that could not be ignored. It was the great dictator of the world as they knew it, the father of all things, the bringer of life and death. For ever tick that passed by another chance, a moment, was lost to the void, never to be seen again. it was a gloomy, wretched thought that would haunt many of the mortals in this world. For those who lived not by the clock though, it was just an amusing fantasy, for how ridiculous must it be to live by the second when there is no end in site for centuries to come.

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In a strange twist of that force known as Fate, the child that would seek to sever all ties with this godly entity found herself once more enraptured by his powerful hands at work. Pressed upon her was this urge to move, to travel and seek for... Something that she held not in her possession. What was this? Some item or trinket? A thought of knowledge or lust for power? She could never be certain, never certain of anything but of that longing she felt within her. That longing and a burning hatred for he that would control her destiny.

Thus she walked now, among ruins long since begun their collection of dust, eyes looking but not really seeing that which was around her. She was cloaked and hooded, the darkness hiding her face, while in hand she carried an intricately carved staff. She almost seemed to wander, taking no heed of when or where she was, or bothering to look up from her path save to spy an interest or two.

"Once more I find myself in some wretched place along some unknown path to who knows where... Such is the life I have reaped it seems, though surely I deserve better." She mumbled to herself, picking her way through the debris and scattered remains of houses, "Yet still it seems I shall not find peace just yet... No, still far too much to be done. Too much to..." She frowned and paused, looking up at the afternoon sky, a scowl upon her lips, "Much to do, yet somehow I know not what I SHOULD do. Tis a shame... I suspect that there is a path for me, somewhere hence, yet find it I cannot. Now then what to do..."

Evalin looked back the way she had come and snorted, "Never again shall I return to that horrid place. The trees were too high, the creatures too big, and the apes far too ignorant of their own futility. Let them burn in the fires created by me when the world is reborn anew."

She nodded and looked forward once more, stepping to keep pace as she had before.

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Wretched Aura: As a Wretched One Evalin possesses an unnatural aura about her that causes unease in those who get too close. It can come as a prickle of the hair on the back of the neck, a sense of 'wrongness' about her. How people experience it is different depending on their personality and how they handle the unnatural and unknown. Animals tend to become more agitated, more easily sensing how wrong Evalin is and often avoiding contact with her.
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Ruins of Nial, a Certain Time in History (Shouta)

Postby Shouta on November 30th, 2013, 7:32 pm

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The shattered past was just beyond reality here. A sundered pride of the people who came before lay strewn all around him. Shouta walked through the ruins, apprehensive of what he had stumbled upon. The Vanthan eyes gazed about him, betraying the perpetual grief that plagued the man. Though his was less than the grief that clung to this place. He stepped over a fallen keystone, the nexus of some arch that had long ago became rubble and home to the mossy life of the forest floor.

Caiyha had truly reclaimed this place after it’s breaking. Plants covered much of the ruins. Shouta’s worn boots pressed down firmly upon grass and small trees reaching for the light Syna provided. He found himself falling into a reflective state, walking through this glory of the past, now forgotten. It was like him.

A once proud creature now forgotten and abandoned in the wild chaos that had seeped into the lifeblood of Mizahar. Shouta was not sure how he had survived so long. But he had. There must be something worth surviving for. That was why he was wandering the wild lands. The Ethaefal searched for a purpose to rival those of his glorious past… Or at least he assumed it was a glorious past.

His aimless ambling was supposed to lead him to a city, Zeltiva he knew it as. But instead he had made an error somewhere along the way and found this grave. He took it as a sign. You cannot run from your past.

”Such is the life I have reaped it seems, though surely I deserve better…” The words danced through the old stones and newer trees with an unnatural edge to them. Shouta’s ears perked to the sound. A ghost come to torment he who had desecrated it’s resting place? Bandits making a home in the only shelter they could find? The voice kept speaking, and for some reason, Shouta followed the sound.

He rounded a pillar of stone to find a slope lead down into another shallow valley riddled with the carcasses of old buildings. But here there was life. A woman, small and hard to make out, walked briskly through the dead city. She had been speaking.

Relief. Another living soul to share existence with for a while. After the fear of ghosts it was a welcome sight to see even a potential bandit queen. Shouta stood straight and waved. “Good day! Good day lady of the forest. Do you wander alone through the rubble as well?” the Vanthan made his was less than carefully down the leaf riddled slope to catch up to her.

He placed a smile on his face to endear. Such acquaintances were always important. When two people met in the middle of a land where they were probably the only two for leagues, it was fate. “I am Shouta, pleased to meet you.”
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Ruins of Nial, a Certain Time in History (Shouta)

Postby Evalin on November 30th, 2013, 8:01 pm

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A disturbance that could go no ignored broke the silent peace that Evalin had enjoyed, though truly she could not say she enjoyed any such things that arose from her current travels. Turning to look up at the sudden appearance of another existence, her eyes gleaming red beneath a hood that cast shadows on her features. So it was a man, a strange man who deemed it safe to approach any stranger that chanced upon his path it seemed. Still, strange and unexpected though it was it was at least a relief from the creeping boredom that came with traveling long roads alone.

Perhaps now I might find more conversation than I would with simply myself. A lonely life I live, a wretched life of freedom that is, in its own way, a prison from which I cannot escape.

Turning around fully as the man approached Evalin slowly lowered her hood, dark hair falling out to frame her face. Her skin was pale, ashen even, and looked as though it had seen no sun in ages past. Hair was long and tangled knots of black raven, patches of the darkest sky which had been scythed from the peak of some moonless midnight to rest upon the head of a girl who could be no older than 20. A thin frame, sunken cheeks, a mask that bore no expression and eyes that looked out, though they were dead and did not quite look at anything. But oh those eyes, eyes of red like freshly spilt blood, though they seem distant and cold a spark of light, a fire within, a hunger, a lust, faintly masked by the fixed expression that death does bring to a corpse, tough it walk as a living man.

Leaning upon her staff, fingers thin as bone and just as white wrapped about the wood, embracing it for support and for security. Her eyes wandered up and down this man who suddenly approached. Hair like the remains of some wilderness flame, skin near as pale as her own, though without the tint of death and corpse. It was a young face, very young, and skin smooth near perfect that Evalin could not help a lingering trace of hunger to bubble to the surface of her mind as she looked at this picture of beauty sheathed in the clothing of a man.

He was quick to introduce himself, something Evalin found quite amusing as she simply stared at him with her cold eyes, thinking of what way to best answer, but with a slowly creeping smile, one not quite so pleasant, Evalin spoke softly in hushed tones as if she did not wish to disturb the spirits of the past with her words, "How curious you are to approach and call out for me when so many seek to escape my clutches. I wonder if you are brave, or simply foolish, for no man may speak with Death in such easy tones and think he might escape with his breath."

Evalin always found it amusing to present herself as this, a mask of death, a walking corpse and so she certainly was. She was a stragne enigma, an impossible sight. The mark left upon her by the God of Undeath gave her an otherworldly feel, that odd sensation that courses up the spine as unease and dread fill the soul. It was with the eagerness of a child that Evalin watched for this, wondered how the boy reacted. Faced with one who claimed to be death even as that foreboding came creeping upon his skin. Though it was not truly a lie for indeed Evalin was dead, as were all of her kind. Still... An immortal has little she can claim to be fun in her endless life, thus what joy she could find had to be taken at another's expense.

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Wretched Aura: As a Wretched One Evalin possesses an unnatural aura about her that causes unease in those who get too close. It can come as a prickle of the hair on the back of the neck, a sense of 'wrongness' about her. How people experience it is different depending on their personality and how they handle the unnatural and unknown. Animals tend to become more agitated, more easily sensing how wrong Evalin is and often avoiding contact with her.
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Ruins of Nial, a Certain Time in History (Shouta)

Postby Shouta on November 30th, 2013, 11:00 pm

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This woman was not what he had perceived. She was pale and sickly where he had imagined beauty and naivety. She was cold and intimidating where he was warm and charming. She was the oil to his water. And she called herself Death. Shouta’s newfound anxiety tickled his nerve as he searched for a response. The beautiful Ethaefal’s smile cracked. Was she going to kill him? Or worse?

“If you truly are the macabre visage of death, then still I bid you good day. As for me, I am too caught up in the woes of life to worry for the release of death. We are, I’m thinking, the only ones alive in all this corpse of a city. Our meeting was fated.” Shouta’s words were hard to push out with such an intimidating figure looming next to him. “But I would think that death was all done with this place…”

Shouta stepped away and looked around at the dead ruins. He was careful to keep her in view, and at a distance. That was only a small comfort though. Personages like her seemed to have other vile means of harm, especially those who claimed to herald death’s ending touch.

Syna shined down from her journey across the sky and her radiance broke through the canopy of trees. Golden light fell like a veil between the two, bringing the ground between them into bright detail. The stones of Nial still seemed without hope, even under the light of the goddess. In all the forest, it seemed the only thing to move was the pair. Shouta was searching for words to break the tension, a way to escape the threat before him.

“What is this place? Do you know?” His mind raced with the possibilities. She had been here of all places, as had he. Was there a reason he was not seeing? “Are you the last shadow of this city’s past, still walking these faded roads in search of your vengeance? A ghost of the dead glories of the past? Have you come to seek the breath of life once again?” The questions came to him and spilled from him as quickly and uncontrollably as the fear itself. Their substance as liquid and unalterable as the anxiety that drove them. Shouta could not have stopped such things if he had the nerve to.

He waited expectantly for the woman’s answer. He could only hope it was a verbal one.

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Ruins of Nial, a Certain Time in History (Shouta)

Postby Evalin on December 1st, 2013, 12:02 am

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Evalin's expression darkened upon the name of her greatest enemy used, "Watch those words boy," she spat with distaste, "It is I that guides my own path, not the hands of that cursed Fate."

Letting the fires of hatred die down the Immortal quickly looked away, eyeing the world around her as one might eye something that was beneath one's notice, something lowly, unimportant, for surely it was. This place was gone, buried by time and scorched by the presence of death. It was a relic of the past that was no more and could not have an influence on the workings of today.

Leaning on her staff her eyes fell back to the boy, Shouta, and she searched to hold his gaze for but a moment to answer, "Be a visage I am, and surely boy you know the truth. Death is never done when even a single living soul still be strolling about this plane of existence. Though she may hide from site, at the edges of vision, a mere whispered breath of warning that bites the nape of the neck, she is there. Death can never be escaped, and neither shall she be gone until there is no-one-left-alive." She punctuated each word carefully, eyeing Shouta with interest as she did.

Letting her eyes then wander to the world once more Evalin absently waved a hand, eyes growing bored as she once more lost interest in the surroundings, "A place once left over by the great Alahean empire, or so the tale goes." His questions brought an amused smirk to the girl's cold pale lips, and she raised an eyebrow as she glanced back at him from where she stood, "Curious are you of the purpose I am here? As I had said before, Death shall always remain when even a single living soul lingers." She turned, lifting her staff and walking slowly toward Shouta, "You ask of me, who I am though I have told you have I not? Wish you not to know the truth of it? Care for you not to know the cold reality..." Then she moved, faster than an eye could track, faster than should be possible for such a body as hers. In a tick she was before Shouta, the gaping distance between them nothing but a memory as she now stared up into his eyes, and a single hand reached to stroke gently against his cheek, "Perhaps it is your time..."

She smiled and laughed, pulling back and taking a pace or two to give the boy room to brood as before. Still chuckling, amusement lighting her expression and voice, Evalin made to circle the boy, the clack of her staff on the stones echoing eerily despite the afternoon light, "Seek you to mark me as a figment of imagination, a thing of the past, a relic of this place so as not to give unto me the power you even now suspect I have? My my, brave or foolish you be, to dis-empower Death's hold upon you."

Shaking her head she chuckled again, pressing a finger to her temple and running it down over her cheek before looking to Shouta once more, "Though be you not afraid, for this day is not your day boy. What am I you ask? Who am I? I am face of vengeance, she who will defy the greatest cruelty of the world. I herald many a name over many a region. I am she who severs bonds, I am known as the Contractor, the Sorceress of Flame and Shadow. I am the Darkness between the stars and the All Consuming Flame. Who am I you ask?" She stopped and turned, raising her staff over her head before slamming it down. Flames erupted from the tip, arching in a circle around her body before quickly dying down, though not before the girl smiled and proclaimed, "I am the Immortal Witch Evalin, she who will sever the hands of Fate to tear this world asunder, level it to ash so that it might be rebuilt anew."

With a flourished movement Evalin dipped at the waste, her robes rustling as she offered the man the slightest bow, extending her arms to her side in exaggerated professionalism, "And the pleasure is my dear Shouta, the boy who waves greetings to Death."

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Wretched Aura: As a Wretched One Evalin possesses an unnatural aura about her that causes unease in those who get too close. It can come as a prickle of the hair on the back of the neck, a sense of 'wrongness' about her. How people experience it is different depending on their personality and how they handle the unnatural and unknown. Animals tend to become more agitated, more easily sensing how wrong Evalin is and often avoiding contact with her.
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Evalin
The Immortal Witch
 
Posts: 1220
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