[Flashback] Finding the Void (Wrenmae)

[Seidaku]

Time stamp: 50th day of Winter, 507 A.V.

Kneeling on the floor of his small housing, Seidaku dipped a slender brush into a jar of black ink. Pausing for a moment to consider his next move, he stared at the complex circle of Glyphs radiating out from a single point of blackness the width of his palm. With slow, steady movements, he raised the brush again and delicately touched it to an angular twist near the extremity of the symbols. The change he made would be imperceptible to a casual observer, but it would make the channeling of Djed for his portals at least one percent more effective.

His modifications completed, Seidaku rose from his kneeling position and gathered up the brushes and ink. Before he did anything else, he would need to clean his supplies. As impatient as he was to start, he knew - from harsh experience, he thought, rubbing idly at a burn scar hidden by the sleeve of his shirt - that skipping on the details would only lead to disaster later on.

His brushes cleaned and put away, and the fresh ink placed upon the wall now dried, Seidaku sat down facing the wall, with his hands placed upon his knees, palms facing upward. It was time to begin.

[Wrenmae]

Tearing around the corner of two juxtaposed houses, Wrenmae almost tripped over himself in his hurry. As was beginning to be his habit, winter sapped the life out of his body and held him abed longer than he would have liked. Pushing a heavy coat over his body, Wrenmae had taken to the streets in a frenzied jog. People of every shape presented eerie obstacles along the winding roads of Alvadas, most that had a mind to see the city for what it was, to bask in its illusions. It was them the boy tried to avoid, throwing himself around a Jamoura and several black eyed desert people. Hopping from one foot to the other, he tried to gauge the distance between one wall to another, shortcuts seeming the only way he could get to his destination on time.

Stepping onto the side of a wall, he vaulted himself over the gap between the two streets and landed in a tumble, trying his best to tuck arms and legs close before ending unceremoniously in a heap outside a soup stand.

The cold air was a rich caress along his skin, every fiber of his body firing adrenaline even as he forced himself to slowly come out of his cramped position to lay upon the ground.

"Poisoner."

The name, familiar and hurtful, lanced his inherent excitement and deflated his glee. Scowling down at him, Bhanya Norrik, the soup stall owner, waved a dismissive hand hurriedly. "Well? Get up, Get up and go, I don't want you poisoning my customers!" Scrambling to his feet, Wrenmae apologized in a mumbled scattering of words and syllables. Pale faced, he found no mercy or hint of understanding in Bhanya's eyes...only a level glare of hatred and fear.

Both hands out, unarmed and not trying to cause trouble, Wrenmae backed away and turned down the road. The encounter haunted him the rest of the way to Seidaku's house. It poisoned his mood, his feelings, his energy, and so when he opened the door to the house of the man he worked for (at least for a few coin and to keep the place straightened up) it was quiet and without his usual excitement.

"I...I am sorry for being late," he mumbled, eyes on the ground "I overslept." The design on the ground drew his attention, and quietly he took up a position beside the scholar, interested in what he was working on.

[Seidaku]

He felt the first stirrings of a portal. A sense of emptiness in his mind that radiated outward to coalesce in the air in front of him. Tiny wisps of blackness began to flow upward from the Glyphs set into the floor and spiral around a point in the air. This was the defining moment, when his will and Djed pierced a hole through the world to the infinite blackness beneath. He reached out with his mind -

And then the door to his home opened, startling him out of his meditative calm and banishing the wisps of blackness like shadows at noon. He managed to avoid toppling over in surprise, but only barely. "Has it been a week already?," he asked, more to himself than to the boy.

"I...I am sorry for being late," Wrenmae mumbled, eyes on the ground "I overslept."

"Late? Oh, yes, well... don't do it again," Seidaku's chastisement was only half-hearted at best. After all, what did it matter if the boy was late, if he had not even remembered that he was supposed to have a visitor at all. "Do watch for the portal in a bit, though. You remember the dangers I spoke of, yes?"

He had no doubt that the boy did, of course. There had been no problems thus far, but one could never be too careful.

[Wrenmae]

Nodding his quiet agreement, Wrenmae pressed himself against the wall of the small house, watching the designs drawn by Seidaku. The man had initiated him...or rather, told him, of Voiding. The magical principle was a strange one, the kind of arcane oddity Wrenmae was particularly interested in. The idea there was another 'there' a sort of empty place used to store materials and anything else one might imagine was, in itself, intriguing.

While Seidaku maintained concentration on the portal in progress, Wrenmae tried to copy the swirls and shapes of the design with his finger in the dust around the room. The only possible positive in his abscence lately was the accumulation of dust in the house. Seidaku was the kind of scholar who might forget to eat if enraptured enough...so Wrenmae had found a willing teacher in the form of a man in need of cleaning...just to negate one other thing to bother his studies. In the dust, Wrenmae concentrated on the shapes and angles of the initial design, mimicking the curve and angled ends of each line as best he could. Of course with Seidaku over the symbol, sometimes he had to play guesswork. It was rude to ask the mage to move just on his account alone.

The symbols were similar to those he knew for Malediction, but profoundly different in both application and complexity. Malediction focused on circles as the main use of its spellwork while Voiding seemed to use all manner of both angles and circles.

Dashing his work, Wrenmae started again with slow designs, forcing himself to take care in his progress rather than hastily hope to complete a sufficient design with his minimal skill. After a moment, he looked up at Seidaku and spoke, quiet to avoid messing with his concentration.

"How did you stumble onto Voiding anyway, and why take such interest in it?" Seidaku had explained this before, but Wrenmae enjoyed the story, enjoyed the idea of people relating their history with wistful smiles and uncovered information.

Voiding was a principle he wanted to learn...knowing the background of importance in Seidaku's life would provide him with more insight on how to respect it. How to learn it...how to excel in it.

[Seidaku]

With his eyes closed, Seidaku concentrated on the flow of Djed around him and through him. The Glyphs on the floor surrounding him assisted with directing it in the direction he wanted, toward the seam between worlds. He could feel the Void, waiting just out of sight in his mind's eye.

Muttering to himself under his breath, he focused his will and reached out with his mind. Wisps of blackness swirled up from the Glyphs around him and began to coalesce in the air before him, weaving themselves into a thin line that seemed to rotate on itself into a swirling, perfectly black portal, barely wide enough to stick two thumbs together through.

He heard the boy's question shortly after the portal swirled into being. Letting his concentration lessen, he gave a satisfied nod to the portal now hovering before him. "My interest in the Void started well before I was able to look upon it directly," he said, oblivious to the fact that he may have told the story before, "I have always styled myself as a scholar of sorts. Unfortunately, as you may have noticed, Alvadas is somewhat lacking in that department, focused as it is on the arts."

"If you are persistent though, you can find books. Merchants, travelers, scholars, and best of all the Sunken Conundrum," he trailed off slightly at that, realizing that it had been week's since he had last visited the Conundrum. He would have to make it a point to visit tomorrow.

Realizing that he was wool gathering again, he gave himself a mental shake and continued, repeating, "If you are persistent, you can find books. The book that started me on my current path is called "Dreams of Oblivion", you have probably seen it on my mantle? I found it in a shop of second hand odds and ends, if you can believe it. Cast off like rubbish. It is all theory and conjecture, there are no rituals of course, but it was what set me on my path."

[Wrenmae]

Transfixed, Wrenmae stared into the tiny abyss whirling at Seidaku's fingertips. It did not so much turn as devour distance and perspective, like a constantly gnawing mouth drinking in the world around it. How cold it must be beyond the hole, beyond the understood limits of what was and what wasn't. For Wrenmae, Seidaku's art was something of a fascination. With symbols, focus, and Djed, one could punch a hole in empty air into a place beyond. Could the gods go there? Could they touch what lay beyond the void?

It didn't seem so, an eerie sort of affection for the realm of storage and shadows developing from such a notion. Still, although hypnotized by the nothingness, he followed the words Seidaku spoke with languid interest. Yes, books and lore were hard to find in the general sense around Alvadas. Most merchants brought baubles from faraway lands, more interested in the product of jewelry than knowledge. The disaster, the cataclysm, it destroyed the wellspring of knowledge and mocked scholars of the present with the loss of the past. Personally, Wrenmae had little experience with tomes or knowledge of these matters, but he found them interesting. At some point in time someone had deemed their story or ideas important enough to transcribe...and only some had survived. So in a way, they were immortal on the pages and now...sitting in the form of a book in Seidaku's possession they continued to teach.

Immortals.

"Seidaku," Wrenmae said after a moment, clearing his throat, "Would you...teach me how to open a void?" He followed it up immediately, speaking so fast one word threatened to swallow the other, "I simply was interested in the whole magic and concept and I thought if I asked you may not be opposed to at least showing me the basic principles and such of Voiding if you have the time and don't mind..." He immediately rethought the words, rephrased them a hundred different ways in his head. The silence between them grew for the moments following and for the briefest instant, Wrenmae stared at the small void wondering if his words had been swallowed whole by the blackness.

If it even hungered for voices.

[Seidaku]

For several seconds, Seidaku and the boy stared in silence at the perfect blackness of the portal. Left to his own devices, Seidaku would likely have sat there staring into the Void for hours more, lost in thought and smiling slightly to himself. That was not to be though, and Seidaku shook his head to clear it and blinked at the boy.

"I don't think," he said, flustered, "Umm, that is to say that... I am still learning, myself."

Of course, he thought to himself with a mental shrug, I will probably be learning for years, yet. And the boy only asked for the basics.

He thought back to his years of frustration trying to find a teacher himself. If he turned the boy away, he would be just another of those mages jealously guarding their secrets... those few he had. Besides, if he taught the boy the dangers, it was perfectly safe. And, if the boy was not safe, that was the sort of problem that would solve itself quickly enough.

With a quick shrug and a nod, he said, "I can teach you what I know. That should cover the basics, at least."

[Wrenmae]

Clapping his hands together, Wrenmae grinned. Like a stone emerging from placid waters, his grin stretched across his face, excitement dancing in his eyes. Of all the people in Alvadas, Seidaku was one of the few who would teach the boy...despite the rumors of his plague bearing. Taking a seat beside the inked symbols for Voiding, the storyteller sat in rapt attention. Every journey was about first steps and beginnings. One could hardly become a grandmaster at anything unless first beginning as a pupil, a novice mutterer, a neophyte.

The Void represented the pinnacle of something too transcendental to understand from first glance. There was a mysticism with it far removed from the more normal applications of Djed. Here, in secret, hidden behind doors and in the embrace of privacy too absolute to allow outsiders, Wrenmae would begin an initiation into a dark and infinite practice.

He spoke again, unsure if the first time was hidden by his other question or if even Seidaku didn't know the answer, still...the reason for the 'why' was almost the point of trying. Passion was within work, no matter how mundane, and without origin, how could one truly homage to the teacher or progenitor of practice?

"What truly drew your interest in the Void?"

[Seidaku]

At the boy's question, Seidaku's attention drifted back to the portal and a distracted smile bloomed on his face. When the silence had stretched long enough that it seemed that he would not be answering, he gave a small shake and blinked himself back into the moment.

"It's fascinating, isn't it? How could anyone not be fascinated?," he asked in reply, from his soft tone the question obviously rhetorical, "Perfect emptiness, stretching further than you can see... further than you can imagine. Even before I could reach out to it for myself, I was enraptured by the concept, the idea of it."

"Think about what forms the foundation of anything you know about magic," he said, oblivious to the fact that the boy was unlikely to have much of said foundation, "That Djed, energy, cannot be created or destroyed. That Djed is contained within everything."

Seidaku's words began to pick up speed until they were almost tripping on one another in his explaination, "Then how do you explain the Void? Beyond that, how do you explain us? If energy cannot be created, where did the energy that composes our universe come from? Far back, further back than I can even conceive of, there had to have been a point when energy, and eventually matter, came into being from Nothingness. That is what the Void represents. A vestige, a fragment of that primordial Nothingness."

He gave a breathy laugh as he turned his attention back to the boy, "How could I help but be fascinated by that?"

[Wrenmae]

All points come from a common origin. In the end, we are all connected. By philosophy and wishful thinking, Wrenmae had blindly wanted and assumed that everyone held some kinship to each other. Even the hulking Jamoura pushing their way curiously through the market were somehow irrevocably tied to even the lowliest human. It would help, of course, to know this branch of magic better...to understand its application to the world. From nothingness came everything? Did that mean to nothingness they would all return? For someone blessed...or perhaps cursed by Vayt's touch, the idea of being linked to another was something of an idle fantasy. Inevitably people grew sick around him, diseased, wasting away under his influence.

Through a point of understanding between an older man and this boy, Wrenmae had found a companion. Seidaku was a curious fellow, so encapsulated by his research that nothing else seemed to register. Even his illnesses were only passing obstacles to keep him from his magical advances.

Seidaku was a true scribe, a seer, a magicer of some illusive quality.

He did not belong in Alvadas, so thought Wrenmae, perhaps in some university studying practical magical application, but not a small house here.

"So the void is the empty bag we all fell out of," Wrenmae speculated with a rueful smile, "And you're interested in getting back in?"

Looking at the markings again, Wrenmae noted the similarities between Voiding and Malediction. Both used circles as points of origin, the continuity of eternity within the simplicity of shape.

Would that they all be circles, eternally channeling the mighty Djed within them all.

"What must I do to learn Voiding?" Wrenmae asked at last, retrieving the book Seidaku had mentioned from its place, holding it reverently. "Is anyone capable of using it...or is there some ritual to be learned first?"