[J] Ankou :: Spirit Guide

[A Wandering Esper]

The Lost Memory

 

[A Wandering Esper]

Awaken, Spirit Sleeper  

[A Wandering Esper]

Homeward Bound

 

[A Wandering Esper]

Home Sweet Home

 

[A Wandering Esper]

...Surprise ?

 

[A Wandering Esper]

A New Journey

 

[A Wandering Esper]

Stars and Moons and Endless Dunes

 

[A Wandering Esper]

Mirage

 

[A Wandering Esper]

Searching

 

[A Wandering Esper]

Birnam on the Sea

 

[A Wandering Esper]

Falling Under

Just a moment.

He needed

Just.

A.

Moment.

A blink of an eye, the flutter of a breath. The souls continued, unable to turn back now even if they wanted to do so, down down down until they reached the Underworld. Ankou, for his part, more or less drifted aimlessly before he seemed to finally realize what had just happened, and where he was. It was only then that he did stabilize himself. The Spirit Guide did not follow the souls who continued to fall past him, some still seething, some having finally gotten the sense that they had been bested and that resisting any further was futile. He remained right where he was, suspended in what was essentially nothing. It was not quite a place and certainly did not exist in the traditional sense of the world, but if Ankou had one place to call his own, one place to call home, the soul paths were that.

This place was, of course, harsh and remorseless to those who were not it's master. To pull a mortal down there would most likely seal that mortal's fate, eroding the body until only the soul remained intact and whole. He was uncertain how another god might fare, even. They certainly would get lost extremely quickly, at any rate. For those still yet held back by their host's mortality... Well, he had no inclination to figure that out unless there was truly no other choice.

More ghosts passed him by, but with his presence gone from Above, the downpour lessened to a trickle, and then finally ended, bringing with it...

Silence.

He had not known silence, had not had his mind sorely to himself ever since coming to Daelyth... No, before even then. He had not truly had his mind to himself ever since he had re-acquired Gungnir, since the part of him hidden away in the spear had more or less forced his way back into him. That was when the voices had started coming from far away, that was when he started to be completely unable to block them out of his consciousness if he needed to do so. Two months where there had been some presence talking to him, reaching at his consciousness, trying to catch his attention. There had been more quiets moments, and there had been literal mental storms, but never once had there truly been silence.

It would have been enough to draw a mortal oracle to madness, to shatter their mind completely and utterly under the strain of the constant and sometimes violent calls. The mental stress had left it's toll on him, even – when the voices faded away and left not a sound behind, the Spirit Guide was confused for a moment, before he remembered that this was what silence felt like.

Once, he had told Endiovar that he doubted they had known each other before the fading. Silence had seemed unconvinced, and even he was not so certain now. What little he remembered was indicative that they had at least known each other, and right now, at this very moment, suspended into an endless sea of ever-shifting shadows... He could understand why.

Now, through, there was nothing to cling to. And with nothing to keep him awake, with exhaustion running bone deep, So he simply let the darkness slide it's way in...

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He did not know for how long he did sleep, drifting aimlessly in the soul path. All he knew what that he had, in fact, passed out, and slowly, ever so slowly, awareness and coherent thought was returning to him.

And the silence, the emptiness, was still there.

Ankou closed his eyes once more, and let out a breath that felt like he had been holding all this time. To have his own powers, his very self, his very core flicker back and forth from him, as if sliding in between his fingers whenever he did try to catch it, had not only been embarrassing, but utterly and completely frustrating. He had not felt this way since he had been half-mortal, himself, and had actually forgotten what this frustration felt like, nearly tangible in it's intensity. In a way this was even worse, if only because he was not supposed to be struggling, anymore.

Perhaps it would be good for him not to forget this. To remember what it was like to struggle, what it was like to be small and contained.

No, he decided. He would remember, this time around.

But there, in the silence, in the darkness, he could think again. Think, and figure out what exactly he had overlooked. This was obviously something Gungnir had done to him – something his past essence was doing to him. There had been no issues before that moment, where memories had assaulted his mind and things deep within had started to pull and trash and shift.

In retrospect, it would seem obvious. What was different in between the him from before and the him from now ? Plenty of things, when he finally stopped to think about it. Many things were the same, but so many things were different. The Guide of old had power as bright and strong as a star, and in the end had eroded, fallen apart, and fell just like one – discarded and forgotten.

The new Spirit Guide had started small, so utterly small – a cold, rectangular jewel that had once been carefully held in Destruction's claws, balancing somewhere in between life and death until that very gem, that cold essence, had been forced onto a mortal by the will of his most loyal servant. Adrian, while unwilling at best and utterly broken by Gehenna at his worst, had ended up teaching him many more things that the fire mage might have hoped he could have done.

But in what was inevitable no matter the outcome, success or failure, Adrian gave in, and Ankou emerged – nothing but a youngling, newly born, in the face of the potential end of everything. He had no choice then but to learn, to adapt to survive, to push his still limited mana so thin at time that it would be the first to admit that was dangerous folly. This really was the time he needed to remember, the struggles he needed to commit to memory forever. Ankou needed to remember everything – the good, and the bad, because it was that everything that made him who he was now.

Shedding that mortality completely had come with it's relief, but it had also come with it's own set of pitfalls. The risk to repeat previous mistakes, and to forget, most important of all, where he had ultimately come from. He had not been born into strength this time around. He had to earn it.

The Guide of Old had proclaimed that the world would know him, but had failed miserably. Ankou had proclaimed nothing, but had succeeded where he had once failed. Mortals knew him now. Even if they did not have a name for him... They knew who he was, and what he had to do.

Now, a foreign, unknown element had been introduced into that new being that he was – powerful in sheer power and ancient beyond mortal understanding, but weak and brittle in it's own way. It was time to make the two different part a true whole again.

But that would require more strength than he currently had. That much was evident.

Slowly, carefully, he opened his mind to the voices again. Every soul who called for release, and at that very moment, he was certain, he could hear them all, each and every one of them that wandered all of Creation.

But the voices were not only the dead, no – he opened his mind to all of them. To the two valkyries he had left to the safety of the pantheon, to the two aoidei who guided their steps. To the mortals of the pantheon who knew him, had seen him. To the oracles who prayed, without knowing exactly who they were praying to, but would know eventually, would name him sooner or later.

The Spirit Guide reached out for those voices, that infinite crescendo of the dead and the living. He found strength in those voices, and took just a bit – just a little bit – from all of them. He listened to their faith, their devotion, their prayers, and made it a part of him.

Like the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis, it was time to break away from his own cocoon. The pressure was hard now, painful to bear, like something that had been shoved into a container much too small to contain it.

When he let go, however, the pain and the pressure vanished, which caught him off-guard. Ankou was so used to the near-agony of the previous two changes that, for a moment, he started to think that nothing had happened. But that was very clearly not the case. The power coursed, pulsed through him, expended on the base that was already there and changed it as it was needed. It became obvious, as it happened, that the worn and tattered robes he was wearing became ill-fitting – not enough so that he could not wear them, as they had been rather loose to begin with to allow for air circulation, but definitively awkward.

Mostly, it was the wings. They remained slender and lithe, but gained in bulk, growing thicker with stronger, longer feathers covering the new growth nearly instantaneously. The blue glow from the base of his wings started to spread, growing in intensity and covering, flickering like soulflames and lightning the previously dark paths with bright blue.

He paused then, finally opening his eyes again – a piercing yellow that seemed to glow just as surely as his feathers did.

Just a moment. Just a little bit longer. And suddenly, everything... was right. There was no other way to explain it.

Then those three pairs of wings flexed, lifting him upward with ease. It was certainly time to go back, before Cosine started to worry, or that Glyph had Xun Jiang dig a hole to try to find him. Whatever silly thing they might actually attempt.

The thought, oddly enough, made him smile.  

[A Wandering Esper]

Birnam On The Sea, Part 2

 

[A Wandering Esper]

Fehlari Ruins

 

[A Wandering Esper]

Epilogue  

[A Wandering Esper]

Hide And Seek