#corporate necromancer would sit next to me and start asking me about whatever i was doing | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sunriseoverastorea · 6 years

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Pen lies on her back, watching the liquid sky, heavy with crystalline stars and the inky blackness of night, shimmer and shiver above her. On this particular visit, she found a ridge, a strange sort of hill jutting sharply from the amber plains, and though it seemed to crane hundreds of feet into the cosmos, she reached the top after only a minute, or perhaps, even less. Rajya was waiting at the top, standing still as a statue, looking down over her domain. Empty and oppressively silent, yet the charr does not seem to be bothered. As if she doesn't even realize what's missing. Pen remembers what it felt like when Rajya was longing, for life, for freedom, for the sun—that is gone now. By bringing back the part of her soul that was missing, it seems that the charr has become less alive. More resigned. More of a ghost than a restless spirit.

“You think she will like the tale about the disgraced son?” Pen asks, stretching blue fingers into the stars, and stirring them, swirling them into a gale of icy dust. Rajya's ear twitches as she nods.

“Yes. Marea will like it very much. Adventure and dubious heroes were always her favorites.”

“Dubious heroes. Like Raigar and his crew.”

“I never met Raigar. But from what little Marea shared with me, I would not call him a hero. Not an evil man, but not someone who was placed on the earth to do good, either.”

“So, the son is a bit better than the people I know. Perhaps one of the Accord. They have a wild collection of personalities,” Pen chimes with a smile. She allows images of the Astralarium to trickle through her minds eye, sharing them once more with Rajya. The charr had not been present for the entire adventure—she missed the friendly librarians who let her take a book with her, and the journey back to the camp.

“They do. I enjoyed the Accord, in the brief time I spent on their grounds.”

Pen closes her eyes. She sees impossibly tall golden walls rise up around her on all sides, overflowing with ivy vines, the rushing of water in the distance mixing with the nearby chatter of two sylvari. White noise like candy, so delicate and pretty she could pluck it between her fingers and shape it into a bead, and that bead would fall into the passing stream, bobbing along through lush green valleys teeming with bio-luminescent flowers, until finally, hurling off the ridge of a water fall and connecting with the rocks below, the memory shatters, and she opens her eyes, sighing softly.

“Beautiful. The old headquarters. I was there a few times, myself. But it seems you saw a good deal more than me, Rajya. You, you felt more than me, if that makes sense.”

“It does. I had a knack for feeling things,” Rajya grumbles, pulling her cloak of coarse wool tighter over her shoulders. “Many said it was my greatest failing as a soldier.”

“Really? I thought the pacifism would be far worse.”

“Believe it or not, the feelings came first, and many, many years later, I defected from the legions,” Rajya says slowly, as if speaking to a newborn cub. Pen bites her lip in embarrassment, clearing her throat.

“Right, that does make sense! Well, I have said my stupid thing for the evening. You cannot be surprised at this point. Why don't we change the subject—Rajya, what do you know about revenants?”

“Next to nothing.” The charr's voice has grown cold all of a sudden. The air around Pen's head feels thicker, heavier. She sits up, reaching for a white furred shoulder.

“Wait, Rajya Sleekfur, do not leave me. I have more I wish to ask you! You were well learned in your time, and even if you had little chance to meet a revenant yourself, you must have heard something about them. I want to channel you, Rajya. When I fight. I already have my talents for guns and my highly inaccurate sense of proportion from you, and that has gone quite well, so imagine if I could directly channel your spirit in hand to hand combat? When I use my staff? You knew how to fight with one too, didn't you? You are so much more experienced than I. Allowing you to guide my movements would--”

“--I do not fight.” The answer is sharp and cutting, yellow eyes darting towards Pen's face behind an unpleasant snarl. “What part of 'pacifist' did you not understand, sapling? Twenty years in the home of my race's enemy? You have felt the things I have felt, and you dare to speak so foolishly. As if you are a bouncing baby tree that knows nothing but the Grove and Ventari's teachings.”

Pen shrinks back, withdrawing her hand, clutching it onto the fur around the collar of her coat. “Oh—yes. I, I am sorry. I get carried away, sometimes. I am not all Rajya, after all. I am Pen as well.”

She offers a reassuring smile, but the charr turns away. The charr fades away, melding with the evening shadows before her very eyes.

Pen has discovered that spirits are not quite like the living. They have moments, sometimes hours, even days, where they seem little different. Personalities and memories in a unique fleshy shell, who she can talk to, tell stories, hear advice, learn to cherish as she might a wise old mentor in the corporeal world of Tyria. But just as quickly, they turn on you. They run off, and no matter how long she searches, she can't find her constant companion. The charr has retreated to the Mists somewhere, to brood, or wander, or do whatever it is that moody ghosts do. And Pen feels strangely hollow.

In those hours when she is left alone, when she lies in the long amber grasses and watches the sky glitter and shift, she wonders who she is, who Pen Yfan really is, irreparably altered by a soul far stronger than her own. Would she recognize herself without Rajya in her head? Would she still be a Dreamer? Would she still indulge herself with savory meats, still get lost in the methodical machinery of rifles, still love the tortured land of Ascalon, that she feels far closer to than the Pale Tree herself?

She digs her hands into the dirt. Such questions are dangerous. Fleeting, irrelevant. She is the only Pen Yfan that exists, and ever will exist. Hypotheticals make no difference. Many doors are closed to her, but far more have been opened.

Marea tells herself something similar. She sits very still on a hard wooden chair in the infirmary, the crew's questionable doctor tending to her wound from the previous evening. She took a giant metal pinwheel to the head, and now she grits her teeth and clenches her fists as necromantic tendrils weave through her crushed ear, pulling cartilage back into place. The sound it makes is grisly, wet, sinewy snapping, but through the disgusting melange she begins to hear the birds more clearly, chipperly chittering atop a building across the courtyard. Her eyes flit upward. The birds are small, blue, all standing in a line at the edge of the stone roof. As if watching her, an exhibit on display.

After only a few minutes, the doctor wraps a bandage around her head, and instructs her to wear it just like this for the next three days, after which her ear will have healed properly, good as new. She gets to her feet and strides away without a word of thanks, starting across a long rope bridge to another part of the canyon. It's amazing what magic can do, she thinks, her own insufficiency foremost in her mind. Necromancers can rebuild tiny, minute bones in only fifteen minutes. At least, some can. Not her, never her, the barest minimum of power is all that will grace her since she lost her old focus.

She comes upon a small outcrop in the cliff wall, outfitted with a table and chairs, of once noble make but since scuffed and worn down to better suit their ramshackle home. She sits down in one, kicks her feet up on the table. And finally allows herself to smile. The night before was thrilling—explosions, placed and set off by none other than herself, roving golems and plenty of tech abandoned for the crew to plunder. She lives for the excitement, for the brutality, of a fight for her life. The golem was an unfair match, but even with falling on her ass in the mud and getting whapped upside the head, she can't wait to do the whole thing all over again. In another place, with different dangers, and even better rewards.

Her manic desire for destruction is something she knows to be troubling—it does not bother her, but it takes little sense to put two and two together. That her full embrace of what she considers human nature is what leads to her downfall, over and over again. But so far, since the chilly evening when she spoke to Raigar in the Priory encampment at Fortune's Vale, she has held to her promise. That she would become Marea the Woman, and leave behind the Girl. Leave behind the wanton carelessness. Leave behind the failure.

What constitutes a woman is still to be determined. On the whole, she feels unchanged. She still eats sugary sweets by the dozen, laughs at inappropriate times and becomes needy and jealous when ignored by her captain and best friend. But at the same time, she feels a sense of calm. Something is keeping her grounded. Allowing her to toe the fine line between too much of herself, and just enough. Perhaps she is truly growing up. Maybe she can change. Perhaps it's like Rajya said—all beings, great and small, are capable of changing, of becoming better versions of themselves.

Or perhaps there is disaster lying in wait, just around the corner. After all, life never stays quiet for long. But for now, Marea is content. She tucks her arms behind her head, gazing out over the craggy cliffs, squinting at the hard slate blue of the sky. A sight she has seen in her dreams, for as long as she can remember. Home. For now, she will stay. Live. Work hard and prosper like any average sky pirate might. She will make the most of her time, before the ugly, snarling head of human nature returns to the forefront once more, and plunges her life into chaos.

With a sinking feeling her chest, she wishes that the afternoon would never end.

#rp post #marea the silent #pen yfan #rajya sleekfur

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