Resurgence (Closed)

[The Thing In the Dark]

(OOC: this thread is closed and invite only, please PM or contact me before posting. thank you. )

***

Somewhere in the distance, water drips incessantly. The echo resonates in the silence of the cold, damp, darkness. A figure huddles on the rock-strewn floor, tattered rags pulled to it in a protectiveness seen only in the fetal position of babes. It’s breathing rises and falls almost imperceptibly…consciousness is but a fingers width away.

It opens its eyes.

…I cannot see…

This first impression sears into life. The Thing begins to huddle low, rolling slowly from its fetal position into a predatory crouch, that of some wild thing, hunting for something. The sleeves of its ill fitted robe drag on the floor, covering its hands, as bone and sinew crack into place as they begin to re-knit from years of deterioration.

The thing lifts its head, still cowled and deep-set in shadow, and appears to sniff the air: mold…mildew…decay…something dead somewhere…comforting scents in this unfamiliar darkness. The Thing has never been without sight. It decides that this is but one more test from The Master.

…ok…lets see if we can stand

As the form begins to unfurl into a standing position, Its mind swims and it collapses in a heap. Images flash before its minds eye:







The psyche that has been forming for the last few moments shatters in an instant. Spittle and other foul ichor begins to stream from the hood of the now hunched form.

Its shoulders begin to shudder as a dark giggle begins to escape the form.

The gibbering Thing begins to form a reality in which to exist.

Even if it is only in Its mind.

[Ransom]

The darkness felt soothing, comforting. A gentle companion to share and smooth away the aches of the newly formed figure.

He tried to remember how he came here, and just exactly where was here? Memories flooded back though only in part. Shattered fragments of past lives. Swirling mists in chaotic forests. Red eyes glowering under ebony horns. Entropic masses flowing all over each other. A muscular red figure emanating an aura of pure menace and threat seated atop throne of bones and ivory and ebony. Kneeling before the throne a figure of shifting ash and flames, runes of flame hemming a cloak of ash.

A swirl of brilliant, blinding blue flame and it was all gone.

He opened his eyes. Blazing blue eyes that literally glowed with an inner fire pierced the darkness. He looked down upon his new form.

Human....

He looked around,

Where am I? His voice echoed around the room, a rasping voice that sounded like the crackling of a flame.

He was seated in an obsidian throne atop a granite dais. A rather small room, circular. He must be in a tower, he thought to himself. There was a large full-length mirror across the room, encased in ebony and onyx. Aside from a black rug that ran from the edge of the dais to the end of the mirror it was the only concession to decoration in the room.

Indeed, it was one of the only things in the room for that matter. He looked around and couldn't even see a staircase or door exiting the room, merely a quartet of arrow-slit windows presumably each facing a cardinal compass direction.

He decided he might as well examine himself with the mirror. He rose on unsteady legs, and with increasing confidence crossed the room and stared at himself in the mirror. Brilliantly flaming blue eyes stared back at him from underneath a crop of silken black hair. A lean, lithe body was reflected in the mirror, pale and untouched by the sun. He looked down at his right arm as a spectral glow outlined a missing arm.

Just as he noticed the glow, similar glows began appearing around the room. He looked as each began to form into an ethereal human. One in particular stepped forward and knelt before him, holding out a dark grey cloak and robes that seemed to shift as the faint light hit them.
My master, we've been waiting for you. The figure said in a ghostly voice.

As the man clothed himself, confidence grew about him, in equal measure the darkness seemed to cloak him, lying about his shoulders in a powerful mantle.

He turned back to the mirror, now fully clothed, grey and black robes shifting like ash in the wind, hemmed in black with flaming runes just beginning to glow.

His name came back in a flash, and he spoke it aloud, relishing the power, and the awe of his ghostly servants.
Ransom. He said clenching his ethereal hand in a fist.

[DininDarkstar]

The searing pain rushed thru Dinin’s entire body as he opened his eyes,
His hands nothing but bone and chest and legs were melting off due to the extreme heat.
The pain was easily controlled due to the magma and heat burning the nerves off of his body.
“I know this place.. This is Pandemonium” Dinin exclaimed to himself as he broadened his view from his melting body to the scenery around.
As far as the eye could see was an ocean of magma with tiny isles floating around.. Pure chaos was erupting on these isles though.. Demons big and small dueling for a fate that would befall them all. This is where Demons went for punshiment..Known to many as the realm of “Forgotten Sorrows”, Pandemonium held the most gruesome and dangerous demons and beasts in the Realms.. All who dare oppose the Dark lord himself arrived here.
Dinin now nothing but complete skeleton stood aimlessly by himself looking over the edge of his floating platform to the 13 layers of Pandemonium
“My lord truly has forsaken me” Dinin thought to himself as the situation at hand fully set in. Trying to figure out how to fix the shit he was in Dinin’s skeletal frame paced back and forth on the platform.
Flames erupted from the ground and out of the smoke appeared another Demon,
9ft high and as broad as an old oak, his size was second to his horrific appearance.
Skin red as the fire it came out of and horns blacker than the depth of space.
Gleaming eyes of fire locked onto the skeleton that was in front of him.
“You have been forsaken by all Gods” The Demon stepped forward to Dinin and palmed Dinin’s skull as his bone structure crumbled away all that was left was the ethereal spirit and a pile of dust with a skull laying on the ground.
“This is why you are here before me. You are an Abomination,
Your judgment is Servitude” The Demons booming voice was dripping with distain and villainy as he merely pointed his finger at Dinin and sucked his Ethereal spirit into his hand leaving Dinin in a void of both time and space. The Nothing


“Walk the plane of existence once more..Carve away the facade and gut out the true chaos”

A rush of motion hit Dinin like being shot out of a catapult, Upon the moment when the rush stopped Dinin opened his eyes to find himself laying on an alter knife stuck in his stomach and him dressed in priest garbs.
“He coulda gave me a better body that for sure” Dinin thought to himself as he pulled out the knife and sat up on the alter examined the sanctuary he was in.
It was an eerie place lit with magical blue torches that illuminated 3 statues surrounding the alter Dinin was sitting on.
Each alter depicted a God.. Barnabas, Angelique, Leto. All of the statues seemed to be crying. Crying tears of blood down there faces as they stared sadly at the alter.
Dinin stands up off the alter to examine to walls to look for a false door, or someway out of this dismal room. Upon lifting his butt off the alter the stone tablet in which he was lay on depresses and sinks into itself. Giving a puzzled look Dinin leaned forward and looked down the hole that was once the top of the alter.
Dinin gets a great look at the 100ft drop to the bottom where there seems to be another well lit corridor before he hears the snapping of wood and the scrapping of rocks together below him. Given no time to react the alter and a 15ft circular stone base give out and begin to free fall tord the bottom of the pit.Dinin only began to smile as the platform came crashing into the bottom of the 100ft drop leaving Dinin covered in debri.

[The Thing In the Dark]

Days pass.

The Thing gibbers and twitches and tics in the dank, cold twilight. Enough light seeps through the entrance of the cavern, by day, to read the insane scrawlings on the floor and walls. Arcane and obscene sigils and signs cover the surfaces with maddening disorder. No rhyme or reason to the scribbles, but peering on them, The Thing makes sense of them as they tell the story of His coming. They sear into his mind, though to his eyes, there is nothing but blackness. The thing stands...its head cocked slightly to one side. Blood drips from the sleeves of it's cloak, from fingers stripped almost to the bone from etching the sigils to the rock.

it speaks.

'ng... 'ng... Twi'lkkn.
{listen...listen...heathens.}

The words seethe in a gutteral sound not heard since a time long in the past.

A searing light flashes before it's minds eye at the utterance of these glotteral sounds.

A ghostly figure in ashen robes...

...Ransom...

Life and power surge into the thing from somewhere.

It collapses again.

[Ransom]

A primal scream tore through the tower. It echoed so that it seemed to go on and on and on. The ghostly minions cowered in fright. Minions that would charge a god himself is their lord asked them too, cowered in fright from the echoing painful cry of their selfsame lord.

This lord who was currently kneeling on the floor, his head between his knees and his hands, both real and ethereal, raised protectively over his head, the life leeching from him.

Suddenly it cut off, as suddenly as it began, with unnatural quickness, even the echoes stopping, cut off in mid scream. The lord looked up with eyes wide, blood dripping down his face from them as though he had been crying red tears, which indeed he had been.

He slowly raised his spectral hand to his eyes glowing with fever. They shifted, now-blue now-red now-orange, as though burning with real flame. He turned the hand over slowly, examining it, feeling something out of place.

Almost of its own accord, the hand snapped into a fist and slammed down, as a word came to his lips.

P'ftgn, came a voice that was flame and ash, guttural. A voice that should not have been able to come from a human.
{Lord}

He rose, ashen garments swirling around him, the fiery runes on his hem flaring back to life with excitement, as if they changed with his very moods. He looked around for his servants, who were slowly floating back to examine their lord's sanity.

Come, our lord is risen. He needs our help.
With a brilliant flash of blue flame rising from the floor into a pillar the room was gone, replaced by a darkness so deep and profound it was almost suffocating. The flaming runes of his hem diminished and became almost nothing while the glow of the figure's eyes and hand, instead of illuminating, seemed to make the darkness only that much deeper by contrast.

He knelt suddenly more sensing the tattered figure than seeing it. He knelt by the thing and whispered with words more ethereal than vocal. P'ftgn, Lord. Your servant awaits you... Will you ride my power to the Forest of Yuggoth where its chaos will heal you and sooth your pain?

[The Thing In the Dark]

The thing looks around...the sigils carved into the naturally hewn rock around it, burn golden-yellow in the ebony of its blindness. Each symbol, unbeknownst to the Thing, is a clue to its lost memory. And still they burn.

Something nearby mutters unintelligable syllables. The thing knows what is nearby and knows that it will wait. Without seeing, the Thing in the robe looks upward

It focuses on a symbol on the ceiling...thinking the name recently remembered...It says the name again...

..Ransom...

The mad symbol, an eye inscribed inside a five pointed star, begins to burn brighter as the memory comes to life...

A damp, ill lit chamber with shadowy corners. The corners alive with formless, shapeless, menacing things...things sworn to the God. An oversized and menacing throne of ebony and bone, houses the form alien to the thing. It peers down on its form, for in the vision-memory, it can see. Slicked red skin stretches taught over muscle and sinew.

Seated to its right is a small elven figure. Black skinned and purple haired, a chill emenates from her frail form. A chill and power and malice...Kahlan.

To the things left is a huge human. Garbed in full field mail, the human's form is obscured and ensconced in unyielding metal...Hale.

Kneeling before the throne are two figures, face to the throne...on the right, blue eyes pierce from a shadowed cowel..Ransom.

To the left, red eyes glare from above a body housed in leather and blades...Dinin.

His four counselors...he remembers...

And the flash is over.

The Thing closes its sightless eyes and reaches out with the power flowing into it.

It chants names slowly...a mantra...as it slowly recedes from standing into a cross legged position on the floor. It is directly beneath the star and eye.

Laying its hands on the rough rock floor in front of it, the blood beginning to cake and dry on the sleeves hem, the chant continues.

...kahlan...ransom...dinin...hale.
kahlan...ransom...dinin...hale.
kahlan...ransom...dinin...hale.

...and it knows one has already answered the Call.