[GREAT] Awakening

[PepsiWhirda]

Awakening

"Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before."
- Edgar Allan Poe


Whirda Windstrom drifted through darkness.  Suspended in a realm without shape or form, her existence was bereft of sensation—at once weightless, sightless, and soundless.  Without any mechanism by which to measure the passage of time, the days—years, perhaps?—ran together in an interminable blur.  During this time, the voice of her mother found her.  And while Whirda could not hear, she listened.

Her mother’s voice intruded gently, coaxing Whirda to consciousness.  It began as a murmur—an incomprehensible ripple in the uniform void.  Words soon replaced murmurs, and the meaning of her mother’s message took shape. 

There is a world beyond this world, she told her child.  There is light beyond this darkness.  You can go there, she promised, if only you choose to awaken.

At first Whirda did not understand.  Her response was a silent outpouring of confusion.  To her enfeebled mind, the concept of another world eluded understanding. 

I cannot go, Whirda protested.  I am safe here.

Safe?  The word reverberated in the stillness.  You think yourself safe?  There is no safety in weakness, my child, only folly.  The only safety is the thrumming leylines of magic, the cold hilt of a sharp blade.  You knew those pleasures once, Whirda Windstrom.  You have become lost to the truth of power.

In its ravings, her mother’s voice became something different—something chilling and twisted.  Something familiar? Whirda wondered dimly.  She had not the time to pull on that spark of consciousness, withdrawing again as the insidious voice returned.

I am sorry, my child.  Having regained its composure, the voice once again sounded like an echo from Whirda’s distant past.  It is just that I cannot bear to see you in pain.

Like foul tentacles, the words pried and prodded at Whirda’s mental barriers, seeking a gap in her defenses.  Whirda withdrew further, disoriented by the intrusion and seeking the safe and familiar silence.  Somewhere in the tainted annals of her heart, though, she sensed tumult.  The discordance of spirit, the capitulation to baser urges she had fought so long to stifle rose, hot and bitter, like bile in her throat.

Yes, the voice intoned.  You feel it now, don’t you?  The primal truth of who you are.

Shaken from her stupor, Whirda recognized the voice to be that of Ahn’Thrix, the shade lich she had slain in the Pale Moors so long ago.  While she had ended the creature, Whirda had not escaped intact.  The shade’s foul dagger—the dagger she now held sheathed at her hip—had infected her with a contagion, turning her interminably into the very abomination she had cut down in the chambers beneath the mountain.  This experience, it seemed, represented the advanced stages of the disease, Whirda’s last chance to shake free from the transformation.

From that chilling realization, Whirda found her voice.  You will not have me, Ahn’Thrix.

The very air around her pulsed with mirth.  The shade appeared before her then, an apparition in the darkness.  He appeared just as she remembered, more than seven feet tall, ensconced in black robes, rotting flesh sloughing away from his stark white bones.  And his eyes—gods, his eyes—smoldered like blue fire in the recesses of his emaciated skull.

Impossible, Whirda imparted.  I watched you die.

Ahn’Thrix leaned in close, his face just inches from Whirda’s.  True power cannot be slain, Whirda Windstrom.  The shade offered a grotesque, skeletal grin.  It can only be repurposed.

You will not have me, she imparted again, a litany against her consuming terror.  She struggled fruitlessly to escape her intangible bonds, to draw the dagger from her belt and slash, maim, destroy. 

You do not understand, my child.  You are already mine.

The shade’s eyes flashed, illuminating the void in electric blue light.  Then Whirda was falling.  Her arms and legs flailed, seeking handholds and footholds that did not exist.  All around her, Ahn’Thrix’s cackling filled the air, chilling Whirda to the bone.  She flashed a glance down to see a pristine pool of black water rushing toward her.

There was no time to draw breath before she plunged into the pool, the icy water like knives digging into her skin.  Her eyes bulged as her lungs flooded with liquid, her voiceless scream emerging only as a stream of bubbles before her eyes.  Whirda tried frantically to swim, but an unknown weight bound her limbs, dragging her deeper and deeper, further from the distant blue light of the chamber above.

And then, nothing.