Legacy & War (Battle of Nippur)

[Tom Marvolo Riddle]

It amazed me to note that I believe I had passed out during one of those timely moments when the sorting hat took me my frequented spots upon the dataverse. Though this bout of entertainment had a dream like quality that suffered from bad acting and poor script writing. Either way I was out cold for long enough to be subjected to an entire feature film in my unconscious state. What caused it, I could only guess. An educated guess but a guess nonetheless.

Maybe from pain, injury, both or something else entirely. One moment I was the mouse at the mercy of a giant cat and the next I was nothing. Obviously my construct had been devastated to the point of disbursal and the injuries sustained by my true body had overwhelmed me… what was worrisome though was that it was human in reaction though I lacked many of the qualities that made me such.

I was a book after all.

Which was perhaps also why I found myself being stolen; lifted away in the embrace of what felt like claws… or mayhap, talons. That was striking itself, an odd sensation really. The pressure of the ground being removed and spindly pointed digits prickling either side of my binding. Like drilling ants burrowing into the temples of my metaphorical head. Painful to say the least.

"It seems..." the being began in a mental burst that burned with shining colors across my mindscape including bright pain. Injury without a full body and mental communication did not cooperate well it seems. But it was the only sensation that I could latch onto other than the claws that bore me. I tolerated it.

A dull thud and pressure brought a new wash of pain in scintillating technicolor to my body; but more importantly it was letting me know now I was fully grounded, or as close as I could tell to touching a weight supporting structure. Stretching out my senses I felt around me to the most limited way, a sort of mental prodding until I found where I could best position myself and then I began to focus as Nealaphh completed his communication to myself and the others.

I focused on the agony, on the reality it brought me, pain meant life, it meant reality, and it was what kept me here among those great and weak. I was real. Like before I focused on the lifeblood I had taken from the last two who had hosted me, who succored my weakened state enough to take human form. That memory became the template to which I fed it energy. The energy of them somehow given a concrete and permanent place within my existence, of my essence. I drew in magic, like one would breathing, and effected the force of will to reshape reality and spent a scant amount of the omnilium that my very consciousness seemed so adept at handling and focused into a form I was familiar with.

The concept of Forever, what exemplified me, wrapping everything that was left of me now upon that singular point.

Forever.

The world peeled away from thought, darkness and the sense of touch to resounding sound and glimmer of the real. Fatigue burned it's way upon me as I grew from an outstretched hand upon my true body, ink forming the base, the veins, paper wrapping around it into the other various tissues and finally ghostly skin layering over it until all that was left was me as I first had been upon arrival in this place.

How I was aware of thus, I have no idea. Magic perhaps the best answer by my estimation. I was aware of who I was, and that was all that was needed.

"Progress for progress's sake," I said as soon as I had a mouth to smile with, though somewhere it failed as weariness ebbed away what little energy I had. Too tired to care, the only thing I could really bother about was the ghost of pain across my body, even now it had the faint phantom like quality I had previous when it was about ready to give up.

But whether I cared or not was irrelevant, my goals took precedence. With sordid breath I drew my hand out and pulled on my omnilium. Not really summoning anything, just pulling at something hidden in it. Something already bought and payed for, its essense having marked my fractured soul.

A hat fell upon my head and the stream to the dataverse resumed once more. At the same time I commanded a search of the place that Neal had mentioned. Renowned for the monsters? That made my estimates of the place shoot up a bit and the climate was probably as close to the Scottish Highlands as I had ever heard of so far since arriving.

"How do you propose we get to these… Moors?” I asked mutedly, before adding, “Sounds like a wonderful place to set up shop.”

I surveyed the area around us, the panorama being filmed by the dataverse, of the destruction, the gore, the typical example of humanity and human like nature turning upon itself in pitiful attempt at dominance. The lack of any natural resources and these idiots were fighting over a scrap of land that was meaningless. No, when I wrought Hogwarts upon the earth, I’d ensure that it’d be as eternal as I was. Perhaps more so if my will was done.