10-12-2014, 11:07 PM
The first thing he could recall was darkness.
The second thing...was also the dark. A different kind of dark, more present: thick and almost palpable. Suffocating and almost...alive. For a moment, he felt like he was dying without really knowing what it meant. He tried to thrash against whatever it was that held him bound in the dark, to scream and rage against it as his instincts told him to. But he found he could not move. He could not let his rage and fear be vocalized.
It felt more torturous as he made these realizations than when he had felt simply suffocated by blackness.
Then he finally saw it. The silouhette in the darkness. Grinning at him. And it seemed only as he noticed it that it began to....to speak. Its words blew past him, their meaning sinking into some deeper part of his mind but lost to his consciousness as a whole. Some deep, black...presence blotted out his rational understanding. He understood he was being spoken to. That it was an explantion of some sort. That it was important.
But it didn't register.
All that registered was the writhing emotions in his head. Fear. Confusion. Rage.
The rage boiled more than all the other feelings combined, tinging his vision red. He did not know what the source of the rage that gripped him was, but it was overpowering. Madness, deep and bestial, as if some dark, primitive part of him had been awakened.
As the strange silouhette finally stopped speaking, he found himself suddenly able to move again. The black void he had been imprisoned in changed suddenly, glaring white, blinding his eyes after the darkness of the void before it. He staggered under his own weight, dropping to his hands and knees, sprawled out on ground he could not see.
He let out a ragged breath, struggling to find the strength to move. He was shaken, for some reason. He couldn't recall why... He could barely even remember anything beyond waking to the strange grinning figure in the blackness. There was... There was darkness, even before the silouhette. There was darkness, and there was...and there was pain. Pain and....and what? He turned his mind upside down, working frantically for something; anything to give him some sense of what was going on.
He could recall the darkness, slowly closing in on his vision more and more. Pain, growing sharper with each passing second until it finally stopped...the darkness had grown more complete then, suffocating and yet not oppressive. But all the while there had been a great, overlying sense of confusion, regret, fear, and even anger. Anger at...himself? At the things he fought against, perhaps...
The clash of steel against steel echoed in his mind and he instinctively lurched backward, staggering to his feet and several steps backward, flailing an arm to ward off an imagined attack, a strangled howl ripping from his throat. That was it...he had fought. Fought against everything. With his sword he had butchered everything because it tried to do the same to him. Tried to send him completely into the Dark.
More and more it came back to him. Distorted, fragmented, haltingly, but it came back to him. He remembered that he had fought for a long, long time. He remembered that he had fought against....it had been a great, powerful thing...but he could not recall what. Only that after his battle against it something had changed.
Trying to remember what brought a terrible pain to his head, and he clamped both hands to his helmet, shaking his head furiously. He didn't want to remember that! He didn't want to remember what had changed! No, that was why he was so shaken, so wracked with emotion he couldn't understand.
The Dark still had its hooks in him, even now. Even after....after all that pain...after...after...
Another howl ripped from his throat and he slumped forward, collapsing into a heap against the invisible ground.
He didn't know how long he lay there, lost to the world, but he soon became aware that he heard something. Faint, and had he still been raging and confused he would have missed it: the slow, tinkling noise of a small stream of water. With an effort he lifted his head, gazing this way and that, searching for the source of the noise, but seeing nothing any way he looked.
Focusing himself as best he could to calm his thoughts, he sought out the source of the noise...behind him. Crawling up onto his feet, he turned about to face the noise...and saw something that twisted his gut into a knot.
A stone relief stood before him, of a mighty knight amid a pool of water. Proud and regal the relief might have once been, but now it stood weathered, cracked and fading, its original carving beginning to be lost to time, stained in many places and worn almost irrevocably down in others. About the feet of the knight there rested a wolf, curiously untouched despite the overall decal of the rest of the figure.
Slung across its back there was the better part of a massive tower shield, though it was worn through with spidering cracks, and a large chunk of it had fallen away into the water below. One of the knight's hands was held forth, clutching the blade of a massive sword, raised as if in a salute to victory. The blade was notched, chipped, and scored with battle, blackened and scorched as if by fire, and looked sinister and unholy to behold, but it also seemed...familiar. Almost comforting to look at.
With a growl in his throat he suddenly lashed out. His armored fist collided with the statue's outheld arm, and with a crunch, the weathered stone split under his fist, breaking off at the wrist and sending the blade clattering to the ground. This blade was his, he knew it. It was his...and his alone.
With a mad frenzy he snatched the blade from the ground and smashed it against the relief, gouging deep scars into the weathered stone. It offended him and frightened him and -- perhaps most of all -- it scared him. It seemed eerily familiar to him, for some strange reason. It made him uncomfortable. He didn't want to look at it. He wanted to break it, smash it, burn it, get away from it!
For at least several minutes he raged, his inhuman snarls and howls echoing in the emptiness as he reduced the one proud structure to a pile of rubble, clogging the pool of water at its base hopelessly. His breathing ragged, he sagged down with the weight of the massive blade in his hands, staring at the rubble intently, as if expecting it to move.
But something else moved instead.
Almost blending in with the white of the strange void, but standing out enough that his eyes could pick out their movement, he saw them coming: a small group, no more than eight, marching along in unison. Their movements stirred something within him. They were...he knew this...mili.... Military. That was the name of their type. Structured, organized, trained, disciplined. Military.
He simply stood there, waiting, his ragged breathing the only noise and movement he made.
"...have to watch out for this one. Seems like a real handful."
"You got that right. Must be one of the crazy ones, I guess."
Their voices reached him as they drew nearer, and came into clearer focus. White armor. Some....strange items in their hands. Their stride was purposeful, coming right toward him.
Coming right toward him.
Right....toward him...
Right to....ward.... Right....towa....rd....him....
A flash in his mind struck him unawares, causing him to stand upright. An image of a structure. Corpses lay littered about. A man in armor. Striding through a fog gate. Weapons at the ready. Coming right toward him.
Pain.
He felt the searing bite of a blade in his memory, and he let out a fierce howl. Pain, fear, confusion and rage intermingled in his mind. His vision pulsed red, misting over and blotting out what little rational thought he had.
Armor. Soldiers. Weapons. Pain. Right at him. Pain. Kill. Weapons. Kill.
Dropping into a crouch, he suddenly broke and ran. Clutching at his blade with one hand, he sprinted across the white expanse, blade dragging along the unseen surface in his wake.
"We ought to be carefu-- WATCH O--!"
The cry of the white-armored soldier was cut short by the impact of the new arrival. With a crunch, he crashed against the ground, his rifle spinning and clattering away into the distance. The remainder of the group had little time to react before the massive blade came about, slicing through the air with a ringing whoosh.
It smashed into the armor of another of the soldiers, producing an audible "Gwuh!" from the hapless man before he was flung away, through the air. He hit the ground and rolled. Twice. Coming to a halt several feet from where he had been standing, his armor slashed open as much as bashed inward. A low, rasping growl whispered through the enraged knight's helmet as he slowly hauled himself back to his feet, using his sword for support as he did so. Whether out of caution or fear, the remaining soldiers had backed away, their helmets hiding their expressions making it impossible to read their emotions.
He took a single step forward, and immediately the six remaining soldiers brought their rifles up to bear. "Stand down! Now!" The voice sounded full of as much fear as authority. It was just another pointless formality. Give the enemy a chance to surrender before striking back.
The Abysswalker never surrendered.
With a lunge, he struck again, his massive blade spearing out in a thrust, skewering one of the white-clad men. A roar was the only response to the gurgling cry the impaled man made, before he was flung off the blade into two of his companions. Another strangeld cry, sounding more like the screaming of a wounded, enraged beast than anything human, came from the knight, and the remaining soldiers hastened to back away from the deranged man, gathering those among them still living and retreating back the way they had come, keeping their weapons trained on the armored madman.
But Artorias had no intention of letting them get away. A brief flash of something welled within him, some memory of a voice....his own voice, screaming at him, pleading with him to just let them go. Leave the rest of them be. He whipped his sword up and went to plant it down to support himself with, his confusion leaving him unsteady on his feet. But then he saw red.
Literally.
A flash of red lit up his vision, and a bolt of energy blazed past his head. The Stormtroopers all had their weapons trained on him, or at least all the ones still able. One of them still had his finger on the trigger, ready to fire again at even the slightest indication of some threat-- real or imagined. A low growl whispered forth from the knight of the Abyss's helmet, and his entire body trembled.
And he saw red, figuratively.
A hideous shrieking roar erupted from him, and that tiny voice in his mind begging for mercy was smashed aside and silenced, and the knight sprang forward into a mad dash, the blade of his sword scraping along the ground. The answer from the Stormtroopers was immediate this time. And red light blazed in the knight's vision. Streaks of red light blazed past him, and more than one hit him full-on. His chest, both legs, and one arm took a painful, devastating searing. His momentum slowed from pain, and broke into a staggering, halting run.
But his own above average size and the sheer mass of his armor and massive sword still let him crash into the closest unlucky Stormtrooper. The poor man let out a strangled gasp and a cry of pain and went down, hitting the ground with a sharp thud, and Artorias crashed down on top of him with a much louder thud, accompanied by a sharp crunch as the Stormtrooper's armor gave way to the impact and broke.
And before Artorias could even get his limbs under him to attempt getting back on his feet, he was met with a fierce kick to his side. The same arm blasted by laser fire only moments ago. And there was another round of harsh cracking and crunching as he was knocked aside, rolling along the ground. And this time, the inhuman shriek that ripped from the Abysswalker's throat was alight with as much pain as rage and confusion. And as he finally rose to his feet, amid another volley of blaster fire, his left arm hung limply at his side, at an unnatural angle at the elbow.
The pain was fierce. Distracting. Debilitating. Familiar.
He brandished his sword with his undamaged arm, swinging it wildly, charging recklessly at the remaining white-clad soldiers and their red-firing weapons. He was met with the sound of one of them calling a frantic, and obvious, "Retreat!" and several sets of bootfalls moving swiftly away from himm still keeping up a steady stream of fire against the knight.
And now something else began to claw at him. He was outnumbered now, and injured. They also had injured and he suspected at least one dead. But the battle was not in his favor. Maddened rage, even against enemies as comparatively weak as these, could not overcome training. And their weapons...ranged warfare was not his forte. He was no Gough.
He could not win this encounter if things did not change.
And with a grating cry of fear, he halted his ragged pursuit.
The Abysswalker turned in the opposite direction. They had been enemies. Enemy soldiers. Out to get him. He had to leave...had to go somewhere without enemies. Back to his home...back to the Dark. He slowly started to walk. His back to the statue and its fountain, and to the retreating soldiers, he walked.
He could see it in the distance...something loomed, too far away to be seen clearly. But it was what he fixed his mind on. Dragging his blade behind him as if it were too heavy to lift properly, he trudged onward, doing his best to put out the occasional blur of red light as it whizzed by him.
Though soon enough even that stopped and left him to trudge and fight his way along as best he could away from the pain. Away from the enemies.
The second thing...was also the dark. A different kind of dark, more present: thick and almost palpable. Suffocating and almost...alive. For a moment, he felt like he was dying without really knowing what it meant. He tried to thrash against whatever it was that held him bound in the dark, to scream and rage against it as his instincts told him to. But he found he could not move. He could not let his rage and fear be vocalized.
It felt more torturous as he made these realizations than when he had felt simply suffocated by blackness.
Then he finally saw it. The silouhette in the darkness. Grinning at him. And it seemed only as he noticed it that it began to....to speak. Its words blew past him, their meaning sinking into some deeper part of his mind but lost to his consciousness as a whole. Some deep, black...presence blotted out his rational understanding. He understood he was being spoken to. That it was an explantion of some sort. That it was important.
But it didn't register.
All that registered was the writhing emotions in his head. Fear. Confusion. Rage.
The rage boiled more than all the other feelings combined, tinging his vision red. He did not know what the source of the rage that gripped him was, but it was overpowering. Madness, deep and bestial, as if some dark, primitive part of him had been awakened.
As the strange silouhette finally stopped speaking, he found himself suddenly able to move again. The black void he had been imprisoned in changed suddenly, glaring white, blinding his eyes after the darkness of the void before it. He staggered under his own weight, dropping to his hands and knees, sprawled out on ground he could not see.
He let out a ragged breath, struggling to find the strength to move. He was shaken, for some reason. He couldn't recall why... He could barely even remember anything beyond waking to the strange grinning figure in the blackness. There was... There was darkness, even before the silouhette. There was darkness, and there was...and there was pain. Pain and....and what? He turned his mind upside down, working frantically for something; anything to give him some sense of what was going on.
He could recall the darkness, slowly closing in on his vision more and more. Pain, growing sharper with each passing second until it finally stopped...the darkness had grown more complete then, suffocating and yet not oppressive. But all the while there had been a great, overlying sense of confusion, regret, fear, and even anger. Anger at...himself? At the things he fought against, perhaps...
The clash of steel against steel echoed in his mind and he instinctively lurched backward, staggering to his feet and several steps backward, flailing an arm to ward off an imagined attack, a strangled howl ripping from his throat. That was it...he had fought. Fought against everything. With his sword he had butchered everything because it tried to do the same to him. Tried to send him completely into the Dark.
More and more it came back to him. Distorted, fragmented, haltingly, but it came back to him. He remembered that he had fought for a long, long time. He remembered that he had fought against....it had been a great, powerful thing...but he could not recall what. Only that after his battle against it something had changed.
Trying to remember what brought a terrible pain to his head, and he clamped both hands to his helmet, shaking his head furiously. He didn't want to remember that! He didn't want to remember what had changed! No, that was why he was so shaken, so wracked with emotion he couldn't understand.
The Dark still had its hooks in him, even now. Even after....after all that pain...after...after...
Another howl ripped from his throat and he slumped forward, collapsing into a heap against the invisible ground.
He didn't know how long he lay there, lost to the world, but he soon became aware that he heard something. Faint, and had he still been raging and confused he would have missed it: the slow, tinkling noise of a small stream of water. With an effort he lifted his head, gazing this way and that, searching for the source of the noise, but seeing nothing any way he looked.
Focusing himself as best he could to calm his thoughts, he sought out the source of the noise...behind him. Crawling up onto his feet, he turned about to face the noise...and saw something that twisted his gut into a knot.
A stone relief stood before him, of a mighty knight amid a pool of water. Proud and regal the relief might have once been, but now it stood weathered, cracked and fading, its original carving beginning to be lost to time, stained in many places and worn almost irrevocably down in others. About the feet of the knight there rested a wolf, curiously untouched despite the overall decal of the rest of the figure.
Slung across its back there was the better part of a massive tower shield, though it was worn through with spidering cracks, and a large chunk of it had fallen away into the water below. One of the knight's hands was held forth, clutching the blade of a massive sword, raised as if in a salute to victory. The blade was notched, chipped, and scored with battle, blackened and scorched as if by fire, and looked sinister and unholy to behold, but it also seemed...familiar. Almost comforting to look at.
With a growl in his throat he suddenly lashed out. His armored fist collided with the statue's outheld arm, and with a crunch, the weathered stone split under his fist, breaking off at the wrist and sending the blade clattering to the ground. This blade was his, he knew it. It was his...and his alone.
With a mad frenzy he snatched the blade from the ground and smashed it against the relief, gouging deep scars into the weathered stone. It offended him and frightened him and -- perhaps most of all -- it scared him. It seemed eerily familiar to him, for some strange reason. It made him uncomfortable. He didn't want to look at it. He wanted to break it, smash it, burn it, get away from it!
For at least several minutes he raged, his inhuman snarls and howls echoing in the emptiness as he reduced the one proud structure to a pile of rubble, clogging the pool of water at its base hopelessly. His breathing ragged, he sagged down with the weight of the massive blade in his hands, staring at the rubble intently, as if expecting it to move.
But something else moved instead.
Almost blending in with the white of the strange void, but standing out enough that his eyes could pick out their movement, he saw them coming: a small group, no more than eight, marching along in unison. Their movements stirred something within him. They were...he knew this...mili.... Military. That was the name of their type. Structured, organized, trained, disciplined. Military.
He simply stood there, waiting, his ragged breathing the only noise and movement he made.
"...have to watch out for this one. Seems like a real handful."
"You got that right. Must be one of the crazy ones, I guess."
Their voices reached him as they drew nearer, and came into clearer focus. White armor. Some....strange items in their hands. Their stride was purposeful, coming right toward him.
Coming right toward him.
Right....toward him...
Right to....ward.... Right....towa....rd....him....
A flash in his mind struck him unawares, causing him to stand upright. An image of a structure. Corpses lay littered about. A man in armor. Striding through a fog gate. Weapons at the ready. Coming right toward him.
Pain.
He felt the searing bite of a blade in his memory, and he let out a fierce howl. Pain, fear, confusion and rage intermingled in his mind. His vision pulsed red, misting over and blotting out what little rational thought he had.
Armor. Soldiers. Weapons. Pain. Right at him. Pain. Kill. Weapons. Kill.
Dropping into a crouch, he suddenly broke and ran. Clutching at his blade with one hand, he sprinted across the white expanse, blade dragging along the unseen surface in his wake.
"We ought to be carefu-- WATCH O--!"
The cry of the white-armored soldier was cut short by the impact of the new arrival. With a crunch, he crashed against the ground, his rifle spinning and clattering away into the distance. The remainder of the group had little time to react before the massive blade came about, slicing through the air with a ringing whoosh.
It smashed into the armor of another of the soldiers, producing an audible "Gwuh!" from the hapless man before he was flung away, through the air. He hit the ground and rolled. Twice. Coming to a halt several feet from where he had been standing, his armor slashed open as much as bashed inward. A low, rasping growl whispered through the enraged knight's helmet as he slowly hauled himself back to his feet, using his sword for support as he did so. Whether out of caution or fear, the remaining soldiers had backed away, their helmets hiding their expressions making it impossible to read their emotions.
He took a single step forward, and immediately the six remaining soldiers brought their rifles up to bear. "Stand down! Now!" The voice sounded full of as much fear as authority. It was just another pointless formality. Give the enemy a chance to surrender before striking back.
The Abysswalker never surrendered.
With a lunge, he struck again, his massive blade spearing out in a thrust, skewering one of the white-clad men. A roar was the only response to the gurgling cry the impaled man made, before he was flung off the blade into two of his companions. Another strangeld cry, sounding more like the screaming of a wounded, enraged beast than anything human, came from the knight, and the remaining soldiers hastened to back away from the deranged man, gathering those among them still living and retreating back the way they had come, keeping their weapons trained on the armored madman.
But Artorias had no intention of letting them get away. A brief flash of something welled within him, some memory of a voice....his own voice, screaming at him, pleading with him to just let them go. Leave the rest of them be. He whipped his sword up and went to plant it down to support himself with, his confusion leaving him unsteady on his feet. But then he saw red.
Literally.
A flash of red lit up his vision, and a bolt of energy blazed past his head. The Stormtroopers all had their weapons trained on him, or at least all the ones still able. One of them still had his finger on the trigger, ready to fire again at even the slightest indication of some threat-- real or imagined. A low growl whispered forth from the knight of the Abyss's helmet, and his entire body trembled.
And he saw red, figuratively.
A hideous shrieking roar erupted from him, and that tiny voice in his mind begging for mercy was smashed aside and silenced, and the knight sprang forward into a mad dash, the blade of his sword scraping along the ground. The answer from the Stormtroopers was immediate this time. And red light blazed in the knight's vision. Streaks of red light blazed past him, and more than one hit him full-on. His chest, both legs, and one arm took a painful, devastating searing. His momentum slowed from pain, and broke into a staggering, halting run.
But his own above average size and the sheer mass of his armor and massive sword still let him crash into the closest unlucky Stormtrooper. The poor man let out a strangled gasp and a cry of pain and went down, hitting the ground with a sharp thud, and Artorias crashed down on top of him with a much louder thud, accompanied by a sharp crunch as the Stormtrooper's armor gave way to the impact and broke.
And before Artorias could even get his limbs under him to attempt getting back on his feet, he was met with a fierce kick to his side. The same arm blasted by laser fire only moments ago. And there was another round of harsh cracking and crunching as he was knocked aside, rolling along the ground. And this time, the inhuman shriek that ripped from the Abysswalker's throat was alight with as much pain as rage and confusion. And as he finally rose to his feet, amid another volley of blaster fire, his left arm hung limply at his side, at an unnatural angle at the elbow.
The pain was fierce. Distracting. Debilitating. Familiar.
He brandished his sword with his undamaged arm, swinging it wildly, charging recklessly at the remaining white-clad soldiers and their red-firing weapons. He was met with the sound of one of them calling a frantic, and obvious, "Retreat!" and several sets of bootfalls moving swiftly away from himm still keeping up a steady stream of fire against the knight.
And now something else began to claw at him. He was outnumbered now, and injured. They also had injured and he suspected at least one dead. But the battle was not in his favor. Maddened rage, even against enemies as comparatively weak as these, could not overcome training. And their weapons...ranged warfare was not his forte. He was no Gough.
He could not win this encounter if things did not change.
And with a grating cry of fear, he halted his ragged pursuit.
The Abysswalker turned in the opposite direction. They had been enemies. Enemy soldiers. Out to get him. He had to leave...had to go somewhere without enemies. Back to his home...back to the Dark. He slowly started to walk. His back to the statue and its fountain, and to the retreating soldiers, he walked.
He could see it in the distance...something loomed, too far away to be seen clearly. But it was what he fixed his mind on. Dragging his blade behind him as if it were too heavy to lift properly, he trudged onward, doing his best to put out the occasional blur of red light as it whizzed by him.
Though soon enough even that stopped and left him to trudge and fight his way along as best he could away from the pain. Away from the enemies.
![[Image: kUpgBYg.gif]](https://i.imgur.com/kUpgBYg.gif)