Ten thousand years in the fire is long enough

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Gabriel Templar
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Ten thousand years in the fire is long enough

Post by Gabriel Templar »

"They say it's a riddle, they call it the Lament Box" The man was saying.

The little lacquered box sat on the table by his side, amid old papers that were slowly curling yellow with age.

"I've seen them listed at Wentworth's," Gabe said, apparently they weren't all that rare. "So... what's it do?" Gabe asked, reaching out to touch it.

The owner of the shop slapped his hand away, and Gabe shrunk back, vaguely blushing with embarrassment. "It's a riddle Gabe, I don't know... I sell a lot of these, yeah, but not like this one." He made a noncommittal sort of shrug.

Gabe unslung his messenger bag from his shoulder, and rolled his arms. The bag's strap had been digging into his neck for the better part of half an hour on the tram. "You know how much this is worth to me." Gabe said.

"How much?" the proprietor smiled in defiance.

"Okay, the swords I just gave you outright so I didn't get nicked keeping them in the dormroom, the melted husk of a Psychochronometron, and the Muian relics notwithstanding? And discounting the fact I'm your best customer too, I've got some stuff you might want."

The man smiled wider. I'm too valuable for him to show me the door Gabe thought, and it was probably true. A dealer in the arcane has precious few customers and even fewer suppliers. Correction, even fewer honest suppliers.

"they say it's a gate." The man said.

Gabe looked down at the little cube, reaching out to touch it once again. It felt very cold, colder than lacquer at room temperature ought to be, and he could feel something thrumming under its shell. The man had let him touch it, oddly enough, this time.

"No thanks, I've seen that movie too." he said.

"You know, you might be interested, considering what they called the thing, what the thorns called it."

Gabe paused in the process of picking up his bookbag, "what?"

"Asura's box," he said, picking it up and holding it out, "the name sound familiar?"

Gabe put the bag back down, tilting his head to consider the little bauble. "Asura, wife of Asuro..." he said, recounting what he was becoming more and more certain each day was his own geneology, "Fourth man from the Shadowsun, Scourge of Mesopotamia". Gabe wanted to reach out to touch it again.

The merchant laughed, a dark and warm sound like percolating coffee. "Now are you interested?"

"How much?"

"More than anything I've ever sold you, as you said, prior gifts notwithstanding."

Gabe made a resigned little grunt, hauling the bag onto the table. The heft of its contents ripped loose the latch and spilled ingot bars of alchemical and otherwise mystically charged metals to the table with the dull clank of a spilling silverware drawer. "fourty ounces of alchemical silver, ten ounces of alchemical gold, the market value of those alone is in in the tens of thousands. Five pounds of psionically charged brass, four inscribed rubies, three inscribed sapphire, and two of the biggest crystals of Orichalcum I've ever seen."

The man nodded, "by the way, the council thought this thing would summon a Nictus. I'm guessing... well, don't jump in blindly okay?"

Gabe shook his head, "which is it, home, or Nictus?"

The man began to slide the bars onto his ancient brass scale, "can't it be both?"
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Gabriel Templar
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Post by Gabriel Templar »

Part II : Without you to guide them all to Zion


Gabe slammed the cube down on his desk. Twist, push, pull, nothing worked at all. Hours spent trying every possible pressure point turned into a week, then a month of occasional obsession and still nothing. A pair of pieces had been pried loose, in a long month. 2 down and at least a dozen more to go.

Gabe leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling.

And did he even know what he'd find when he got there? No. Portalcorp had told him it was unsafe, sitting in the waiting room feeling like a fool, "No can do Gabe," she said, "Class alpha-four energy signatures, indicative of Nictus energy patterns, no-go zone." And they'd led him out, even as he tried to bribe and bargain his way. "Come on, shut the portal once I'm through, use a snap-back, send me off from the Mole Point, no risk to earth, I don't think Ruularu would let any last long if they did get through. I need to go" They were entirely unmoved.

And now the box had become his vexation. Built as a sick joke, consecrated to malicious spirits, stolen by the soulless mages of Orranbega, and now it sat on his desk: stark against the white-oak top plain-varnished and bright, a little black nugget; the two parts removed gave a tantalizing glimpse of a darkly burning core.

He leaned back in and shuffled his papers, looking for the hint in the runic translations that would fling the puzzle wide. It was teaching him Orranbegan, slowly but surely.
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Gabriel Templar
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Post by Gabriel Templar »

Part III: Tonight we walk on water.


It wasn’t a puzzle, it is an allegory.

The box unfolded slowly, but it didn't matter. There was no gate at the center, though hGabe dug his way to the core dutifully, there were only the runes and sigils laid in gold into the wood. It was a scroll, a magic spell wrapped in allegory, veiled in symbols, and as the words were read, the magic wove itself.

Gabe dreamed, the night he finished the box.

Typically, he had nightmares of a long-distant past, fragments of ancient lives, but tonight, oh! What unearthly geometry his dreams held. His mind was bent by the box, or the lessons it taught.

He dreamed in non-euclidean angles and strange horizons, MC Escher would have wept at the sight of the square spheres and inverted circles.

And he awoke to sudden potency. Everything had gone still and flat, and in that moment he knew. He knew that time folded for him, space's curve was hammered flat.

He tried to write a note, but it came out garbled. He knew he had to leave a sign, so he took the cube, which suddenly seemed hyper-real, and placed it on the center of his desk, on edge.

Then he stepped sideways, across the Einsteinian edge, and disappeared.



------------------------

Gabe's body sat in his chair, before a puzzle box turned on-edge, with a vacant smile and his hands placid at his sides. His hands trailed blue balefire, the only sign that he wasn't at home at the moment, along with his twitching eyes.

He watched his eyelids as astral projections flickered there, occasionally his mouth would open, as if he had just thought of something to say.


((okay, this might be slightly confusing, because the first part is limited 3rd person perspective to Gabe, and the second is omniscient. Gabe has, in fact, not left at all. When they told him it was a gate device they didn't lie... exactly. He is in fact astrally projecting to the specific destination of the device, his 'homeworld', or more accurately the place his spirit comes from, in a way, sort of, uh, I'll explain more in later parts))
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Gabriel Templar
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Re: Ten thousand years in the fire is long enough

Post by Gabriel Templar »

"Only a dream..." Gabe though, and it was certainly true.
A dream, nothing more.
It was a comforting thought.

Because from what he could see, he was standing atop an obsidian ziggurat, itself perched over a sprawling and vast city or strange and tumbled blocks, the light of dual moons cast splayed packs of shadows like stage lighting, two different sources creating a spread of different shades of shadow.

The woman who'd met him was sitting in a throne, cast of iron and bronze. Her pure-white skin stood out starkly against the black metal of the throne, and the lines flayed deeply into her skin. She wore emepheral gauze, and a crown like a cluster of baleful stars set in silver wire. She held a crystal in her hand, it glimmered with a dark light.

"We can repair you, of course," she said, "but you've grown beyond the ability to simply rejoin the halves to make a whole, there's more than a half to you..."

Gabe shook his head, "you did this. Fix it."

"I told you... just take it."

Gabe shook his head again.

"if you're going to be difficult... this may not be very enjoyable for you."

As she raised the shard towards him, it flared to life. And Gabe tried to turn to run, only to find that his hands were now bound by thick chains. Dream logic! his brain was screaming, real chains do not appear out of thin air, not like this.

she moved with a certain feral grace, bounding at him, crystal raised like a weapon. White light and white heat.
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Gabriel Templar
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Re: Ten thousand years in the fire is long enough

Post by Gabriel Templar »

((I realized that I've kinda let gabe stall out at a dramatic juncture because I've been so busy with RL lately, so without further ado, the conclusion of 10,000 years))


Gabe woke to the taste of iodine and something scratching his face.

Dim light, fuzzed, halos around the objects in his room. It took a moment to realize he was lying face-down on the carpet, draped over his toppled chair. His eyes would not focus, if they could have he'd have realized the clock read an hour after he had touched the box.

His hands felt numb, no, not his hands, his fingertips, they felt burnt. They were also cherry-red.

his stomach felt like a squid inside him, writhing, and he crawled for his trash can, it was dark, and swimming inside with untold neon geometry. It was so very dark.

----------------------------------------------------

It didn't make sense, not even in a dream-logic sort of way, what he'd seen, but now he was convinced that it wasn't real. His eyes still refused to focus.

Wait? what time was it now? and why was the inside of the trashcan covered in dancing geometric patterns? Why could he still not feel his fingertips? If he could crawl over to the table, and the lockbox, all of it might be clear. Or none of it might become any clearer. He couldn't move anyhow.

-----------------------------------------------------

Gabe woke again and it was light outside this time, a fuzzy pre-dawn haze. His eyes weren't as sensitive this time. he knew he'd passed out, and he'd dreamt of crystal ziggurats, and of the Nictus, again. A sharp hook of panic set in as he realized that he wasn't any better than he was last he could remember. Clearer now, the patterns dimmer. His eyes could focus, sort-of, everything was still reduplicated in mirror sets.

His mouth was sandpaper and glue, sticky, dry. Heavy, very heavy.

----------------------------------------------------

This time Gabe woke with nothing more than a light headache, a severely kinked neck, and a pain in his fingers.

He sat upright with a jolt, upsetting the trash can and it rattled across the floor, he hoped that no one had noticed.

"my god," he thought, "I must look like I've had a month-long bender."

Getting up experimentally he rubbed his eyes, and looked for his mirror.

What was in that little box? He decided at once that there was no gate, magical teleportation never had done this to him before. His eyes in the mirror, red and wide, pupils obscuring all but a bare millimeter of iris confirmed, as far as he knew. But then the images seeped back in, memories of inhuman forms and demonic figures.

Gabe smoothed out his shirt and coat, which looked exactly as if he'd slept all night in them, and stumbled for the door.

Hallways he knew by heart, he was on autopilot, down the hall, left, left, outside, across the quad, through the doors, right, upstairs, left, left, knock on the door.

As soon as it opened Gabe shuffled on in.

"Mr. Conrad? I just went nuts." he said, and sat right down.
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Gabriel Templar
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Re: Ten thousand years in the fire is long enough

Post by Gabriel Templar »

Doctor Andrews:
Attached is my report on the artifact you requested to be analyized. Full details and pictures are in the accompanying appendix, I hope this helps.

Sincerely,

Dr. Andrea Marshall, Paranormal analysis Division, MAGI.




Artifact details:

Appearance: A black puzzle box, made of interlinking pieces of lacquered wood. Runes scribed in gold filligree appear to be of Orranbegan alphabet, but numerous misspellings and modern usages indicate modern manufacture, as does lack of wear. Box measures 12x12x12cm. Bow was delivered disassembled, in 23 separate pieces.

Suspected Origin: Modern manufacture, inexpert forgery showing numerous mistakes in runic alphabet. Creator must have been vaguely familiar with Orranbegan artifacts but lacked full understanding. Wood is of earthly origin. No transdimensional signature. The spelling errors rule out any expert mage, including Circle of Thorns. Wagering an unscientific intuitive guess: possibly a lone prankster, possibly magically active gang.

Magical analysis: Simple light cantrip in center produces a burst of purple-red light as the box is disassembled. Further auditory glamours and cantrips provide malevolent whispering and barely audible chittering. Activation by remote waldo did not trigger suspected gate effect. Further personal analysis found no evidence of a gate, transdimensional or otherwise.

Chemical analysis: Wood is coated with standard modern lacquer, available commonly on the open market. Spectral analysis indicates that it is probably Home and Garden Black Satin, produced by DuPont for several large home supply chains. White unguent film on the inner surfaces of pieces 1,2, 5 and 7 (the inner pieces) is more interesting. The unguent is remarkably complex, chemically, indicating probably herbal origin, in addition to a DMSO binder designed to allow the psychoactive compounds to penetrate the skin. Pharmacologically active substances include Aconitine, Atropine, Scolomine, Etgotamine and Lysergic Acid. Best guess as to their origin is a mixture of Belladonna, Ergot fungus and Aconite. All capable of producing detailed and frightening hallucinations, but nothing magically active.
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