The memory of what happened is fleeing, like so many others. Of all of the ones that leave, though, I think it's the one I don't mind going. It's a memory of terror, pain, and confusion. But...something drives me to try to hold onto it. A cloying need in the back of my mind to know. So I focus, trying to capture glimpses of it, grabbing at the wind itself as it rushes away.
My perspective drifts as I watch, reviewing the memory from two perspectives. Both sides experienced at once in a disorienting haze that I slip into readily.
A mighty thud followed by the sound of a bone, or bones, snapping erupts when my back slams into the tree — no pain follows, though. When I land in a heap about fifteen feet down onto the forest floor I realize that I cannot shift myself. My legs just won’t move. Everything below my waist just feels cold and numb in a way that’s hard to make sense of.
The memory stands amongst many flooding through my mind. All telling a similar story with the same ending. Notes cribbed from one another openly and blatantly. This one feels…different so I try to focus on it to the exclusion of the others.
There’s nothing for it. I pull myself into a sitting position against the tree to face the creature that’s been savaging me. There’s no question about the outcome here — not really. At the start I was scared, but I think I’m past that now. The beating has taken place over such a length of time that I’ve had time to come to terms with it. It's playing with its food. Nothing but malice like any monster.
This me, if I am me, fought back. So few of me seem to have either the ability or the wherewithal to. But no matter what, whether I fight back in my memories, I still lose to myself. Both sides of every memory, experienced at the same time, every time. Dying. Killing. Dying. Killing.
But maybe I can stop it? I’ve been trying to survive this entire time. That’s simply not going to happen, so what if I at least try to make the world a little bit better on the way out? Maybe if I’m lucky I can take something from it on the way.
The thoughts I have are hungry or scared. Eventually, hungry and scared. The me that hunts is hungry. The me that dies is scared. But at some point, both of me Become simply…me. Hungry and scared, interlocking, interweaving. But as I fade into myself, the scared flees, as scared is wont to do, leaving me only with my hunger. The hunger that persists even as the me starts to leave. Leaving behind nothing else but that hunger. A desire for more.
It stalks forward — the worst creature I know to exist on this blessed world of ours. Twice as tall as me even while hunched over nearly in half to menace down at me. The figure feels like a vague mockery of femininity, stretched and twisted and cast in lambent, internally radiant amethyst. Long, lanky, with limbs too thin, fingers with too many joints, each ending in crystal blades. Blades that have opened me up from neck to navel too many times to count. Defiantly, I look up at the monster, the Calamity from scripture, and shout something meaningless while it regards me curiously.
Why doesn’t it die? Why is it different?
Suddenly something snakes around my ankle with crushing force. I hear the cracks but no pain comes with the noise. I’m merely lifted like a favorite toy, casually. With ease I'm brought up to the side of its head alongside its set of three scrutinizing sapphire eyes, hanging upside down as blood leaks down from my guts and over my face, obscuring my vision incessantly. I can do something here. My knife.
My knife.
In a swift motion borne of desperation and spite, I rip my knife from my belt and ram it home into the largest of the sets of eyes alongside its monstrously elongated and smooth crystalline head. I drag it back towards me, using what little leverage I have to rend the monster asunder.
My minds and heads are suffused with such thorough and blinding pain that I can’t think. The pain comes through as overwhelming data. Not actual pain, though the outcome is the same. I stumble away from myself with a shout, a screech, a cry.
Good, I hurt it badly. Maybe I’ll have nicked something important or blinded it forever on that side of its horrible, horrible head.
When I land on the ground with a heavy thud, a cool sensation runs through my body, stemming from my right arm. I raise it while the creature staggers away from me and see the quicksilver ring glowing a comforting green on my ring finger. The feeling concentrates in my lower back and I feel something reconnect. Sudden agony screams up my leg and into my mind from an ankle that is beyond shattered. I writhe on the ground, wheezing, trying and failing to focus.
A tendril reaches up at my behest, pulling the intruding object from my vision. Information about the offending weapon floods into my mind. The craftsman who made it —someone who needs to be taken, they are clearly of skill — the material composition, essential irregularities. It is a quality knife, and one of significance to someone. Someone who just stabbed me with it. I stalk forward and lift the creature from the ground by its right arm, ensuring to break it just as many times as possible, in as many places as possible. It’s a waste of energy, but a token one to test this one's limits — its suitability.
Agony fills my mind with starbursts, but the cool presence from the ring on my hand dulls it immediately, allowing me some modicum of focus through the sensations. I see a glint for a moment and realize the creature is flipping my knife around like a toy in one of its countless amethyst tendrils as its bores into me with inhuman eyes. Eyes that are reforming as I watch. Regrowing as if no damage had ever been done to them at all. I realize the futility of the situation. Despite my best efforts, I never had a chance. Anything more was delusional. The realization sets in and the creatures lips peel back into a grin, baring a jagged wall of pristine crystalline teeth, each longer than my forearm.
With a single flick the quality knife that means something buries itself into the creature’s throat, right at the base of its neck. Its eyes go wide as it sputters and gurgles as the rich, vital Victus and Sanguis essence pours from its body in spurts that slow to pumps that slow to a dribble. Maybe not a waste though. An opportunity.
I’m dropped again. But I don’t feel anything this time. Even trying my hardest, I can’t move my head at all, like something is physically blocking my neck from moving. Maybe it’s the source of this cold and fuzzy feeling in my mind. As my eyes are starting to close, I see a flash of movement. My right arm, being raised and my hand being delicately closed around something.
[Memory Rend]
[Forced Imbuement | Akasha]
Selectively destroy a target's memories and knowledge, rendering it into pure essence.
With a surge of consciousness returning, I open my eyes, the last vestiges of the cascade of memories leaving with the crashing return of reality. A reality that is stark and sharp. Rendered in black and white. Areas of essence richness, and essence void. The two states that matter.
All around me, I see vessels…bodies? Bodies. Bodies that have collapsed partially or wholly into a featureless white dust that stands out even in this strange sight of mine. The more whole ones look as if they’ve been ravaged by something terrible. Rent asunder, with so much essence spilled in waste, never to be recovered.
The more complete vessels evoke a sense of…something in me. Something terribly dark that sticks to the fringe of my awareness. It's cold and tight and as I try to focus on anything, but I feel dampness pooling around my eyes for some reason. Eventually, I succeed in redirecting my thoughts back to my main concern. I’m apparently in an area nearly devoid of essence: Far too much darkness in my vision, and no sources of power worth considering seeking. All of my memories were of being sated. I want that. I want to be sated with curiosity and essence.
In order to achieve that, I need to leave. This place makes me feel….bad, and it’s devoid of what I need. So I’ll leave.
I rise, and as I do so, I feel some vestiges of objectivity fleeing my mind. The stark rendering of the world into concentrations of essence starts to break down, bringing more of reality back into familiar shades over the span of ten or so seconds. This reveals my situation more clearly to me: I’m kneeling in the center of a town. Or…what was once a town. Corpses are scattered and drained to uselessness. Buildings are burning and sending vast columns of essence into the sky alongside plumes of smoke. And I’m in the center of a town square next to an intermittently firing fountain.
I feel something cool running up my right arm and some fog in my mind disappearing alongside it. Dispelling yet more of my objectivity. Bringing in wasteful emotions in its place. But when I lift my arm, it reveals something wrong.
My arm looks cast in a purple crystal. Covered in fissures and cracks that lead all the way down to what appears to be bone made of the same material. Periodically, small bursts of purple mist and ichor emit from deep within the fissures to diffuse into the air or splash onto the ground. Wherever the emissions contact any other materials they are steadily eaten away at until nothing remains than a featureless, essence devoid, white powder.
My hand, I realize, has been clenched this entire time. Opening my palm up, I see a small crystal sphere with tiny wisps of shiny purple smoke within. As if on cue, when I go to close my hand again, it shatters abruptly. But…it’s another distraction. It didn’t and doesn’t have what I need.
I make to step forward but, unbidden, I hear words from the oily smoke all around me in this place. A voice that trembles at first but hardens towards the end.
Beware the amethyst mist, born of the Seed of Calamity that corrupts all it touches. No longer a mortal, now a monstrous harbinger spreading only darkness and despair, The Calamity comes.
My steps arrest themselves. The words are familiar, but I can’t place why, and not being able to understand that gives me serious pause. The distracting sensation of knowing I should know something but not knowing it anyways floods my mind — only to be broken when a vessel steps out of the smoke ahead of me.
No…a woman, I think. Feminine, at least. She’s wearing badly damaged, but quality, armor. Black leather trimmed with gold thread that's reinforced with dark plates at key locations in the gorget, stomach, wrists, and thighs. It’s barely holding together, making it look like she almost certainly has been in a terrible fight: an assumption that is further enhanced by her haggard, if determined, expression, a missing pantleg and sleeve, and a clumsily splinted arm pinned to her left side. What skin is revealed is an almost porcelain white with countless visible scars leading up to intensely luminous golden eyes with vertical reptilian slits in place of more “normal” pupils. Her head is framed by up-and-rearward sweeping black horns poking from neck-length, shock-white hair nearly matching her skin tone. Finally, to either side of her head, sit tall and sharply pointed ears.
“I’m sorry, but you can’t be allowed to leave here.” Her voice rings cold as she raises a weapon to a ready position. A knife held in a deadly stable grip and seems to have some sort of golden essence swirling around the blade like stardust matching the color of her eyes.
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“What have I done? Why must I die for it? I don’t understand.” My own voice comes out flat and without inflection, feeling unfamiliar even through my own lips. The essence dusting around her suddenly falters while her stern expression does, some of it falling to the ground and dissipating swiftly. “She isn’t certain. Does she know why I must die? Maybe it’s a misunderstanding.”
“Y-you killed all of these people. This entire village is in ruin because of you. Do not try to trick me, the Calamity has arrived, and under the Watcher’s gaze, I shall lay it low!” She lowers her voice, speaking under her breath and shaping an incantation of some kind. Her essence mists out with her breath, returning to wreathe the knife in a sharp halo of gold as her eyes spark into a harsher light, pupils narrowing down to a barely perceptible slit..
[Watcher, I imbue thy killing might unto this tool. Watch my action, and hear my word, I pledge the death of the Calamity]
The essence she expends manifesting the spell is anomalous. It doesn’t share a color basis with anything I can think of immediately, and seems to come from nowhere, manifesting from thin air. In fact, as I focus, the aura bleeding off of her is almost exclusively Aero — however she got hurt likely involved her using an unsafe amount of it.
“You’re very badly essence imbalanced. I would rather not fight, and you’re just risking your safety.” Maybe showing concern will help ease her mind?
“I’ll hear nothing else out of you!” She rushes me with the killing blade extended.
“It’s antithetical. Anathema. Bane. But she’s too slow, she can’t get past my guard. I don’t want to hurt her, she’s confused and scared. I’ll stop her instead.“ I drop into a stance, planting one foot behind me, and raising my hands to protect myself. She lunges, far too slow, dominated by emotion, her essence burning bright once more. The motions she lunges at me with feel indescribably familiar. One of my memories I saw was a nearly identical situation, and as I focus on it, the memory lays over my vision. It sits on the fringes of my awareness as I move myself fluidly with the remembered motions with professional precision — the steps playing out in my mind like a mantra I’ve spoken my entire life.
A quick sidestep, left arm extended. Grab the wrist and tug. While they’re unbalanced, strike the rear of the elbow. A standard nonlethal disarming technique I’ve performed dozens of times and practiced hundreds. But this memory ends abruptly immediately following the elbow strike when I die, so I improvise the end.
The acts come out in a blur of practiced motion, and the impact against her elbow elicits a shocked yelp of pain as it hyperextends and knocks the knife flipping out of her hand. In one smooth motion, I shove her along her path with my left and snag the handle with my right, avoiding the mistake I made in the memory that got me killed by the monster I had been fighting then by keeping her beyond arms reach.
The moment my right-hand touches the strange essence wrapping the blade, I feel it pour into me and it hurts. It hurts more than anything I can think of. Blinding, searing pain from inside my body. Information screams into my skull. Indescribable white noise floods my every sense. Hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling, and seeing nothing but static. For a few moments, I struggle to even think, but I move the knife to my other hand in a daze, not wanting to give up a weapon. The moment it leaves my right hand, I feel relief from the painful sensory overload. I stare at the knife in my hand for a moment, trying and failing to comprehend it.
The knife darkens in my grip as the light leaves it, its energy clearly expended. I have seen it before. This specific knife. I don't understand why, but I know it. Calling on another memory for guidance, I slip it into a fitting sheath on my belt with a smooth motion and turn to face the woman. “I don’t want to die, and I don’t want to kill you.” My voice coldly intones distantly. “I don’t know where I am. I don’t know what this is. Can’t you help me?” I feel a sense of desperation growing inside myself that I don’t like. That desperation is cloying at my self-control. I know I can just end this and save myself the hassle she’s giving me but the thought just feels so viscerally wrong that it’s hard to even think about.
She stares at me, eyes wide. Her aura goes cold and inert for a moment before she shakes her head, willing it to flash back to burning gold. “This is a test of faith… and I will not fail.” She says aloud, reaching with her good arm down to her side, pulling out a slim knife. When she rips it free, I see a droplet of something drip off it, a concentrated energy source. She stands, and takes a handful of dancing steps backwards, creating space between us. She incants again,
[Sight of the Watcher, guide my hand!]
Her wrist flicks forward, and I try to search my memories again, but it’s coming too fast. All I manage to do is daze myself as dozens of useless, but similar, memories overlay one another — blurring everything before me with hazes of motion that’s nearly impossible to decipher.
The knife flips end over end as the golden white energy wreathes it. I reach out to grab it from the air as it flies towards me, but at the last moment, as though struck with a hammer in midair, it redirects itself, avoiding my grasp by a hair's breadth. For a brief second, I see it pass my hand before realizing what’s about to happen. I start to twist my body, but am too slow.
The knife impacts and plunges into my left arm effortlessly, its golden sheathe flaying everything before it before breaking apart and burying itself into my shoulder. Nearly instantly, I feel a searing burn course into my body in time with my heartbeat. It’s agonizingly painful, but it brings a sort of pleasing relief shortly after it starts to course through my body.
I reach up and rip the knife out with my right hand on reflex. The moment I grip it, I see the fluid dripping from an internal reservoir dry up, leaving behind a featureless white powder. A second later, the knife itself collapses into the same inert dust filtering between my fingers as knowledge regarding both floods into my mind and the essence from within them floods into my body alongside their destruction.
Aetherbane Toxin
Fames, Puritas
An alchemical distillation used to inflict significant damage to or disable monsters that rely on essence-based attacks. Original formula recorded by Alistair Blackthorn for usage by the Order of the Eternal Vigil to combat Calamities.
Throwing Knife (Essence Reservoir)
Mineralis, Instrumentum, Vacuous
A simple throwing knife designed for delivering bane-targeting essence distillates to targets at a distance. Especially useful as it can be loaded and reloaded with any essence or distillation with a simple command. Current model designed by Vigil Armsmaster, Theron Drakallo.
The knowledge I glean scratches an itch I wasn’t even aware existed, but the possibilities for the anti-magical toxin come to mind immediately — to combat itself and any remnants of whatever essence was on the earlier knife.
I focus on that knowledge, the feel and shape of the essence distillation, and try to will it into my blood productively. Quickly, a burning rush like a heavy fever washes through my body. I feel it sweeping through, collecting foreign essence that shouldn’t belong and coursing it to my arm, where it quickly drips out and onto the ground: primarily looking like mixed purple and red ichor. As it does, I feel a good degree more emotion come to the forefront of my mind, and with it, fear.
“Why? I’ve avoided hurting you. I don’t want to fight you!” My voice sounds more familiar now, each word carrying more feeling and pain than the last, as whatever essence was trapped inside me continues to be taken away or destroyed. “I didn’t do this, at least…not on purpose, if I did do it…” I trail off as my head swims, my body trying to combat the essentia poison in my veins to a mixed success. She draws another throwing knife, repeating her chant. “I can’t stop her knives. It’s late and dark, maybe I can escape into the forest?” I take a knee, feigning a worse wound than I actually have, and she forestalls her throw to get closer.
“Just…stop resisting. Please, if there’s still someone in there that’s listening, just lay down and let me end your suffering. You’ll be taken into the embrace of the Watcher and saved from this fate.” She inches closer, cautiously, weapon poised. The knife in her hand hisses and buzzes with essential energy that I have to fight every urge to not shy away from. Something instinctual within me recognizes it as antithetical to my being.
I hang my head, ostensibly going along with her command. She gets within arms reach on my left. “I’m truly sorry this happened to you. I will find out what I can about this place and ensure they aren’t forgotten. You didn’t deserve this, nobody does.” Her voice comes heavy with regret, sadness pinned to every syllable, but all underlined by resolve. She raises her knife in a reverse grip to plunge it into my neck.
Sensing my opportunity, I jump to a standing position, driving my shoulder into her stomach on the way up. As she rocks backwards with a wheeze of air rushing out of her, I start to run, eventually settling into a dead sprint away from the center of town. I hear her curse as I break away from her.
“Stop! If you leave-” she starts to shout before cursing again. “Drek!” I look over my shoulder briefly and see her drawing a brace of five knives into her good hand and incanting another Imbuement into her knives. The essence expended is incredible to witness. It has to be coming from something apart from her, her body can’t contain that much. Momentarily distracted, I lose track of the threat in the situation as she looses her volley. Four knives arc into the air, sheathed in white-gold light, tumbling at far too high an arc to hope to catch me. The moment that thought crosses my mind, the knives stop moving in the air and all orient to point directly at me. Eyes widening with fear, I push myself, arms pumping into a faster sprint, building speed as I tear past the gate. As my strides grow in speed, eventually settling into an almost wolflike lope across the open terrain of the road, I catch a glimpse of my right hand. Hidden beneath the purple haze, I see a ring on my finger, gleaming golden, and I feel my steps fall more evenly, more surely. The feeling is sublime, and I embrace it greedily.
The woman's voice cracks in the air in an unfamiliar tongue, being heard clearly despite the distance.
“Xun,” The first knife launches with a burst of force blurring through the air at me. I follow my instincts, and try to keep my pace, dashing into a small copse of trees and hear the first knife penetrate an entire tree to clatter harmlessly to the ground. I glance back and see the hole it tore in the tree. And continue to run. I see her starting to chase me, actually managing to gain on me, her entire body being wrapped in golden essence so bright I can barely make out her silhouette. Her remaining 4 knives following along behind and above her like loyal hunting dogs, she shouts the next series of words aloud, each word punctuated by the sonic crack of the knives taking off. “Kra, Jin, Vax.” Each syllable announces a new threat to my life, and with 4 of them spearing towards me, I realize there’s no way I can possibly dodge them all on open ground. Abruptly, I kick off a tree to redirect myself, carrying on off the road as I hear the whizzing of the knives taking a wider turn to chase me with the woman not far behind them.
The knives don’t seem to be trying to bury themselves in me anymore, instead doing near passes to slice my arms and legs, not allowing me to grab them. In no time at all, I feel my wounds should be lethal. But I keep regenerating just quickly enough to stay up as I run, while she repeatedly incants to return the knives to her side to redirect them.
For what feels like hours, we play a game of cat and mouse through the forest as it increases in density. I’ve long since lost track of where we are in relation to anything. But I see a tough cluster of bushes and undergrowth in my way, without enough time to veer, so I cover my face with one arm and hurl myself through it. Immediately on passing through, however, I realize my error. The forest does not continue. Instead, I'm faced with a cliff face and chasm. I drop to the ground and dig my hands into the dirt to slow myself as I roll my way to the edge of a ravine. Stopping just in time, I stand up, turning to face my assailant as she bursts through the bush as well, but stops far more gracefully, her four attendant knives stock still in the air, arrayed above her in a semicircle like a halo of my imminent death.
She pants, “How can you run this long? You should’ve been tapped out miles ago. But…that doesn’t matter. End of the road.” Her face hardens as she composes herself with a deep breath, steadying as she braces for a presumably final incantation. I see she has some rivulets of blood pouring from her mouth from overuse of her strange essence.
“Please, I’m begging you. I don’t know what’s going on. If I was whatever you think I am, would I be running from you? Would I be begging for my life? You treat me like a mindless monster, but I don’t even know who I am, let alone what I am. I ask you again, please reconsider. This doesn’t have to end this wa-” My voice catches as the first of the knives rockets forward, burying itself in the center left of my chest. The world around me darkens as my vision tunnels. All I can see is the golden eyes, so full of hate, and the stars of golden light escorting her.
Is it hatred? Maybe. It might be fear or sadness. Staring at her eyes, they speak volumes that I don’t have context enough to read.
Her voice is distant as I feel the more of the poison take hold. “I’m sorry, but this is the way things have to be to save lives.” She says the three remaining syllables, counting, I recognize distantly. But in the moment of her apology, I decide to take a risk, and dive backwards off the cliffside and into the ravine. Impossibly far, but coming so fast. I hear her curse again as I look down and see a distant river at the bottom of the ravine.
As I fall, I flip over just in time to see the knives cresting the edge, speeding towards me, ready to join their fellow already lodged in my shoulder. Terror grips me as I think of death rushing to meet me from both sides, but mercifully, the water comes first.
I hit the river, angled, with my back taking the brunt of the impact, but I’m still moving far too fast, and the river isn’t that deep. The pain of striking the water is sharp, but it's nothing compared to the blinding pain that follows as my head slams into the stony riverbed. My consciousness begins to slip away just as I see the knives strike the water. They lose too much speed to threaten me and are swept away with me by the fast-moving current.
Limp and barely aware, I’m carried along by the river, the last thing I hear being a string of curses from above as my grip on the world fades entirely.