Erebia

[Chris Ganale]

[Follow-on to the RP battle from last Monday.]

 

The scene outside of the Vylbrand Academy, no more than a hundred fulms from the building’s entrance, was nothing short of a massacre. Centered in a rough circle around a lamp post lay scattered half a dozen combatants. Closest to the Academy, a largely-intact Garlean Vanguard slumped in a smoking heap, arcs of electricity still sparking across its shell. A few paces away and to the left of the machine, a highlander in an imperial uniform sat slumped against a rock, positioned as though overlooking the carnage. Burns and explosive trauma on the body’s left side indicated the cause of his death, but the pattern of blood and drag marks across the cobbled path suggested that the explosion hadn’t immediately spelled his doom.

 

The apparent epicenter of the explosion that had marked that man’s death was at the base of the lamp post in the area, signified not only by the warped and twisted metal of the post bent in half from the explosive force, but by a crater a fulm across and six ilms deep. Small, burnt chunks of flesh scattered about the area suggested that a body had been used to try and smother the blast, unsuccessfully, and the presence of a pair of Garlean-styled short simple blades in the grass nearby supported this observation. The presence of a Garlean lance, driven point-first into the ground, suggested a third aggressor, of which no other trace could be found.

 

Further afield, the allied toll was equally harsh. Myu laid crumpled in a heap several fulms away from the blast point, her right arm severed from her body. If ever there had been any doubt as to the mechanical nature of her being, the wires trailing from her body and severed limb, as well as the clear fluid leaking from her injuries in place of blood would put those doubts to rest. Crumpled plating across her body indicated that she had taken the brunt of the blast, and smoke rising from her frame pointed to some sort of high-energy attack that had overloaded her systems.

 

A dozen fulms past Myu, Satomi sprawled at the edge of the cobbled street. Blood leaked slowly from a puncture wound in her leg, but aside from some bruising and scorched clothes, she otherwise showed no external injuries. Situated between the two and off to the side, Chao laid with her legs tucked up beneath her in a pool of her own blood, though her left leg rested at an unnatural angle. Burns and tears permeated her battlesuit, the chest armoring caved in by some extreme force. A Garlean pistol rested just beyond her fingers, dropped when she’d lost consciousness.

 

This had been the scene happened upon by Vylbrand Academy member Dryce Pearlfinder, the aftermath of another assassination attempt. Acting quickly, she and several others were quick to move their injured into the infirmary. Satomi, her injuries the lightest, was the first to recover, administering aid to herself before turning her attentions to Chao. The magitek prodigy’s broken ribs and leg were tended to quickly, and various antidotes and neutralizers were administered to stave off the debilitating effects of the ceruleum poisoning and flush it out of her system. The worst, it seemed, was over.

 

Four bells later, however, the nightmare truly began.

[Chris Ganale]

When a conscious awareness of her surroundings returned to Chao, she initially believed herself to be dead. Opening her eyes, she found herself lying flat on her back on an endless white plain, with no discernible difference between any existing walls, ceiling, or floor. All that stood out was a single lamp post, the very same one that had been the centerpiece of her battle with the Garleans, projecting a lonely pillar of light that just barely reached her with the edge of its circle.

 

Sitting up slowly, she checked herself over to find her injuries were gone, but that her armor was still in the sad state it had been in when she had fallen unconscious. It was this combination of factors, along with the surreal environment that she found herself in, that led her to believe that she was dreaming.

 

"So clever, as always, would-be Reclaimer. You have all the answers, and yet you still know nothing."

 

Scrambling to her feet, Chao spun to face the unknown voice, finding herself faced with a nebulous figure seemingly made of pure shadow. Its form shifted constantly into a number of silhouettes she found familiar, all matching individuals she knew, as though her very own subconscious could not decide who it wanted to confront her with. The figure's eyes, however, never changed; they were the very same sharp, mismatched eyes she saw whenever she looked in a mirror.

 

"What is this place?" the fire mage demanded.

 

"This? This is Phantasmagoria." It was then that she realized that the voice was not unknown; like the silhouettes its form wavered through, it was as though the voices of everyone whom she had ever known were speaking at once to her, blending together into the words of this shadowy being. "It is where your mind attempts to solve the challenge you have created for yourself by corroding your own soul with Magia Erebia."

 

The shadowy creature reached across itself, drawing an equally-undefined shape that extended and twisted itself into the form of a sword. Chao recognized its shape as that of an Ironworks-made magitek sword, and knew of only one person in her network of contacts that wielded such a blade. The appearance of a feathered beret, however briefly, on the creature's head confirmed her assumption.

 

"And it is here you must find the answers to Magia Erebia. For if you do not..."

 

The creature charged her. It wasn't an instantaneous movement, the way she had half-expected, but still unsettlingly fast. It swung its blade as it reached her and she lifted her left arm in defense, but her forearm armor offered little resistance; the blade bored through the advanced metal and severed her arm halfway to the elbow.

 

Hot crimson blood splashed to the ground, marring the pristine white field as her lost limb fell into the center of the pool with a wet smack, splashing her own blood onto her boots. She stared in shock, whether more from the fact that her armor did so little or from the screaming pain in her nerve endings, she honestly wasn't sure.

 

The shadowy being left her no time to contemplate the matter, drawing its sword back and driving it to the hilt into Chao's chest, just below her crumpled torso armor. Blood fountained from her mouth, unhindered by the missing hand that she instinctively tried to lift to stem its flow.

 

"...Then death will be the most merciful of outcomes."

 

 

 

In the outside world, resting on a bed in the Vylbrand Academy's infirmary, her entire body convulsed in response to the lethal stroke, blood bursting forth from her mouth. Satomi, tending to both Chao and a separate victim of the Garleans' tender attentions while still nursing her own injuries, limped over and turned the miqo'te on her side to prevent her from drowning in her own blood. Rurujua, the local chief medic, quickly began applying restorative magic to shore up her vitality.

 

It was the first death of Chao Lingshen.

[Chris Ganale]

Chao jolted as though waking from a nightmare, but it was not the comforting dimness of Satomi's lab that she found herself in, or even the clinical lighting of the Academy's infirmary. She was still in that bleak, white-washed dreamscape of her mind. Directly ahead in her field of vision, she saw herself impaled on the dark creature's magitek sword, the very vision of her death. Yet even as she looked on, the sight began to fade, growing dimmer to view even as it was burned permanently into her memory.

 

"Here in Phantasmagoria," the shadowy figure's voice came from behind her, "you cannot rest, cannot flee, cannot hide. Even the mercy of death's embrace is denied you here. So long as you have the strength of will to endure death in your mind again and again, you will continue to revive until the death of your very soul. You are renowned for your iron will, Reclaimer. How long will it take for you to break, I wonder?"

 

Chao spun to strike at the shadowy being as soon as it began to speak, flame trailing from the edges of her boot. Her kick connected with empty air, evaded with contemptuous ease by the creature disappearing from where it had been and reappearing in the exact same instant a dozen fulms away, its very posture indicating disappointment as it didn't even break its monologue.

 

"Can you do no better, Reclaimer?" it taunted. "With your limitless potential before you, your mind is still fettered so?"

 

Not answering, she opened her hands, small flames flickering to life in each of her palms. With a muttered intonation of "Captus Flammeus," she snapped her left arm toward the creature, ropes of flame shooting from the flame in her palm. As before, it faded from view, but this time, she closed her eyes, stretched out her senses, and allowed instinct to guide her movements into snapping her right arm up and to the right.

 

She opened her eyes and was rewarded with the sight of the being writhing within the magical bindings. A feral grin spread across her face. "You may be a product of my memories of everyone I've ever known, but this is still my mind, and my capabilities are only limited by my imagination!"

 

She twisted her hand around the flaming garrote, reaching forward with her left hand to pluck the rope of flame like the chord of an instrument, sending a surge of energy through it and into the creature. Within only moments, however, it burst free from the binding ropes, scattering them as embers on the wind. "Now at least you have some semblance of a hope at survival," it told her.

 

It raised both hands to the sky, an unseen wind howling around it. "Only one question remains: Will that flickering ember unleash a resurgent inferno, or will it be extinguished here and now?"

 

Chao sensed a surge of aether from beneath her and leaped to the side as it flung its arms outward, barely avoiding a pillar of dark flame that erupted where she had been. The air around her warped and shimmered, and it took her a moment to realize that the flame pillar had little to do with it.

 

The very environment itself shifted; where before they had been on a featureless white plain, now they stood in a vast cityscape that seemed to combine the aesthetics of Ul'dah, Limsa Lominsa, her home in Doma, and several Garlean castrums.

 

She had little time to sightsee, however, as the creature was coming at her again in the guise of Imogene and her magitek sword. Standing her ground once more, Chao swung her left arm forward to meet the strike. In a flash of light and energy, the magitek sword was stopped by a blade of energized aether, projected from the metal hilt that had appeared in Chao's hand. Here, in the innermost depths of her mind, the magitek genius could will all of her conceptualized weapons and equipment into reality.

 

The shade realized this as well, looking past her at the four magitek funnels looming up behind her. It leaped away to break contact, raising its shield as all four opened fire. Evading the first three of the thick red chemical lasers, it was forced to take the fourth on its shield, the magitek construction being the only thing that allowed it to survive such a powerful laser. Even so, there was no way it would hold up to a sustained barrage.

 

The creature retreated rapidly, seeking to gain distance in order to have a better reaction time to the extremely-rapid muzzle velocity of the lasers. The funnels pursued it doggedly, twisting and spiraling through the air as they filled the space with red blasts of energy from all directions. One such beam caught the magitek sword halfway up its length, slagging the upper half of the weapon.

 

Chao tensed her body, exploding forward into a shundo that left cracked cobblestone in her wake. The creature turned to react to her attack, but a timely attack by one of her funnels forced it to divert its attention to shield from the laser, allowing her the opportunity to sever its shield arm with her energy sword. Giving it no time to recover, she spun to add momentum to her side kick, launching it away in time for another funnel to burn away a significant chunk of its torso.

 

Nearly a dozen fulms away, the shadowy being halted its forward momentum and righted itself in a single movement, dispersing its kinetic energy in a spherical burst of energy around itself. It was already reforming itself from the extensive damage it had taken, its countenance shifting again. She didn't immediately recognize its newly-armored form, but the appearance of a magitek warhammer in its hand swiftly removed all doubt from her mind as to its identity.

 

Shifting her energy sword into a reverse-handed grip, she charged at the shade of Nero tol Scaeva; the frumentarii was an old nemesis from her days in Garlean employ, harshly critiquing her works and always suspect--rightfully--of her loyalties to the Empire. As she advanced, her funnels fired ahead of her in an effort to pin the Garlean down. However, Nero's armor, both its hard angles and its construction material, offered better protection than Imogene's had, and even the agility with which it wielded the warhammer allowed it to parry aside some of the laser blasts.

 

Contrary to Nero's personality, and thereby clearly attempting to unsettle her, the shadowy being said nothing as it surged forward to meet her charge, energy emanating from the head of the warhammer. Drawing her blade back for the contact, Chao felt a sudden flash of unknown foresight: she did not want to try to block that hammer or be anywhere near where it hit.

 

Slamming both feet to the ground, she leaned her weight to the right and executed an embarrassingly-sloppy shundo half a dozen yalms away. The awkward shift in momentum caused her to trip in mid-action, sprawling to the ground and barely managing not to stab herself with her beam sword. Her landing positioning gave her a front-row seat to the imminent impact of Nero's weapon, but far beyond it, a sudden motion drew her eye toward what looked to be a reptilian tail rapidly vanishing behind the corner of a building.

 

The magitek hammer struck the ground and released a tremendous blast of energy, rippling the air around it. She knew that such an energy pulse would have liquefied her had she been caught in it, and was suddenly grateful for whatever intuition had prevented her from meeting it head-on.

 

There was no time for further consideration, however; the shadowy being was overextended and vulnerable from that hammer strike, and she had to capitalize on its weakness immediately. She launched herself from the ground, taking a normal grip on the energy sword and pointing its tip directly at the creature's heart.

 

It made no attempt to evade or block, turning fully to face Chao as its form shifted again with a speed that caught her off-guard. This time, unlike the others so far, it assumed a complete form, in full color. The magitek genius found herself hurtling full-speed at Satomi, and the look of fear and confusion in the hyuran scientist's eyes caused instinct to override intent. Chao shifted to the right, missing the doppelganger of Satomi by so near a margin that one braid was burned away by the superheated blade.

 

She heard a metallic click, and looked over her shoulder to find herself staring down a rifled barrel, the sadistic grinning visage of Satomi beyond. The shadowy being chuckled in the hyur's voice--and only Satomi's voice--before it quipped, "Compassion is a weakness, and a luxury you can ill afford, Lingshen."

 

The flash from within the muzzle overwhelmed her vision with light.

[Chris Ganale]

Breathing heavily, Chao hunkered down in the shadow of a ceruleum storage tank in what she perceived to be a far corner of the amalgamated cityscape of her mind. After reviving once more following the underhanded use of Satomi's image, she had engaged The Other--as she had taken to calling it--at least a dozen more times. Her ability to fight it had grown, but every time, she still fell victim to its relentless onslaught and cheating ability to recover from whatever she did to it.

 

Clearly, it was not to be through battle that she would secure her escape.

 

She had lucked out moments ago, with The Other having assumed the form of Grundy and using the roegadyn's size and skill with the axe to trap her in an alley where her speed would avail her little. She'd taken a gamble and thrown a sleep spell at the armored behemoth. It had paid off spectacularly, slumping over the impostor of Satomi's friend and sometime-bodyguard in mid-strike, allowing her to escape via a series of long-range shundos.

 

She held no illusion that she'd be able to escape for long, but even the slightest reprieve was welcome. Time within her mindscape was a different beast than it was in the real world, but she estimated that she had now been engaged in continuous combat for over one hundred 'mental' hours...and had died no less than twenty times.

 

Reaching up, she mopped a sheen of sweat from her forehead and shook the moisture from her palm, scanning the area around her. She had taken several zig-zagging and circuitous pathways to get to where she was, and backed herself into a corner with only one real entryway while still leaving herself the option of a vertical exit. She had no doubts in her mind, however, that The Other could or would simply come through a wall to get her.

 

Despite the false cityscape being entirely empty, there still existed an ambiance that suggested a life to the city. It was because of these illusory sounds of false life that she didn't realize she had company until it was quite literally breathing down her neck. She looked up to find a huge, horned, reptilian creature perched on the ceruleum tank above her. As soon as she noticed it, the thing leaped down to block her from an escape by foot, stalking before her on all fours like a wolf on the hunt. Burning embers dripped from its maw where a normal creature might have drooled saliva, and the temperature shot up by over a dozen degrees.

 

"What a curious creature thou art," it spoke, its mouth moving despite not looking capable of sentient speech. "Thy soul is scorched by flame, yet it is self-inflicted. Thou hast the potential to be of use, if thou could but overcome this trial."

 

Standing up, Chao eased into a ready stance, tracking its every move with her eyes. "Never have I heard of an eikon accosting someone not enslaved to them in their dreams," she tersely responded. "But your penchant for brute force and domination is wasted here, Lord of the Inferno." Sarcasm dripped from her enunciation of Ifrit's title. "Return to the aether and your little schemes in the desert; there are more pressing intellectual matters for me to deal with here."

 

The fire primal halted its pacing to turn toward her and unleash a furious roar. Along with it, an explosion of flame engulfed and blew past her, but at the very least, she was completely safe from tempering in this environment.

 

"Thou art not lacking the resolution to thy self-inflicted trial," Ifrit roared. "What thou lacks is the strength necessary to succeed."

 

Emboldened by the general inability of Ifrit to harm her--what could it, after all, do to her that The Other had already not--she smirked and planted her fists on her hips. "It should be abundantly clear by now that mere strength alone is insufficient for overcoming this trial. But then, as far as primals go, you don't seem to have been burdened with an overabundance of sense."

 

Letting out a low, threatening growl of irritation, Ifrit slammed its palm to the ground, causing another burst of flame to spread out from around the primal. "Thy soul has been marked with flame, and thou shalt bend thy knee before me. It matters little whether thou succeed or fail here, for my Tempered already come to collect thee, drawn to the sulfurous stench of thy soul. A bloody fate awaits all who oppose my will."

 

The primal gestured behind her with a taloned hand, and she glanced back to see that the landscape had changed; the ceruleum tanks replaced with the Vylbrand Academy, the entire building engulfed in flame. Amalj'aa standards had been raised at the yard's entrance, and she saw the corpses of several of her friends fallen--and burned nearly beyond recognition--where they had been slain. Several other still-living members, most notably Satomi and Grundy, were being led away in chains, an altogether worse fate clearly awaiting them.

 

Hot rage flooded through Chao's body at the vision of the Academy's destruction. While The Other had gone well out of its way to mess with her head, it had been possessed of a certain honesty in that it had never threatened any actual people. Ifrit, on the other hand, had made a bold declaration that it fully intended to destroy Vylbrand Academy in pursuit of her.

 

Her head snapped up, the scene of carnage freezing in time before her eyes. She lifted her hands to her waist and willed the dreamscape to bend to her desire the same way that Ifrit and The Other had, the battered and beaten prototype battlesuit changing into a far more powerful, up-armored and streamlined combat armor; her ideal of the pinnacle of her powered assault armor design. She turned back toward the primal, her piercing gaze evident even through the Allagan-inspired visor covering her eyes.

 

With a gesture of her hand, a darkened field of aether pinned Ifrit in place; Allagan gravity manipulation technology at its finest. She condensed and directed all of her magic energy and ki into a pair of orbs centered in the palms of her hands, then slammed her them together and wreathed her left arm in that virulent power, focusing it down into her fist. Sprinting the short distance separating herself from Ifrit, she charged into--and through--the primal. The charged power of her attack burst into a huge pillar of light, shredding through the primal's form.

 

She skidded to a halt several paces on the other side of the collapsing creature, dropping into a ready stance, but this dream form of Ifrit was clearly finished. Disturbingly, even as it disintegrated, the primal appeared to be leering at her tauntingly, smug in some measure of self-assured confidence that it still held the advantage in their dealings. She waited, watching as it dissipated into aether, before relaxing and stepping up out of her stance.

 

And then it was as if the entire world exploded around her.

[Chris Ganale]

That the blast hadn't killed her outright she attributed half to the testament of her ideal powered armor's defensive strength, and half to the fact that it didn't seem to have been centered directly on her nor intended to kill her. Aided by a prodigious leap, she took to the skies, held aloft by the gravity manipulation devices built into the hips of her armor. She looked down at the billowing explosion cloud below her, the interior of her visor lighting up statistics and information on her heads-up display.

 

The back of her armor buzzed, the tactile sensors alerting her of an incoming threat. She spun to face it as what looked to be a streak of light charged toward her; The Other finally catching up to her. Her visor analyzed the attacker's stance, slightly edging out her own ability to read what it was doing, and allowing her to choose her response. She steadied herself in midair with her gravity modules, allowing herself the stability to meet The Other's charge with a crescent kick. Her kick met the elbow strike of the shadowy being with a blast of ki that snuffed the fires of the explosion and Ifrit's vision far below them.

 

It was the elbow strike that allowed her to pinpoint the persona that The Other hand taken on for this engagement, even before she'd stopped its attack cold with that of her own. True enough, the silhouette of the shadowy being matched that of her cousin--the martial miqo'te Ku Fei--even down to her flowing cyclas garb. Oddly, she felt as though this impersonation of one of the closest people she had ever known was a sign of respect from The Other; especially given her surety that Ku had perished in the Reckoning.

 

"Finally, we fight on equal terms, Reclaimer," it said as it broke contact, but wasted no time in launching a flurry of fists and feet at the miqo'te, a fusillade that the engineer was hard-pressed to counter and parry.

 

It really was almost just like facing off against her cousin again, but she knew that it was simply The Other drawing on her memories. Even still, the thought of Ku Fei brought fresh the memory of her second-hand information of the Reckoning, the sorrow pulling on her heart.

 

The Other capitalized on that memory, but instead of an attack, it drew that memory from her subconscious and shifted the entire cityscape beneath them, changing it to an image of her home in Doma, in flames and under assault by the Garlean Empire. She hadn't been present for the Reckoning, trapped as she'd been by Garlean conscription at Castrum Meridianum, but she had enough of an active imagination and knowledge of Garlean tactics to figure how it had probably gone. The Other didn't let up one moment from its assault, however, several times forcing Chao to activate her magitek energy shielding to ward off a blow that snuck through her defenses.

 

"Look closely," The Other told her. "Savor it. Remember it. This is the source of your power! Your first impulse, your first motive! Your original memory!"

 

Her gaze flickered for just an instant to the environment around her, but she thought herself covered in that moment of inattentiveness by the presence of her magitek barrier.

 

She thought incorrectly.

 

Blossoming fire of pain exploded in her ribs as she suffered one of her cousin's signature elbow strikes, blowing right through her barrier with a strength she knew from observation could disintegrate boulders. Blood fountained from her mouth at the strike, and another blow destroyed her gravity devices, sending her falling to the ground far below.

 

"But, with that strength alone, you will never succeed," its ominous voice chased her, the creature itself remaining high above to watch her fall.

 

Even the most powerful armor configuration I could envision... Chao thought, her vision blurring; whether through blood loss or the smoke rising from the Doman cityscape, she couldn't tell. But then, I already knew that strength alone wouldn't be the deciding factor, didn't I...

 

"This, finally, will be the end, Reclaimer." The Other's form had shifted again, the size indicating a lalafell, and there was only one lalafell she knew that had any kind of combat ability. "Veniant spiritus glaciales obscurantes...."

 

Oh, now that was cheating. Stealing the appearances and abilities of others was one thing, but now it was going to finish her off, using Zoey's ice powers and her own incanted style of magic combat. But surely enough, aetheric ice in the appearance of ice shards began to swirl around the lalafell, coaelscing into her partially-cupped hands.

 

"Cum obscuratione flet tempestas nivalis!" Massive surges of aether surrounded the lalafell, swirling snow and ice shards around her as a brilliant blue glow built that forced the visor Chao wore to automatically dim to protect her vision. "It won't be so bad. Your path to greater magic will be forever barred, but you will have your friends to protect you. It wouldn't be so bad, to live out your days in relative peace in that Academy. Nivis tempestas obscurans!"

 

The Other in Zoey's form drew its hand back, coalescing all that energy into a single spiraling storm of energy which it then proceeded to hurl down toward Chao, the air before it dropping to subzero temperatures as it closed in on the magitek prodigy. Its words, however, and even the threat of that powerful ice spell, barely registered in the back of her mind, her thoughts still following the path of what she had learned, or rather, failed to learn, here in Phantasmagoria. But at its mention of her friends, something tweaked in her mind. Did she not already know? Was it not in the words she had heard from those close to her?

 

"If you're faced with a difficult problem, don't try to get over it," Zoey had once told her. "Hold it inside you and move on with life."

 

"Be a woman who can always move forward," Cid nan Garlond had given her his parting words when she'd made her ill-fated attempt to flee from the Garlean assassins. "No matter how dirty you become."

 

And the words of wisdom from Satomi, her truest friend: "Whether it grew from a need for vengeance, or from deciding to run from something, your strength is still your strength."

 

And so that was it, wasn't it. Almost of her own accord, her left hand came up, but it was not a futile gesture to ward off an implacable foe. A magic circle flared to life in front of her palm, catching and halting the spell on its surface. She felt the strain all through her body in her effort to maintain the spell circle, not as a shield, but as a gate.

 

"Magia Erebia," she murmured to herself, using her remaining gravity device to brace herself as she talked herself through what she was attempting. "Good and evil. Strength and weakness. It's the power to accept everything as it is and take them all in, exactly as they are."

 

As she spoke, a small sphere of magic energy had formed on her side of the magic circle, the condensed core of the spell revealed to her. She snatched the sphere in her hand, crushing it and absorbing its power into herself as she incanted, "Complexio!"

 

The power of the spell coursed through her body, surging through her like a wild river as she reached the ground, angling herself to land on her feet. Power, raw and pure, filled her body, leaking into an icy aura of white and blue that threw harsh shadows across her face. Her eyes lit with an unnatural blue light as she gazed up toward The Other.

 

"Fantastic," it remarked, shifting form once more, into that of the elezen she had dueled in the desert to show off her fighting style. "So you have solved the mystery of Magia Erebia. Excellent work, Reclaimer." It formed an aetheric blade of pure energy over its right hand and dove toward her. "Now show me your results!"

 

Chao braced herself, directing and flowing the absorbed energy through her body. A pair of smaller magic circles appeared encircling her right ankle, signifying the directed source of her new power as she met The Other's aetheric blade with another crescent kick.

 

The explosive force of this impact was more than quadruple that of their earlier strike, engulfing the entire area in a blinding sphere of light.