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Elsewhere – Beneath the terrible closeness of the Sky
Hurricane at the very least.....
Unbidden they come, these familiar words of desperate conflict and defiant challenge. Unbidden, but not unwelcome.
The bearing of the Presence changes, casting uncertainty aside in favor of an all too familiar insolence. The bearing of the silent stormwalker changes as well. The defiant freedom of his movements remains, but these are no longer the movements of one who has seen the end of conflict. The self-proclaimed demigod would assert his status even here. So be it. His eyes narrow. Let the barriers fall then, let this Shar upon whom he relies lend him her power and let the outsider make himself ready for battle of the most desperate kind. Without realizing it, so natural is the movement of his hatred, he removes the Stormreaver from its place over his shoulder. Burned fingers tightly grasp its handle and with a shrill hissing his wounded life leaps outward through the blade of the axe and the wind surges into gusting movement.
Where there had been merely threat within the wind – hurricane at the very least – there now is anger. Anger and hatred. His body begins to move in time with the storm that gathers around him and he turns his face fully toward the obscene and blasphemous power of that One who had once been called Larry. Ponderous and terrible – such is the might of Shadow. Furious and unrelenting – such is the defiant anger of Storm. And though the divinity of the outsider be a matter of mere pretense * there is no denying the magnitude of his power. So much the better. For there can be no better way for a man to die than in setting his face in firm defiance of impossible odds and in the pouring out of his life in the destruction of that which brings death. No straw death, this – indeed, the best of deaths. Fury gazes outward from his eyes and for a moment it would seem that the Storm itself and not a man looks outward from them.
Stormtaken. Surrendered completely into the violent freedom of She Whose Anger Cannot Be Contained..... She, the First Born of Wind....... So simple. So beautiful. For better than death in the face of the impossible is victory over the impossible. There is power in the Mage. Great power. Power more than sufficient to destroy him. But destroy him is all that such power can do. And destruction is not a thing to be feared, not when one has been broken. The fingers of his left hand reach for the wooden band he wears upon his right hand. He has but to remove it to make final and decisive his surrender to the movement of the Storm, and should the Mage fall here an evil, a truly great evil, would fall never to rise again. He has but to remove the ring - hurricane at the very least.
His fingers close around the wooden band. “No.” His voice is but a whisper. Even as his body moves along with the storm, his eyes look through it and his features harden. ‘Face into Storm’ so was he named after his first movement in the free and living air, and so has he lived his life through the long years of his exile. The call of the Storm is strong, but to submit to its voice is to submit to the demands of hatred and even the destruction of the Mage is not worth so great a price as this. He has been broken and such a breaking will not be set aside for the sake of his passions. His fingers loosen their grip upon the handle of the Stormreaver. He pauses in thoughtful silence and glances upward through the Storm into the silent vastness of the Sky. Suppressing this sudden surging of hatred, he steps forward, and addresses the Mage, “You have changed.” He falls silent. “And so have I.” Once more he pauses not troubling himself with adding to these simple statements of the obvious.
* The Windbringer has never acknowledged the Mage as a demigod (nor did the Devouring Wind for that matter) for mortals cannot ascend to divinity in his gameworld.
[ 04-19-2005, 03:14 AM: Message edited by: Cyril Darkcloud ]
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