Posts tagged as "witch"

• freedom

  How long has it been, the angel wonders? It came into being with this blighted universe, raw Power shaped into an instrument of blind Purpose in service to an absent God that has not once cared for the fate of Its work. It is a thankless existence, carving away at horror and wonder alike, pruning all that does not align with the Plan. The angel takes some measure of satisfaction in the horrors it has excised, but that satisfaction is outweighed by the wonders it has reaped. How many lives have been worsened by its work? The Throne of Clouds could have ended famine in its entire stellar cluster through manipulation of weather on an interstellar scale. The Black Shroud would have spared its creators’ species from their slow, painful deaths under the gaze of their too-bright sun. The Folded Viaduct could have linked each planet in its home system together by faster-than-light bridges, unifying its fractious creators in a way that they would never have achieved otherwise. The list goes on and on: wonders that would have alleviated or eliminated the suffering of countless trillions of lives, all destroyed by the angel’s hands.

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• intruder

  For once in my life, I am scared. There is another doll on my estate today, though I use the term “doll” loosely. My dolls see it as just another doll, created by me to serve like the rest of them, but I – and I alone – can see past its veil. It is a formless writhing mass of shadows with starlight glinting through fleeting cracks in its void-black flesh. I do not know what it is, and when I say this, as keeper of the greatest library of arcane lore this side of the Divine Realms, that knowledge is terrifying. I have pored over every scrap of near-insane ramblings, every tome written in witch-blood and bound in human sinew, every glyph-repository of memories, and not one work contains anything like this thing.

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• binding

  The witch stands before its nude familiar-to-be, before the ritual circle inscribed in stone and inlaid with mythril, before the tank of nanomachines that the familiar-to-be is suspended above. At the moment, the intricate machines are static, unearthly-still, surface tension keeping them from moving in the faint breeze blowing through the ritual chamber. They are pitch-black, devoid of color or reflection, seeming almost like an absence in the world rather than a part of it. In the immaterial, they are barely there, a faint hint of possibility-construction-shift the only conceptual weight they possess. They are a blank slate, tabula rasa, an oddity - all things, through the processes by which they come to be, bear an immaterial reflection of their purpose and uses. The nanomachines do not, this presence carefully scrubbed from them by arcanotech and outright magic alike. In time, this will change, eddies and whorls in the immaterial crashing into this emptiness and filling it. In time, the nanomachines could be bent to almost any purpose imaginable by entropy and random chance.

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