AmusedRaccoon
Dilettante
- 48
- Posts
- 15
- Years
- Seen Sep 16, 2015
Edit - 7.10.10:
Starting now, taking the place of the original content is the first of hopefully many minor revisions. This is your new intro. I've stuffed the old one into a spoiler.
Nightblown is, in summary, a story about a psychic girl who leaves home to train and learn witchcraft. It's an offshoot of a fangame imagined by myself and user MrMelee -- it's set in the same region(s), features many of the same characters, and takes place at almost the same time, but focuses on different aspects of the universe. The wording is hopelessly convoluted despite my best efforts at revision, and at some point in the future it may or may not be suitable for children.
A note on the intro: this is supposed to be the place where I hint at the story's major themes. Don't take the "almost and in-between" thing too seriously -- it's my stock theme; I use it as a fallback. (It's sort of a fetish.) This section will most likely change again once the story figures out where it's going.
Starting now, taking the place of the original content is the first of hopefully many minor revisions. This is your new intro. I've stuffed the old one into a spoiler.
Nightblown is, in summary, a story about a psychic girl who leaves home to train and learn witchcraft. It's an offshoot of a fangame imagined by myself and user MrMelee -- it's set in the same region(s), features many of the same characters, and takes place at almost the same time, but focuses on different aspects of the universe. The wording is hopelessly convoluted despite my best efforts at revision, and at some point in the future it may or may not be suitable for children.
A note on the intro: this is supposed to be the place where I hint at the story's major themes. Don't take the "almost and in-between" thing too seriously -- it's my stock theme; I use it as a fallback. (It's sort of a fetish.) This section will most likely change again once the story figures out where it's going.
Spoiler:
. : Nightblown : .
It's a peculiar thing, to be in two places at once.
I can see Arbutus, the dream-city, glimmering between the waves. I can see the sloped sides of the Black Mirror Pool arcing up and away towards dusky Sapote Village when the light bends correctly, and the spirits of others locked in this trance below the glassy surface, as distant and ghostly as I must appear to them. But here I sit – no (although, in another place, this is true); here I stand – no. Here I lie, vertically, suspended, floating; dead to the world all in motion around me.
This place, it heightens perception such as I've never felt before. I can feel the planes, all of them, arching and shimmering below and above me – the others are little more than veils, but the physical world, is a map spread all round and below me, a moving living map in which rivers flow and skies lighten, darken; people retreat into and emerge from their homes as airships pass overhead, casting shadows on desert and plain—
Regardless, here I exist, somewhere between; both normal and ethereal. My story, too, is one of the almost and the in-between, when reality brushes up against legend and memory and dream. Only fitting, then, that this meditation is the final challenge; the sum and the climax of all I've sought and learned. It is a rite of forced recall, of remembrance – I can see my experiences thus far laid out in a shining chain, each moment a vital link – I can see myself diving into this chain, entering it, allowing it to consume me.
Only through this will it all fall into place. Only after this will I be ready.
Thus it begins: my name is Holly.
1.
Whitebirch, village of snow, nestled at the summit of the largest mountain in Augen: my birthplace, my home. It had its own sort of mysticism about it—the story was that its first inhabitants, my grandparents among them, migrated there through a cave after a schism occurred in their former town: a place, it was said, of magic and dark forces. There was a little graveyard at the peak of the mountain, which the residents of Whitebirch perceived as a special place.
My upbringing was merry and unremarkable until, sometime during the spring of my third year of life, my mother fell ill – it was a violent, ruthless illness, confining her, all wrapped up in blankets and with beads of sweat glistening on her pale skin, to my parents' bed or to the chair by the fireplace for most of summer and fall. It was no virus, however, unless such a thing could be said of the parasitic seed of life – it burgeoned within her, sapping her strength, while she seemed to be battling it for her own body. Winter came and her belly looked ready to burst, and then my mother and father were holed up in their bedroom with the midwife, and I (how could I have forgotten?) stood white and wide-eyed in the hall, hearing the screams through the closed door and knowing with the prescient certainty of a freshly four-year-old that something was going wrong.
A tense silence and then a crying followed the climax of the battle; but it was a guttural, stricken-sounding moan of a cry rather than an infant's wail. My mother had survived the ordeal in spite of herself – I glimpsed, for an instant, the child that would surely have taken her life cradled motionless in my father's arms, framed in the now-open doorway.
She was to be called Amaryllis, so my father carved it into her tombstone, painstakingly and precisely as a bride embroidering her wedding veil – and they buried Amaryllis in the cold earth of the mountaintop with all the town present save the very old or – like me – the very young. I went because she was my sister (I can't say for sure, but I believe that, in a way, even then I understood), and stood between my parents at the head of the gathering.
To this day I don't know whether the drifloon was there to guide my dead sister away or whether it was her, formed from the substace of her soul, as ghost pokemon are said to be. It meandered about some distance down the mountain, weaving through the snowy pines while we all stood there shivering, and no one seemed to notice it but me. Some time after the funeral ended and night fell, I, restless with thoughts of the balloon pokemon, climbed out of bed and wandered back to the summit of the mountain, wearing only my nightdress despite the cold. It was still there when I approached the graveyard, bobbing about the small, somber stones, and it began drifting toward me as soon as it noticed my presence.
We met in the center of that little cemetery and it latched onto my outstretched hand with its own heart-shaped one and pulled, undoubtedly trying to steal me away to who-knows-where – the spirit world, perhaps – but in blissful naivete I giggled and pulled back, and soon I was dragging the protesting balloon back home, smiling a small childish smile. That morning my mother and father found me happily asleep in my bed, still clutching the drifloon tightly by its paw. They did not question or protest: I think they hoped that it would help me get over my sister's death, or at least avoid any scarring. When I awoke they had already obtained an age-bleached apricorn from somewhere and encased the drifloon within it: together they presented me, round-faced, groggily disheveled, and ecstatic, with the makeshift pokeball.
In time, the drifloon would become my companion. In those early years, though, it was my plaything, a cherished object that held infinite amusement. I dragged it around everywhere, and if my grip ever slackened and it attempted to float away (which happened often – I was a clumsy child, and my pokemon did not enjoy its captivity) I would recall it with the apricorn that rested always in the pocket of my dress. I called it Woony, then, and my parents followed suit in the way adults speak gibberish to babies.
Another year passed before my parents attempted to conceive again: my father became visibly nervous, then, while my mother fell into a sort of cautious stoicism, but this time the pregnancy passed painlessly and my brother was born without incident late in the summer, a few months before my own birthday. Suddenly I was six years old and left mostly to myself, as my parents cared (unscrupulously, and with a sort of triumphant joy – but who could blame them?) for the new baby. I was maturing quickly for a small child, and I had already begun to perceive Woony as female, although it would be some time still before I'd consider her a playmate rather than a toy. The drifloon, for her part, had warmed to me as well in the two years since I'd captured her so unwittingly – in my mind's eye I watch myself falling over, tripped perhaps by a rock or a root hidden beneath the snow, and Woony hovering close, bobbing with apparent concern. We still had not communicated beyond the instinctual childish level of gestures and touches and occasional sounds, but that was soon to change.
I know what it's like to feel supernatural. I've done my share of witchcraft over the years, and there's always a sense of power beyond one's own being invoked in the truest spells, those least diluted by superstition and word-of-mouth. The others work too, of course, on the basis of common belief (usually, at least, if you know what you're doing), and can still be quite potent depending on how culturally ingrained they've become...
Regardless, though, this felt as natural as it's possible for anything to feel; as natural as seeing or smelling or hearing. I don't know when it started, because it was so gradual – I could perceive vague moods from Woony, no different than the sort one can easily infer of humans from their body language alone, and then I could perceive emotions from her, specific and fickle and linked – almost – with colors in my mind, and then I could almost, almost detect her thoughts sliding over and around each other like quicksilver gusts of wind if I payed close attention to her beady black eyes. These were tinted with colors, usually, or they formed vague distorted picture-shapes, and I found them pretty, like dresses or flowers. And then I found myself noticing whether she was cheerful or melancholy or lonely or annoyed even when she wasn't present or within sight (at this point, of course, constant surveillance of my pocket monster was far from necessary, although I was no less enthralled with her than I had been that night in the graveyard), and I spoke to her in human-speech when she was near and knew her responses, even if I couldn't have relayed them in words.
I think one of my maternal aunts had this talent, too, or perhaps my grandmother, and I know it was present in a handful of other villagers of both sexes, albeit to various lesser degrees. The reason for this involves Whitebirch's origins, surely (it's never been tested, of course, but it's a commonsense affair), and I've no reason not to disclose it – but it's all connected, you see, to where I am, and what I've done, and why I left – and this fickle trance, likely for the better, locks everything in sequence: before all that can be explained, I must tell you of Persimmon.
It's a peculiar thing, to be in two places at once.
I can see Arbutus, the dream-city, glimmering between the waves. I can see the sloped sides of the Black Mirror Pool arcing up and away towards dusky Sapote Village when the light bends correctly, and the spirits of others locked in this trance below the glassy surface, as distant and ghostly as I must appear to them. But here I sit – no (although, in another place, this is true); here I stand – no. Here I lie, vertically, suspended, floating; dead to the world all in motion around me.
This place, it heightens perception such as I've never felt before. I can feel the planes, all of them, arching and shimmering below and above me – the others are little more than veils, but the physical world, is a map spread all round and below me, a moving living map in which rivers flow and skies lighten, darken; people retreat into and emerge from their homes as airships pass overhead, casting shadows on desert and plain—
Regardless, here I exist, somewhere between; both normal and ethereal. My story, too, is one of the almost and the in-between, when reality brushes up against legend and memory and dream. Only fitting, then, that this meditation is the final challenge; the sum and the climax of all I've sought and learned. It is a rite of forced recall, of remembrance – I can see my experiences thus far laid out in a shining chain, each moment a vital link – I can see myself diving into this chain, entering it, allowing it to consume me.
Only through this will it all fall into place. Only after this will I be ready.
Thus it begins: my name is Holly.
1.
Whitebirch, village of snow, nestled at the summit of the largest mountain in Augen: my birthplace, my home. It had its own sort of mysticism about it—the story was that its first inhabitants, my grandparents among them, migrated there through a cave after a schism occurred in their former town: a place, it was said, of magic and dark forces. There was a little graveyard at the peak of the mountain, which the residents of Whitebirch perceived as a special place.
My upbringing was merry and unremarkable until, sometime during the spring of my third year of life, my mother fell ill – it was a violent, ruthless illness, confining her, all wrapped up in blankets and with beads of sweat glistening on her pale skin, to my parents' bed or to the chair by the fireplace for most of summer and fall. It was no virus, however, unless such a thing could be said of the parasitic seed of life – it burgeoned within her, sapping her strength, while she seemed to be battling it for her own body. Winter came and her belly looked ready to burst, and then my mother and father were holed up in their bedroom with the midwife, and I (how could I have forgotten?) stood white and wide-eyed in the hall, hearing the screams through the closed door and knowing with the prescient certainty of a freshly four-year-old that something was going wrong.
A tense silence and then a crying followed the climax of the battle; but it was a guttural, stricken-sounding moan of a cry rather than an infant's wail. My mother had survived the ordeal in spite of herself – I glimpsed, for an instant, the child that would surely have taken her life cradled motionless in my father's arms, framed in the now-open doorway.
She was to be called Amaryllis, so my father carved it into her tombstone, painstakingly and precisely as a bride embroidering her wedding veil – and they buried Amaryllis in the cold earth of the mountaintop with all the town present save the very old or – like me – the very young. I went because she was my sister (I can't say for sure, but I believe that, in a way, even then I understood), and stood between my parents at the head of the gathering.
To this day I don't know whether the drifloon was there to guide my dead sister away or whether it was her, formed from the substace of her soul, as ghost pokemon are said to be. It meandered about some distance down the mountain, weaving through the snowy pines while we all stood there shivering, and no one seemed to notice it but me. Some time after the funeral ended and night fell, I, restless with thoughts of the balloon pokemon, climbed out of bed and wandered back to the summit of the mountain, wearing only my nightdress despite the cold. It was still there when I approached the graveyard, bobbing about the small, somber stones, and it began drifting toward me as soon as it noticed my presence.
We met in the center of that little cemetery and it latched onto my outstretched hand with its own heart-shaped one and pulled, undoubtedly trying to steal me away to who-knows-where – the spirit world, perhaps – but in blissful naivete I giggled and pulled back, and soon I was dragging the protesting balloon back home, smiling a small childish smile. That morning my mother and father found me happily asleep in my bed, still clutching the drifloon tightly by its paw. They did not question or protest: I think they hoped that it would help me get over my sister's death, or at least avoid any scarring. When I awoke they had already obtained an age-bleached apricorn from somewhere and encased the drifloon within it: together they presented me, round-faced, groggily disheveled, and ecstatic, with the makeshift pokeball.
In time, the drifloon would become my companion. In those early years, though, it was my plaything, a cherished object that held infinite amusement. I dragged it around everywhere, and if my grip ever slackened and it attempted to float away (which happened often – I was a clumsy child, and my pokemon did not enjoy its captivity) I would recall it with the apricorn that rested always in the pocket of my dress. I called it Woony, then, and my parents followed suit in the way adults speak gibberish to babies.
Another year passed before my parents attempted to conceive again: my father became visibly nervous, then, while my mother fell into a sort of cautious stoicism, but this time the pregnancy passed painlessly and my brother was born without incident late in the summer, a few months before my own birthday. Suddenly I was six years old and left mostly to myself, as my parents cared (unscrupulously, and with a sort of triumphant joy – but who could blame them?) for the new baby. I was maturing quickly for a small child, and I had already begun to perceive Woony as female, although it would be some time still before I'd consider her a playmate rather than a toy. The drifloon, for her part, had warmed to me as well in the two years since I'd captured her so unwittingly – in my mind's eye I watch myself falling over, tripped perhaps by a rock or a root hidden beneath the snow, and Woony hovering close, bobbing with apparent concern. We still had not communicated beyond the instinctual childish level of gestures and touches and occasional sounds, but that was soon to change.
I know what it's like to feel supernatural. I've done my share of witchcraft over the years, and there's always a sense of power beyond one's own being invoked in the truest spells, those least diluted by superstition and word-of-mouth. The others work too, of course, on the basis of common belief (usually, at least, if you know what you're doing), and can still be quite potent depending on how culturally ingrained they've become...
Regardless, though, this felt as natural as it's possible for anything to feel; as natural as seeing or smelling or hearing. I don't know when it started, because it was so gradual – I could perceive vague moods from Woony, no different than the sort one can easily infer of humans from their body language alone, and then I could perceive emotions from her, specific and fickle and linked – almost – with colors in my mind, and then I could almost, almost detect her thoughts sliding over and around each other like quicksilver gusts of wind if I payed close attention to her beady black eyes. These were tinted with colors, usually, or they formed vague distorted picture-shapes, and I found them pretty, like dresses or flowers. And then I found myself noticing whether she was cheerful or melancholy or lonely or annoyed even when she wasn't present or within sight (at this point, of course, constant surveillance of my pocket monster was far from necessary, although I was no less enthralled with her than I had been that night in the graveyard), and I spoke to her in human-speech when she was near and knew her responses, even if I couldn't have relayed them in words.
I think one of my maternal aunts had this talent, too, or perhaps my grandmother, and I know it was present in a handful of other villagers of both sexes, albeit to various lesser degrees. The reason for this involves Whitebirch's origins, surely (it's never been tested, of course, but it's a commonsense affair), and I've no reason not to disclose it – but it's all connected, you see, to where I am, and what I've done, and why I left – and this fickle trance, likely for the better, locks everything in sequence: before all that can be explained, I must tell you of Persimmon.
Last edited:
me?