Fanfiction:V Translanka Magness 8

<1025A.D.>

TEMPORAL VORTEX REPORT

-REPORT NO. 8-

[UNKNOWN TRANSFER RATE, SYSTEMATIC DATA MALFUNCTION]

CRYPTIC TEXT SYNCH RESULT - MULTIDIMENSIONAL TIMELINES

CODE - MAGNESS

CODE EX. - "e N n | @ e F f | @"

Fear for one, then absolute uncontrollable madness. It must have been. It was hundreds of them and just one to stand against; one little girl with her hair bunched up and hidden on the top of her head. That-s all if could have been was madness. But still she stood, unwavering in this great peril. The wolfs of the forest were ravenous.

Their heads were hunched down like the dogs they were, ready to pounce. They were ready...to kill. This was reflected in her own eyes, even if she hadn-t the power to do so. She was still just as ready. More ready, for she knew her life was on the line. The hazard signs were all there she could have thought; alone in the forest in a church in its decline and the howls getting ever closer. The howls that were put aside and not thought of until it was too late and they came crashing through the chapel windows.

Her fists beat into the square jaws of those first wolfs with fury. Their fur was mostly grey with splotches of blackened mud and dirt. Most of it was neither dirt nor mud. It was dark and red and it was not paint. Their claws were tiny daggers protruding from the tip of each finger. But they were sloppy and shaky from hunger, so their hands missed, where hers had held true.

In the end of course, it wouldn-t have mattered how true her tiny fists with their big gloved knuckles hit those first couple wolfs. It wouldn-t have mattered if she had hit each one with a good solid blow. There were simply too many. They would have flooded her and her blood would have spilt and stained the glossy wooden floors of the church. It would have happened just like that, in the flicker of a moment in time, if not for him.

She tried to hold onto the image of him and his glorious entrance not just into that place in the woods, but into her life. He would change her forever. It had already begun. This image slipped away from her though and it was replaced with a much more familiar one; a lone doorway.

The heavy oaken door seemed to stand without any support. The hinges were attached to nothingness. Upon the door, three words were writ. No, they weren-t written, they were engraved, they were part of the door. The edges of the large black letters seemed brimmed with gold. This is what they said:

--- (YOU Fate) ---

< (Loss) >

The handle was the same type of shining gold that lined the letters. It beckoned to be held, to be turned, to be pulled. She had no choice. A hand reached out and grasped the knob; Marcy-s small gloved hand. It turned the doorknob without her actually willing it to. Although she wished very much to see beyond the door, at the same time she feared the other side. Very momentarily, the thought of why the words were writ as they were swamped her mind. The first two words were wrong; mismatched or misspelled? They weren-t in the right order. They didn-t make sense. No, they made sense. They were very important, but they also didn-t matter at all.

The door opened easy as paper and she was swept away...

The hall was great and made of stone. It seemed a dark remnant of an ancient castle. Now the hall was a great staircase leading down in a maddening spiral...down and down and down. These were dizzying depths. The torch glow changed from a regular and natural orange & red to that of an uncannily evil and unsteady flicker of black & blue. They became brighter and brighter as the stairs crept downwards.

There were great sweeps of faceless people that kept falling. They would approach a gloved hand-somewhere close in the foreground-and for whatever reason, they would duck down or crouch or lie down or tip backward suddenly. The gloved hand held something; something that must be shown very quickly to these people and then put away again. What was it? Only a flare of shining white or silver could be seen when it was taken out.

Light blue strands of something (String...? Hair...? Impossible to tell in all this blur...) kept getting in the way and were swept aside from view. The hands continued into the depths until finally the end came and there was a door with something writ upon it. After the door-writing overlooked and quickly forgotten-there were more people who did lie down and someone else as well. The same thing was shown to her as well, although by that time it was as if the showing was that of an over-enthusiastic child. They were very proud and uncaring for the thoughts of those who were shown their prize. The hands were just moving out, showing everyone in sight. It was shown to this last one the quickest of all and yet time seemed to stop altogether for it.

This last one, the most unexpected of them all, let out a small gasp. Perhaps it was of terror, but it sounded more like shock, dismay, regret and anguish all rolled into one little exhale. No, it wasn-t from her. It was from that whose hands were doing the showing. The coldest of chills ran up and down both their spines and for the first time he not only felt, but actually revealed-in sunken face, stuttering hands, and sulking posture-his ultimate surprise at this, his ultimate of failings.

There was a tremendous shift and he was no longer there. For a prolonged moment there was only darkness. Only there wasn-t only darkness. There was his immense misery...and along with it, a sound. It was strikingly familiar. It was like laughter, but it was not jovial, no joy or real sense of cheer could be discerned from this sound. It was malicious like only he had ever known anything to be.

Then it was gone and the darkness faded with it. He saw a smoky house emerge from the sinister depths of the gloom. It too was strikingly familiar to him. There were a few major differences with it though. It seemed a touch larger here than his memory held. There were also many people about it inside, banging at sturdy windows. The doors nailed shut from the outside. And the most major and significant difference of all was the most clear-cut; it was alight with enormous flame.

At the top floor he saw and recognized a face. Although it seemed older and finer than he remembered, her face was still wrapped in large round glasses that held onto those bright blue-green eyes he knew. Tears welled up in these eyes. Flames danced behind her and caught her back aflame. She banged on the glass either to get his attention or out of desperation from the fire, he couldn-t tell. She mouthed five words into the shadows of the forest, "Save the children. Save Kid."

"Lucca!" He screamed to her. But he was no longer asleep. That last word in his dream had struck him awake like a splash of cold water. Marcy awoke at his outburst with the same sort of acuteness. Neither of them said anything. They just sat for a moment and breathed deep breaths. Both their dreams had led into frightening depths of unknowingness. Just dreams, they thought simultaneously, but these things were more than mere dreams and at the heart they both knew it.

Gil checked the stars and noted that he had been asleep for several hours. It felt as though no time had passed in the forest. The moon was a sliver that was mostly tucked between the rim of trees and the awaiting waters of the western sea. What could be seen of it cast an eerie azure light on the assembling of trees.

A faint glow flickered to one side and he looked in its direction; toward the middle of the once grand cathedral, toward the tree. The strange non-words, the markings and even those two contorted bumps glowed strangely. A deep white, that was the nearest to gray he had ever seen light shimmer, shot fiercely from these marks.

"What is that?" She asked. Her brow twitched with a confusion and fearfulness that was all too well deserved (whether she knew it or not at the time was another matter entirely). The tree shook slightly and a lone leaf drifted from an innermost branch down to the waiting ground below.

"I...don-t know." He answered with his eyes firmly concentrating on the radiance of the grand tree. The light exuding from the letters and marks intensified and seemed to seep into the tree itself. The light grew and grew until they were forced to shield their eyes-now pinpricks floating in white-from it. Marcy averted her gaze slightly, but kept peering back and forth in quick little bursts. Gil put up a steady arm, but still tried desperately to see what was happening to the tree in-between his fingers.

There was a rumbling sound that seemed to be coming from the earth itself. This grew like the light and the rumbling turned into a thunderous noise that shook their footings loose. Marcy fell straight on her ass and Gil toppled over to one side, catching himself at the last moment before he would have struck his head into a good-sized jagged rock. I certainly don-t need that again, the thought flashed in his mind sardonically at the brief memory of his ‘encounter- with the future-s metallic floors. He continued to look in the direction of the tree, with its blazing white light.

And then, as soon and suddenly as it had all started...It stopped.

"I...I..." Marcy started, stuttering, "Uh...Un err...earthquake?"

Gil glowered at her with slit-eyes in a brief moment of contempt. She overlooked this.

"Then...What the hell was that shit?" She asked with only the briefest hint of fear in her voice, his anger had brought out her own.

"I-m not sure." He said looking at the enormous tree. Had it grown? There was something different about it that he saw almost immediately, "The marks..."

"They-re gone..." She finished his statement in surprise. A flash of a memory entered Gil-s mind. A fire and a house and a woman he knew. When did that happen? Just now, right now? Was it happening now? Not a memory, a dream. Was it truth?

"Lucca..." He whispered the word. And like magic, it conjured up a horrific storm in that part of the forest the likes of which he could never have constructed himself. The other trees shivered with anticipation-or fear?-and leaves fell around them like snowflakes. Great groans were replaced with terrible shrieks and cracks that filled the forest with their clamor.

It took him by the ankle and up into the air before he knew exactly what was happening. It was a flash of movement that neither of them really saw until the deed was done. His sickles clattered to the ground. More and more struck forth from the ground; some straight and others like curled toes. Long and slender roots sprung forth that were more reminiscent of branches or even hands. The one that grabbed Gil swept around his ankle and proceeded to spiral up his leg several times, overlapping itself.

They seemed to dance in the darkness in deep swaying movements, pretending there was a strong breeze. There was no breeze. No noise at all but the crackling, shifty, movements of the root-branches and Gils grunts as the root squeezed harder and harder, digging its tip half an inch into his inner thigh. The pain jolted him just as he was getting his wits back. If only...the sickles...The scattered thought flashed.

Marcy was busy dodging numerous root-branches as they sprung forth from the earth and tried to grab at her; her legs, her arms, her hair, her skirt. One finally reached up high and swung in a large arch and bashed her one good across the side of the head. Gil saw this in slight glimpses as he was flung about by his leg. His eyes were opened wide as windows upon seeing her body sailing off into the forest. Her hair was mostly undone and as she disappeared her movements resembled that of a swimming dragon.

There was pain looping up his leg again and then another root circled his other leg and up his spine until it held his skull like a great pitchfork of a hand. He saw the great tree again before he was smashed into it head first and knocked unconscious.

Huh...Another dream? The thought seemed to float out of him from far away. No, this is the dream...How I tire of dreams...

Don-t we all? The voice entered his head. There was some kind of chilling resonance to that voice; like it came from a great aluminum hall and a vast open field at the same time. He only knew it was a kind of husky deep voice; the smith on the bridge, Zappa, came to mind, but only because he was on the surface of his memory. The voice laughed at him. Reading his thoughts?

His mind swirled momentarily and finally a kind of background emerged. It was scenery in a sense. It wasn-t any kind of reality. It wasn-t a place or a time. It reminded him of clouds; how they can so easily be cast off as nothing more than sky. Something up there in the heavens to mark the ground from everything else, like a huge grey & blue backdrop. But if you looked close enough and looked with just the right kind of eyes, you could really see and think of clouds as they are; dimensional and substantial things of weight (although limited) and size that float and move about in the air.

Your mind be in the clouds I see. This voice was different.

It...It-s that stupid frog. He thought this with a kind of wonderment.

Aye and nay...The thought echoed as the other had. He heard clearly with his mind-s ear his heavy-not to mention heavily unmistakable-Old English accent mingled with a sparse assemblage of those familiar rumbling guttural ribbit frog noises. For thou art dreaming and yet thou are not...

What do you mean to say? This is more than a dream? He saw in his mind-s eye the short, but humanoid, frog there at the summit again; that-s what this particular backdrop was, that summit in Denadoro.

How many times have thou knowest thou were dreaming? This was true. He could not think of many, if any, times where he was fully aware, right from the start that he was dreaming. Surely he never dreamt that a dream questioned him about his state of dreaming. Most dreams felt the same to him. You never really ‘see- anything in a dream, that-s not possible; you just know things for what they are.

Cyrus, the fool, appeared beside him at a small distance. There was something frightfully wrong with him though; although it was actually a common occurrence in his dreams of Cyrus. He seemed to shimmer and change with his movements. One moment he would be decked in his full regalia of knight-s armor. The next he would be a flaming corpse of blackened bone and charred meat. It was actually a common occurrence of many of his worst enemies which he had laid to waste. There was a countless number; not just of laid enemies, but of dreams.

You-re going to need help this time, Janus of Zeal, son of Zeal. The fool said this last part with a sort of smirk that faded when he shimmered and the smirk was replaced with a skull; the smile faded because of this, somewhat.

They-ll die as you died. He said to them, thought to them.

We do as we must to find our own answers and to do what we must. They both said this in remarkable unison, mouths moving like puppets. Their voices mingled together and died in the vastness of the fake landscape surrounding them all.

You didn-t have to die, Cyrus, you fool. You died for the pathetic belief in your country and for your even more pathetic King; your ignorant beliefs in boundaries. They-re nothing but imaginary lines separating imaginary rights between two nations. His thought was cut off as the scenery dropped around him to reveal...

Dizzy, that-s all. She was just a little dazed. She stumbled out of the forest somehow. That had to explain the change. But how could she explain the intense heat, the vast coldness, the blinding light, or the heart-breaking darkness? All these things drastically flooded her senses at the same time.

Then all became clear. Clear enough anyways to see what was meant to be seen. There was a city of some sort. A kind of city she had never seen. It had buildings, although mostly obscured from her view, that were very large in scope, but they seemed to serve no real purpose. She saw only one place she recognized, a place that held some kind of memory in her mind. It was a playground. But it wasn-t whole. It was destroyed.

The entire city lay in ruin now that her eye-her mind-s eye-focused on the surroundings. The slide broke off prematurely into nothing, there were only three bars on the partial set of monkey-bars, and the sandbox was hard blasted to a reflecting glass. Something beyond horror happened to this place; this dead place.

But it wasn-t dead. She heard it echo in her head like an oncoming train; the steady beat of a drum or bass. She looked up to where she thought the sound originated and she saw it was none of those things. It was something living. It was...A heartbeat...It was...A lone crow riding the top of a squall high in the sky.

It was surrounded in life. The Shadows swallowed it. The Flames burnt it. The Water drowned it. The Lightning struck it. And the Wind...The Wind of the Darkness...It rode it like a steady breeze. With the ease of one under constant pressure from forces such as those...Surrounded in life & death...Casting both in long shadows of shimmer light...On and on it flew, gliding the crest of an awful and wonderful wave, and nothing could stop it...

IPSO FACTO! The words blared into her head like a siren and everything was gone. Where had she heard those words? Had she? Ipso facto!

The fake scenery dropped around him to reveal...reality. He was surrounded in it; root, branches, bark, wood...tree. One eye was blocked from the outside world, along with most of the rest of his body. Blood ran into the other, blurring his already limited vision. He was weak as well, a terrible weakness. It was draining him not just of his blood, but of his ability as well. The sound of humming enveloped him. No, it was not a hum. It reminded him of something more like a purr and under different circumstances he might have smiled (inside his head anyways). It was excitement. It was ecstasy. It was coming from the great tree in which he was encased.

"Whff...gar...char...yu...tree..." He tried to speak, tried to ask what it was.

I can hear you. A voice said in his head. It was soft, kind, and innocent. It was the voice of a child. Don-t worry...Janus...Janus Zeal...of...Zeal...son of Zeal.

The voice smiled in his head. It laughed at him. He could feel it swarming his mind when it searched for a name. Get out of my head. He thought calmly. Calmly was the only way he could. He was too weak to be as ferocious as he would have liked; even in his mind, if not especially.

You spoke of the master. Its voice now boomed directly into his brain. You spoke of our creator. So you shall be drained and your knowledge will become my knowledge. Your power will be my power.

It won-t work. He thought, but he knew it would. It smiled, looking him directly in his mind-s eye. The images he was thinking of flew into his mind. The markers they saw as they entered; the graves. No passing strangers had done those burials. The markers weren-t struck into the ground, they came out of it.

Oh, but it will work...Oh how it will...

Monster...

Yes, I-ve been called that before Janus Zeal of Zeal, son of Zeal. If you must label me though, I-d prefer my name as much as you would like me to stop calling you by yours. She called me...NioFio.

She...Lucca...? Created...You...? The words were getting harder and harder to think. They were slipping from his mind almost as soon as he thought them. It was as if the creature-now known as NioFio was eating his thoughts.

Yes...Lucca...Our master...Our creator...

Im...Im...possih...bull...He could not manage the one word. He could no longer think. He only gazed through his own blood and swelling tears out into the red darkness of the very early morning.

"Let him be!" A sharp and angry voice shot out from that very same red darkness. NioFio-s grip (its roots and branches) on Gil lessened a bit at this voice; at the fury in the voice. Then it tightened again, like a child holding on to a toy during clean-up time.

"NO!!!" The defiant voice of NioFio was the same as the one that talked in Gil-s mind, but this time it was much louder. It screamed the words, "I DON-T WANT TO!!! YOU CAN-T MAKE ME!!!"

In a flash it shot snaky tendrils of roots into the forest where the anger voice seemed to come from. Gil was still heavily dazed, but he was picking up parts of what was happening. The roots came back battered, broken, and...Cut? How was that possible? Of course, this question did not occur to him. He was too far gone; too lost. The great tree however did wonder this, and that thought transferred into his mind.

You...die...Gil thought to the creature known as NioFio.

Two lines, streams, of light flew and caught hold of the mighty tree. Two more followed. They glowed with blue fire. They were blue fire. Then he saw her. The lines stretched up to her, high in another tree, and she jumped and for that moment she was an angel floating down to save him. Her eyes though...Her eyes were bleeding...But it wasn-t really blood, but he couldn-t see and thought as much. It was black. It was grey. It was dry, but now wet with tears she didn-t feel. It was ash and it covered the sides and corners of her eyes like badly smeared mascara and eye shadow.

"Let him GO!!" She said again, the hatred was lingering and was being companioned with a stern look of irritation, impatience, and annoyance; pure abhorrence. There was neither hesitation in her voice nor falter in her movements. She tugged on the streams of light (memory of this later would surface in Gil-s mind, reminding him of shackles from the future) somehow attached to her hands-or was it her fingers?-and the creation of vegetation screamed in mind-numbing hurt that trailed off into a hoarse cry, "Now!"

"C-mon!" She said hauling him carried over her shoulder. She wiped at something she didn-t truly perceive next to her eyes with her free forearm before trying to steady him with it. He bent down to pick something up, and toppled over onto it instead. She picked him back up and they left, he managed to clutch his failing hands around his belongings and his sickles. The streams of light followed behind Marcy as they went, still attached to the great monstrosity.

"Let...let us go..." NioFio cried out into the darkness like a small and frightened child, "Let us go...Please...!"

If one were to follow those blue vines of light, one would find that same tree, dying or dead. As Marcy & Gil left the forest, the lines of blue firelight were attached to the tree and they led to a small bunching of bushes which she had tied and broken them off at.

"I hope you die." She whispered under her breath, glancing back a moment as they left that damned forest with Gil-s slack arm around her shoulder. Neither of them knew if he would ever regain anything, but they knew of only one person who stood any chance of helping...

At this rate, you too, will meet a hideous fate....

From: Fanfiction