Board Thread:Roleplaying/@comment-5543592-20181223224329/@comment-5543592-20181227003022





Tim strode into the fog.

The Undercity vanished behind him as a fine red mist enveloped everything. It was cool, and he felt droplets of water collect on his face.

He breathed in, and out, the fog passing harmlessly through his nose and out his mouth. It wasn't some god. It was nothing. Just some weird, red mist.

He breathed in, and out.

This thing was old. It had been down there for years, decades, centuries, maybe even milennia. Aeons? It was old as the earth and then some. The oldest thing alive. And Tim could feel it, feel that it was massive, maybe the largest thing alive too.

But it hadn't always existed as it had. It once had been something different. Formless. More an imagined concept than a living breathing thing. The Issaquah had worshipped this thing without entirely understanding what it was. Tim couldn't entirely wrap his head around the concept. Was it alien? He got the impression of a metroid hitting lava some time in a past long ago.

And then it's world had changed, sometime in recent memory. Barrels of green emptied into the water. Bombs falling from the sky. The earth mutated and changed and this thing changed with it. It became something, a concept given physical form.

The lines between what was Chahalheel and what was time began to grow blurry and indistinct. Tim could feel his skin sloughing off, dripping to the floor, pooling at his feet, but he touched his hands together and they were intact.

Their shared memory grew more recent. Tim saw a young boy with cut knees wander into a cave, scared and alone. It found a naked portion of Chahalheel and walked into it, just as Tim did now. But the child's identity was not as sturdy as a grown man's, and it instantly fractured. It it's place a piece of this creature broke off, and took hold. It was there Kheiro was created. Neither understood what happened. Chahalheel wasn't some sentient, malevolent entity. It was a slumbering. barely conscious, creature, created by man's own science and radiation. When part of it took hold of Kheiro there in began his obsession with returning to Chahalheel, with bringing it above ground. He was Chahalheel made manifest in human form. This thing was dangerous, it wanted to consume and destroy. It wasn't so much an animal as a virus. Something barely conscious, but with the will to survive all the same.

Tim knew if he wanted to he could destroy Chahalheel with a thought. It would dissipate and cease to exist, without any danger to him. But something in the Royal Wasteland would be lost. That kind of... magic it had. Whatever edge it had would be gone, the playing field leveled. This was fair. It made the most sense, pragmatically. It is what Tanner or Abel would choose.

But Tim could see something else, as he delved deeper. The slow bond a young man made with Chahalheel as he tended a garden close to where the creature nearly broke the surface. The frequency that that man spent near it leant him a long life, and as he grew old, and the world changed, he became the High Lama. And his presence spoke for the long-lasting, beneficial effects of Chahalheel. This thing could grant ''power. ''Tim knew that, as easily as he could destroy it, he could draw from this fog and gain supernatural power unseen. More than Kheiro. More than Tanner. More than Hades. He would be a force unseen since the Master, perhaps even greater than.

He would be a god. This was what the High Lama or Kheiro would choose.

Was this what Hades had felt like? No wonder he went insane.

And behind thought there was something dark. Something dark and angry and evil. It wanted to destroy and kill and ruin  That was all it wanted. Vested in Chahalheel was the power to wipe the Royal Wasteland from the face of the earth. One thought. Boom. The Outsiders: Dead. Red Hand: Dead. Seattle: Gone. This was what Hades had wanted. Total annihilation. Here, and then everywhere else. The world was corrupt and broken and pointless and it needed to end. It had taken Tim's family. It had taken his face. And it would take everything else from him.

And then, Tim could see something else. Something small and insignifcant compared to the grand designs of destruction and preservation. It was him. As he was. As he was going to be. As he had been. His life growing up. His parents, their deaths. His gradual growth into who he was now. The mistakes he's made, the promises, the choices. Everything that made him who he was.

The final option was to let Chahalheel be. On it's own, it did not hurt anyone. It was not evil. It was dangerous because people, in their ignorance, wanted to use it to their own ends. Buried as it had been, it would be safe. Tim could return it to where it had been locked away, and seal it up again. Eventually, someone like Kheiro would come along again and try to take it for themselves. And someone like Tim would come along to try and stop them. The cycle that was life would continue. There would be no assures, but at least he would not destroy something so grand and unique as this.

The memories and thoughts receded as Tim became more himself.

He held real power in hands. True power. Intoxicating in it's purity. He need only think and his will would be done.