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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 5160509" data-attributes="member: 11697">[spoiler]The cell was small and windowless, dirty from careless neglect and the slow accumulation of dust and dirt from passing boots in the adjacent hallway and the occasional drip of water from the ceiling stones. But not much more when that sole occupant had never eaten or drank a drop of water as far as anyone knew. Eventually they'd just stopped bringing her meals, though none of the Bleakers still alive remembered when they'd done so, or even when she'd been incarcerated in the Irretrievably and Criminally Insane Ward of Sigil's Gatehouse. Truth be told, they were frightened of her.She was one of our own they were told. A former Factol of the Bleak Cabal, and like all of them she went insane, slipping into the tragic grasp of the Grim Retreat and then into the arms of her comrades who forced her into a cell with the promise of recovery or death - one or the other. Neither came.Oh they tried to kill her. Many times. It didn't work and eventually they stopped trying. But they didn't like to approach her cell. They didn't care for the whispers that seemed to echo all around them, within the cell and inside of their own heads when they saw her, or just her luminous eyes, solid milky white and absent pupils, or the magnetic and twisting halo of psionic lines of force that came and went from her head like the pulsing fields of a dying star. She scared the hell out of them.The eldest occupant of the Gatehouse looked up from within her cell, former Factol Tollysalmon and smiled as the Bleakers dragged one of her successors up the stairs and towards a cell of his own. The time for Factol Esmus had arrived, just as she had predicted."Imagine if you like," she whispered in githyanki. "Imagine being a prisoner inside of your own shell of a soul. The slate clean and bereft of your memory and power, you go about life and make your way in the world, but your lucidity and everything you were is still there, conscious and screaming to be back in control every few decades or centuries that you gain a moment of true lucidity. You realize what happened. You realize what went wrong. You realize just how much the Chromatic Queen STOLE!"She smiled and the white lines of forced erupted from her head and danced upon the cell-door bars, eliciting audible crackles and snarles of sizzling electric sparks."And then imagine a few hundred thousand years of that. Imagine having the time to plan everything but no capacity to force it into play while all the while being watched from the walls by an omnipresent Bladed Gaze..."A decade passed and another prisoner was hurled into a cell. A babbling man who claimed to be the Factol of the Fated. Of course they already had a Factol, so obviously the man was insane. But he had that same look in his eyes. That same puissant rage of having been wronged and left with the knowledge to take revenge but no means to enact it. Gifad. Rowan Darkwood. The Ancient Wizard of the Labyrinth Gem. Three shades of the same broken man.Gith the Unshackler and ex-Factol Tollysalmon. The same.The githyanki looked up and snarled, dragging claw-like nails across the stones she sat upon. For the first time in hundreds of millennia her eyes focused with a mental clarity she'd been denied."I remember."[/spoiler]</blockquote>

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