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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GlassEye" data-source="post: 6326401" data-attributes="member: 40413">Ok, this is what I came up with in terms of a vision.  doghead, take a look and feel free to make whatever changes you think necessary.  If we even use it.  <shrug>[sblock=Vision]Roots and vines.At first Slice couldn’t tell what he was seeing except a profusion of writhing plant-life until the vines irised away, beyond his sight, to expose a blur of images, a hundred changing turns of a kaleidoscopic life with one face.“Yes,” said the familiar, maddening voice.  It spoke with no hesitation.The shadow moved and Slice could tell that it was well pleased and yet, it was exactly what it knew would be spoken.  It circled the edge of the grove and snagged a delicate strand of spider silk that gleamed like silver in the moonlight.  As the shadow moved closer to the elf the web unraveled.  Shadow wrapped the strand of silver around the elf’s finger.“There are three in the forest beyond.  Bring them here.  Wind the strand and beware that you don’t break it for it will bring you here.”---The baby was lying in a nest of silk and waving its tiny elfin hands and feet at nothing.  A crone, one of the bent and broken fey and ugly as nothing Slice had ever seen before, uncurled a gnarled finger, spit upon the fingertip, and touched the spittle to the baby’s eyes.  The image fractured as if he were seeing it from two vantage points: the finger reached towards his eye, dripping with some viscous fluid, and touched the ball of his eye.  His vision blazed and faded as he blinked his eye clear though he knew something was there, deeper than skin, deeper than bone, some essential element that he could see if he only focused, that he needed to grasp, to drink in and understand.From the outside, the crone.  He could see past the veil of her skin.  She was rotten stump-wood carved into the semblance of a creature and made to dance like the wooden poppets at a market day faire animated by twitching strings controlled by…---“Who are you?  What do you seek from me?” demanded a low, husky voice at odds with the rumbling crash Slice expected.  The voice emanated from a figure concealed by a shifting mass of shadow as the stars wheeled overhead painting circles in the night sky.  Only his own vision of the figure was shadowed, through his borrowed eyes he saw a feminine figure of carved and polished wood yet able to move with serpentine grace.  Slice thought to answer her questions but another voice spoke before he could.“Khirynnax, born of the Great Forest and a son of the Stinking Mire.  I seek the secrets of the aether, the animating force of the fey.”“And will you serve me a year and a day for what you desire?”The moon, the same moon that gazed down on Slice and his companions as they fled through the wood, stopped in its track awaiting the answer.---Scene after scene flashed by, most too quickly to catch more than a fleeting glimpse.  Each glimpse, however, revealed a root or vine, plucking, prodding, pushing some unknown agent to alter the course of Khirynnax’s life until it flowed in the channel dictated by each root and vine that led back to that grove of shifting shadow where the stars wheeled in the sky.[/sblock]</blockquote>

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