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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DMO" data-source="post: 1327209" data-attributes="member: 16324">Confluence, Part 1The half-formed dreams began to slip away. The crescendo of light. The tumult of color. A communal song conspiring against the silence. He stretched after them, but they retreated ever more quickly. Impossible trees, tall as authority, towering over the stars. A conflagration that consumed the sky. Some awful noise, like the groaning of a mountain suffocating under its own weight. He became agitated, scrambling after the ephemera but finding no purchase. A child weeping. Vertigo. Howling wind. The bewildering silence of doubt. Echoes of a low voice murmuring words into the darkness, diminishing, then gone. Desolation. At last, he quit struggling and surrendered.  There was a muffled rumble of thunder. He opened his eyes. He looked down to find that he was standing upright, naked. At his feet were markings graven into stone, a diagram circumscribing the area in which he stood, its nested silver bands populated with strange characters. Breaking the continuity of the circle was a thin trail of water that had streamed from a nearby puddle collecting upon the floor. A slow drip fed the puddle through a crack in the ceiling. The walls of this space were close. At one end of the room narrow steps rose from the floor and into the wall, hemmed in by more stone. An old wooden chair stood nearly within reach, and atop the chair rested the remains of what had once been a man, skin tight and shriveled, with long beard and bald pate. In the corpse's lap lay an open book. He stood there taking stock, his face expressionless, gazing about: self, circle, water, chair, body, book, exit. At last, he tentatively raised his leg and stepped across the silvered boundary. With both feet outside the circle he suddenly sprang like a startled cat, leaping away and landing in a crouch. Looking back and finding nothing changed, he gradually, warily, straightened. He went to the corpse in the chair. Cupping its bearded chin in his hand, he gazed at the face. As though from across a great distance, he could hear the ever-present murmuring, the voice from his dreams. His head cocked, and his face grew intent. But the words were not discernible and quickly faded; the only sounds were the muzzled complaints of a storm. He let the chin down and reached for the open book. Flakes of aged ink dusted off the parchment at the upset, and the words on the cracked pages fell away. There was a sudden cry of anguish -- at first he didn't realize that he had produced the sound -- and he quickly slammed the volume shut, sending more ink flakes and crumbled bits of parchment fluttering into the air. He clutched the book to his chest and hurriedly walked to the stairs. With a final, lingering look about the room, as though trying to memorize every detail before it too disappeared into the shadows of his mind, he ascended the steps and exited through a door at the top. Beyond the door was a world oscillating madly between dark and bright, as jagged streaks of lightning tore at the night sky. Thunder boomed loudly -- he could feel the immediacy of the storm in his chest -- and stinging rain came down in torrents. Stone slabs and copper monuments littered the field. They gave way at the ruins of a large building, where he could spy the shifting, sputtering light of a fire. He strode through the rain, stepping barefoot across the stone rubble that skirted the ruin. Only old, rusted hinges remained of the doors to the structure. Proceeding through the arched doorframe, he found himself in a space vaulted by souvenirs of stonework and timber. Glass remained in only a few of the windows, but not a single pane was whole. Water streamed through the vacancies in the ceiling. Two figures sat beside a struggling fire in the looted cavity of the building's interior. They had been eating meat off daggers held over the flames and laughing bawdily, but now they sat in stunned silence, regarding him as if an apparition of death stood in their midst. At his continued approach, one of them reached hastily for his sword upon the floor. "That's plenty far right there. Any closer and I'll cut you down." The other one gave a nervous snort and took a swig from his wineskin. Closing the few remaining steps between them, the interloper reached out suddenly to snatch the wineskin and take several long swallows himself. The drink dribbled down his chin, and a fiery warmth flared in his stomach, followed by a sharp prick. He lowered the bag to find the tip of a sword pressing against his belly. The man who lost his beverage scrambled to his feet and brandished a knife-skewered rabbit. "Bloody fields, man, are you mad," he cried, wielding his supper, "chasing naked after death!" The nude figure seemed to taste each word before responding. "I do not understand you." He gazed piercingly at the man, who recoiled as though struck. "What are you?" the man hissed. He pondered for a moment. "I am Zadkiel. What are you?"</blockquote>

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