Aranel

[Solsticegelan]

This is a story which I have posted only a single chapter of so far - because I am too worried about details, stressing this or that point out, making sure the plot isnt stretched and developement and worldbuilding go along fine. This initial post contains the Index; The Next the prolog. I am eventually going to post the rest of the first arc, but presumeably only after its finished.

Part of why It's just now being posted here is... well, procrastination, my only other enemy, but the other large reason is my new quest, taking place in this same world. A link is going to be below.

So listen closely, if you would care, to this young fools story.

Index: Working Titles

Arc 1; A Quite Awefully Long Journey.
Prolog; It begins again.
Chapter 1; Of Mountains and Mages
Chapter 2; Of Strange Happenings
Chapter 3; Let's make a deal, Shall we?
Chapter 4; Of Backlash and Tropes
Interlude; A Summery of Old World Magics
Chapter 5; Of a Quest!
Chapter 6; Of a long Journey; Or Beyond the Valleys Low.
Interlude; Aghanim and the Status Quo
Chapter 7; Of Bonding and Pasts
Chapter 7; Of Bogs and Affliction
Chapter 8 Of Strange Men and Women
Interlude; Religions of the Old World
Chapter 9; Of The Lord
Chapter 10; Of Necromancy and Eldritch Beasts
Interlude; Ages of the Old World
Epilog; Of the Path Ahead

Artwork Index
Aranel

Related Content
"This is New...Right?" [SB, SV]
Other Threads [SB, FP]

 

[Solsticegelan]

Prolog; It Begins Again

All tales must begin somewhere. In some stories, their beginnings are chosen, specific, planned, Some are chaotic, and forced. They may choose to be mysterious, epic, awe inspiring, simple, or human….

How shall this story begin?

There is nothing, yet there is everything, stretching on forever. It is incomprehensible and indescribable, beautiful and horrifying…

And there is a repetitive beating noise, thumping like a heart in this not-a-place, as a hammer held by an invisible force pounds and molds a sword, constantly forging it into shape. So it continued,
Clang
And will continue
Clang
Until eternity is born
Clang
When it will fall silent
Clang
Until the day infinity stretches no more
Clang
-0-0-0-​

Deep, deep below the ground, sunlight – sunlight- streamed through elaborate glass morals, lighting up a long, seemingly unending chapel-like building, with a single red carpet running along most of its length, ending where parallel columns rose from the ground, connecting to the ceiling every so often. It was nondescript, with no details allowing distinction between the gray bricks and windows.

There seems to be a whispering, a rasping of harsh and unnatural voices, picking up within the endless corridor, echoing endlessly as something stirred, dying down as though it were a simple breeze. With a gasp, a young man looked around, dressed in an outfit that could belong in any age, with a white color and shortened sleeves. He reacts horribly to his sudden appearance in this place, whirling around in horror, and were he to calm, a curious interest.

Eyes wide, he opened his mouth as though he were to scream for something, for anyone to come and help him, even if it were in vain. Instead, all that comes from his mouth is a dry rasp. He wills himself to step forward, to start walking, to find some way out. He knows he couldn't break the windows, couldn't find an escape, even if he tried; and as he started walking, he knew he couldn't step off the long carpet, no matter how hard he tried, and so he didn't.

As he walked forward, eventually the whispering noises would pick up, their echoing force appearing as though it were the wind, growing louder and louder every time it started, and occasionally sounding distinguishable to the young man.

How long had he been walking? The young man didn't know. Days? Weeks? Months? The light streaming in through the windows never changed neither position nor intensity, beaming down upon him. He grew hungrier and his thirst couldn't be quenched, but he kept on walking at the pace he'd been moving at since he'd started, convincing himself over and over it would all be alright if he kept on going. His hunger didn't matter, his thirst didn't matter, the aching in his legs didn't matter; it would all be perfectly attended to once he left this place, if he only kept walking forward.

So forward he walked, on and on, past mural after mural, each one depicting a single moment in his life, a single moment of the universe. Anything and everything, everything that was or wasn't, it shined as brightly as a dying sun. As he walked towards it, he felt the weight of everything that existed, everything around it, outside it struggling to crash down upon the universe. Upon him. He felt the ever-pushing things below him, mirrors that shrunk and shrunk yet add up to so much as they tried to overthrow him. And suspended above him he felt the weight of more and more, in the shape of that he viewed as he walked. But it was not yet there to bear down on him, he felt not its conception, but its preconception, and it all confused him. He understood yet could not the entirety of his universe, other universes, every ultimatum and continuity and offshoot and chance and emotion and timeline and things so alien it simply could not be described and things so old he could only just glimpse their truest forms of madness at the edge of his mind. Yet most importantly, as he walked on and on, he felt the voices on the wind which was not. He felt their whispers, heard them grow louder and louder as they pierced his mind. But never once did he see himself.

Finally, after what seemed like an infinite number of steps, for infinite they had to be, with his emotions dulled, his mind no longer reacting to the voices ever growing in strength, he grew excited. He saw a wall; and what must be the way out; he could see a larger mural on that wall, one of a sword, beaming down onto something finally different, something he could see gleaming in the distance; what he assumed must be the door. He tried sprinting, but winced in pain from the effort, the voices picking up, almost telling him to stop and keep walking, that they'd push him forward. So he walked, and a panic set in, for he had grown closer to the wall, and saw the carpet ended at a single podium, coming a few feet off the ground. A sword rose up, embedded in the stone, and beyond that he saw no way out, no doorway to his freedom from wherever he was. Madness, growing in his mind since he had begun walking, finally sprouted and bloomed, and he kept on walking, urged on by the voices, silently manipulating him.
Eventually, for he could no longer tell how long it had taken, he stood in front of the sword. He wanted to sit down, and cry, and die, but he couldn't. Why? He didn't know. Some time ago, he had stopped making his own choices; now only the voices, a permanent gale in his mind, echoing throughout the infinity he had crossed, controlled his bodies functions. So, he finally acknowledged them. He urged them, implored them, to tell him what to do.

And finally, the voices came into booming crystal clarity, coming from everywhere at once, inside of his mind and out. Calling out to him, as did the swords hilt, begging for itself to be filled.
"Take it. Take the sword, and meet your destiny. It is Aranel, and Aranel is all; Aranel is key. Take that which we forged for you before all else was"
"Who….what are you?" The man rasped out, for he was now a man, for how long he had been walking. The words burned his throat, the first words he'd spoken since before any could now remember now.
"We are nothing, and everything. We are Aranel; take the sword, and all shall be answered. We are those from before all was made and before nothing existed; take our gift, which we forged to you. Take Aranel."

The man stepped forward, onto a step that raised him to proper height with the sword. He clutched it with both hands, and hesitated for a moment. The voice was booming from his mind, repeating the command to take the sword, to accept the sword, to become what they had declared him to be before the first god came to be. But there was something, not nearly as loud as the voices that encompassed all, telling him not to. But a final repetition convinced him of what was right, and he removed the sword from its position within the gray stone. A blue light emerged from a gem he just now noticed inside of the gracefully complicated hilt of the sword, and suddenly, he knew all…he saw all of reality itself, though all of time and space, and things he couldn't have previously comprehended. It was all coming to him, an endless stream of information; it was amazing. He could feel the voices in his mind, coming from within the sword, the echoes almost dying down.

So he looked and he looked, and saw all that could be, the incomprehensible forces that now looked like simple additive math to him, the barriers that separated one timeline from another, the vastness of space, particles and atoms and dark matter and magic of all kinds, oh so much! Framed within a single instant was everything plain and alien and eldritch, mortal and immortal, animate and inanimate! He noticed it all, just as he noticed that something was now missing from him; not something important, not something to be missed, just something; for now he could take true action. For his mind had expanded, become everything; he could take it, shape it, control it all – except for that one force, the one thing binding everything.

It was not Magic, that he could tell. The ancient powers which defied science but now had all their secrets open to him. He felt its ebb and its flow, its pulse and its non-being; saw how it spread and bent and folded, how its laws and saturation changed amongst all things.

Nor was it some Lovecraftian horror, for he could tell he was older than them now; they were as easily killable and manipulate able as anything else. It was not language, which could scarcely be used to describe the indescribable, yet he could use to do so. His Body? He could already feel its newfound power, how it would be shaped and flow as naturally as all else. Not even the endless horde of things that are not, waiting to crash down upon all of reality.

No,what he could not control was time; Time! The threads of reality rested before him, willing him to destroy and change and create, but TIME was the one thing he did not have! Oh, he could manipulate it; but just as it was with Magic, the laws it was bound by changed everywhere, and everywhen. Even for him, he was unable to escape it. There was a warning, now being call out from the vast mirrored world above.

"Don't become-!" the voice had shouted, cut off by the whispers commanding him one final time.
Don't become what? The man mused. The man's voice hadn't stopped the information on what he could do with the sword; and he possessed the ability to look into his own future, however cryptically he did such.

So he looked forward, to see what he would become. The ever present voices faded; he felt a single voice press into his mind. He saw what he would become, and so, he fell down, and weaped. He cried, and cried, and cried for an eternity, because he knew what would become of him. The voices were gone now, just as they were in the future, and for the first time, a night fell upon the pathway of infinity. The sword had fallen from his hands, and now lay in front of the man, somehow sheathed, glowing softly and giving menace to it. But the man took no notice.

Infinity died around him as murals shattered around him, one by one from the first to the last where he now laid slumped and crying, in a single instant that wasn't real, as the lights all dimmed, save for one. The one laying in front of the sword, of twin stone guardians standing stout above a rippling lake of creation as they held in chains a single small figure. The man and the sword vanished from this place, from this Endless Cathedral, as smoothly and unnoticeably as they came, as endless hordes of things that aren't stepped in through the windows and as the countless smaller mirrors of all time that never seemed to end broke in through the unmoving floor. The carpets stood framed against pitch blackness as red as blood as the larger mirror, the one that wasn't, the preconception of a conception came to be with unimaginable force.
And Aghanim awoke.

-0-0-0-​

There is a city ,glowing and golden, with towering skyscrapers and magical lights, a near perfect utopian ideal of a place, in a world known rather in a rather cliché way as the old world. This planet, so vast and infinite, contains races and animals of incredible descriptions, and none have fully explored it; But despite that, all would agree that this city was the most amazing, the crown jewel of what was to be called the golden age of humans, and all intelligent beings in general for that matter. Within a tower at the center of the city, on a night no different from any other, Home of the Grand-Arch mage Aghanim, a single candle lit a dark room.

Slouched over his parchment, sitting in a desk in a homely study as a large grandfather clock slowly beat back and forth in the background and as some small creature stirred in the rafters above him, Aghanim was quickly writing down his what he had witnessed within his dreams. The clock began ringing out a sonorous song of ringing bells, signifying the coming of midnight.

The small creatures in the rafters above stopped their chattering in dread, as the clocks chimes slowed. Aghanim stood from his chair suddenly, his long blue cloak he wore sweeping up behind him, picking up a scepter adorned with a large blue crystal on its tip, he turned to meet an uninvited guest.
"It is time, Aghanim. Shall you heed my warning?" A figure stated from the shadows.
Aghanim tensed. "Your warning… or your threat?" He questioned, scepter glowing menacingly.
A pause in the conversation as the figure obscured in shadow attempted to find his answer. "Both, I suppose." He said. "Heed my words well, magus; Bear no children to retain your legacy within this world, and I shall leave you and it alone.

"If you chose to ignore my words rather than abide to them, than be warned. I shall sheer the earth of this world apart, tear the life from it like an animal would marrow from bone."

"You fear me." Aghanim stated, power swirling. "Yet I know your reputation, Reality Render – Both you and Aranel's."

The sword, bearing an elaborate yet effective handle, contained a single gem, light blue in nature. It flared up in anger as the name was used, yet Aghanim made no move to shield his eyes. The figure hissed in anger as shadows took back his figure.

"You of all people should know the danger in names, wizard – I will not take kindly to blatant disrespect of our titles."

"Our?"

The clock chimed once again as Aghanim asked his final question. The gem now glew softly, in malevolence.

"Aranel and I feel no need for me to repeat myself. Be warned of the dangers of your progeny, Magus! I do this not for myself, but for you."

The clocks chiming ended as Aghanim sighed, with the figure vanishing as suddenly and quietly as he had appeared.

"I'm sorry." Aghanim whispered from the dying light of the candle.