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December 14, 2004 | |
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Gideon's Lament - Gideon Club - Banished Sun�
The room is dark as pitch, void of anything except a single spotlight that cuts through the shadow like a razor. It highlights what remains of a man. Flesh and muscle long ago stripped to allow access to veins and arteries, that have been separated from the body to disappear into the darkness. It is here that science meets machine. Magic weds with medicine. As it is obvious that this man, Gideon, has been kept alive through many years....perhaps centuries. The purpose is unknown. The atrocity to humanity, is obvious. Purple tendrils of energy seem to swirl around the remnants of his body as if infused with a life of their own.
The Auburn haired sorceress treks through the hallway that leads to a lonely maze door. In her hand, a flashlight, casts what little light there is in the basement. She pauses before the door, and lets out a gust of breath as if she had been holding it since her decent began. Resigned, she places a hand on the door, palm flat, and pushes...
Damen murmurs softly, the sound echoes throughout the room, but does not orient from the lipless visage you see before you. The liquid-filled tubes would not allow words to be forced around their life-giving duty. Instead the words seem to come from the chamber iteself....as if the very shadows were part of the horror that hangs suspended in the air. "Strange you would find your way back here, my own. YOu did not seem to have this same relentless resolve when I was trying to heal the chasm that had cracked open between us."
Damen no longer resembles anything that hinted at humanity. Eyelids have been peeled back so that his sightless eyes may peer into darker secrets, the lids themselves tacked into his forehead by small blinking diodes. Flesh has merged with machine wedded in a taboo marriage of science, sorcery and madness.
He hangs suspended in the middle of the room, cables and wires bursting from his wrists and ankles and disappearing into the darkness. A twisted crucifixion mocking any faith. Such it is, for a man who would be a god.
The light in her hand fades with the flick of her thumb and sinks to her side. Her eyes clench at the sight of the man who once held her heart. Not in horror. No, not this time. The gesture is filled with ache. And Pity.
Damen rasping laughter skitters across the walls of the room. "Why did you come, Yosannah?"
Yosannah retorts, matter of factly, her voice a soft whisper, meek in contrast to the laughter that spills forth from the man, "Why did you let me."
Damen's body shudders as endorphins laced with sorcery sift through his bloodstream. "So that you can see the miracle that I have become."
She creeps forward now, tucking the thin flashlight at her back, "Miracle. This is no miracle. You are no god. How long will you endure here until you are asking for death." Her gaze scans the length of the tubing that runs to and from his form, inspecting. Searching.
The rasping voice continues, but if one listens carefully it would become obvious that it changes, as if a chorus of people were speaking together, as one. "I would endure this for eternity. Every day I grow stronger....and my reach grows further. I am becoming one with the very shadow. I know every fear. Every desire. If I concentrate I can feel the people living in their self-made oblivions, blowing through life like fragile tumbleweeds. I *am* Banished Sun. If that is not godliness....than what is?"
Yosannah senses a web of magic and technology around Damen that filters away into the darkness.....the paths of energy move in and out of the man.
Yosannah peers around Damen if she can, clinical is her eye, "Banished Sun is just a shadow, Damen. A shadow among an infinity of others. If this is the extent of your passion, you are truly more narrow minded then anyone could have ever thought."
A sigh, akin to a wind settling across the highlands. "Before one can consume a lethal portion of poison without fear of an end, one must build up their tolerance. I must understand what it is to be shadow....before I can begin to expand my domain. And I will understand, Yosannah. And with time....perhaps millenia....long after everyone I know is dust...I will become the key to it all."
Her tone is even, flat. Void of any real passion, "You'll never know what it is Damen. No Amberite will ever know. You, are no exception."
Damen says "Spoken like a true shadow."
"You want what I am. Why can't you be content to be what you are."
Damen says "And grow stagnant? Never! There are other worlds than these....but all are linked. I would find that link."
Yosannah regards him now, "Stagnant. No." She insists, "The link, Damen is already within you. You are a child of Amber. Stagnant is what became of that man you killed so that you could take his place."
Screams from a thousand mouths rip through the room suddenly, as if this hallowed section of the club has become a crossroads for the spirits. "Killed? I freed Gideon. Do you think Stone and I gave him a choice to serve his role in the creation of this shadow? No. He ripped him from his life for his innate psychic ability. I freed him. And now, that power is mine. I hold this shadow together.....as it holds me together."
Yosannah drops herself before him, humbled, "Let me hold you together. Let me take you to Amber. Walk the Pattern, Damen. Let it cure your madness!"
Damen says "Pity comes too late, Yosannah. Why would you offer yourself as my pillar now? You refused me when the time came. You spek thus, yet you are branded by another man's metal."
Yosannah shakes her head, "If this shadow is yours, if you are a part if it, then see my mind and you will know that what you say is not true. Unless you no longer wish to see the truth."
The fingers of a dead man graze her cheek. Then only a cacophany of whispers in her head.
Yosannah trembles at the caress. She forces her eyes closed and opens her mind to him. Her breath comes quick, nervous.
Damen says "Curiouser and curiouser said Alice to the cat. Keeping your darker side in check again, Yo?"
Her eyelids flutter as she attempts to withdraw from his probe, abruptly, spatting, "...always."
The whispers cease.
Damen says "So I ask again, why are you here, Yo?"
"For you, Damen." She allows a long moment's pause, her gaze intent on her hands, her fingers, "For myself. To make this right."
Damen says "Nothing will make us right, Yosannah. We have proved that time and time again. And finally, neither of us had the strength or the desire to fight for the other anymore." He chuckles, "And there is nothing left of me to love."
"What are you talking about."
Damen says "I am no longer a man. I am something more."