Kaelan's Documents

[Aphel]

He put all the things he would no longer need into a box, wrote a short letter and placed it on a certain desk before leaving again. Tying up loose ends. He tossed the box into the fire.



"Dear Instructor Min A'Litae

I would like to speak with you about the future of my studies at the Tower Academy. Should you see Tess, send her my apologies.
~K. Silverwing."

[Aphel]

No matter how much he drank, the thirst was never assuaged. He watched the people and their petty everyday dramas, their desire to drink themselves into a stupor. Their weakness. Their ignorance. The streets and cities and villages and courts were filled with smooth talkers, opportunists and other kind of filth. Disgusting. Now he needed another disguise so nobody would expect him to be familiar with the Al'Noth, it was worse enough that he was an elf.

Why don't you go back to your kin where you belong, pointy ears?

Why don't you shut up and don't care, rose ear?

[/I]

Another night outside. Staring into the river the next morning at the reflection of a scared, ugly face of a broken, useless and disgusting man. He smashed his reflection and cleaned himself. Moving on, vagabond. Moving on.

That's the hurt talking, and not you.

Then you struggle, day and night, with the Dark One. Do that. Feel that. Feel the hate burning. Feel the chains and dream the dreams of a starless sky looming over wastelands.

[/I]

[Aphel]

Krandor Hospital. Now. Regular reality (at least he was fairly certain that it was that way).

Faces, gray and black, not noticing him. For them, he wasn't here or there at all and the floor was cold under his bare feet, the window ajar and the building unknown to him. Something about it made him nervous, an instinct he struggled with since he woke here and had his world reduced to a bland, muffled environment lacking a certain something he couldn't pinpoint.
He sat down in front of a wall of faces with his legs crossed, and scratched his bandages without noticing, focused on the odd geometric taking shape on the parchment in front of him. He needed to be able to create thinner lines. Much thinner lines – how else could he even attempt to create a physical representation of an abstract and somewhat impossible concept?
And while his mind worked, physical discomfort was irrelevant and mental discomfort suppressed.

The wall across his bed was filled with representations - charcoal on parchment – of both organic shapes and geometrical shapes rooting in his mind and dreams. He arranged them without thinking, hoping for a subconscious pattern to emerge. Why and what it could tell he didn't know just yet. They were still haunting his dreams, and during the day they were two-dimensional on the wall across from him. He only needed to ask for more parchment and some charcoal, clean up, eat and other mundane tasks. He loathed them. And at night, he dreamed of impossible structures, cultures, faces and things he could not even give a proper name. It was reassuring to wake up and not see the Dark One's skull-shaped obsidian mask, to see that all angles and shapes were simple three dimensional and somewhat congruent to the axioms of mathematics. But there was always something odd about it, something he couldn't identify.

Maybe he should start from the beginning again to solve it.
Center. Back then. Regular reality.

[Aphel]

Shapes.

The building was clean and quiet at night, and it had taken him quite a while to create a space large enough without making too much sound pushing the furniture and such away. With great care he handled the charcoal, such a brittle, tricky thing between his fingers. Faces and shapes from the wall stared at him, starlight from the window. He found it utterly frustrating to only have two dimensions to draw on, but he had not the means to build what was required. So two dimensions had to do.
Speaking and thinking was hard. He spoke slowly and monotonous, so he focused on something else then the drawing and let that what was not his mind draw.

We are nothing but shapes filled with pain and dreams, with hopes and blood and bones. I must not despise the shape or how it interacts with the other shapes. The vessels is not yet relevant. Behind vessels stand the great forces of the pan-universe struggling for supremacy in always new forms. It is a battle between what exists and what is yet to be born, between what never should have been yet always was and this which cannot be undone. It is into this that we are born, and in this struggle all morality loses its meaning, the question of good and evil is reduced to a simple choice: Survive or perish. Yet I must flee this and ascend from the pressure of surviving into the realm of understanding and creation.

And when he was finished, he stood in the middle of something barely on the edge of being visible. The charcoal reflected the light from the window a little bit worse then the floor, but still it was little more than a large, complex circle pattern, a labyrinth arranged in multiple sections. He immediately understood the symbols as a blend of various languages and the interconnectivity between the adjacent patterns both along the vertical as well as the horizontal axis. There was the Pattern of the Dark One, the Devourer archetype, that-which-has-no-name -
He spun around himself, feet on the cold stone floor. Patterns from patterns, symbolism, pattern axioms; this as well was language and he danced, for the first time, not caring about anything, past the charcoal lines on a starlit tile floor, arranging his drawings new.
Then he sat down in the middle of the pattern labyrinth and meditated until morning dawned over Krandor.

[Aphel]

He should never have tried to convince Feawen that he was fine and strong enough to go on a little stroll, regain his strength, see a little of the world, travel by foot – she had that certain concern in her eyes when she let him go. Eyes of a mother.
I am not supposed to have a mother.
He shuddered, could see them clearly before him now. Calys eyes, too. He missed those eyes as much as he feared them; he knew that he was nothing without them yet would never see them again.
And if he did, he would never again see love in them again. Meaningless baubles trying to deceive the mind with emotions that never really were reflecting in them. Gems. Gold. Love in the eyes of somebody else. Things he no longer believed in to hold any true meaning. Tools of power to bring ruin. Nothing more.
At night, he dreamed of fire, screams and wastelands under a smoke-filled orange sky. He dreamed of a black sword and the reaper, and the reaper was him. He dreamed of ultimate power, omnipotent  and all enclosing, the rush and the hate of the unwilling willing harbinger of the end of all things that appeared good and noble and just and so on -
The charred ground trembled under his boots with every step, the Dark One challenged him, the Bloody-handed One. And they fought, fought and fought over nothing more than ashes and who ultimately was right in a world abandoned by gods and mortals alike.
He woke with a bad taste in his mouth and nothing to drink nearby.

Her name had been Rolana, and something in the back of his head told him that she once had a great future ahead of her, full with the miracles and wisdom and ability only the Lady of the Al'Noth could gift. Her world shattered and broken by nothing more than the old childish thirst for revenge and supremacy, because she had known something.
Kaelan got up and begun to sort his notes, research, think of his violation of the law, the smoke and the mirrors on this stage. No worth in trusting those that rule by the power of precious metal. If one poked around enough, he was sure one could eventually find those whose loyality wasn't for sale but could be rented for the right price ... and it was an old game, a game Those from the Deep honed to perfection. He could not take any chances. If there was a slim chance of this really...
He shook the thoughts off and felt his weakening body shaking. Ate a little. Continued to read and make notes. Move up, move on, survive. He was fairly certain by now that his time on this land was almost up, and he decided he would make it count. Just burn one time, brighter than any star, brighter than the sun – be a beacon. Just once. Make his life worth something by using it and living it well. He accepted death as the end of life, and humans pushed it away all the time. He never had been able to, not since the day the Old Man died in front of him. Death was the end of life. All those pleasure and immortality seeking people...they would never understand. He forgot some lectures of his youth when he had been with Caly, a weird attempt to heal them both at the same time. Make your life count, heal the wounds of others and your own. Create something. Do something that holds meaning. Do not idle. Do not sweet talk too much and teach if you can. Pass on experiences.
He pretty much botched all that in the recent time. Caly be Caly. He was not that weak anymore. He wasn't even the same person, as if he had one day shed his skin, pushed all that junk away that had possessed him.
He smiled a bit and looked at the drying ink, then back at the book. Turned a page. Her death would not be in vain, nor the suffering that died because some pointy-eared faction decided to act like a bunch of children. Hurt Elly, even. Nothing he could do to save her. They too, were perfectionists. Just that they were even less right in the end. He wondered, for a moment, if he was the only one who thought that way. Turned a page. Hm. That looked interesting...


It all had gone wrong so fast. The things he found, Elohanna suddenly disappearing, Millon fighting bravely, the woman thinking that he was an enemy, her death...
It was hard for him to forget pictures at times, he had to live with them, accept them haunting him. His mother told him once that she as well could not forget things so easily, and that it took a special kind of person to live with so many memories at once and accept that one sometimes had to do bad in order to do good. Kaelan understood. It was a burden, a heavy one. He would walk on nevertheless, just like his father showed and trained him to.

[Aphel]

He would never forget.
He would never expect anybody else to understand how it is, would nevermore explain or try to explain. The price he paid and would pay would determine if he was another one of those that could not stand it and never reach or cross that thin white line sperating common living things from intelligent living things.
He wanted to sleep, the desire was so bad that he just wanted to lie down and never get up again.
Endure.
Suffer.
Prevail.

[Aphel]

He had used his last piece of parchment and his last bit of dried rations a while ago. The grass was soft, warm, for now – a bright and warm sunny day. Climbing threes once had been easier for him, in a distant youth. His hands were sore from the rough bark, and he rested his head against the trunk for a moment, staring past the canopy of leaves. They would follow him. They would hunt him. So he just kept on wandering, walking, running, hiding.
Might find it by chance.
By remembering while walking.
He would learn to swim in this tidal wave of memories until he found what he was looking for. He couldn't allow himself to feel anything else. No. Nevermore. He was done with that waste of time.
Elly be Elly. She and her friends would be capable enough to do this, how was HE supposed to be helpful at all? He was a novice, instable at best and hindering anybody else at worst. He letters were sent. Lucinda's servants might or might not know now, depending on if the letters reached them or not and if they could believe him or not. He! Help Elly! He should turn himself in if he wanted to help her, she was twice his age! Knew things he did not want to know, was more experienced and more resourceful. Three hundred years! And she still acted like a child! Believed she had no choice!

Kaelan stretched his fingers. Once, in a time when he was learning how to kill rabbits with snares and hunt deer with a spear, when he realized that everything most civilizations were based on was the suffering of those that were not able to defend themselves or were vicious enough to be feared and left alone for the most part – he found a book in mother's shelf near the window. He read about how all the fighting in a life can break a man, how it was easy to succumb to darkness, how it was necessary that some decided to follow a path in their lives while others just lived. There were the path of the craftsman, the path of the artist, the politician, the healer, the scholar, the warrior. And the seventh path, the one that was followed by those who walked all the other paths but could not find a home in any of the other paths even after walking each of them for some time. The first page of the chapter about the last path did not contain any poem, he remembered. It had been empty.
He remembered the title.
“The Seven Paths. A meditation about perfection.”

Maybe it had been a dream. An illusion his mind crafted from various books and experiences.
Maybe it was real.

He wished he was a mightier hunter. Like the Folianites. Like his father. Like the servants of Toran. He envied them, so strong in mind and body. For him, there was no rest. No.

Kaelan shuddered and remembered his father's prayer spoken in the first gray light at dawn every day. His lips moved subtly.

[Aphel]

In one of his more lucid moments, that was when he was only hallucinating from hunger, he sat on a lonely stone in the middle of a forest clearing, the sun warm on his skin. There was one part of his mind that kept him going, one part that kept him busy while the rest argued over various issues.  
 He stood up and thought the trees were people, scholars in ridiculous fancy robes and gowns.  
 “In this day a-an-and hour, t-t-there is nobody a-a-at our side. W-w-we are, at best, all a-alone in a delusion, c-c-caught up in a m-m-magical i-ill-illusion that affects our m-minds.  
 But it is t-t-the unthinkable w-w-w-we are supposed to think. W-w-we s-s-should not waste our time with fancies a-a-and folly hope-belief. W-we m-m-must act, or we shall surely p-perish in a crimson red tide t-t-that rises from the Depths below. There is n-n-nobody on o-our side but those that s-s-stand next to you now. T-t-there is nobody we can trust. And w-w-we should not expect n-no help.  I a-a-ask but one t-t-thing of you: ladies an-a-and gentlemen, w-w-what are you prepared to do? A-are you p-prepared to pay the price for idle a-a-and sunshine years in h-honest tears and toil and blood?”
 Then he walked away, past them, without seeing the trees, his knees all weak and shivering.

[Aphel]

Slept little. Breakfast in the morning. Adapting to "civilisation" once more.
But I will never crawl again.

[Aphel]

Things could have been different – but can't they always? It's the choices I make in my life that defines who I am, so I will blame things on past decisions that went wrong in their outcome. But resentfulness is just a waste of time. I need to look ahead, because no matter what, that's something I can always do. Yet, still, it hurts. Words fail me, here, now and always – I wish I had the strength for the words of the poet or the prophet, yet, I do not. My own language is falling apart, leaving a stale taste in my mind. I am scared now. Of my own mind, of drawing, of using the Al'Noth. Of speaking, too.
I miss her, but I don't know who she is. I miss learning and study and roaming, and not worrying too much. See new places, eat new food. Travel. All that. But I am stuck here, with a mind not of my own I think, and a stone, and dark elves and all that.

[Aphel]

He did not recognize the man in the mirror nor was he sure that mattered. He had slept better than ever before last night, but ...
The sharp edges of the man's face, the scar across it, the miscolored eyes, the missing tip of the man's ear - he was ugly, no doubt of it. Something utterly strange and alien to his expression - grim, cynically observing.
Kaelan looked on the tattoo, that mark of the Silver Guard, and dressed. He had burned a lot of softness during the laste cycles. Good.
It was time to look for something to do.