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Out Of Character:
Here I’ll be “setting the scene” – so to speak, since it is my hope that this will be an epic battle. So I’ve decided to expand, from Nin’s point of view, upon Anomalies introductory post above while introducing my own. My goal (apart from winning of course ^^;) is to just put on a good (and interesting) show for people.
For clarity of mind: thoughts are italicised, whereas sub-vocalised thoughts are italicised with quotation marks.
***
Nin stood silently in anticipation, his patience waning beneath the blackened sun as he awaited the order to move. Arms crossed and with a black cloak swirling fiercely about him, Nin, poised in sinister meditation, observed the entire planet from within the psychic eye of his mind.
He quietly watched as events had unfolded…
Dawn had broke clear over the horizon of the world, bathing the perennial plains, the vast forests and the soaring red mountains in a bloody hue. Flesh-plants waved delicate fronds in the first glowing rays of the sun; screw-grass writhed as it sank its roots deeper into the hard earth. Strangle-vines tightened their grip on the ruins of an abandoned outpost, rendering steel and plastic down to their constituent parts ready for absorption. On the horizon the upright cones of spore chimneys, towering over distant cities, sputtered smoke into the sky, readying the clouds that would bring the afternoons fertilizing rain.
As far as the eye could see the sky was bare, yet a sinister heaviness, veiled and unseen, continued to linger high in the air. The rising sun was hazy, yet behind it, creeping slowly up from the horizon, there was a growing body of darkness: as of a great storm moving out from all directions. It looked as if the twilight, under an endless procession of trees, was flowing downwards from the mountains as the vast blackness reached out to veil the sky; blotting out the sun into little more then a silhouetted black orb.
The Masters floating fortress hung in the aerial midst’s of an untainted firmament, like a angelic sanctuary and cocoon of dreaming will, as the amassed armies of darkness closed in ever more, and to lay siege of what was soon to become the Masters tomb.
His senses were quickly diverted, bringing Nin’s mind back to the presence of the dusty hill as he detected a shift in the Dark Christ’s semblance. He nodded to them.
An irrepressible grin forged its way across his face, hungrily, as Nin, along with his brothers, was teleported directly into the heart of battle.
***
Strident and clear, the booming wail of a war horn sounded their arrival.
The sky was now utterly dark, the stillness of the heavy air foreboding a violent storm with a procession of clouds. Suddenly, in the skies surrounding the Masters fortress, a blinding flash seared the gathering clouds. Branched lightning smote down, lashing against the fortresses eastward tower defences as, for a staring moment, the watchers amidst its walls saw all the space between them and the sky alit with a white light. There, as the light faded into fierce swirls of black and contorted shapes, twisting and flaring in almost every direction like a rampant fire, Nin, embraced in a cloak of shadows, stood within the sky in effortless levitation.
His eyes flared menacingly, casting his sights down toward the raging struggle below. Brazen trumpets sounded. The hordes of the Brotherhood surged forward, some against tower walls, others towards the causeway and the ramp that led up to the Dragon gates. There the hugest Demons were mustered, together with the thundering gait of scores and legions of wild Orcs. A storm of arrows and energy blasts met them together with a hail of boulders alit in flame. The hordes of the Brotherhood wavered, broke and fled back; and then charged again, broke and charged again; and each time, like the incoming sea, they halted at a higher point. Again trumpets rang, and a legion of roaring Orcs rushed forth in tactical formation. Many held up great shields above them providing protection for others by forming a metallic canopy of singular armament, while in their midst they bore a titanic steel ram - swinging on mighty chains and imbued with the psychic force and strength of the armies stronger minded horrors. They gained the gate.
The mighty battering ram, swung by thousands of mesomorphic limbs, smote the Draconic gate, penetrating its supernatural defences with rending boom. Again and again the great ram swung and crashed, while the Masters continued to hail down fire after fire of bitter defiance.
The fortress was under heavy siege; Nin could tell that its defences were already suffering the malaise of the innumerable strain of the black horde, despite possessing the psionic faculty of being able to hear the Masters within as he honed his senses - their voices filling his mind:
"Ion output at 100% and holding!"
"Enemies on the ground keep coming, increase magical shields to compensate for low level fire!"
"Airborne enemies inbound, increasing Ion field discharge field to maximum! We're losing air-space superiority!"
"Orders from the top, ignore the ants stings, swat the flies before they can infest us with maggots."
"Roger, commencing energy blanket discharge!"
‘ Pitiful…’, he thought to himself. But then something changed. Another mind more advanced then the remnant psyches surrounding it had sharply entered into the fray. It brought on a strong sense of tactical order amongst the disarrayed minds of the Masters. There was an evident improvement in the Draconic gates defences.
This one was interesting…
Nin’s blood began to rush, surging like liquid fire coursing through his veins as he peered deeper into the mental field surrounding this aberration.
The Pillar of Mind!
Perhaps he would have a challenge this day after all…
Raising his right hand to the tip of his scalp, Nin slowly pulled down an ornate death mask – flawless in specular reflection - over his face; shaped with a nightmarish countenance. Then, reaching behind to the back of his head, he pulled up the cowl of his moiling black cloak, concealing the remaining areas of his cranium.
Continuing to peer into the mental field of the Pillar himself, Nin slowly descended unto the extending bridge below, where scurrying monstrosities rushed to and fro the Draconic gate: the very nerve centre to the fortress itself.
Then, almost without warning his mind rippled with electrochemical activity, like capillary waves along the interface between two fluids, as a secondary presence formed within the recesses of Nin’s mind.
‘Hmm… what’s got you all fired up, eh?’ A robust voice vibrantly sprung to life in subitaneous thought, sub-vocalised and confined entirely within Nin’s skull. He knew it well. Ignoring the question put to him, he sub-vocalised a laconic response.
‘Stay quiet.’
The ripples of mental activity, as gentle as a passing breeze, swiftly withdrew back into the quantum neural depths.
Reaching the stone bridge, his cloak wavering amidst the air between the boarders of life and death, Nin stood directly before the great fortress. The structure loomed up from the horizon like a stoned creature of obscene beauty. Great ring walls of stone, like towering cliffs, stood out from the keep like a mountainside, from which it ran - in complete circular design - and then returned again. The Dragons gate lay directly ahead.
The skull gate roared, as if with fury, as great streams of molten fire were expelled from its huge gaping jaws, engulfing the attackers in a torrid of writhing flames.
Hordes of Orcs fled in dismay, a great many burning and cast a light as they scattered in multiple directions. Out of the disarray, Nin swiftly grabbed a fleeing Orc commander, his hand gripping tightly around the grotesque creatures neck as he held it up from the ground.
“Sir, Nin…!” The creature yelped in discomfort, clutching at the warriors arm in hope of release.
“Why does the Dragons gate still stand commander? You were ordered to bring it down were you not?”
The Orc gasped for breath as it attempted speech, it’s vile voice rasping in the process.
“Aye, indeed sir, but… its power seems to have… somehow intensified… We could not overcome it.”
Staring up at the gate once more, studying both it structural and energy lay out, Nin knew of what the Orc spoke. Lucid…
“Why, if it was not for...”
He instantly cut of the Orc.
“Their victory against you needs no explanation…” He paused, releasing his grip; the Orc fell to the stone floor with a clash, slowly scampering away as it picked itself up, breathing freely once more with a momentary sigh of relief.
“… But your defeat allows none,” Nin closed.
Without a second thought the Orc was instantly flayed alive; it’s body writhing uncontrollably in violent discord.
Facing the fortress in full view, focusing his mind, Nin sternly arose to challenge her defences. His mind washed over the ion fields, the magical barriers, the technomechanics and the gates structural integrity, but without possessing an acute knowledge of the gate itself breaching it would toll both time and effort – two things he could ill afford this day. Suddenly, like the dark gathering of clouds about him, a scheme hatched in his mind.
He rapidly increased his neuronic activity, allowing him to take advantage of the brains quantum nature. Then, coupling his mind to a coherent quantum system, Nin began to continuously pump his brain into cycles of quantum coherence and collapse. During each episode of coherence his brain entered and re-entered a state of superposition with infinite counterparts of itself across parallel universes, where his mind attempted neural coupling between parallel states. His thoughts suddenly became plural, as if behind every thought he detected the faint choral echo of others that perfectly shadowed it. The act itself always forced the brain to collapse down to one macroscopic state, but the collapse was not instantaneous. There were series of vast moments when coupled brain coherence bled back into his own mind, putting him into a weak superposition with his own parallel-world counterparts - each in a different point of relative time. Impressions and information gathered and solidified, like the phantoms that take shape after hours of sensory deprivation, as a long white corridor stretched out to infinity within him. Then suddenly, like a torrent of rolling waves rushing out from the breach of a dam, a barrage of selective neural data swept across the dimensional barriers of space-time, flooding directly into his mind. His neurons began to stabilise once more, decelerating back into their natural speed, as the quantum link broke away from the endless white corridor of parallel future states.
Concealed from all but himself, his lips forged a reptilian grin. By sharing the task between infinite counterparts of his mind, spread across parallel universes and varied future states, Nin was quickly able to obtain the knowledge he sought.
Extending his right arm, palm arched vertically, Nin exerted his own mental efforts toward the gate. Blackness surfaced within the irises of his eyes, and it seemed that in a moment of silence the world had stood still. Almost hauntingly, the silence was luminously foreshadowed by an aggregation of psychic energies, as space-time rippled in distortion - guided by a power and mind of malice. The mighty skull of the Draconic gate began to tremble, as if almost with fear. A sonorous rent, like the cracking of bones, smashed through the fortress, as thunder running in the clouds, with the squeal of metal being torn aside - rupturing apart as the gates magical barriers waxed and waned. Horizontally stretching his fingertips, his eyes widening in the process, Nin intensified his assault. Slowly, severing the mighty gate piece by piece, the skull was rancorously torn from its architectural majesty.
The fortress hung amid dark skies in an effusion of rubble, like a lithic beast abruptly decapitated, with lapidary prowess.
Then, as if stricken by some blasting spell the gate was ripped asunder: there was a flash of searing lightning, and its great jaws trembled in riven fragments to the ground.
The way was open; the gate was breached.
He quickly withdrew the armies of the Brotherhood; psychokinetically manipulating each of the synaptic creatures accordingly, as the causeway leading up to the now hollowed entrance became clear with the parting black tide of his troops. He would face this foe alone.
Staring into the seeming void of the cleft, mindful eyes - followed by a bleak and sinisterly whisper - pierced through the darkness and unto the Pillar himself.
‘…I see you…’
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