[Can’t Opt Out]

The man could feel panic blooming inside him, hot and putrid and like nothing he had ever felt before—no, that was a lie. A handful of moments laid themselves out in his mind as he moved, chasing after the Baalphorian girl and at the very least, the path she’d taken was one that was all but straight as straight could be. There were no branching tunnels, no twists so sharp that he couldn’t move relatively quickly—although, he was now keeping an eye on the ground, searching for more loose gravel. Oddly, he had seen none? What was with that? It were as though the universe had placed a pile of gravel at that one, singular spot, all so he would fall on his ass!

Fuck the universe!

Also, the panic—the previous moments of panic he had experienced, all displaced by time and the reality that just like right this very moment, virtually none of those instances of panic were something that belonged to him.

A few did, mostly surrounding his older brother. They lived dangerous lives, and sometimes, threats came. His brother was powerful, but sometimes, even his life could be threatened.

The man did not take threats to his brother lightly, nearly as much of the blood covering his hands having been spilt for his brother as for the unwanted souls the man was always picking up on his travels. Killing all those people… it was nice. So many souls didn’t deserve to find a place in this world.

Something about the panic surging through him seemed to be reaching towards someone like that—someone with a blistering soul, deserving of being flayed. Was it someone close? If he abandoned his search, would he be allowed the glory of being able to pluck someone’s bones out? Pull their teeth from their skull while they screamed? Tug nails from their beds and pour acid over the exposed nerves?

Something—something powerful and unexplainable—told him that the person the panic swirled towards, as though the person actually experiencing the panic were actively trying to send them bad vibes, was someone deserving of even more suffering than that. This person was the sort of rotting soul that deserved to be torn to pieces with slow precision—to be brought to the brink before being sewn back together, all so he could be torn apart anew.

Unfortunately, it seemed that destroying that person’s soul wasn’t on the agenda for the day, an echo of energy tugging at his soul, urging him to keep going. Those tugs of energy had never yet led him wrong—usually, they led him to people in need of aid—so, despite how much he wanted to turn back and seek out the person who was panicking—the person he felt increasingly drawn to, as though suddenly, their coming together were nothing but the flap of a zirth wing away—and the soul who would dare upset them so much, the man kept going.

For whatever reason, he needed to find the Baalphorian girl—and if he was forbidden from going to so much of the eastern continent, maybe whoever called to him was Baalphorian as well, connected to this girl in a way that made her survival imperative?

The man wanted to know, but while the aether may occasionally deign to give him tugs and pulls and vibes, nothing so concrete as a knowledge of the future reached him. Onwards it was… a very boring onwards.

It would become a cascade of chaos eventually, he knew, but for the moment? Boring, boring, boring.

So, back to thinking about those previous moments of panic it was!

Mostly, the man was confused as to why this was the first time he had actually connected the panic back to that mysterious person, pulling him towards them. Perhaps this was the first time they’d been so physically close—and fuck did that suck, that they were so close, and yet, he couldn’t go to them.

What sort of person were they, this person he was meant to meet? This person whose panic was so strong he was apparently able to feel it? Dissect it like it was a monstrous human in need of torture and death?

Every other time, he hadn’t bothered to pull the tendrils of panic apart, thinking them instead some anomaly—and there was that, at least: for as horrific as those cracks of panic had been, they hadn’t been so common a thing that the man had ever bothered to wonder if something were quite seriously wrong with him.

That… might say more about him than anything else because looking back… what was wrong with him? He’d experienced a collection of terrible moments—so terrible he’d been left hyperventilating and near vomiting—and never really bothered looking into the cause!?

Sometimes, he really did wonder if his mother had tried to kill him when he was a baby, the way his sister sometimes liked to claim. Spiteful bitch that she was, the man had never put much stock in her claims, but maybe he really did have some brain damage? Who knew—and it wasn’t like he could do anything to fix brain damage, so better to not worry too much about it.

Anyways… moments of panic!

The biggest one had been about a decade ago, and that one the man could remember viscerally. It had been early morning, and he’d collapsed, shaking and clenching his teeth. A kolrathi had found him—not one he knew personally. They’d held him through it, muttering things about how they were sorry and it would be okay.

What had they been sorry for? How did they know it would be okay?

“I told them we should let you go,” the kolrathi had said, and later, when the man had tried to find that kolrathi, no name on the tip of his tongue but a description of the soft-grey eyes and sad smile that had graced their youthful features, no one had known of whom he spoke.

A ghost, perhaps, come from the aether itself to ease his pain. Personally, the man thought it more like that kolrathi had been struck dead for daring to even hint to him that, much like he suspected, someone—or the kolrathi as a whole—were intent to keep him away from the person his soul was connected to.

Without anyone to ask, there were no answers to be found, only the vaguest of demands that he try to stay west of the Twin Tides.

So, he’d let it go—probably, he shouldn’t have let it go before that, during the handful of times he’d felt that phantom sensation of emotions that didn’t belong to him. None of them were like that time a decade ago, nor another time that happened a few years later—although, if the former time was panic tinged with fear and disgust and confusion, the latter had seemed more a bubble over of grief into panic and rage. It hadn’t been the good sort of rage, emotions releasing into a torrent of anger; rather, it had felt wrong—displaced in a way he would have to ask about, if he ever managed to meet this person… assuming he wasn’t just making all of this up in his head.

Maybe he really had been dropped too many times, strangled, shook, dosed with drugs—part of the reason he didn’t much believe his sister about his mother trying to kill him was simply that, with how much the woman had allegedly tried to snuff out his life, there seemed to be no way he should still be alive!

There had actually been one time, now that he was thinking about it, something like twenty years ago, when the man actually had moved to search out the source of the panic and fear racing through him. Back there, he hadn’t yet even suspected that someone’s soul was calling to him; instead, he had just thought it an escalation of everything he already experienced—those tugs towards people who needed him.

He made it nearly to Seer’ik’tine before the feeling fizzled out—whoever needed him found by someone who would keep them safe or they’d been killed, he had assumed. The moment he had let the idea that whoever he had been called towards was dead float through his mind, the man had needed to step off the aetherstream and vomit.

Back then, he hadn’t known what to think of his reaction, but now… now, the very idea that that person might die without him there to keep them safe… was that supposed to be something he was meant to survive? Surely not. Having met this mysterious person or not, the man still felt like he would shatter to dust were they to die.

The two of them were tied together, and if death took one of them, surely it had to claim the other—strike them down as one. It was strange to suddenly feel as though that were the truth, written into the very fabric of the universe.

Never had anything of the urges within him to search the continent for something felt clear—more, it was a murky, stormy sea, forever washing any comprehension out into the depths. Now, it felt as though the storm were stilling—the eye of the storm quickly surging towards him, towards them.

He wanted to meet them—wrap this person who was his up in his abilities and know that they would be safe, always. Somehow, it felt as though he was meant to be there, keeping them say; yet…

The man turned a corner, another, another, a rare moment of this tunnel being a twisty little bitch.

“Believe,” the universe itself seemed to say. “Believe that this is the right path,” and it wasn’t that he could actually hear it, but at the same time, he could taste the truth of his haphazard translation of the universe’s intentions over his soul.

Whether he wanted to turn back or not, he couldn’t. Forward—he had to go forward, even if every step felt like a knife through his soul, and he wished he could understand the will of the aether better than this. Perhaps, if he could glean more than momentary echoes of something, he could determine what existed behind those somethings.

When he was little, the man had loved sitting and listening to the kolrathi spin tales from the millennia of understandings they and their predecessors had learned, both from their own readings of the will of the aether, as well as stories gifted from others blessed with the ability to hear the universe with clarity. It was never a thing of perfect clarity, he knew; rather, it was something to be dissected, and his favourite stories had always been those that crossed over with other stories, other nations, other traditions.

There was a story from the far east, set somewhere in the Cyrenix Desert—no one who had been gifted with visions of the incident could ever entirely agree with exactly where the story was set, some stories even claiming it was set in Baalphoria… or perhaps the land that would one day become Baalphoria? Other times, it stretched into other nations, but mostly, it was set in the eastern side of the continent. All the same, it was unclear where or when the story had originated, the kolrathi having travelled the continent, snapping up stories and myths wherever they went.

Stories passed from mouth-to-mouth, flawed-transcription-to-flawed-transcription. Even within his mind, the man knew the stories he heard had been morphed by time and his own storytelling inclinations. Sometimes, he pulled his niblings close—his sister always seemed to be popping out yet another child she would barely love, searching for some perfect formula of genetics and personality, most likely, as though children were things that could be designed, mutilated, formed into whatever perfect minion she desired.

It would never happen, and all those children were broken for it.

When they were small and innocent, however, willing to entertain their uncle, he would pull them close and whisper stories to them. His eldest niece still liked his stories, laughing about how he always told a few ever so slightly different from the last time he’d let it slip off his tongue—and he definitely didn’t tell any story how the kolrathi told them.

That was fine, he thought. If the aether didn’t want the tongues of those to whom stories passed to mutilate them, she—a common thread through the stories, regardless of their origin, was the use of feminine pronouns for the universe—wouldn’t allow her most blessed to share their stories. Instead, they would all be like the syvyl of Nur’tha, their minds broken by all they had seen of the aether’s machinations, their mouths unable to form what they had seen into sensible syllables.

“There is a place,” the story the man thought of as he moved, unsure of why this particular story was playing within his mind—he might like the story, but it seemed his thoughts an uncontrollable cascade of information, and as his mind moved, it felt as though he were telling someone else the story—“where the final note of a mountain, slips into murky waters, and it is here that the saviours of both the aether and the benefactor shall find a home”—and depending on the version of the story, sometimes it was the aether and her enemies. The part the man loved, however, was the fact that version to version, the number of locations changed.

Sometimes, there was a single home—a single mountain, slipping into the ocean, a lake, a bay, a body of water known my a million names in a million dialects, another land entirely. Other times, there were half-a-dozen possibilities—only ever possibilities, only one place meant to be their true home and it was so fascinating that, sometimes, the savours of the aether and her enemies were meant to live side by side—whereas other times, those locations were all meant to be filled: the southern gift, the middle ground of a forgotten peak, the final note that was never a final note and the real final note that follows its trail, the winding waters of a forgotten land, as well as the shattered ridge that slipped into another world.

These stories were all but the only stories the kolrathi ever spoke of that contained the aether and the benefactor—the aether and her enemies—although the man knew there were more. There were more, the kolrathi were simply keeping them to themselves, the majority of the other sects blessed with understanding by the aether as well, as far as he had ever been able to tell.

The world, it seemed, wasn’t meant to know of the cosmic war between the aether and her enemies—perhaps, they weren’t even meant to know that anything other than the aether was out there, lurking in the dark.