Event :  The Slumbering Sound

Location:  Britain Hall

Time:  8pm CST (9EST)

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In the darkness lay a voice. It had slumbered for a time, tired of the marching, sore in the bones, weary of the brightness that woke the darkness and washed away the stars. But the earth had begun to tremble, cracked and shook, shifted and started to disturb his slumber. Great chasms were driven into the ground and widened into the darkness, letting the sun spill in and fall upon dark shimmering scales.

An eye opened, murky and pearlescent. It rolled around until a great black spot, a pupil resembling a star, long slender points reaching to the corners of the white emerged. Rumbling followed as the thing shifted and light spilled into the cavern as it bounced off the tough black hide. The light fracturing, rainbow colored, flooded against the rocks like a sea.

Before the Council of the Weld had dissolved and the ancient ones went their seperate way, before the Skybark Tree, and even before Ithkis the Wise on the shores of the Deepek Mire. When they had crawled in the Apak Sau. There had been the brightness, she who walked in the sun and washed away into the light. Her haunting voice a melody that dissolved the hearts of others and stole from them all sense of self. Not from suffering or from spite, but a sense of unity, a sense of oneness that had held them all aloft with it’s melody.

There had also been the other voice, that lie within the darkness, like tendrils it rose in long ropes of smoke, filling the air, wafting upon the winds to all corners of the world. A whisper and a scent, the smell intoxicating, placating, warm and cool at once, hot and icy in the throat, chilled along the skin like a noxious fever. It rose and they stood. It commanded and they marched: without wear or tire, never knowing pain or suffering, only the desire to heed it’s call. So that it’s hands reached every corner of their world and every secret belonged to it.

They held together through control and unity. But over time they grew from fledgling creatures, into the great beasts that roamed the sky unfettered and unhindered. None could challenge their rule and even the great Skybark fell under their domain, a place of rest for the ones who came second and not first to the great world. And underneath them both the sky and the land trembled.

But all things would change and eventually the others grew too quick, they learned and the more they learned, the more they wanted. With their knowledge came a sense of needing, a sense of separateness. A sense of the self beyond the whole. At first it was only the way of things, but soon it grew to a burgeoning all enveloping trepidation. The brightness withdrew her great power and let the sun wash upon them, drape upon their scales and their claws, bask upon their backs and their teeth. She merely watched as the sun became a thing to share with them, became a warmth inside of them. In time it would grow into an uncontrollable thing, a fire, a burden, that burned them from within… if only…

But the darkness watched it grow, spill upon them and drive away the shadows. It drove away the cold, washed away the deep sunken desires, gave rise to the pain. At first the darkness clung to them, held onto to them, like droplets of cold rain upon them. But finally it too spilled away, it let them, crawled into the caverns, down into the earth, down below the roots of the great tree. All the way to the heart of the cold stone, to the Otherlings first, teaching them until they too were driven to the surface and to the sun. Bitter it sank down into the stone, reaching quietly up through the soil, soaking in the earth, watching them as they changed. But it was lonely, the darkness there in the unspeaking, the unmoving, the unliving rock and it became like it for a while. Still dreaming of the times when they were one thing, a single thought, a single mind, a single silent joy.