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Orem
You were born in the town of Yudshire, a moderately sized town not far from the castle where the royal family lived. Or, where they used to live. You were born a year before the Fall, when Malvakar rose to power and the royal line vanished. You were always a smart child, very curious and studious, as best you could be in the days after the fall. Your family had few books, but you learned to read and read everything you could, and sought out stories wherever they would be told, always asking and asking.
Your older brother was killed by Malvakar’s plague, but you grew up alongside your older cousin Grey. Grey and his mother moved in with your family, fleeing from their home near the castle. Grey’s father, your uncle, was a royal scholar, and Grey took after him. His interest in knowledge was equal to yours, and you grew up like brothers. You would come up with crazy ideas all the time, often getting you and Grey into trouble.
You, Grey, and a small circle of other kids, all hungry for knowledge, began spending your time together. As a group, you would read and reread the few books through the whole town, and pry adults for stories and memories of older days.
As oldest and best educated, Grey ended up de facto leader of the bunch, but as a group you usually act as equals. Having grown up with Grey, you know just as much as he does, and tend to come up with a lot of wild ideas for the group to consider. Leara (CASTING) is one of the most inquisitive of the group, and very hands on: when she wants an answer, she sets out to find it, and doesn’t slow down until she’s satisfied. Nai (CASTING) is the most methodical of the group, taking anything she wants to know and breaking it down to basics to solve it. Kor (CASTING) is an experimenter, always testing and wondering, seeing what happens in what circumstances. Varin (CASTING) always develops theories about how things work, working to find conclusions and answers to questions from what he knows so far.
In these days where information and stories are stomped out wherever they are found, it wasn’t long before you exhausted the books and stories of the town, although you came to learn who was hiding deeper stories from you. You’re sure the blacksmith Boreus (CASTING), has tales he won’t tell.
One day you proposed an idea. Grey was opposed at first, but as all of you were more desperate to discover and learn, he began to seriously consider the idea.
When Grey was 18, and the rest of you 15 and 16, you left Yudshire. You traveled on the roads at first, but after a near encounter with some bandits, you took to the woods instead. You got lost at one point, but found your way back in the right direction. It was a long and dangerous trip, but eventually you reached the old ruins of the city surrounding the royal castle. You picked your way between abandoned houses, keeping quiet and careful. Eventually you made your way to Grey’s old house, just outside the castle itself. Many of his father’s books had deteriorated, but you searched the house for everything you could find. You made your way into the attic, searched through old possessions, finding old record books and histories, which you all gathered with excitement. And then you found the Book.
Leara spotted it first, sitting in the corner of the room, somehow less dusty than the rest of the attic, as if it had not been lying unused as long as the rest, and yet it seemed an older text than any other you had found, the weathered dark blue binding lying facedown in the dust. Leara touched the back cover of the book, and jolted back with a scream, falling and clawing several feet away from the book, eyes wide with fear. The rest of you gathered to help her, hoping she was unharmed and had not been heard. As Grey helped her up, she brushed off dust, still shaking, all of you speaking and asking questions in chaos, before Grey got everyone quiet and asked her what happened. And she told you.
Do not open the last page.
It has become something of a mantra for you all. Leara reapproached the book, despite all of your comments of concern, and carefully turned it, avoiding the back of the book and touching only the spine and front, and opened the front cover. All of you gathered around. You could not read the text inside. But you could see it, and you could feel it. The writing almost seemed to move in your mind’s eye. Something about it speaking out to you. It was no foreign script, it was something more primal, for you could not even have said if the book was written in human letters or others, it simply was written. And all of you could feel that there was a wisdom and a power kept within this grimoire, pure truth laid out onto the pages.
Except for the last page. Clinging to the end of this text of wisdom was a darkness. And this was a darkness beyond a lack of light: it was the darkness of the blackest of souls. As each of you looked upon the book you could feel from several feet away what Leara had nearly touched, and it scared you. It scared each of you beyond description, as strong a fear as the wisdom an inspiration.
Do not open the last page.
Grey repeated it first. You all nodded your agreement immediately, and all together with covered hands you carefully lifted the grimoire, trying to avoid touching the back cover even with gloved hands, and placed it in one of the bags you had brought to fill with books. All of you stood together, around this discovery, and vowed without hesitation: as a group you would try to understand the grimoire for what it was. You would learn from it. And you would not open to the last page. That was the day you became the Circle.
You gathered the rest of the books you had found into bags, and began your cautious and quiet journey home. The trip had taken only a few days each way, but in these times a few days missing was a grim sign. Your returns were greeted with great relief, and great concern, and many commands that you all never take such a risk again.
For your part, you agreed with the sentiment. You live in your books, you have no desire to seek out danger and adventure as some of the other children in town do. Though you are always one to come up with wild ways around obstacles, you have no desire to find a way to open that page. You feel no curiosity, no sense of challenge, only a deep set terror about that page. But more than anything else, you focus on the grimoire. After many days, you all began to turn the pages, looking deeper and deeper. The text continued much as it started, pages and pages of strange marks and designs, marked and surrounded by text that existed somehow beyond normal script. In time you all began to understand something of it. The patterns and marks began to have meaning in your mind. You could feel a link slowly forming between yourselves and the book, its knowledge beginning to sink in as you kept near it day after day.
And then the nightmares came. When you lay to sleep that first night you were not expecting what came, although now it is all too familiar. You felt yourself in a pitch void. But you were not alone. A shadow circled, and circled. It was watching you. Though you could see nothing, and hear nothing, and feel nothing, you knew. It was watching. And in this black nowhere you could feel it coming closer. You tried to turn, to see it, but you could neither move nor see. And then a cold sharp point sank into your chest, right into your heart, which froze into pure stillness and pain. Sharp edges closing around your ankles, and your wrists, cutting deep, grasping into your body until the black razors clasped around bone, and began to pull, tearing and tearing, ripping your body and your dream into pieces.
And you woke, in sweat, and tried to scream. But you couldn’t. A crushing weight stifling the fearful shout in your windpipe, and as your eyes focused you saw your cousin Grey over you, his hands wrapped around your throat, cutting off all air. You struggled, trying to scream, to break away, but he held you down. You clawed at his hands, but he held firm, and you met his eyes, staring straight into yours as your vision began to fade, black closing in the edges until all you could see were his eyes, and then all faded.
You woke with a painful pounding in your head, and severe and painful bruising around your throat. It was dark, and you were cold. Very cold. You could feel rough wood under your back and head, and there were close walls all around you. You lay still for a moment, and realized where you were. A coffin. They had buried you. Buried you alive. You tried to bang on the top, to try to pry at the wood, but found you did not move. You tried to turn your head, and realized it did not turn.
It was then that you realized you were not breathing. The cold made you want to shiver, but your body stayed still. The blood in your veins wasn’t flowing, you realized. The cold was piercing, and your head was still pounding. They hadn’t buried you alive. You were dead. Dead and thinking, and feeling. Time passed. You couldn’t tell how much. Minutes? Hours? Days? You could feel your body beginning to fall apart, rot setting in in your stomach. You felt the long drawn out sting of the first insects entering your body as it began to decay. Days? Months? You felt it. Every moment of it. From the first minute until there was nothing left but bone. You learned then you don’t stop feeling, or stop thinking, when you die: you just stop moving.
Then you woke up. Grey was awake as well. You looked to him, but he turned away with a wince. You could still feel a fading bruise around your neck.
All the Circle had started having nightmares, you learned the next day. Many of them matching, consistent with one another’s. You all knew it was tied to the last page. It was not a threat, not a challenge, the darkness there was not goading you, it was simply raw malice. The nightmares were born simply of your proximity to the page. And if it could bring these shadows into your dreams from a closed book, where could its horror reach if you opened it? It would be a danger and risk beyond what you can ever judge. Do not open the last page.
Re: The CHALLENGE continues!
