Post by Baldur Odinson on Sept 7, 2016 11:53:37 GMT -8
**ONE YEAR AGO**
The old man stared into the campfire. On his head was a wool cap, his clothes tattered and ripped as though the streets had not been kind to him. Around him was naught but his tent, his bags, his horse. The desert. He wore several necklaces and rings, his long beard wrapped with gold loops and a silver chain. He was working a ring on and off his left index finger and watching the flames lick and caress the logs amid the crackle of it's breath.
"I don't know where to start."
He seemed to be speaking to nobody but the bugs, the beetles, the birds....the bushes. But still he stared, and still he spoke, having taken several seconds to compose his thoughts, wrinkled and weathered face doing nothing to hide the clear emerald green orbs in which light danced.
"When the world rallied for war, marking their might by the mountains of bodies they could build, politicians desperately clung to the idea that, at any given time, a weapon could be forged that would mean their doom. So they worked, and worked quickly. Writers and philosophers gave them dreams- desires for golden rings on which all power lay, or on weapons with which to destroy the world. From these thoughts, and a pinch of madness- came the atomic age."
He looked at the desert around him.
"Though these mechanizations and methods of extinction continued to grow, some men saw their potential to save humanity. They built wonders behind concrete and steel. They tore space, and time, and reality. They twisted physics, bent laws of the universe...all in the name of discovery. Of being, to the last- Gods. Their idealism was altruistic at heart but...egocentric in application. They did not expect to succeed."
He would bring his eyes back to the fight.
"These men, powerful and bright, built objects that took humankind beyond that course with which it was to stay- it forced them to confront the reality that, should these instruments of imagination become commonplace, the linear progression of evolution would cease to be necessary. So they buried them- in mines, in space, in fire. They could neither risk these tools coming to light, nor suffer to subject them to destruction."
He held up his hand, eyes staring at the ring.
"Thus we see....The 9 Gate's. On my hand sits the All Gate, the last of them build by the law of Three. I have had it for as long as I can remember- and was ready for it to spend eternity with me in the ground. I haven't told a soul what it is, where it came from. Why it's here. Yet....there you stay, watching me in the dark, waiting for sleep to take it's hold so that your hands might find my throat."
He stood, jewelery jingling a little as the hunched old man looked out into dark.
At me. The Cheshire. Thomas D. Gibson.
Not good.
"I see you." he said.
There was a shifting to the bushes on my right....then silence.
OOC: To be continued
