Post by Bricingwolf on Oct 7, 2017 16:23:28 GMT
the story of Nicodemus, and how he came to know the supernatural world. attached is the word document, which is a bit easier to read. Nico and The Creature.docx (19.32 KB)
For me, it started with a girl, a war, and a kid named Django. It was the winter of 1917, in Helsinki, and I’d expected to spend another boring winter killing time with my best friend and “blood brother.” Aapo, whose family owned the farm nearest ours, was born on the same day as me, and our parents told us that we’d been thick as thieves since we could crawl. We were 13 years old when we met the girl, and the small curious boy named Django.
Her name was Vidoma Karela, but she introduced herself to me as Sera. She was my age, and Romani, or as we called them, Kale. Her father was a musician, and her mother a seamstress and fortune teller. I learnt later that they were both practitioners of ancient occult arts going back to their family’s past in India.
Sera had shown potential with music, spells, and the fighting stick. Eventually I learned that this was why her “other name” was Sera, after Kali Sera, a protector of the Romani. At the time, I just knew that I was instantly, catastrophically, tragically, in love with her.
Django was a distant cousin of Sera’s. His real name was Jean, but no one called him that. He was 8 when I first met him, and he immediately took to Aapo and me as if we were his own brothers. My family was friendly with the Kale Romani around Helsinki, and often had them over for dinner, and let them set camp in our fields when we could. Sera was afforded more freedom than most 13-year-old girls, because of what she was training for. As it happened, my father was one of her tutors, to my barely contained delight.
I remember long hours of training, as my father always made me train with his students. Normally I hated being stuck in that barn, when I could be plucking guitar strings or hunting rabbits, or sleeping in a tree in the woods nearby, usually with Aapo, but that winter and spring I didn’t want to be anywhere else. The lessons would start at dawn, just after the morning farm work was done, and we’d take a break in the afternoon. I was supposed to help with the afternoon chores, but I’d usually run off with my new friends. With her. We’d run into the woods, chase rabbits or climb trees, or just talk. Europe seemed to be about to explode, and there was worried talk around town about Russian revolutions and German “influence”, but we were young, and didn’t care to see past each other. For the first time in my life, I had a band. Friends who all loved me and eachother as much as I loved them. As fall fell into winter, we became more and more inseparable, and the normally lazy Aapo even began joining our cane lessons and physical training. Sera and I teased him about losing his baby fat, but our jokes did a poor job of hiding the unexpected feelings growing between the three of us.
In the deep winter, we were mostly stuck indoors, and we got the itch. If you’ve lived in winter places, you know it. Days on end cooped up with a full house. Most of our guests had gone south again by this point, but Sera’s family, and Django’s had stayed. Sera’s older brother and I had become close friends, and Sera and I had a confusing relationship with a friend of mine from a nearby farm. We all stayed close, and our company made the confinement easier for a week, maybe two, before we couldn’t stand it. Finally, there was a day where the snow stopped, and the sky was as clear as it would get for a time, and we snuck out. I don’t know why we let little Django come with us, and no matter how long I live I’ll wish we hadn’t, but we did.
We put on skis and slid across the brilliant landscape like elves in a story. Like real elves, too, actually. We knew that our parents would know where to look for us, so of course we went into a part of the woods I normally avoided. The trees were dense enough that eventually we removed our skis and walked, we gathered wood and built a small fire, and we ran. To us, there seemed nothing more beautiful than to run.
When we got hungry, we walked back to our fire, and found Aapo, my best friend, asleep, and little Django gone. Panicked, we woke Aapo and followed Django’s boot tracks, deeper into the woods. We heard a singing, and we ran again. It was not such a wonderful thing to run, now. The singing grew louder, and seemed to fill our senses. We became dizzy, and sick, but also felt a need to find the source, to hear the music more clearly, like we were on the verge of understanding, like if we just could hear the voice clearly, we would break through sickness to euphoria. I didn’t notice I was crying, or my bleeding nose, until Sera began to chant in Romani, and then to sing, a song she’d taught me in secret. I’d thought she was just being mysterious, playing with me, when she’d told me that it was a song to protect from the whispers of the First Gods. Who’d ever heard of such a thing? But I joined her, and my head cleared, the alien voice dulled, and even Aapo recovered. He had no voice for singing, and didn’t know any Romani anyway, but he kept time by snapping, and we moved on, following the tracks and the insidious voice.
I don’t know how long we were under that spell, or how long we walked after breaking it, but finally, suddenly, we came upon a clearing. There stood Django, staring into the water of a still pond, as a dark figure sank into the pool. His movement made no ripples, and his mouth never moved, but the song seemed to come from him. I could understand it now. “Come to me, child of light. Sing with me, in endless night. We hear your song through time, and sing, so that you will come to me.”
As we ran into the clearing, Sera picked up Django before he could reach the pond, and I stood between them and its waters, continuing the song. Django was silent, dazed. The figure’s head was still above the water line, and with a sickening slowness it turned to me, and I felt its gaze bore into mine. I tried to suppress it, but that same impulse to know, to understand, came back to me, and I realized that it wasn’t just the song, but also something in me. Sera was yelling something at me, but I ignored her. I barely knew her in that moment.
The creature was laughing, its voice cold like a dead thing, burning like hell fire. I was weeping again. His eyes moved downward, and mine followed, I stared into the water. There should have been a reflection, but there wasn’t. I saw a strange moon in an alien sky. It wasn’t on the surface, like a reflection would be, but was beneath the surface, inside the depths. Something slithered around the moon, and its sickly yellow hue deepened, twisted, and became an eye. The eye shrank, and my vision followed, and I saw infinity.
A dark planet rushed past, following the coward moon in its retreat, then a purple sun. A solar flare burst toward me for an instant, but the sun withdrew as well, though not before I saw its center open into a second terrible eye, and at its center an open maw, beaked with many tongues. I heard a voice cry out, I imagine it was mine, but I’ll never know for certain. The impossible solar system flew out of my vision and I saw a sky full of stars, and every one was a horror. Then, galaxies become dots of churning ember, then pinpricks, and I saw the universe laid bare. The empty, screaming, hungry, unending void. I think I began screaming. Someone did, it may as well have been me.
Then the voice returned. “I can show you more, tiny flickering nothing.” It sang to me, as the universe before me split, and became many universes. I could see time, now, and gravity, and…something else. Between the universes there was void. True void, that made the blackness I’d already seen seem as full of life and light as a summer morning, and in the center of the void, but also everywhere around it, holding it, was a tree. There are no words for the immensity of the tree. No world has ever held a tree like it, for its fruit are the worlds. At first, I imagined it stood at the center of a vast forest, but no. The forest was the tree and it was the forest, and maybe all forests, and maybe everything. For a moment, I felt hope, to see such magnificent life at the center of all things.
And then the voice cooed again, softer and sickly sweet, “Even this is nothing, to us. Where you are a flicker, she is a flame, but both must end someday. Already my brother eats her from below, do you see?” and I saw, and I wept again. What is hope, against what I was seeing? Something dark, something beyond evil, or death, or hell, was gnawing at the roots of the tree. The voice spoke again, and gone was the sweetness. In its place was the sick feeling in the pit of your stomach when thunder hammers into the soil beneath you, and the voice spoke with the bass growl of a mountain wolf. “Your gods are nothing, your world is nothing, and to nothing you will all return. But I, little candle flame, I can make of you a conflagration. A destroyer of worlds. Come to me, Nicodemus Vaara. Come to me and eat the void that shall be your death and rebirth. Come to me and we will taste her together and she will be yours until after the last star dies its pitiful weeping death and you will be mine and we will all be nothing forever. Come…” he continued, but a new voice pierced through the darkness, and I saw a figure walking upon the trunk of the tree as if it were safe ground, down toward the roots. An old man, with a staff, or perhaps a spear, and an old, battered hat. Ravens circled him, and wolves, and their voices joined his in a language I didn’t know. One of the ravens flew toward me, like a falling star streaking through the sky in reverse, and screamed with the voice of an old man, his accent vaguely familiar, but not Finnish, “Quickly, Nico. Return, or they are lost!”
I do not know if the song the old man sang changed, or if mine did, but I was singing again, and we sang together, and it was the song Sera had taught me, and I fell back from that place, back to the terrible star and its dark planet and haunted moon, and the three became a face, and the face rushed toward me, and I was by the pond, and the figure in the water was rushing up toward me, all teeth and empty eyes and terrible, screaming laughter, and I fell back with a shout. I spoke words I didn’t understand, though I learned years later what they meant. They were Old Norse, and they said, “Return, [creature name], to your prison, and do not bother us again! You were bound before the great wolf, before the first spring, before the Gate of Heaven. You were bound by blood and by bone, by earth and by sky, by fire and in water you were bound! Be silent! Your voice is abomination, and your song is ugly and crude! You are nothing, so to nothing return!”
It took me decades to figure out the nature of the spell, and why I suddenly knew it like I knew my name, without even learning the language, much less learning the words. It took no longer than it took to speak for the creature to retreat. Faintly I heard its voice, broken and bitter, “You will return, I think. And the Interloper will not be here to help you.” And then he sank beneath the pool, and the reflection of the moon in the water rippled with the impact of the first drop of rain, and we cursed and ran back toward our camp. It had been midday when we’d found Django missing and Aapo sleeping, but somehow hours and hours had passed while I’d been enthralled by that evil song.
We reached our camp within half an hour, but we didn’t speak of it. We set up a tent under a large tree, soaked and tired by the time it was done. Django was still silent, but helped as he could. We had hidden more firewood in the hollow of the tree, in case of rain, and we built a small fire in our tent, and hung our soaked clothes over it, then huddle around it in blankets. Had we not planned for the chance of unexpected weather, we’d surely have died that night. Luckily for all of us, Aapo and I had been spending days and nights in the woods since before puberty. It had been in those very woods that we had cut ourselves, speaking half remembered oaths from old stories, and become brothers. That night had been strange as well, the night filled with strange voices and music, and mysterious lights.
Aapo started crying first. It was quiet, but then he began rocking back and forth, and his breath caught, and his quiet tears became sobs. Something in it reminded me of the creature’s voice, and my will broke, and I wept, like a child in pain. Sera was the strongest of us, but she was crying soon, as well. We could take no comfort in each other. The creature’s song had whispered strange thoughts into our minds, and even looking at each other was difficult. The thought of being touched, by anyone, no matter the shivering cold, made bile rise in my throat. I could feel each them slipping away from me, into their own little hells. Aapo, my blood brother, was a stranger to me. I saw him glare at Sera for a moment, a jealousy there that had not been before. I looked at her, and I couldn’t keep my eyes on her face. All I could see was the awful promise of the creature. “we will taste her together”, it had sung to me, and I imagined I could feel the poison of its words infecting my love, trying to twist it into something as dark and unholy as the creature itself. Sera herself looked hunted, like she was alone with dangerous strangers. For all our preparation, and for all Sera’s knowledge, it was little Django who saved us all. If not for Django, we might have gone mad.
In the midst of our growing panic, as our minds reeled further from sanity with each wracking sob, a voice called out, softly, shaking, but determined. Django was singing. It wasn’t a magic song, I don’t think. I don’t even remember what it was, but it was beautiful, and pure, and without any need to speak we huddle together for warmth and we sang together. I doubt any of us meant to sleep, but after what felt like hours of singing, we were warm, the fire banked and safe, and we woke with the sun in the morning. For a time, we forgot what we had seen. The spell was broken, but it had left it’s mark, deep under the surface, and we did our best to bury it.
For me, it started with a girl, a war, and a kid named Django. It was the winter of 1917, in Helsinki, and I’d expected to spend another boring winter killing time with my best friend and “blood brother.” Aapo, whose family owned the farm nearest ours, was born on the same day as me, and our parents told us that we’d been thick as thieves since we could crawl. We were 13 years old when we met the girl, and the small curious boy named Django.
Her name was Vidoma Karela, but she introduced herself to me as Sera. She was my age, and Romani, or as we called them, Kale. Her father was a musician, and her mother a seamstress and fortune teller. I learnt later that they were both practitioners of ancient occult arts going back to their family’s past in India.
Sera had shown potential with music, spells, and the fighting stick. Eventually I learned that this was why her “other name” was Sera, after Kali Sera, a protector of the Romani. At the time, I just knew that I was instantly, catastrophically, tragically, in love with her.
Django was a distant cousin of Sera’s. His real name was Jean, but no one called him that. He was 8 when I first met him, and he immediately took to Aapo and me as if we were his own brothers. My family was friendly with the Kale Romani around Helsinki, and often had them over for dinner, and let them set camp in our fields when we could. Sera was afforded more freedom than most 13-year-old girls, because of what she was training for. As it happened, my father was one of her tutors, to my barely contained delight.
I remember long hours of training, as my father always made me train with his students. Normally I hated being stuck in that barn, when I could be plucking guitar strings or hunting rabbits, or sleeping in a tree in the woods nearby, usually with Aapo, but that winter and spring I didn’t want to be anywhere else. The lessons would start at dawn, just after the morning farm work was done, and we’d take a break in the afternoon. I was supposed to help with the afternoon chores, but I’d usually run off with my new friends. With her. We’d run into the woods, chase rabbits or climb trees, or just talk. Europe seemed to be about to explode, and there was worried talk around town about Russian revolutions and German “influence”, but we were young, and didn’t care to see past each other. For the first time in my life, I had a band. Friends who all loved me and eachother as much as I loved them. As fall fell into winter, we became more and more inseparable, and the normally lazy Aapo even began joining our cane lessons and physical training. Sera and I teased him about losing his baby fat, but our jokes did a poor job of hiding the unexpected feelings growing between the three of us.
In the deep winter, we were mostly stuck indoors, and we got the itch. If you’ve lived in winter places, you know it. Days on end cooped up with a full house. Most of our guests had gone south again by this point, but Sera’s family, and Django’s had stayed. Sera’s older brother and I had become close friends, and Sera and I had a confusing relationship with a friend of mine from a nearby farm. We all stayed close, and our company made the confinement easier for a week, maybe two, before we couldn’t stand it. Finally, there was a day where the snow stopped, and the sky was as clear as it would get for a time, and we snuck out. I don’t know why we let little Django come with us, and no matter how long I live I’ll wish we hadn’t, but we did.
We put on skis and slid across the brilliant landscape like elves in a story. Like real elves, too, actually. We knew that our parents would know where to look for us, so of course we went into a part of the woods I normally avoided. The trees were dense enough that eventually we removed our skis and walked, we gathered wood and built a small fire, and we ran. To us, there seemed nothing more beautiful than to run.
When we got hungry, we walked back to our fire, and found Aapo, my best friend, asleep, and little Django gone. Panicked, we woke Aapo and followed Django’s boot tracks, deeper into the woods. We heard a singing, and we ran again. It was not such a wonderful thing to run, now. The singing grew louder, and seemed to fill our senses. We became dizzy, and sick, but also felt a need to find the source, to hear the music more clearly, like we were on the verge of understanding, like if we just could hear the voice clearly, we would break through sickness to euphoria. I didn’t notice I was crying, or my bleeding nose, until Sera began to chant in Romani, and then to sing, a song she’d taught me in secret. I’d thought she was just being mysterious, playing with me, when she’d told me that it was a song to protect from the whispers of the First Gods. Who’d ever heard of such a thing? But I joined her, and my head cleared, the alien voice dulled, and even Aapo recovered. He had no voice for singing, and didn’t know any Romani anyway, but he kept time by snapping, and we moved on, following the tracks and the insidious voice.
I don’t know how long we were under that spell, or how long we walked after breaking it, but finally, suddenly, we came upon a clearing. There stood Django, staring into the water of a still pond, as a dark figure sank into the pool. His movement made no ripples, and his mouth never moved, but the song seemed to come from him. I could understand it now. “Come to me, child of light. Sing with me, in endless night. We hear your song through time, and sing, so that you will come to me.”
As we ran into the clearing, Sera picked up Django before he could reach the pond, and I stood between them and its waters, continuing the song. Django was silent, dazed. The figure’s head was still above the water line, and with a sickening slowness it turned to me, and I felt its gaze bore into mine. I tried to suppress it, but that same impulse to know, to understand, came back to me, and I realized that it wasn’t just the song, but also something in me. Sera was yelling something at me, but I ignored her. I barely knew her in that moment.
The creature was laughing, its voice cold like a dead thing, burning like hell fire. I was weeping again. His eyes moved downward, and mine followed, I stared into the water. There should have been a reflection, but there wasn’t. I saw a strange moon in an alien sky. It wasn’t on the surface, like a reflection would be, but was beneath the surface, inside the depths. Something slithered around the moon, and its sickly yellow hue deepened, twisted, and became an eye. The eye shrank, and my vision followed, and I saw infinity.
A dark planet rushed past, following the coward moon in its retreat, then a purple sun. A solar flare burst toward me for an instant, but the sun withdrew as well, though not before I saw its center open into a second terrible eye, and at its center an open maw, beaked with many tongues. I heard a voice cry out, I imagine it was mine, but I’ll never know for certain. The impossible solar system flew out of my vision and I saw a sky full of stars, and every one was a horror. Then, galaxies become dots of churning ember, then pinpricks, and I saw the universe laid bare. The empty, screaming, hungry, unending void. I think I began screaming. Someone did, it may as well have been me.
Then the voice returned. “I can show you more, tiny flickering nothing.” It sang to me, as the universe before me split, and became many universes. I could see time, now, and gravity, and…something else. Between the universes there was void. True void, that made the blackness I’d already seen seem as full of life and light as a summer morning, and in the center of the void, but also everywhere around it, holding it, was a tree. There are no words for the immensity of the tree. No world has ever held a tree like it, for its fruit are the worlds. At first, I imagined it stood at the center of a vast forest, but no. The forest was the tree and it was the forest, and maybe all forests, and maybe everything. For a moment, I felt hope, to see such magnificent life at the center of all things.
And then the voice cooed again, softer and sickly sweet, “Even this is nothing, to us. Where you are a flicker, she is a flame, but both must end someday. Already my brother eats her from below, do you see?” and I saw, and I wept again. What is hope, against what I was seeing? Something dark, something beyond evil, or death, or hell, was gnawing at the roots of the tree. The voice spoke again, and gone was the sweetness. In its place was the sick feeling in the pit of your stomach when thunder hammers into the soil beneath you, and the voice spoke with the bass growl of a mountain wolf. “Your gods are nothing, your world is nothing, and to nothing you will all return. But I, little candle flame, I can make of you a conflagration. A destroyer of worlds. Come to me, Nicodemus Vaara. Come to me and eat the void that shall be your death and rebirth. Come to me and we will taste her together and she will be yours until after the last star dies its pitiful weeping death and you will be mine and we will all be nothing forever. Come…” he continued, but a new voice pierced through the darkness, and I saw a figure walking upon the trunk of the tree as if it were safe ground, down toward the roots. An old man, with a staff, or perhaps a spear, and an old, battered hat. Ravens circled him, and wolves, and their voices joined his in a language I didn’t know. One of the ravens flew toward me, like a falling star streaking through the sky in reverse, and screamed with the voice of an old man, his accent vaguely familiar, but not Finnish, “Quickly, Nico. Return, or they are lost!”
I do not know if the song the old man sang changed, or if mine did, but I was singing again, and we sang together, and it was the song Sera had taught me, and I fell back from that place, back to the terrible star and its dark planet and haunted moon, and the three became a face, and the face rushed toward me, and I was by the pond, and the figure in the water was rushing up toward me, all teeth and empty eyes and terrible, screaming laughter, and I fell back with a shout. I spoke words I didn’t understand, though I learned years later what they meant. They were Old Norse, and they said, “Return, [creature name], to your prison, and do not bother us again! You were bound before the great wolf, before the first spring, before the Gate of Heaven. You were bound by blood and by bone, by earth and by sky, by fire and in water you were bound! Be silent! Your voice is abomination, and your song is ugly and crude! You are nothing, so to nothing return!”
It took me decades to figure out the nature of the spell, and why I suddenly knew it like I knew my name, without even learning the language, much less learning the words. It took no longer than it took to speak for the creature to retreat. Faintly I heard its voice, broken and bitter, “You will return, I think. And the Interloper will not be here to help you.” And then he sank beneath the pool, and the reflection of the moon in the water rippled with the impact of the first drop of rain, and we cursed and ran back toward our camp. It had been midday when we’d found Django missing and Aapo sleeping, but somehow hours and hours had passed while I’d been enthralled by that evil song.
We reached our camp within half an hour, but we didn’t speak of it. We set up a tent under a large tree, soaked and tired by the time it was done. Django was still silent, but helped as he could. We had hidden more firewood in the hollow of the tree, in case of rain, and we built a small fire in our tent, and hung our soaked clothes over it, then huddle around it in blankets. Had we not planned for the chance of unexpected weather, we’d surely have died that night. Luckily for all of us, Aapo and I had been spending days and nights in the woods since before puberty. It had been in those very woods that we had cut ourselves, speaking half remembered oaths from old stories, and become brothers. That night had been strange as well, the night filled with strange voices and music, and mysterious lights.
Aapo started crying first. It was quiet, but then he began rocking back and forth, and his breath caught, and his quiet tears became sobs. Something in it reminded me of the creature’s voice, and my will broke, and I wept, like a child in pain. Sera was the strongest of us, but she was crying soon, as well. We could take no comfort in each other. The creature’s song had whispered strange thoughts into our minds, and even looking at each other was difficult. The thought of being touched, by anyone, no matter the shivering cold, made bile rise in my throat. I could feel each them slipping away from me, into their own little hells. Aapo, my blood brother, was a stranger to me. I saw him glare at Sera for a moment, a jealousy there that had not been before. I looked at her, and I couldn’t keep my eyes on her face. All I could see was the awful promise of the creature. “we will taste her together”, it had sung to me, and I imagined I could feel the poison of its words infecting my love, trying to twist it into something as dark and unholy as the creature itself. Sera herself looked hunted, like she was alone with dangerous strangers. For all our preparation, and for all Sera’s knowledge, it was little Django who saved us all. If not for Django, we might have gone mad.
In the midst of our growing panic, as our minds reeled further from sanity with each wracking sob, a voice called out, softly, shaking, but determined. Django was singing. It wasn’t a magic song, I don’t think. I don’t even remember what it was, but it was beautiful, and pure, and without any need to speak we huddle together for warmth and we sang together. I doubt any of us meant to sleep, but after what felt like hours of singing, we were warm, the fire banked and safe, and we woke with the sun in the morning. For a time, we forgot what we had seen. The spell was broken, but it had left it’s mark, deep under the surface, and we did our best to bury it.