Topic: Karma always comes to collect.

Against Descent

Date: 2017-03-11 17:28 EST
"Yours is not to ask why Yours is to do and die" KMFDM, "Professional Killer"

When all this started—no. That sounds like I take no responsibility for any of this, and in truth, I chose it. It is the one thing I can truly claim. I could have said no, when the hand was extended to me. I could have just gone into that good night, and let it all go.

Instead, when I could feel myself dying on that operating table—truth be told, I think I did—it was like I touched eternity, saw the face of God. The long tunnel with the brilliant light at the end. Hearing my loved ones call my name. All that crap they tell you that happens when you die...

And then I turned my back on it.

They teach us, you know. Oh, the others—the other Traditions, that is—they have their beliefs. Not always the right ones. (Though I suppose the question is, who, or what, is right' I suppose that's better asked of a philosopher. Or a psychologist. Or a sociology professor. I digress, though.) To them, all we are are pumped-up assassins, taking what profits we make and creating more little killers like the rest of it. It discounts what we actually do, but there are few who care to see past the stereotypes. It's better on this Earth. Mine? It was shattered before I ever left it, a charnel wasteland, shrine to the Nameless' hubris. Or perhaps one to the foolishness of the other Awakened, those who should have seen the warning signs, but couldn't put aside their petty squabbles for long enough to put a stop to the trainwreck that was about to happen.

Still. They teach us. To separate ourselves from the act. Don't get me wrong. We're killers and murderers, each and every one of us. A simple appellation with a not so simple definition. Because, what do we do, anyway' After all, while at times, payment does exchange hands, that is never the point. There's more. A lot more. And most people never scratch the surface.

Killing is only part of it. The Wheel turns. My kind and I, we guard Fate. We guide it. To reduce us to thoughtless killers undermines the truth. Sometimes, in an individual life, their path goes so wrong, that the only way to 'fix' it is to become Atropos, she who cuts the cord of one's life, and send them off to the cycle of reincarnation. The mortal shell is flawed; usually, the soul within can be preserved, to take its place again, and find a better way.

I have become Death, shatterer of worlds.

I am Euthanatos.

Against Descent

Date: 2017-03-13 12:23 EST
"And she had Audrey Hepburn's smile With deeper, sadder eyes The only thing she said No one hears Cassandra cry" The Cruxshadows, "Cassandra"

I was not always like this, you know.

Most Mages like me are not born. It can happen, but I've only ever met two, and one was here in Rhydin. I am no Scientist, but I suspect that it's the nature of the realm itself that makes it easier for the sleepers to Awaken, here. You see, that's what happens. Something rouses us from our mundane slumber, and all of a sudden, there's more. I'd say it's like being blinded, and then being given your eyesight back, but I've never been blind, so I feel as if that's a terrible comparison. Maybe it's like seeing more colors than are normally on the spectrum' Things are just...sharper.

Different.

I had my thirteen years to be normal, I suppose. I was born in Italy in the summer of '87; those who know call me Autumn's child now, but that is another story entirely. My early life was idyllic and rather uneventful, really. Full of the trials and tribulations of childhood, but with no real lasting impressions. Not for the first decade, at least.

I was ten years old when I first got sick, and the diagnosis was quick and brutal. Cervical cancer; not terminal, but advanced for a child of my years. It wasn't unheard of, but unusual enough. The doctors who treated me in Italy were fairly aggressive with it; I was in remission by my 11th birthday. My parents and I considered it luck, but they chose to emigrate to the United States anyway. My mother, who stayed at home and was a poet and writer, could work anywhere, buoyed by her royalty checks; my father was in some sort of technological field, and he felt confident that he would be able to find a job. And so, we left the only home I'd known for ten years and whisked away to a new land.

It should have been an adventure; instead, it was misery. Because of my illness, I was behind in school, and while I did my best to catch up, I made no friends that I can recall. It hurt, then, and yet it painted, in stark strokes, a framework that would pervade the rest of my life. Even now, I can count friends on the fingers of one hand. Family—that's just Mesteno and Salvador, and Faye, as much as one can count her as family. I do, though, and count myself lucky.

My cancer came roaring back with a vengeance the spring before I turned 12. That meant going back to the hospital for chemotherapy and radiation to start, and to discuss surgery after. When the radiation and the rest failed. I thought things had been getting better—that I had been getting better. Other than my lack of friendship, things had been going well...but in their rush to get to my side as I went into surgery, they got into a car accident. They didn't make it, and I went under the knife alone. As I've said before, I was near positive that I died on the operating table. While I was recuperating, the nurses and a social worker were arranging to put me in the foster system, but inexplicably, I was spared that.

Not that the 'sparing' was any easier.

He called himself "Mr. God"; an arrogant name to be certain, but beyond the usual talents, he had one for creating life as well as destroying it. He never gave me another to call him by, either. I was barely healed from surgery before he had me up and staggering around his house. He wasn't much taller then than I am now, and I was gangly with growing—though I finished soon after, probably thanks to the surgery and radiation. Swarthy and sun-kissed, with eyes as dark as chestnuts and a forbidding demeanor, though even he could find amusement, at times. Smiles barely touched his lips, but even now, I remember how they made his eyes shine.

He was to be Acarya, my mentor on the long road I was about to set foot on. What had happened in the operating room—that had been no mistake, and yes, I had died. He knew, because he had been sent to attend there. Hardheaded teenager that I was, I wasn't about to believe any of it—or the fact that my parents were dead—until he took me to the morgue to claim them.

I had always understood that death was a part of life, but it had never particularly hit home as hard as it did, then.

And he gave me no choice but to start training.

I had always had some small ability to see beyond the veils of time, but I never had any control over it. For the most part, I still have little, even now, but magick can steady my Sight. But when I agreed to obey Mr. God, my vision tilted, and sent me careening forward, straight into Hell.

It was one of the first inklings of what was to come, and yet not a one of us was prepared when Hell truly came to Earth.

Against Descent

Date: 2017-05-22 16:53 EST
"I never sent for love, I never had a heart to mend Because before the start began, I always saw the end." -Marina and the Diamonds, "Starring Role"

Now, I do not remember him well. As if a veil had been laid over him, specifically, blurring and blotting his face, his whole name, his form, from out of my memory. I have my suspicions as to why, and this means that I do not push back against this phenomenon as hard as I normally might. I know my memory is not all there. I know there are pieces missing; ones that I have given up and paid for, if not power itself, things I have done with that power. This reeks of that. A price paid. All I can remember now is his first name, and a hint. I believe he was a Son of Ether, one of the few left on my world. And I feel that, once, he meant more to me that I can now recall. Why' Because a similar haze covers other faces from my past, including my parents. Still, what can I do"

Such is life.

He was a part of my cabal; there were about eight of us, at that time. Big, for a cabal, especially big for the end times. Before our Earth went straight to hell. He was the only Scientist, though. Why that is important, I'm not sure, but I make the distinction nonetheless. I can give him so little else, now, and that brings a pang that I cannot understand. Because I don't remember.

Even then, things were going bad. I had just turned sixteen, and my mentor had told me that I was no longer an apprentice. Not that that meant he had nothing left to teach me, just that I needed to get out and experience things. As it turned out, there was a new cabal forming in Pittsburgh, and he shoved me into it. Awkward as ever. That was where I met Max, the Son of Ether I'd already mentioned, along with a handful of others. Like the Akashic Brother, Peter Yang, who was nothing like I'd expected, considering most of that Tradition cared nothing for mine. Lots of old, bad blood between the two—but he never seemed to care. He was training along another young Akashic named Morgan Knight, with one of their greatest Masters—Nhairis Tran.

Little did I know that I'd come to hate her other student, in my time, but he'd undergo more than a name change by the time we came to odds. And the Wheel turns in strange ways. I met another version of him after I came to Rhydin. That certainly ended differently.

It was early July. Astronomers were still babbling over a recently discovered new star. Flipping their collective lids and fighting over naming rights. For them and the rest of the Sleepers, it helped to awaken wonder. And probably even Awakened a couple new Mages, though I was utterly unconscious of that fact. Because for the rest of the Awakened, the 'star' was less star but portent, and the omen wasn't a good one.

We just didn't know how bad it really was.

As for the star, we called it the Eye of Iblis. Mr. God, amongst others, had noticed it for the first time around when I'd first Awakened. As to why it was named that, the truth was lost to time, and no one was entirely certain as to how it was the supernatural element that noticed the Eye first. Nhairis had ties to the werewolves, and they informed her of the fact that they, too, were aware of it. But by then, they were having their own troubles, even as the Mages were, and so anything else was not forthcoming. Not that that was a surprise. It was the way it had always been.

But slowly, things started getting worse, and even the Sleepers were affected. Within the next month, one of the ancient vampiric progenitors rose from its torpor and decimated a good part of India. We found this out because it was part of the Euthanatos' birthplace that got decimated by the bomb that the Technocracy used to kill Ravnos. For the Sleepers" They thought it was a typhoon of unprecedented size. It was a good cover story, at least. Not that anyone liked it. Ravnos' rising was just one more brick paved on a road we didn't know led to Hell. We—the Traditions, the Technocracy, and the Sleepers all—walked down it anyway, practically hand in hand, with no heed paid to any of the foreboding signs.

Idiots, all of us. And I number myself among them.

I wanted to fix things, so very badly. Even back then. But at that time, I had all the fire and fervor of youth on my side. Fourteen years ago. I look back now, and I'm amazed at just how naive I was back then.

But I digress.

The first salvo towards the Traditions as a whole" That came when the Nameless assailed Horizon, the Order of Hermes' chantry. Its seat of power. None of us had seen it coming until the first among the Nephandi, the most powerful, practically destroyed Horizon, and set his eyes on Earth, through the nodes of power that were linked there. He dared us all to try to oust him from the Order's bastion, or die trying.

Fools that we were, we did. Many of us. Even my cabal, with our Hermetic, Richar val Orten, practically frothing to help lead the charge. It was being organized at one of the Order's ancestral houses, Quaesitor, in Germany. I never found out why we got an invite, only that we did. The decision ended up to be an assault on Horizon proper from three fronts. As young as most of us were, we weren't expected to go, Richar's desires aside. Maybe that was why he got pulled aside, with myself and our Dreamspeaker, the Moose-Man, for a set of different instructions.

We were told to go to Horizon with the others, the eight of us, and take a back door in the Tomb of La Salle—the man who was credited with the foundation of the Traditions. We were told to go to fallen Doissetep, and find something that we had all thought was a myth. I would have sworn that it was only a fever dream, myself, but the mysterious stranger who had taken aside" He'd left a key with Moose. And so we were tasked with convincing the others—not so easily done, until Peter called over Nhairis, and even had her use the spehere of Mind to prove that we weren't joking.

We weren't. But I wish we had been.

What little I recall was that Max had been on our side of the argument, before Nhairis stepped in. I don't remember the whys of it, only that he'd believed us, and by then, he was the de facto leader of the cabal. The rest of us? We fell in behind him, piling in to his decrepit Volkswagen van, and joined the throng heading to Horizon. By some miracle, we made it in one piece, but it was a war zone. At least Max had plenty of skill in driving, and managed to evade the worst of the damage being done. Bodies were flung around us as magickal explosions pitted the road, but he had apparently visited the chantry in the past—or spent a lot of time talking to Richar—and it took us shorter than I had expected, at least, to reach the tomb.

In retrospect, it would have been easier if we had been told exactly what we were looking for. Oh, of course we had been told to seek the Parma Magica, but not even Richar, a Hermetic himself, could tell us what that meant, or what it even was. We made the portal and ended up in the ruins, doing our best to keep our heads down. Max asked us to spread out and search, and the rest of us obeyed. Though for a while, our efforts seemed fruitless.

It set Janet, the Ecstatic, and Isis, the Verbena, to squabbling and sniping at one another like a pair of ill-bred cats. I kept my head down and kept looking. Richar kept a grip on his key and his temper, his face set in grim determination. Max had paused to shrink his van, in a twist of Science, to the size of a Matchbox car. As usual, Moose-Man and Peter were quiet, and it was a question as to whether Ciddy, the Orphan, was even doing anything save standing on a high point in the ruins and smoking.

I tripped over something, and that set him to laughing, sounding much like a crow's cackle, eerie in the relative silence of the ruins. Picking myself up, I looked to see just what it was—no surprise that I'd had one of the minor Entropy luck-rotes up; it was a book. One that I had never seen before, but its title was telling.

Bonisagus' Parma Magica.

Jackpot.