Atrocity Rose

Ah, beloved, the hour grows late, and you grow weary. Do not deny it, dearest, for my eyes are keen and can see each and every one of your mortal frailties. If it pleases you, I shall tell you of what you ask. But remember there are things that are better off being unknown. There are things out there in the planes. Monstrous things beyond the likes of which the common tongue's vocabulary can describe.

I would share the experience with you, beloved. You know that I can open my mind to yours, to let you browse the width and breadth of all I am like an open book. I can, but I plead with you to not ask this of me. There lies within me a fragment of a greater creature, a mere shadow of a reflection of a mote of her majesty. She has no name, dearest, for where she dwells she is everything. She is the beginning, she is the end, and whatever is not of her is consumed and devoured until it is. Like I was.

To truly know of what I am, you must know what I was, and what I strove to be. As apropos as my name is now, when I was born it was a title meant to instill a grand destiny. My name is and was Atrocity Kajara, my love, and my birth was the first of the midwife had witnessed in my Emperor's court.

You would not have heard of him, dearest. For to reach out to where he reigns is to slip in between the barriers of existence twice over. The name of our world was lost to the sands of time, as the Empire was ripped from it as a page from a notebook. Ours was a struggle between good and evil, an eternal war fought balanced on the head of a pin.

In every generation there was born a King of Darkness and a King of Light. Each was destined to gather allies to their side, to eventually lead the vanguard of an army against the forces of the Other. All was in balance, dark gave way to light who then in turn gave way to dark. Dawn, day, and dusk. And then? Then my Emperor cheated.

Through manipulating the bloodlines, manipulating his own blood, he was able to draw out power hidden within. Patterns of ancient magic lying dormant within the lineage. It was with this new sorcery that he extended his own life far beyond what was possible with mundane sorcery, for our realm had no undead. Ours was a world for the living.

And the next time the King of Light drew forth, he found himself opposed not merely by a King of Darkness, but the King of Darkness standing at the right hand of the Emperor of Blood. There was no longer a dawn.

With nothing but time until the rebirth of the King of Light, my Emperor busied himself in the blood. The Kajara Line was his masterpiece. From all the men and monsters of our world, my Emperor wove together a tapestry of raw physical and spiritual power.

With my kin at his side, the Darkness grew until it nearly subsumed the Light. Until that holy blood was all but purged from existence, until there could no longer be a King of Light. Upon that day, upon the day when the last child of light first drew breath, the greater gods of our world decreed that the imbalance could be tolerated no longer.

The Empire was cut from the fabric of reality with the sharpest and cleanest of cuts. The gods surgically cut the growing tumor of Darkness from the world they had worked so hard to create. But the power of my Emperor was great. Not great enough to prevent the severing of our existence, not great enough to prevent our casting into the Void.

You know of Planes, dearheart, but do you know of the Void? Eternal stillness. Eternal nothingness. Eternal cold. Infinite in scope. Beyond even the comprehension of those that dwell upon the infinite Abyss, or the infinities of each layer of Hell. For they are not truly infinite as they imagine. How could they truly comprehend infinity and continue their petty little squabbles, their grabbing for the souls of mortal beings.

Know you of Eberron? Or Krynn? Or Toril? Or any of the myriad worlds that the planes seem to coalesce around, the anchors that give the other planes meaning. Imagine, dearest, the greatest of these. A magnificent sphere of rock, of soil, of water, of ice, and of magma, titanic in scale. Now imagine, dearest, the radiant sun. An incredible fire so large and so dense that it collapses inward upon itself, burning and crushing the very air around us again and again until it becomes iron. That fire is a million times bigger than the tiny orbs upon which mortal men dwell.

From that incredible pyre to its nearest sibling is an even greater distance still. A distance so great that it can be measured only by taking the movement of the fastest thing known to mortal minds, light, and measuring the distance that it travels in the span of one year. Four of them. Four years it takes for the light shining from the nearest star to reach mortal eyes.

Imagine a hundred such stars. A thousand such stars. A million. A billion. A trillion. All of that? Not even a speck in the face of infinity. There are trillions of those not-specks just in the blackness that can be seen. In the face of this, it is no wonder that the gods and outsiders turn their gazes inward to the small affairs of a handful of worlds and the planar bubbles centered around them.

Now, think of that great mass of an incomprehensible scale and it as a grain of sand on a beach. One possibility upon a beach of possibilities. All of immense, unimaginable, eternal creation branching off with each new event, each of the tiniest potentials that could be. In this writhing mass of what is, what was, and what could be, nothing could exist outside of it. For it encompasses all there is.

But you can step beyond, beloved. Perhaps not you personally, but some have the power to tear open the very fabric of reality and step into the nothingness that does and does not exist between what is, what was, and what will be. Within the nonexistence are things, that even in nothing exist nonetheless.

The very gods had ripped us from existence, the memory of what we were gone in its entirety. An entire continent that had been, never was. But my Emperor's power preserved us. In the eternity between moments within the Void his power brought us into existence again. A newly born world upon which our discarded scrap of reality settled. A nest of some unimaginable cosmic jackdaw who cherished the gleam and sparkle of the Emperor's power.

Like any other world it had its gods, its demons, its powers, its inward-facing patrons. With the new world came new blood, collected from other scraps of cast-off realities. The Empire grew glorious with new wonders and new horrors alike, crafted by my Emperor's hand. And I? I was one of them. Destined to be a horror, beloved, an Atrocity. The Kajara were made to serve the Emperor in so many different ways. But only a chosen few earned his favor.

His hand in our creation, our birth, was not enough to warrant the honor of serving him truly, to become the faintest droplet of the Blood. We would need to be reborn. Reborn through the elements, through the Void.

With all that I know, with all that is within my capacity to describe, my love, I still lack the means to properly convey the sensations as my Emperor placed his hand upon me, sending his power through me in order to remake me anew.

My body and mind were torn apart. I was sand upon a beach, my body no longer a body, but a smattering of dirt and dust that no longer knew existence. A mind that ripped and shredded and tore itself apart, beyond bestial rage, beyond animal cunning, beyond even instinct to no longer even be. I ceased to exist. I had no mind, no body, no soul. And yet I still was.

Cut adrift from all existence, not in the void, but the dust of my non-being scattered to the winds over unwanted tidbits of reality, cast aside by megalomaniacal gods. It was there that I found her, beloved. It was there that I found... my goddess. That word is an insult and I weep at my limited magnitude of comprehension and utter inability to describe her magnificence.

She dwells in the Void, beloved. She has been there for time untold. Time beyond time. She merely is. She consumes the scraps that the gardener gods cast aside, the unwanted, cancerous reality that they decree must not be. She is life. She is death. She is everything. She is nothing. She is She Who Thrives Between, and she devoured the nothingness that I had become.

I weep even to think of it, beloved. I weep tears of water from my eyes, just as every fiber of my being weeps with her essence. For a glorious instant and a horrific eternity I was a part of her. I was but a single atom of a being of unimaginable power. She is a single being so vast as to defy infinity, and yet I felt her vibrant embrace.

She took the dust of nothing that I had become, and made me something again. She is something like a plant, like an animal, like a fungus, like a bacteria, like a virus, and yet nothing like any of them. In seconds and eons I grew from nothingness. I had a mind again. A feeble one with no more intellect than a cockroach. I had roots, I grew, I fed, I hunted, I devoured.

And in time and in nothingness I was, once again. I had a self, an identity, an instinct. She took the pieces that my Emperor created and sculpted something with them, with a touch of her own image. In her unimaginable mind she knew all that I had known, all that I would ever know, all that my delicious scrap of a world could ever be, or ever have been.

And so she completed me, even though I had failed my Emperor. I lacked the will, the strength, the stamina, call it whatever you will to hold onto myself through my journey into the void and beyond.

I was sent into the void the moment before my death, as my Emperor ripped out my heart and placed it in my own hands, beloved. I was reborn in the nothingness, in the between that does not exist. After eternities I realized that I drew breath, that I was fully existent once again.

The round worlds of the material plane were strange and unfriendly, their skies empty of the corkscrewing moons and gleaming comets. The comforting expanse of the rest of the world no longer curved comfortably up at the horizons. The impossible donut of my home was gone, and in all my searching I have never found the merest trace of it.

Nor did I expect to, dearest. My beloved Empire had been cut away for what is, was, and could have ever been real. I doubt even the gods who cut us away remember. But that matters little. Though I have failed to prove myself worthy of my Emperor's favor, I've known the love and compassion of She Who Thrives Between. A piece of her came with me when I arrived here, after all. With such a tiny mote as myself it will take eternities before these planes are fertile enough to draw in her roots, her teeth, her tongues. Everything will know her wonderful, beautiful, horrible, caress. In time.

Ssh. There, there beloved. There is nothing for you to fear. My heart belongs to you, and to you alone. So soft and warm, is it not? Comforting. Such a beautiful thing, my heart is. So smooth and polished and gleaming. Flesh made stone made metal made crystal made soil made wood made sap made amber.

I told you, dearest. I told you that some things were better left unknown. You wished to know of me and my heart. You can see for yourself how black it is. How could it be anything but? My heart is a fickle thing, dearest, and you know as well as any what can be done with it. It is not wise to wear my love on your sleeve, but rather best to keep it concealed and cozy, my love for you hidden away from the world.

You stole my heart, beloved. And now I belong to you. For my love will never die, and neither will I. Though they have tried, dearest. Oh how they have tried. And you would know this better than anyone.

You and your friends fought quite valiantly. I do apologize for the mess I made of them. I applaud your ingenuity in recognizing that with possession of my heart comes my loyalty, my affection, my love, and my eternal devotion. Or as eternal as it comes with mortal beings, so soft, so swift, and so fragile.

It is a shame that young woman in white was the first to fall. But the recently departed lich did have quite a keen intellect. If only the devotees of your sun god were a bit less... shall we say flamboyant in their style of dress and their pride in showing off his symbols?

Just lay on your side, beloved, let the coughing expel the fluid. Your body is a fertile ground for my essence to take root and grow. Your wounds have weakened you, my dear. I would restore you, if I could. But the blood that runs through my veins does not truly belong to me, but to Her. Your warmth, your vibrancy brings about her coming just the most miniscule bit faster.

Your poison-using friend and his lacking mental defenses are as much to blame as I. Were it not for his poisoned dagger, you would be able to expel my lady's caress from your body. You have another hour, perhaps two before you succumb. You need not be concerned, dearest, you have fulfilled your vow. As you requested, his phylactery is now dust. You have accomplished what generations have not. Doing so much with the short amount of time you've been given.

Yes, I will see to it that they all receive a proper burial, and you as well. My heart is not my own to give, dearest, you know that, but if there is any individual in particular that you would desire for me to bring your remains, that could certainly make sure I don't 'fall into the wrong hands' as it were.

I am at heart a wicked thing, my love, you know that. I have all the time in the world, and the next, and the next. My lady's will shall be done in time. But she is patient. If this person is as you say, than my heart will be in good hands.

No more words, beloved. Your body is weary. Close your eyes and sleep. You have earned your eternal rest. I do wish that we had not met under such dire circumstances, you have the wit to ask the right questions, and the curiosity to tread right into dangerous subjects. I have not been able to share so much about myself for so long now.

Sleep, beloved. Shed your mortal shell in peace and let your soul begin upon its journey. Sleep.