Now don't get me wrong, the Great Work is the noblest of all endeavors. The Philosophy of the Knife is a philosophy of the concrete and the Alchemy of Flesh is a proven science. We've done more in decades than others have done in centuries, all in our spirited attempt to square the circle.

But if we really stop to think about it... that's the problem, now isn't it?

The universe, no matter how you arrange the gods and devils that dwell within it, is a very big place. There are still Elotheans older than the philosophy and it is only this year that we've seen the first, ever so hesitant attempts at collaboration between Philosophers. Compare this to the Moon Mages, who've been doing their thing for nearly one thousand years and still don't rightly know what the hell they're doing.

Our philosophy demands we simultaneously throw away the hoary rites and demon-worship of our quaint cousins and tear up the foundation of the life-cycle. The Great Work is nothing less than the subversion of Life as a metaphysical and interplanar force, and here we are without a manual. Certainly the price that Sidhlot and related madmen paid for their knowledge was too high, but one may envy the runny candle they paid for with their souls when you're walking down a stairwell without a torch.

Some years ago, I was enjoying the local cuisine in a southern Therengia village -- watery beer and burnt bread -- minding my own business. The last person I'd murdered was at least fifty miles up the road and I buried it deep enough, so I fit in well enough with the highwaymen, Rangers and other dirty folk. Still, a man at the other end of the bar was eying me in that glassy-eyed moronic look seers and priests get when they're scrying your aura. He didn't raise the hue and cry, but there wasn't anything friendly in that face. Human, bearded. Peppered black hair, angular features. I could still recognize him today, if he walked by.

I took my leave and, sure enough, my drinking companion followed shortly afterward. It was clear that he was trying to shadow me, but he wasn't any good at it. At least, not by our standards. It was getting dark and any sane man would've stayed the night, but we both proved to be quite mad. A few hundred feet up the road the ramshackle village ended with a mill, where I decided I'd wait and collect those offensive eyes.

Now in context of this little lecture, I'm sure you're thinking I should've been more careful. But it was dark, I was in my element and I am not so out of practice that a bumpkin friar or a Moon Mage who hasn't struck it rich yet would pose any individual threat. There was no reason to suspect I was about to find anything other than fodder for a Risen, and that is where the danger is.

I laid in wait just within the empty mill, a hunting knife withdrew but hidden behind my back to avoid it glinting in the sunset. The man glanced in, failed to spot me, and continued along the road in his mockery of a chase. I crept up behind him, practice rendering the movements rote, and concentrated on the swing I'd need to come up and across his jugular.

It was at the moment I moved forward, committed to the strike, that everything went wrong. The blade strapped to my left thigh -- my ritual knife -- suddenly burnt against my flesh, and I had a bizarre premonition: I had chosen the wrong knife.

The man... the thing transformed in front of me. It was not any physical transformation, or even the sort of magic or spiritual power that might as well be physical. He was one thing, then the next blink he was something else. It was still shaped like a human, but naked and with ashen skin. And his face... oh his face. It was segmented vertically into three sections: white, grey and black, none of which lined up properly. The left side of his mouth was up by his nose, which was above his right eye.

But worst of all was the feeling, the malaise that sheeted off this thing that wore the skin of a man. Common is poorly equipped to describe such things. All I can say is that in that moment, looking at that thing's misplaced eyes, I knew -- I knew! -- it was more real than I was, though I have no idea what that means. I felt it in my gut and knew it like I know gravity.

I dropped my knife.

Like any good Philosopher, I ran. If it chased after me, I won; I don't know. I was sick in my stomach and a terror I had never felt had claimed my mind. I ran through the woods until the crash through the underbrush had scarred me like a whip, and I vomited from exhaustion.

I don't know what that thing was, or how something so absurd has anything to do with humble me and my activities with corpses. Perhaps you'll even think I had a bout of madness, if you're unkind. It's irrelevant to the point: reading Kigot and practicing how to duck will please Book, but don't think for a second you're not -- that we're all not -- babes in the wood. The very nature of Transcendence means it must go through vistas stranger than anyone has ever tread, or else someone would've already done it.

-Armifer
"In our days truth is taken to result from the effacing of the living man behind the mathematical structures that think themselves out in him, rather than he be thinking them." - Emmanuel Levinas

I'm sensing some definite undertones here.

---

Rev. Reene

"Oh, I'm not omniscient -- but I know a lot."
- Mephistopheles, Faust

WTB Armifer collection of spooky stories.


"By Idon's hairy hangnails!"
~Tsinlee

<<makes them think they're mad.>>

hey, if you don't realize you go mad during your attunement you never will. :-)

---

the world is broken

>WTB Cleric/Moonie spell called 'Need Face Lift'. Scares Necromancers, makes them think they're mad.

There's a cantrip for that, actually.

>>>WTB Cleric/Moonie spell called 'Need Face Lift'. Scares Necromancers, makes them think they're mad.

There's a cantrip for that, actually.

Yeah, but mine makes me look sexy. It must be a sect thing.


I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.

the crossbow twanged and loosed.
the barbed bolt found it's mark deep into the misplaced eye of the curious stranger.
the hardened oak made way for the criminson red of blood to flow.

quickly I hastened to harvest the organs of this creature, but it was futile. The misplaced anatomy could never bear the fruit of true life, merely a mask of it.

* Your post here *

More please?

Isn't that an old vision?


I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.

Mr. Book,

I am afraid Stevens will no longer be joining us at the table.

You met young Stevens five years back; the scrawny one that came at you with the cutlery during your visit. While I grant the two of you did not get off on good footing, I molded him into as dedicated a student as any could ask for. Near the end he could find specific citations in Kigot faster than I could! His hand with a knife, while not as prodigious as his mind, was also adept.

He disappeared from my laboratory three weeks prior, and had been gone two when I begun to worry. Of course he was not a prisoner (any more), but this was highly unusual. Thinking back to the preceding months, he described a strange encounter I thought nothing of at the time, but in light of his disappearance stunk of the stories of the Old Man and that damnable redemption nonsense.

He showed back up at my door step yesterday evening, looking as though someone had killed his dog again. I immediately confronted him with my reasonable accusations that he had fallen in with those psychotic Redeemed, but he denied it. Very effectively, I must say; the leaden tone, the defeated look disarmed my usual prudence on verifying these things. He said, "There is no remorse."

The story he laid out was fragmented, like an attunement gone bad (it is fine, though he had clearly not been practicing during his disappearance). From what I got out of him, he went chasing after what the Old Man -- I am now sure he is the scoundrel behind this -- told him and performed some ritual or another. I asked him to describe the ritual, and he found he could not. The only thing that came to him was a symbol you will be familiar with: a circle inscribed within a square, itself within an equilateral triangle, itself bound within a circle.

His description afterward became incoherent. I am afraid he has regressed something terribly, and I was forced to discipline him to an extent that hadn't been necessary since his first nights here. He described night and a bloated sun, cliffs and falls and stairwells of glass, but most of his sputtering reluctance was focused on some kind of spirit-thing. He said they were like men, but aflame. One reached out to touch him, and he felt warmth, love, ecstatic oneness with the universe and other weak-willed nonsense.

Then it was over, he was back in the woods where he'd started this foolish errand, and felt nothing but emptiness.

Of course, the solution to this sort of existential angst was a firm hand and plenty of work, but that is where things went very much off course. This boy who I'd trained myself, who's practice Risen was tending to the gutters that very moment, could not perform Thanatology. He complained that he was not willfully holding back, and to his credit no amount of encouragement let him comply. To all appearances, his ability to ritually invoke the Transference Link has been "burnt out."

I will continue to work with him in the weeks to come to learn the extent of his disability and attempt some form of reeducation, but I fear the Old Man has killed another one of us.

-Armifer
"In our days truth is taken to result from the effacing of the living man behind the mathematical structures that think themselves out in him, rather than he be thinking them." - Emmanuel Levinas

> damnable redemption

I lol'd!