vaetherborn-blog

[vaetherborn-blog]

Entry #3

The Day that Bastard Stole my Fucking Rings

Our next step toward our goal was a man with a mine infested with creatures that were terrorizing the miners. He didn’t have money to offer us (his name was Grrg, what do you expect?), but he had a friend who could do us a favor if we helped him. So we went down into the mines, stumbling upon a family of goblins and their bugbear caretaker. We took them out with little issue, picking up a few useful new skills along the way, and went back to let Grrg know we’d completed his task. The following day we met with Grrg’s friend (lover) Leo, who was a pirate with no ship and no crew. Despite his shortcomings (and being chronically late to every meeting we schedule), Leo seemed to know his way around, and was willing to get us going in the right direction. So we left that town and headed north, hopefully in the direction of the man who could help us get off this godforsaken plane. Leo told us we were going to meet his first mate in the next town, and when we all decided to set out, he offered me a high-five. Seeing this as the first sign of comradery since I wound up in this plane, I gladly accepted. He laughed a bit and promptly left.

The following day we met with Leo and left town. Along the path, we stumbled upon a house that had been dropped in from another plane, and only made it halfway through. The more I observed the landscape the more I realized everything was this way: seemingly plucked from a different world and placed here, in a place that had no original landmarks to call its own. The grass was different colors in patches, with different plant life found every few yards. The ground was like a patchwork quilt of different wildlife, constantly changing and ripping apart to accommodate the intrusions from other dimensions. It was oddly appealing to me, someone with no set place in this world and no certainty that tomorrow would come, that this world was so different and constantly changing; the uncertainty was as familiar to me as the dust that formed my “skin.”

We approached the house with caution, but once we were certain that there was no one inside we entered. The house was on a hill, and it seemed to be cut neatly in half. After some investigation, we discovered the food to be rotten or stale, and nothing of use was left behind. The house was certainly from a world unlike any that our group had been to. The flooring was soft and clean like a rug but more evenly sewn, the walls were filled with tiny pictures that were far too detailed to be painted, and the rooms were scattered with books and small gadgets that none of us could decipher. On the second floor was the decaying body of a teenage human, cut in half when the house was teleported. We rooted around for a while and found nothing of use, aside from some interesting looking clothes (some of which I took) and a book entitled “Monster Manual.” I took this, as its pages were full of information on the monsters that exist in different universes. If I was going to save my own life, I was going to need to make sure my comrades survived. And if I was going to keep fumbling in combat, the least I could do was understand the monsters we were fighting.

As we investigated the house, a centipede-like monster plummeted through the ceiling into the hallway. This time I managed to deal a healthy amount of damage to it, and together we defeated it without too much trouble. It fell to the floor and crumbled to pieces, leaving a mess on the wood and forcing several of us to step through it to get to the stairs. When we made it downstairs we found Leo in the kitchen eating stale food, casually asking us what had happened.

It was then that I got a strange feeling of emptiness. I looked down at my right hand and noticed that three of my rings were missing. I never take them off for any reason, so the only solution was that they’d been stolen. I had no way of knowing when they’d been stolen or who could’ve done it, but a knot formed in my stomach – or the area that would have been my stomach – at the thought of having lost them. There were three missing. One was gold with three sapphires in a triangle on the top. One was silver, and had a snake’s head on it. And the last was a simple steel ring. I’d gotten all of them from people I had known on Kaladesh. Hell, I’d even liked one of the people the rings had come from. The rings were marks of unity, signs that people I’d met would have my back in times of need. This was how I’d shown the first four people I’d ever known that I would be there for them, and this was how I’d come to communicate my comradery to people since then. Losing a ring was like losing a friend, especially in a place so far from where the few people I might be able to call my friends were. Those three rings symbolized three connections that may have been severed forever.

I looked at Leo. “Did you take my rings?”

“What?” Leo took a bite of his stale food. “No.”

As far as I could tell, he wasn’t lying. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was the one who’d taken them from me. None of my companions seemed like the type to take anything from me, except for maybe Xunjra, but she hadn’t touched me a single time. She also didn’t seem like she needed money enough to steal something from me to sell it. After all, she was the only one of us with any kind of stable source of income in this world.

Then again, she almost certainly hated me, so I wouldn’t put it past her.

We decided to settle down in the house for the night. I took a seat by the edge of the house where it was severed in half, looking down over the sheer drop to the ground thirty feet below. The others worked out where they were going to sleep while I pulled the “Monster Manual” out of my bag and cracked it open, leaning back against the wall to look it over. The opening chapters of the book covered basic creatures like goblins, orcs, skeletons, and zombies; creatures any mediocre adventurer could point out their first day on the road. Most of the information wasn’t foreign to me, but there was enough to learn to keep me occupied the full eight hours the others would be asleep.

Aetherborn don’t sleep, eat, drink, breathe, or experience any other bodily functions that other more humanoid creatures do. We can hardly even experience real emotion. The only thing powerful enough to permeate the ashy limitations of our existence is anger, and guilt, and sadness, and occasionally the giddy bliss of a high. I’ve known happy aetherborn, but they are few and far between, considering most of us are vengeful and hedonistic and spend our days causing chaos or making trouble for those around us. What else can we do? They tell us to be happy we get a chance to live, but most of the time I wish I’d never been forced to exist. I didn’t ask to be created, and I never got the choice to live a different life. I’d felt true, unadulterated happiness only once, and it was ripped away from me almost as quickly as I found it; so I gave up on the sensation and have lived my life since then in bitter chaos, refusing to allow myself to experience anything even remotely similar since then. Maybe I didn’t want to get my hopes up, or perhaps I didn’t want to betray the experience I’d had when I was happy, at this point I honestly don’t remember.

I sprang into existence within minutes of four other aetherborn, whom I clung to like they were my family. That is to say, I clung to them as long as I could before they all faded into nothingness. The first to go died only a month after we were all created. The next was six months, and the other two died a few weeks ago. Now it’s just me. I was never the kindest member of our group; in fact you might say I was always the angriest and most selfish member. I hated everyone who wasn’t aetherborn because they got a chance to live that we would never know. In Kaladesh, those who aren’t aetherborn are predisposed to hating the aetherborn. They hate us because we’re destructive street rats, but with our short lives and no real opportunities to better ourselves, what choice do we have? If I could become something better than the dusty husk of hopelessness that I am, I would. If I knew that I could find a way to sustain myself that didn’t involve the draining of others’ life force, I would. But I don’t have any other choice, unless I resign myself to death – and I refuse to do that. I don’t deserve to die because I have no reasonable way to live. I’ve done my best to turn my ability on the kinds of people who deserve to feel pain, but sometimes I don’t have a choice and I wind up picking someone who has a family or wasn’t all that bad or was only stealing because they had no more choice than I did.

It’s amazing what lengths the system will go to exploit the disadvantaged. The higher-ups don’t even care if we wander the streets murdering each other, as long as we do it quietly and stay out of their way. I’ve been caught red-handed draining the life out of a civilian by an official before, and though she watched as the light faded from my victim’s eyes, she decided to do nothing about it. She just rolled her eyes and moved along. That was the only time I’ve ever felt guilty about stealing the life from someone; knowing that even taking the life of an unsuspecting petty thief wasn’t important enough for the people of Kaladesh to give me a second look was emptying. I let the thief’s body drop to the ground and walked away, spending the rest of my day – and most of the following day – standing on the side of the busiest road in the city, watching the cars fly past me, feet away from the oblivion I so badly craved but so deeply feared.

Well, I think we know where I went from there.

Ring count: 9.

[vaetherborn-blog]

Entry #2

When in a Hick Town, Do as the Hicks Do

Before me was a village. I crept toward it, carefully placing my footsteps so as to not make too much noise. As I approached, I realized I probably didn’t need to be so careful; the townsfolk were pretty unassuming, just milling around going about their business. I pulled my shawl up over what would have been my nose, securing it so it wouldn’t fall down to reveal my featureless face. That would have been a one-way ticket to a lot of screaming people.

Or so I thought.

It has been my experience that towns and villages are usually composed of people who look mostly the same. Not with all of the same features of course, but towns of elves and towns of humans and towns of dwarves are pretty common. There are also masses of sky pirates and the like, which are not always the same race, but at least are always dressed the same way. This village, however, was nothing like the towns I’ve visited before. No one looked like they belonged. Difference races, different clothing styles, different languages all intermingling together to paint a picture that looked more like a jigsaw puzzle that had been put together wrong. It was a small village, but it seemed much more alive with how many different people were roaming the streets.

I was so distracted by my people watching that I almost missed them. Two girls, talking loudly near the middle of town. One was short, with dark gray skin and long pointed ears and a quarterstaff in one tense, white-knuckled hand. The other was impossibly tall, her skin ashy white and her hands on her hips. The pale girl was confused. The dark-skinned girl was annoyed. When I approached, her annoyance only seemed to grow.

“Another one?” She raised her eyebrows at me.

“Another one what?” I shrugged, crossing my arms over my chest.

“Another one…not from here.” She rolled her eyes and waved an arm, gesturing for me and the other girl to follow her. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?” The other girl asked.

“There’s a priestess we can talk to. She’ll help you out.” She started walking away from us, and with nowhere else to go, we followed. She led us across the village, to a grandiose monastery that looked oddly out of place in the layout of the little settlement. She pushed straight through the front doors and led us across the large front room, to where a beautiful woman in priestess garb stood, talking to a redheaded woman who looked like she’d been living in the woods for days.

“I’ve got two more right here,” the dark-skinned girl said as we approached the priestess. The priestess turned to us, taking us in with a tired curiosity that said she was more than used to dealing with strange people coming into her monastery to bother her. The dark-skinned girl explained that she’d found us in the village, and that we needed something to do or somewhere to be. I was growing more irritated with every word the girl spoke on my behalf, but I stayed quiet. With nothing to add to the conversation, I didn’t know what I could say to alleviate the situation.

The priestess explained to us that this plane was an in-between for travelers who could pass between the planes. It had formed many hundreds of years ago, and most of the residents of this village had lived here for several generations – including the family of the dark-skinned girl, whom she referred to as Xunjra. As far as the priestess knew, there was no way to get out of this plane, unless a hole opened up and you could walk through it. We inquired further, about whether there was anyone who would be able to help us find a way out of here.

Before she could reply, the room fell silent. Darkness engulfed us, flooding the room like thick water, plunging me and my companions into yet another twisted reality which we weren’t familiar with. From the darkness came three large, foggy figures, looming over us in an eerie stillness that chilled even me to my core. There was nothing but silence as we looked up at them, their hulking forms casting an intense dread on us that was as inescapable as the dark realm that we were currently trapped in. For a few moments, this was all we could see; the fog and the figures, as intimidating as I imagine a god may be to their followers.

The darkness faded, and we were standing before the priestess once more.

We panicked, asking her repeatedly if she had any knowledge of these figures, but she was as clueless as we were. She gave us the name of a man and the name of a town. Joriyah. Anzel. Which way they were and how exactly we could get there was beyond her. The terrain, she explained, was so often shifting and uncertain that there was no way to know exactly where this town was or how we could even start to get there. The pale-skinned girl (whose name I learned was Shandu) said she wanted to try to find this man, and asked if the rest of us would like to try as well. The redhead (Maura) agreed immediately, spouting some nonsense about her god sending her here for some kind of grander purpose and feeling that finding our way out of this plane (or discovering how it came into existence) was somehow tied into that.

I had nothing else to do, so I said yes.

Xunjra took us back out of the monastery and showed us to her parents’ business, a bustling opium den. Opium. That’s what the pink mist have been called in passing. I eagerly partook, and crept into a back room with Xunjra’s least favorite sister to indulge my life-draining needs. Xunjra came to me to let me know she had a job. What kind of job? It turns out that while Xunjra is a monk trained and cultivated by the monastery, she works as a hired assassin for the many folks who came into this town. I was high as an airship and in no place to turn down the chance to earn a quick buck, so I asked her to take me with her. She allowed it.

Maura, Shandu, Xunjra and I crept through the forest towards a small cabin that didn’t look like it was being lived in. Xunjra’s target was a troubled woman whom the townsfolk believed was starting to go mad. She hadn’t been seen in several days, and apparently someone believed this was a good enough time to have her offed – if she disappeared, no one would notice any more than they already had. We came up on the cabin to find all of the windows boarded up and nothing but a dim light glowing from underneath the front door. I pushed it open just slightly, enough to see inside, and to our collective horror, the woman was inside; but she wasn’t what we were expecting.

Chittering around this one-room cabin were four monstrosities, each with a scrap of this woman attached to them. They shuffled about, not noticing the door budging open, mumbling to themselves several similar but different words. “I’mrakul,” “wemrakul,” “Emrakul,” they burbled, over and over again. Something about this chilled me to my core, sapping the last of Xunjra’s parents’ opium from my body. I was suddenly sober and in a cold, damp forest staring into a cabin at a woman who had been corrupted to the point of being nothing but four grotesque creatures that only marginally resembled a woman who was once human. The grave loneliness that I’d been escaping swam its way back into my chest and, for just a moment, I was paralyzed.

Then, I moved inside.

A crack in the floor caught the toe of my shoe and I tripped, hitting my knees a foot away from one of the monsters. It turned on me, letting out a howl and striking at me with one of its claws. The others moved on me as well, and I was knocked to the floor. My allies burst through the door, and in a few quick seconds, the monsters were dead.

“Nice one, V,” Xunjra snapped, wiping some gore off of her quartstaff.

“I—I just tripped,” I replied, rising to my feet. “You’ve never tripped?”

“Let’s just go,” she sighed, leaning down to snap a finger off of the last humanoid hand left on the monsters. She shoved the finger in her bag and turned to walk out, the rest of us following behind her. I put on my best snarky attitude and tried to defend my mistake in the cabin, but it was no use – they didn’t care why it had happened, just that it was a mistake. I fell back, crossing my arms and trying to look pissed. On the inside though, I was shaking. I was terrified and lonely and my chance at making a different impression than the one I’d made in Kaladesh was looking to be squandered. Everyone hated me. Everyone would always hate me.

We met Xunjra’s employer in the tavern and sat around to have us some drinks – at least, the others had drinks. I sat around and tried to banter with the patrons of the bar. I played cards and read tarot and told some mean-spirited jokes that were received pretty well by the drunken few who bothered to listen to me. I even tried to convince a woman that I she should go home with me – though I obviously couldn’t give her what she would want from someone she was going home with, and I also didn’t have a home to go to – by giving her a golden ring from one of my fingers. She smiled, took the ring, and walked out of the tavern.

Ring count: 12.

[vaetherborn-blog]

Entry #1

The Night an Amazing Party Turned into a Fucking Nightmare

I was out late, as per usual. Some big wig aetherborn crime lord was throwing a raging party at his aggravatingly grandiose manor on the south side of town. I wasn’t invited, but no one ever is. We just get news that the party is happening and flock there like sheep led by a dog. I don’t know what time I got there; hell, I barely remember most of the night. But I remember the sounds: the music, screaming from the center of the room, played by a band of aetherborn who had learned their instruments in such a short amount of time that they could barely hold pitch; the voices, many excited, many terrified, most of them angry and desperate for answers to questions that no one with any kind of helpful information would willingly answer; and then there was the rain, slamming into the roof and the windows, a message to stay inside – not that any of us wanted to leave anyway.

The air. That was also memorable. Or rather, that’s what made the rest of the night so unmemorable. I don’t know what the pink mist was that floated through the air and made me feel like I was about to lift off the ground and drift into the sky, but whatever it was – I wouldn’t object to finding more of it. Being that we have no organs or way of processing food, drink, or alcohol, the discovery of airborne drugs that can give aetherborn the same sensation that other races get from their much cheaper and much easier to find substances was quite literally a life saver. Considering most of us over the age of three and a half months are goddamn miracles of life, the constant threat of death around every corner is enough to make any of us want to drink ourselves to death – and since we can’t actually do that, many of us had turned to jumping off of buildings or in front of cars.

But I digress.

The night was ending just as the sun was peaking over the horizon. The rain had finally stopped. The city was bathed in a faint pink and golden hue that would seem serene to anyone just getting out of bed; to me though, it just looked like the painful reminder of my march towards death. That night was my fifth night in a row that I hadn’t indulged on the life force of some unsuspecting thief I’d cornered in an alleyway, or a thug out to steal some woman’s purse, or any number of petty criminals that I terrify into getting their acts together (or so I like to tell myself).

I was quite literally running on fumes by the time I stepped out of the Lord of Luxury’s house into the dim light of the early morning. Just then, all I wanted to do was crawl into the literal hole in the wall I called home and relax.

Unfortunately, the universe had other plans.

I got lost on my way back to my home, and stumbled upon an official-looking gentleman whom I thought I should probably recognize lurking through the back roads of the city. He was taller than me despite hunching over slightly, and had a long, spidery claw where his right hand should have been. I know now that I should’ve run, – and maybe I knew then too, but just didn’t feel the dire need to get away – but instead I followed after him.

He walked, checking over his shoulder every few minutes, to a warehouse outside the city. I followed him inside, careful to stay far enough away that he wouldn’t detect my presence. Once inside, he approached a large ovular metal contraption, ten times as tall as he was. I stood back, leaning around the still open door to the warehouse, afraid of what might happen if I got too close. In the darkness he almost fell out of my sight, but in a moment’s time he was lit up by a brilliant light emanating from the twisted metal construct. There was a moment of bright, blinding light, before it dimmed ever so slightly to reveal another world on the other side. Bright sunlight glowed in the background, a desert landscape stretching out as far as the eye could see; and centered in the frame was the image of a large, foreboding dragon, who leaned forward and squinted down at the man I’d followed as though he were adjusting to the sight of him.

The dragon spoke. A low, rumbling voice that radiated throughout the spacious room. It carried, but I was unable to make out his words from this far away. In my mind, I knew it was a better idea to turn and walk back the way I came. But my gut told me to step forward, so I did. I crouched, creeping toward the man and the contraption as quietly as I could manage. Unfortunately, I was still riding a high from the pink mist at the party, and was much less stealthy than I had intended. My footsteps echoed in the room, and the dragon turned his monstrous eyes on me as the man I followed spun around to face me. The dragon vanished from the portal, and before I could react the man was in front of me, his claw wrapping around my neck. If I could suffer from being unable to breathe, I would’ve been terrified.

He said, “Who are you?”

I replied, “My name is V.”

“Why are you here?” He demanded.

“I got lost on my way home from a party,” I explained.

“Who was throwing this party?”

“I…don’t know. Someone rich. Their name started with…a G?” I wasn’t lying, I had no idea who had thrown the party I was walking home from. There were plenty of criminal aetherborn who’d amassed enough money to throw parties, and I’d been all over the city in the past few weeks alone to enjoy these celebrations of life. It could’ve been any number of people, but I threw out a name that was recognized throughout the city. “Gonti. It was Gonti.”

The man growled under his breath and dragged me across the room to the construct. He waved his hand and the scene on the other side changed to a desolate, middle-of-nowhere locale that I didn’t recognize. I struggled against his grip, but I was no match for him. He grinned, just a bit, and tossed me through the metal frame to the landscape on the other side. I hit the ground and rolled across the dirt, coming to a stop a few yards from the portal I’d been tossed through. I looked back just in time to see the man vanish, and suddenly I was alone. I brushed the dirt off my clothes and stood, taking a moment to look around me at the world I’d been thrust into.

Ring count: 13.