The Sightless Dark

[Barbog 447]

Spoiler

Suffer me not, formatting.

He was a man that encapsulated the word ‘simple’ in its most derogatory form, slow of wit and brutish by many measures, but with a nigh-impossible ability to speak of the soul. A man attuned to the crossroads of spirituality and the mortal realm, reaching out into the soulstream for some semblance of understanding. Despite his nature and appearance, he always felt saner, more intelligent, when grasping at the threads of his reality- called an ‘idiot savant’ when others thought he couldn’t hear, a man who would speak in stuttered and clipped sentences, suddenly able to read aloud your future as a bard spins a tale, just by flipping a set of cards. 
 

Even blindness did not sever this connection. His painted cards switched for an embossed and brailled deck, measuring sands purely through his experience weighing them by hand, calloused hands drifting over the slightest flaw in a palm as if reading with his eyes.

Finding a patient elf to work under who valued the muscle of the slower man and spoke for him was a blessing, but it still limited him. With every interaction, every draw on his tenuous connection with the ‘other side’, he felt frustration and despair fill him- for all his efforts to continue his practice, his one ability that allowed him to value himself above beasts, it was always a struggle, a fight against his impairment. He could no longer work with tools, to use new techniques, losing his skill with practices he had not committed to muscle memory, and it strained his connection with every passing day.
 

One night as the blind man dreamt and yearned, the innate ‘otherness’ that he reached out to so many times, reached back. It was a foreign sensation, shocking and cold and inherently filled him with a sense of wrongness- but he gripped it as tightly as he could, like one grips an offered hand when sliding down a cliff-face. He pulled on it out of pure desperation, a need to reaffirm his connection, his desire for oneness with the ‘other side’... His desperation to be free of the burdens of his blindness.
 

A voice whispered into his ears that so many others bothered not to speak into, and for a few moments he thought it a figment of the dream. The words were indistinct, muddled and meaningless, but he could feel the promises being made, the mutual sense of desperation they shared. It would strengthen his connection, give it form and purpose, to restore his sight and allow him to use his tools to communicate with the world once more- endless gift, for endless service, but a service spent in his natural inclinations, knowing his limits better than he himself did. 
 

A hand of shadow lifted his chin, and he could feel in his palm two knucklebones carved with runes. As he ran his fingers over them, he felt their familiarity to those he often used for soothsaying, though the runes were foreign- it was enough to confirm that this was genuine, that it would reinforce his bond with the ‘other side’, that it would play by his methods and rules. With this, he pushes the knucklebones deep into the sockets, ruining his eyes but restoring his sight, joy filling him despite the blood running through his fingers… And an impending sense of dread for ever losing this gift.