[PK] The Unknowing

[Pallodium 3776]

Spoiler

 

T ʜ ᴇ   U ɴ ᴋ ɴ ᴏ ᴡ ɪ ɴ ɢ

[ ᴀᴏᴅʜ ɪɴɢᴇꜱøɴ ]

 

When had he died?

When had he vanished?

What did it mean, to know?

 

It was the unknowing that kept him up at night. There were restless moons where Aodh was entrenched in that thickening smog of thoughts. What remained beneath the facade of that once-man, he deduced, was no longer Avagis. There was no Avagis. There was no Ingesøn. There merely was the grandiose delusion; there merely was the Absolute, and where there was the Absolute, there was the unknowing. That damned, endless unknowing. 

 

There was a point where he merely vanished. Drafting away from the streets once-frequented, from the hollowed halls of where he and his kith- or what remained of them- once ambled about. It was uncertain who saw him last, or when. Be it before the charters and ships departed from the Aevosi coastline, in search for a land to dock- be it before the fields of descendants hit and razed Kaldur’s battered isles- be it before the very ships landed upon the shores of Azuras. Where he went, was but to the meagre, archaic origin of his creed and kin- the distant northern-frontiers, frosted and chilled.

 

“Have a look at yourself in the mirror when you're trying to save face,” his mind begat of itself. The wind was bitter, tedious yet if not for the frigid snowfall that slowly, slowly trickled from the clouds above. “There lies nobody else who can hear. Who can hear when we're too busy complaining about the way things go.” Frigid hinterlands were never something the folk of the world wandered alone within, lest they bear proper attire and often wrought with a plan. He came without much- merely garbed in meagre padding and a cowl of fur, he remained for the most part unprepared. Yet the unknown pushed him on. 

 

A gloved palm rose, wiping a thin frost off his brow. He continued to trek across a vast, pallid plain. “The seasons all but pass too quickly,” his mind invoked, continuing his indiscriminate traverse forth. This wandering had lapsed five days; there’d been a bare handful of pauses made along the way. Scarce respites made to glean over forsaken, rotten dens which occasionally jutted out from the hills. These small hovels were nigh-invisible in the torrent of snow that beamed down within the northern frontiers, the smouldered wood overtaken by permafrost and ice. The way the inanimate frost almost ravenously overtook whatever bare space they could latch over deeply perturbed him- until it merely didn’t anymore. The known was something to fear far less than that which was not.

 

He crested over a hill, sighting another one of those battered hovels. It had been hours since he had last seen these forlorn residences- their sole tell-tale sign that of the grayed, charred wood which peeked through the pale, recursive snow. Few travellers frequented the vast hinterlands of the distant north, perhaps the only reason why these remnant things still existed. Yet this one was different; a billow of smoke plumed from a makeshift chimney within. A resident. A descendant. Something that lingered within, and was alive yet. A battered doorway warily slid open, for the denizen had gleaned his presence.

 

“Ты потерял вещь,” an elderly crone- the first mortal he had seen in days- or was it weeks, perhaps even months- tacked in a foreign tongue. Too foreign for Aodh to understand, too brash and sudden in its intonations to what he was accustomed to. “Убирайтесь отсюда,” the archaic drawl came again; he understood it not in tongue, yet meagrly by connotation- he wandered off, deprived. Deprived of food; of warmth; of motivation; of knowing.

 

His digits began to numb.

His breath began to slow.

His flesh began to still.

 

Aodh retched blood. The ichor stained the pristine white of the northern frontier, a lone marker of his presence, though not the sole one. Clutching the now-bloodied cloth of his chest, his mind reeled as he stumbled through the snow- the world growing quieter, quieter yet. His stomach growled in biting hunger, though the craving was stifled quickly. It was hard to be fixated upon consumption when one was preoccupied by a fading mind.


 

The snowfall heaved as a stilled body dragged and crushed it, a cadaver tugged behind the old crone. “Жалкий,” her voice groaned. A finch flitted its wings in the treetops, unspeaking in the silence.

 

The frostbitten cadaver tapered over a hill as the hag dragged it atop a sled- slumped down into a crevice hollowed within the ground. Dirt plumed inwards, heaved shovel by shovel, one after another- before a meagre layer of snow was petered atop it. A vast stone was implanted atop the newfound grave- it was nameless, unknowing. It bore but a meagre symbol, a dull strike of steel against its slick, incongruous surface; a single bud of gray amongst a field of the dead, littering the stagnant frontier.

 

“Теперь уже недолго осталось.” The crone slumped beside a tree. She wasn’t getting younger; she was well aware of it. Yet it mattered little. It was a fear that unified most mortals. A simple fear of the unknown.

 

There were no words proffered in response from the newly-sown grave, from the frost-charred body that lay beneath the layers of dirt and snow. They were stilled. They were unmoving, ever-lingering.

 

It was the unknowing that kept him up at night.