mmat

Coming to Avius Csarathaire in his restless sleep as it did, the tumultuous visions prompted the 'ame to toss and turn. Putting aside manifestations of the abandoned city, the bloody sacrifice therein and the fleeting fae all about, Brother Cinder wistfully muttered one thing under his slumbering breath, as though the great, departed dragon was somehow able to hear him. "Don't go yet. I had so much more to ask you." Avius' drowsy voice seemed to plead, as though all the unanswered questions of ancient things within his mind ached.

Although he hadn't yet been privy to the private missives between his mother Quillian and Skana, whose maniist practices he abhorred, Avius had seen Aesilnoth's initial declaration of threat and challenge. He regarded it with a definite distaste. Utterly unlike himself, the phoenix picked up a writing implement and almost put pen to paper, but stopped at the last moment. Discarding the instrument, he instead rose from his seat, retrieved his trusty Dominion blade Eldarian and made for the exit.

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Off in the vast wooded hinterlands, alone and surrounded only by beams of moonlight and deep shadow, Avius felt the latest of many icy notes thrum within his soul. The aspects' song of which it formed the terrible crescendo could now never be ignored. The cinder druid had expected to hear new things, indeed he had been told such. Nevertheless, this veritable rolling chain of death, perceived raw and constantly in his bad luck, was hard to endure. Platitudes crossed Avius' lips of the aspects and stalwartness, but at length he slumped into his own crossed legs and he sobbed, unknown to all but the trees. Whether that was for the mentor and friend he had lost, or for his own internal suffering, who could say?

Casting an icy gaze onto his comrade Eir'thall's denouncement, Avius let out a kind of tired sigh which had become typical of him. He briefly glanced aside to the populated hearth of Amaethea, but then deigned to continue reading, although reluctantly. Line through line, the firebird became ever more conflicted by what he saw. Vulen had deserved what he got, but Laetranis, however cordially Avius viewed the Tahorran, ought to have burned in the inferno he initiated, like a warrior. Figuratively, of course. Still, turning on a friend sat badly with him, a fact made all too clear by the sour look which sat on his face. And with that, Avius climbed to Amaethea's highest place, where he once again became brother cinder. Things were so much simpler that way.

Ambience if you want it idk Brother Cinder he was indeed. It was a fact which was, to Avius Csarathaire’s all-but unmoveable soul, unbelievable. A valah’s lifetime of waiting, postponing, procrastinating. The Elven warrior, and warrior he had always solely been and thought he would ever be, found himself contemplating the fraternal moniker keenly in his own mind. Uncannily, a false thought burst forth that he and this Brother Cinder were not one and the same. The amateur weaver of nature - the greenhorn Brother Cinder was an interloper, set solely on its nefarious task to dethrone and drag down the mighty phoenix of Csarathaire, greatest among warriors and highest swordsmen of all the mali’ame, as well as all the peoples beyond. Brother Cinder - that very same phoenix, felt a pang of shame at the boundless arrogance of his fleeting thought. So what, even, if it were true? A centuries’ worth of honing his skill, training the reactions and drilling ones endurance, he had done it all and more besides. Still, when the hour of trial came and every moment of that long-accumulated lethality was most required, Avius Csarathaire had singularly failed. The shadow of an old, but familiar anguish made its way back onto his face as a sad consideration swept unlooked for through his mind, with the destructiveness of a hurricane. His lioness, the mother of his only son, had died. She had actually died, and would’ve been lost to him forever if not for some miracle, a miracle of pity to him as he wrongly judged it on the days of guilt. The warrior’s mind set to upheaval by such evil thoughts, Avius Csarathaire, sat cross-legged in the uttermost centre of a stone circle, opened his tired, icy eyes. He nonchalantly blinked away a solitary tear and scowled. Focusing on the voices and discarding all distraction was not going well. As though paranoid, he looked around the empty stone circle and let out a sigh. Then shutting his eyes anew, the ‘ame recalled how he had been instructed by his mentor: breathe, four seconds. As he had when the elder had been teaching him directly, Avius shut his eyes and slowly drew in a breath of the cool, high-up air. One. Two. Three. Four. Doing his level best to drown out every meaningless aside that wasn’t his breathing or the ever-present, rancorous song of nature, Avius gave forth a measured, hushed exhale of the refreshing breath he’d just drawn in. One. Two. Three. Four. Again and again he breathed like so, repeated ably over the course of ten minutes, half an hour, an hour, two, more still, each time allowing himself to, against long-held instinct of life and death, immerse and drown himself in the perpetual song of tree, plant, bird and beast that now permeated his every living thought, and that of all druii. There was some inherent companionship in that, Avius thought, and it made him glad. It was at that moment, with struggle and vast concentration, Brother Cinder’s eyes ignited as a dull red fire. Scattered wisps of the same dry-blood icolour danced fleetingly around the upper part of his form, weak and barely formed. With eyes focused on naught but a single rose which stood immediately in front of his crossed legs, Avius held an open hand out and perceived, as though resting a palm on the beating heart of another sentient being, the life of the flower. But when barely a single second had passed, and perhaps not even that, this most unprecedented of moments in the life of Brother Cinder came to a disappointing end. His muscles enfeebled, sweat flowing down the bridge of his nose from wet hair and vision growing ever more faint, Avius slumped onto his back and stared in exhaustion at the blue sky. He felt dejected and weak. After all, it was just the first step.

The following piece was discovered, faded and worn, amid the personal effects and stores of Khaine Csarathiare after the latter’s death, and was then passed onto his son Avius. It details an origin tale for the Csarathaire seed and is one of only a few works to survive into the Second Age. If the events alluded to within actually occurred, the piece was almost certainly written in the later fifteenth or sixteenth centuries of the First Age, before Khaine came to Axios. Amid a river of blood, and an ocean of tears. Amid an empire’s folly, its cruelty and its cheers. Malin’s children unnumbered suffered, wept and died. The end of all things, and the young who cried. But not all the Mali knelt, content with their fate The fire-hearted took up steel, and fought back in their hate. As the vindictiveness of war is so wont to do All this valour did was make the suffering more true. And so in their despair, the warriors made a choice To neither fight where they stood, nor give sound to their voice In anguish they went as one, passing from the land. Where the warriors would go was left to fate’s hand. Through forest, across plain and by mountain pass they fled Until the path before them afflicted the heart with dread. The depth of the snows and the malice of the ice, Failed to daunt the exiles through even its cruel device. But by hunger, by rock, by frost or by fall, These wretched Mali met their end, as it seemed, one and all. As if lured to their sorrow like a moth to the flame Did the fell phoenix come and complete this dark game. Desperate and afraid, the doomed exiles made a plea For the winged fire to save them, and in return to take the knee. Willing slaves were thus marked with a firebird on the chest In its dark service the warriors slew, enslaved and oppressed. So it was that they became as the valah they abhorred But the fires of revolt stirred and we took up the sword Our own kin we killed to free them from the beast In malice and evil, the being saw only its feast. It burned and seared, scorched and consumed Until the aspects came and sealed its black tomb.

A newly attuned brother cinder stood alone atop Amaethea's high stone circle and peered at the fae-clouded sky above. With a clenched fist and a readied mind he prepared himself, whispering a prayer to the aspects.

States Avius.

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"This has nothing to do with flame!" Flame mascot Avius exclaims in faux outrage, after barely skimming the text.

"These quivering High ones do so conveniently time their impotent threats to hide behind and among the steel of others." Avius stated with a mixed sense of disgust and and contempt.

"This one has lived far too long." remarked Avius.

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1.9 dueling is fine enough I guess, but 1.9 group pvp is absolutely the most boring thing in the history of the universe. 1.8 is way better.

There was nothing overly special about the sword Eldarian. The metal from which it was forged possessed neither exotic nor otherworldly power, aside from the fact that it was of very great quality. The subtly curved weapon had never been blessed by a deity or cursed by foul magicks to enhance its bloody function towards whatever end. The only notable things about Eldarian were that it had been forged in higher days during the Dominion of Malin, and that it was wielded by one of the greatest Elven warriors of the age. So believed Eldarian’s master Avius Csarathaire, anyway. The ‘ame didn’t consider that to be an arrogant thought. Through a century of focused honing, he had slain valah, uruk, dwed and even some of his more estranged Mali kindred. Incomprehensible horrors crawling forth from the depths of the void, overreaching sorcerers and nightmare inferi invaders alike had also tasted the old weapon’s deadly edge during especially evil times, together with a score of other assorted beasts and creatures. A thought stung Avius with a hint of proud irritation as the warrior stood atop the stone-adorned mount, sunrays bathing the peak in a new days' light. He still hadn’t slain a dragon. It was valah and Xannite nonsense to laud the slaying of a dragon above all other things, and to deprive the world of such a magnificent, powerful creature was, to Avius, a fearsome shame despite the danger they caused. He actually quite liked dragons, all things considered. Still, the thought of standing atop the corpse of such a titanic winged firebreather, sword through its eye in glorious victory, was an alluring one to say the least. Maybe someday the opportunity would come. Avius lifted Eldarian in one hand in the direction of the shimmering light of the sun, an action which made the weapon appear as though it had divinity inside it, even if that wasn’t true. It was beautiful. Then, with the hand of his tattooed right arm wrapped around the hilt, the ‘ame swordsman gracefully slashed the air from upper right to lower left, eliciting a satisfying whir as nothingness tore before cold steel. The sword felt as good as it did every day, not too heavy, not too light. Time to begin. ...Step. Thrust. Pivot. Guard. Wait… Wait. Go. Parry. Step. Slash. Slash. Avius finally came to rest after his second consecutive lashing strike, panting lightly with the strain of the victory’s stroke’s exertion. Purposefully straightening his back to stand at his full height, Avius took a tighter hold of Eldarian’s hilt and then took a minute to peer around at the sentinels all around him. Seven stone pillars of unknown origin and unknown purpose ringed the Wood Elven warrior’s makeshift arena at the mountain’s summit. It struck him that they were judges of a sort, surrounding him on all sides, a silent council of old masters analysing and critiquing his every darting thrust and dashing tear. Avius let out a silent snort at the anthropomorphic consideration. The stones were just stones. Still, he couldn’t help but wonder about them, and many of the other ruins in this new, barely explored domain. Although far from a scholar or historian in both competency and interest, Avius had, for apparently little reason, found himself more and more fascinated by his race’s beginnings as of late. The warrior readied his long, falchion-like weapon once more, both hands on the hilt, blade pointing forwards. Guard. Pace. Thrust into slash. Withdraw. Guard. Who raised these stones? Avius considered the unanswerable question mid-flurry, and suddenly felt very out of place. For all he knew, this ring of uplifted rock could’ve been a hallowed site, perhaps one of ritual significance to the worshippers of his own gods. Was the warrior engendering their fury by using it as a mere training ground? Avius thought it unlikely. Slash. Slash. Slash. Pommel strike. To the contrary, Cernunnos was a lord of hunters and warriors alike. To increase one’s potency in the Horned Lord’s sacred places was reverence in itself, especially if that prowess was to be used in his service, that of his more caring counterpart and the wider balance. The thought made him train all the harder. Each slash was keener, even than usual, each thrust displaying greater swiftness… Slash. Thrust. Thrust. Parry. Thrust. And it was done. Without a moment of further ceremony, Avius Csarathaire threaded Eldarian back into its resting place at his side and made his way down the mountainside. All that day, the ‘ame’s mind continued returning to the stone circle and the secrets it might hold. The obsession left him feeling unsatisfied, like there was something deeper he was missing. Soon, things would change. Soon, he would be connected to his aspects in a more direct way, and he could begin delving into the secrets of the past.

South Almaris | ~2800YA Why did you abandon us? The question, screamed silently without voice, was saturated with unshed tears, tears which, if they had been shed, would’ve displayed profound anguish to any who might’ve bore witness. Demoralisation too, and insecurity also. That could not be, not now. Did even I prove unworthy? Why did you not tell me? Unanswered, phantom questions, never to be satisfied. Suddenly, provoked by a melodic, trance breaking bird call on her left shoulder, the emerald green eyes of Irrin Sirame, closed in a momentary bout of self-pitying sadness, slid open once more in stoic tranquility. The slender, caramel-skinned Elf purposefully drew in a tepid breath of air as she surmounted the forested hillside, a sudden gust of unheralded wind prompting the bound fabric covering her form to flap for a brief moment. A clasped, elegant hand subtly gripped tighter the short, simple, but well fashioned spear in its grip, the she-elf keen not to lose her weapon as she cast her gaze upon what was, in reality, a rather small but picturesque lake. If what the rumours had said about this place were true, however, and a dark remnant of truly ancient evil had its dominion in this seemingly idyllic place, she would need this most reliable of tools, crafted in an age long gone. Still, Irrin was confident, but not so confident that she would lead her young people into such a malevolent nest of old terrors. It was to be her task alone. She was confident in the way a lion is confident that it can kill a foundling gazelle. It wasn’t arrogance, nor folly, just factual lethality, the degree of killing edge that only a thousand and more years of hard experience and constant practice could bestow. The kind of unrequited self-assurance derived only from the hardest of work, the most tumultuous of lives and unfavourable of beginnings. Irrin Sirame, spear in one hand, tenderly cast her unlooked for but not unwelcome avian companion back into the safety of the densely needled pines from whence it had come with the other. With that and another graceful breath besides, she girded herself to face a nightmare from a time that broke the world. Silently scanning the forest-enricled lake and its environs from a sheaf of long grass and shrubbery in the shadow of a small tree, Irrin narrowed a pair of suspicious eyes. Just a simple, quaint expanse of water feeding a gently rushing waterfall on the far side, somewhere to the Elven predator’s right. Exhaling a breath that could’ve been mistaken as a restless sigh, she thrust her spear into the earth as makeshift storage and then sat cross-legged, retrieving a beautifully carved composite bow from her back. She rested the marvelous work of woodcarving in her lap, ready to grasp at any time, and then waited. No evil of the old time could resist cowering in the shadows forever. It would try to belch itself out eventually. Short minutes went by first, followed by long hours. The tired sun dipped behind the wind-stricken trees and dark fell, plunging Irrin into still, soundless darkness penetrated only by the occasional chirping of a lakeside cricket or two. Time had little impact on the millennia-old being sat in open-eyed meditation among the inconspicuous shrubs, and so it seemed like no time at all had passed when the hitherto undisturbed waters at the lake’s centre, brightened by lunar luminescence, began roiling. Irrin’s eyes, trained with iron discipline for hours upon the apparently harmless lake, focused in an undisturbed instant. In predatory instinct, the Elfess took up her bow by the grip, reached over her shoulder and slowly threaded a serrated arrow from the quiver on her back. Nock. The arrow, held between index and middle finger, made its way almost without the owner’s thinking to the precisely correct spot between string and limbs. Irrin was too busy keeping an eye on the fleshy, barely lit tentacle-hand fusion floating ominously over to the shore on her side of the water, though it wasn’t too close. Draw. Irrin uncrossed her legs, braced with one bent knee and then pulled the bowstring back with a slight groaning of tension-strained string. The horror - an otherworldly slave of the unspeakable destroyer and remnant of the war for creation, as Irrin understood it to be, dragged its malignant, surprisingly wiry form fully onto the shore, dripping and wrapped in lake-weeds. Suddenly, all life went silent, fled from the unnatural, profane creation. It wasn’t meant to be a water-dweller, that much was for sure, but half-made stigmata had augmented the demon in the millennia since its breaching of the world. Brutal arms were mixed with squid-imitating tentacles. Most gruesomely, its ‘eyes’ had been scoured from its face, leaving only a slab-like, noseless mass interrupted only by a razor-sharp, fly-trap-toothed mouth possessing three predatory tongues. Loose. Irrin Sirame unleashed her first arrow. Without waiting to see the shot land, as she knew it would, Irrin immediately ripped her spear from the earth and stood tall once more, coolly weaving her way through the undergrowth and around friendly heartwoods. The she-elf was no longer present when the amphibious demonic monster, its long, thin tentacle-limb torn half off by the brilliantly aimed shot, bellowed forth a pained, gurgled slurry of bile and lakewater. Perceiving the direction from which the arrow had come, its slablike, water-rotted visage turned toward the Elf’s initial hiding place, and then loomed towards it. Grinning internally from her new position, Irrin impaled the spear once more and replaced it with a straight, thin stick, scavenged from the ground. Pulling back her ultimately small, but still leanly muscled arm, she javelined the stick past the demon’s pitiful excuse for a head, where it audibly struck the trunk of a thicker tree just further on from the initial patch of grass. The blind malevolence followed in idiotic ignorance, sensing a path toward its mysterious prey but in fact moving further away. Not so clever. Irrin considered with keen, scornful focus, before checking her own arrogance. It has survived, hunted, for longer than I have lived.. With that hubris-banishing thought, the woman prepared her bow once more. Nock. Draw. Her ooze-exuding foe prowled slowly, the unharmed tentacle arm coiling its way around one of the trees. Loose. A second arrow trod its deadly path through the night air before burying itself in the thick, carapace-like plating on the being’s left leg. It roared once more, this time more in anger than agony, turned in Irrin’s direction with incredible swiftness and uncurled its tendril from the tree. Irrin narrowed her verdant eyes once more and gritted her teeth. Armoured flesh. With just enough time to replace her bow with the glaive-bladed spear, which she yanked from the ground and bore with practiced efficiency, the creature of nightmare charged, its feigned reactions far swifter than when it reacted to the first arrow. Wily thing. Irrin thought, suddenly grateful for the melee weapon she’d been so hesitantly convinced to bring. Amid the fatherly trees and the fabulous moonbeams permitted to reach the wooded floor by their beneficence, a great Elf of elder days, trained by the first one himself, clashed with a beast from a time when the sky turned into black flame and the earth screamed in torment. Irrin kept that in her mind. How many of her people had this thing killed, maimed or devoured during that great war? Had it been something more in ages past, something of great intelligence devolved over the centuries? A stubby, half-severed tentacle lashing in Irrin’s direction caused her to banish the questions. Spear in hand, the warrior sprang back to dodge the malformed limb, which left a small, shaped crater in the earth. She backed up against the trunk of a tree. Perfect. Propelling her slim form onward, with the tree’s help, in an explosion of movement, Irrin skipped into range, evaded another tentacle whip and then jabbed once, twice, three times into the dark beast’s repugnant head. The roar of fury-tinted agony was more of a bestial howl this time, a sound which made its Elven tormentor smell blood, figuratively and literally. Its flat face was leaking the odourous filth, and Irrin found herself less concerned for her own safety and more for the pitiable land onto which it was bleeding. Before the demon could get another attempt off, the spear-bearing paragon quietened her breath, softened her tread and quietly dashed behind a nearby tree, unseen and unsensed. Focus. It’s slow, injured now too.. If I do that again though, it’ll react more swiftly. A thought quickly came to her once more, prompting the woman to crouch and grasp a handful of forest floor debris - chunks of bark, a few rocks and short, damp sticks. Leaning to the left, Irrin tossed the grapeshot of apparently useless refuse around the tree, their din prompting the resurgent, devolved creature to turn. It’s vulnerable. Peeling then to the other side, Irrin swiftly ghosted across the loamy earth with barely a sound. The despoiling thing only realised when it was too late. She leapt forth fleet of foot. using one of its stigmata growths as a foothold to jump once more. The spear’s airborne owner drew back to gain momentum and then thrust forth with deadly precision “Cernunnos!” came a passionate, but still measured exultation, the steel of Irrin’s spear cannoning straight into the weakened demon’s razored ‘mouth’ and out the back of its head. One more diminished gurgle and the things collapsed backward with a thud. The horror was dead before it landed. Irrin, whose spear, anchored through its head had kept her steady during its fall, yanked the weapon free and then dismounted it, watching as the form and corruption alike dissolved into nothingness. Back into the darkness with you. Through the fading darkness of a new dawn, the triumphant Elf strode down the forested hillside and into the valley below, where she had left the vanguard of her exiled people behind. Approaching the area in which she knew them to be residing, Irrin was not surprised to see them stood waiting for her, in their nervous dozens and hundreds. Audible relief overtook that the moment she was seen, and they came to her in aid that she didn’t need. “Let us move onto the lake. It requires healing, and will make a good home in turn, for the time being. Do not quail, the abomination is gone.”

im in