moonshadows

She’d known something was up when Joshua’s thoughts buzzed so loudly on the way to the gym. Some kind of confrontation between her uncle and her Kal’shan; Joshua was unnerved with residual anger and fear, but also determined and hopeful. All she knew was that if it had rattled her adoptive uncle that badly, her Kal’shan had to be in a much worse state. She was glad she’d taken the extra time and effort to embroider the pants as well as finishing the shirt. Maybe, she’d thought, her devotion would distract him from whatever had happened with Joshua.

When she was ushered into the gym and saw him there, so focused on the motions of his warglaives that he didn’t notice her presence, she knew it was bad. His mind was a swarm of sharp-edged thoughts whirling nearly as fast as his weapons, and she couldn’t penetrate that mess enough to find out what was bothering him so badly. For lack of anything else to do, she’d gathered the crumbs and motes of his familiarity with the physical motion of the warglaives, and was making a poor attempt at reproducing the routine he spun so effortlessly through when the storm blew itself out and he noticed her.

As she’d hoped, her needlework was a pleasant distraction for him. She was able to slip inside his mind and find that well-armored object as it opened slightly to reveal the hope that he could share his knowledge with her, pass on everything he knew. He was looking for a student to inherit his teachings, and he hoped she would prove worthy where all others had failed him. Gently, gently she’d pried away the last doubts that clung to his trust of her. Equally gently, she’d brushed at the bruised trust with the balm of her loyalty.

Then something went wrong.

Instead of being relieved and elated at her devotion, the broken machinery of his mind lurched into self-destructive action. She could see the intent to drive her away, to suffer alone – but she wasn’t about to let that happen. He was her Kal’shan, and whether he knew it or not, this was one of the duties that she’d taken upon herself when he tacitly accepted her for consideration.

She’d set the blades down and pressed herself against him, frantically gelling anything in his mind that moved before he could hurt himself more – and it worked. He has her in his arms now, and his mind weeps with relief from the pain. Quickly, because she doesn’t know when she’ll have this chance again, she reinforces the barricades that had almost broken and slips behind them to see what he’s kept hidden.

It’s like walking into a gallery crowded with the entire history of Nathrezim conquest. Horrors upon horrors tear at her, rooms and tunnels and layers of abuse, geological strata crying out for help, each torment buried beneath the ones that followed. Even Nathrezim-trained as she is, jaded to the sort of injuries that can be inflicted on a vulnerable mind, this sickens her.

Deeper and deeper she goes, down through all the layers of the subconscious, each one just as crowded with broken memories and walled-away agonies, until she reaches the relative quiet of the Terminal Boundary. In a normal mind, this would be a twilight tundra of nightmares that haunt the cultural subconscious, but his is abandoned – and so thickly littered with shards of thought that a section of the Terminal Boundary isn’t visible at all. She pokes at the resilient surface that keeps his mind from bleeding out into the Void, and the shards…do not shift.

Something is wrong, very wrong.

She takes a closer look at the shards and discovers that where they are clustered the thickest, they seem to be jammed into the Boundary itself. This is moderately terrifying to her, as every little dreadlord is taught that puncturing the Terminal Boundary will lead to the death of your subject. She wishes she could show this to some of her teachers and find out more; there are what look to be scars on the resilient membrane, and traces of foreign energy. For a moment, academic excitement overwhelms the horror. If the Terminal Boundary can be healed, this could be a breakthrough in Nathrezim Control Techniques. A few seconds of searching rewards her with a shard of memory that looks to have the same foreign energy on it; she touches it to live the memory and see if she can find out what happened.

…land on my right side, thorns biting into me from the vines that have me bound. Brother…he did this to me. How DARE he? I’ll show him, I’ll-

I struggle, but the vines have me bound too tight; I can’t break free. Then a silver light shines on my not-eyes. I look up and see her. Tyrande, my heart. She comes closer, cloaked in the mantle of Elune’s power. So beautiful. Even more beautiful this way than when I had my own eyes. I want to tell her-

The silvery power of Elune strengthens, rises slightly, and takes the form of a night elf woman who looks at me with-

-I don’t need your pity! I am-

The world turns silver and shatters.

She withdraws from the Terminal Boundary, slips back up through the layers of the subconscious, sealing each one behind a wall of her own making as she does. It’s going to take months, probably years, to fix all this damage, and although he seems more inclined to repress than dig around, she really doesn’t want to take that chance. It’s a miracle he’s still as sane as he is – literally. She could tell from the memory that his mind was already bleeding into the Void, and it’s not hard to see that somehow, the broken bits had been used to dam the hole. Deities are not unheard of, and she has no doubt that the goddess of his people intervened and patched him up. For what reason, she does not know – and barring a visit to that world, she never will. Back in his conscious mind now, she again reinforces the barricades before she slips out entirely. The gel is wearing off, and as much as she’s enjoying him holding her like this, she has to move very carefully so that this incident doesn’t make him feel as vulnerable and helpless as he was.

Nothing in any of her classes prepared her for this. She was in the top five for Creative Reconstruction and Structural Alteration, but where do you start rebuilding if everything is broken? For a second, she panics. There’s too much damage! The gel is wearing off, the broken pieces are starting to move, he’ll hurt himself again and she can’t just keep him gelled forever, they have to be able to move so she can sort things out and fix them, but every motion just causes more damage…

Wait. The cushioning foam often used to disguise clumsy intrusions, and to numb the awareness of alteration. It fills in the gaps between altered structures. Maybe, if she uses that, she can get a sense for how the broken machinery should move, and start repairing it. Quickly, she fills his mind with the anesthetic and slips out of his slackened embrace as awareness returns to him.