Marble
Pet Name: Marble
Owner: Apache
Theme / Type: June Kohal
Born: April 10, 2014
Gender: Male
MisticPal Name: Discovery
MisticPal Age: 3864 Days
Battle Portal Stats
Hit Points: 15 / 15
Strength: 15
Defense: 0
Speed: 10
Intellect: 20
Misticpower: 1
Battles Won: 0
Battles Lost: 0
| Attached Weapons | |
Books Read
Books Read: None
Exotic Foods Eaten
Foods Eaten: 0/1254 [ View Foods ]
Alone in the dark, no solution, no choice, I can only wait.
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ID No. 30M
Marble; "a metamorphic rock formed by alteration of limestone or dolomite, often irregularly colored by impurities"
"The Archaeologist"
A soul trapped in the shell of his former body, cursed with immortality with no foreseeable way out.
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My world is static
the end is close
words slip from my fingertips like
dewdrops off the forest leaves
slow and precariously,
not that it matters
not that I matter
lost in the blank white abyss
colorless
but sharp
it cuts like a knife but leaves no scar
only a bruise across the soul
and I am so tired
so tired from thinking
but what else can I do?
Just fall asleep?
I refuse.
-----------~-~-~----------~~-~-~-~~----------~-~-~-----------
Journal Entry, Date ???
I had just reached the top of the mountain pass. I had set up camp for the night. I was going to allow myself a few days rest. Climbing is hard work, and I was exhausted. It was beautiful up here, though the wind blows the snow and obscures the distance, I could see snatches of the world. All green and miniature. I had never gone to such lengths for research before, and never would I have dared to brave such a journey alone. But here I am, after weeks of preparation and training, after adjusting to the altitude and to the physical demands. I have made it. I will make it...
Oh, what my family must think of me. They said I was out of my mind. And here I am, proving them right. I am a failure.
I thought I would return home, I thought my family would cheer for me, commend me for my bravery, for my worldliness.
But that was before the avalanche struck. Now I am buried, under god-knows-how-many feet of snow.
I have been digging, but I do not think I am digging in the right direction. You think you'd know which way is up no matter where you are, but then everything is obscure, and dark, and the walls are closing in around you...
---
I cannot count the hours. It has been long.
I sit, in the pitch black, holding my last match. I am lucky to have had them on my person, before it happened. I almost don't want to use it. Its brothers lay in a pile, ash and black and useless. After I use it, what will come after?
My fingers pain me to write this, but I have been digging and digging and DIGGING, AND THERE IS NOTHING. There is no sky no grass no rock. It is just me buried deep deep down in the white -- which is all black, as far as I can see.
And there is a cold thing on my chest, my lucky amulet. The only things that made it down here were on my person, so naturally I still have it. It is my one true selfish possession, I never cared for pretty, valuable things otherwise. I thought it would help me, I thought it would keep me safe. He boasted immortality, the man I bought it from, but of course, such a thing is not real. I'd like to think that it will burst into heat and save me at the last minute, but I try not to entertain that idea for long, because it is such a useless wish.
I have been daydreaming a lot, down here, thinking of things that I would not have normally thought. I could not dig forever, and the energy it has cost me is precious, so instead I just think. Not that it matters now.
I am so angry. Don't make me write it.
To. Die. Like. Thi --
Dang.
My pencil broke.
Oh well, no one will ever read it anyway. And there is no light, I am only guessing at the words on the page. No doubt many will overlap, or, or be misspelled or...
I am at the breaking point, but instead of crying I shove my freezing hands inside my coat, close to my torso. I ignore the way my legs burn. I am terrified, because I can't... I can't... my feet are immobile, they are frostbitten and beyond recovery even were I to be rescued. Rescue, which was never an option in the first place. I'm alone here. No rescue will come.
I am so stupid. I have repeated this to myself for so long now that my head echoes with it. I hate myself more than I have ever hated myself. I did not have to camp here, not exactly, I could have dug the other way, I could have been more careful.
I am shaking with rage, or is it from the cold? I don't know, I'm getting tired, I haven't slept since I was buried and I don't want to.
I am not sure I will wake up.
So I take out my last match, my last hope. I think for a minute, if it would be better to...
I mean... I might die of the smoke inhalation, first, or... I could just drop it on my jacket...
Everything is too wet, too cold, for that to work but I need to do something.
So I hold this match in my hand, my very last vestige of warmth and of sight. I want it to outline the last of the white snow, which I imagine will look dark, and orange, and flicker, and it will be the last thing that I will ever see. I hope it will be beautiful. I need it to be beautiful.
So I find the strike on the matchbox, and lift my other hand, with the match, preparing, and deciding exactly what I will do when it burns out.
And I drop the match.
That is to be my last memory, the last thing I ever do, my legacy. I cannot find it of course -- I cannot feel, there is no cold and no hot, no texture, my hands barely work. I do not think it is on my chest, or to my right, or between my legs, or...
I have dropped my match without lighting it, and it is the last thing I have ever done or will ever do.
I am such a screw up.
I am the stupidest person I have ever met.
---
Days pass, I have died -- but there is a problem.
I am still inhabiting my lifeless body, curled up and frozen in anguish.
It is the amulet, it feels hot, though I have no nerve endings anymore to feel it with. It is like a heartbeat against my essence, against my soul, pinning me down and making me heavy.
I want to leave, but it is hung around my neck like a noose.
As it turns out, that peddler was not exactly a liar. He did elude to many strange, well, I cannot exactly remember, after all, he wasn't serious. What was the point in listening to him rambling on? But there is no denying it now, I am alive, in some sense, but my body is not. That thing, that strange amulet could not conjure heat but it is keeping me here, keeping me alive and tethered. In some way.
There is something worse than freezing to death, and that thing is spending an eternity alone with yourself, trapped in a black frozen wasteland. My body is dead but my thoughts are not, it is my soul that speaks in this moment, not my brain or my tongue.
Does that mean without this amulet I would not have experienced an afterlife? Because if keeping my soul alive requires being attached to a body, does that mean I would just be dead, or was the amulet created with a more nefarious purpose in the first place... is this the afterlife or not? Would I be less without the amulet? Or more? I just... I don't understand.
And I scream that last part but there is no noise, only the endless deafening silence. I am alone.
I am alone for so long that I become something less than me, and something more too.
In the eons, in the lifetimes that pass and I wait and wait and wait and as I am stuck here, I begin to accumulate.
A little ice here, a little rock there. What is left of the thread on my clothes, I take that too, and I become.
Words are nearly lost to me when I rise, in a new and crystalline body, with no flesh with room for a heart or a liver or lungs. I am clean and I am pure. Though I do not know what exactly I am made of, it is so much cleaner than what I was before. Whatever I was before, anyway.
I cannot leave without the amulet, so I take it with me. I have limbs again, and hands, though they are ambiguous and stubby and perhaps not all that useful.
Before I left, when I developed eyes, I could see, I think, and even with no light I stared.
I stared at me, at my frozen, gnarled body. It is like I was witnessing the aftermath of a war between the ice, which wanted to preserve, and of time, which wanted to destroy.
For some reason I cannot comprehend, before I leave, I look for a match. I want to find it, but for a second time, I cannot. I did not think I really could, though, my thinking is done only as whimsy, and as a sudden manifestation of impulse. I do not think in the way I used to. I am changed, and though I think it strange, the next moment the thought is gone and my strangeness becomes normality and I am, I feel it, suddenly, I am...
Immortal.
I have cheated death.
~
Marble belongs to Apache.
[Created as a Noir Zokuleon]
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