IC Story Thread: Ch.1,Ad.2 - The Far Reach

As the tea and it's contents, the mystic chanting, and the rhythmic movement blend in your body, your perception begins to shift...

At first the change is seemingly entirely within your body. You can feel your heart beating, coursing blood through your veins. An additional sensitivity to your skin. A need to swallow water that you haven't drank. You have never been so aware of yourself. But soon you feel as tho you are, or you must, leave those corporeal teethers behind.

As he sees each of your states begin to change, the Chanter ceases the song and begins to speak with each of you. And although most of you cannot understand most of his words, through his demeanor and gestures and just the flow of his language, you are able to understand his intent.

And his intent seems to be that now is the time to let go of your self.

And the visions come...

As each of you begin the ordeal, at first your mind takes you to familiar places but as if viewing them from afar.

Then, you each see visions of the past, of your cultures, of your People.

...

As men and women of Gondor and Dunedain - all descendants of the blood of Numenoreans, Seonaid, Cirion, and Duinhir, see a visions of the pride of Al Pharazon, and desire to war with Valar - the very weavers of reality - and the destruction of that great island of Numenor under their wrath... and the terrible change that wrought upon the world... and the loss of life. And not just human life. That of animals and plants and rivers and mountains - the likes of which would be lost to all time afterward.

...

As a man of Rohan, Eothain witnesses his people's history of seeking domination over the land and it's creatures. First, as the Men of the North, and their mining and stripping the land of resources, and later their cleaving of that which was once know as Greenwood the Great, to build their homes, and carts and tools - leaving the Eastern Bight, from which it has still not recovered. And lastly their domination of the Mearas - the great race of horses that once ran free across the hills of Middle Earth. But who's descendants are now the beasts of burden of Rohan.

...

And Turil, a high elf, a People seemingly at harmony with All Else. Yet he witnesses the singular beauty of Valinor, and the choices made by those who are his ancestors, and their decision to remain. And in many ways thereby forsaking it. Vanity? Ambition? Risking it all, the glory of that land, to be here, incomprehensibly distant from that promised place. Possibly never to see it, should death find him. Never before has he felt the separation and the desire to be there like he does now.

As your realities become an amalgam of both the physical and mystical, it begins to become harder to determine what needs of your own and of the visions' to pay attention to.

Both the Druedain and your traveling companions drift in and out of your perception. At times seeming very real and you're able to anchor yourself in reality for a time, in those moments, if you try. And in those times the Druedain do attend to you, showing you care and compassion - providing you small drinks of water - and speechlessly trying to help you be at peace. But other times, their forms shift and blend into both the natural surroundings - flesh and limbs moving oddly and melding with stone or bark and branches - and those surroundings of the visions. One moment there is your trusted ally, or a Druedain caregiver, but by the next they morph into a character or aspect of the mystical vision...

As the visions move into a more recent time, you are all faced with legacies, and losses, and pride of your ancestors, and the seeming weight of duty pressing upon you from them... cities they've built, bloodlines preserved, and it all swirls around you and your seemingly small place amongst that.

But such duty is an opportunity, as much as a burden! What is to be done with either?

Any time you find yourself in your body now, it feels as though you must be rid of it! Or perhaps that it is no longer needed? There is warmth within you that is well short of burning, but beyond your control, and anything you touch is just as warm... Welcoming you to melt into it. It would be so easy now.

There is also a subtle vibration to everything, which further blurs the borders between you and all else... You're like a stone broken into pebbles, surrounded by many other pebbles, and the vibration - the shaking - dispersing the parts. Mixing them all together.

Your energy, and that of all else, it threatens... or is it a welcome? ... to join it all together as one. The pathway to interconnectedness is undeniable now. The legacy and loss and pride and duty of the visions is yet there, it guides you away from that pathway. But you have seen it, you can feel it, there is little else to do but...

The visions stretch on and, while you've already lost track of time, as it goes on time ceases to have much meaning.

Your visions span things that are possibly real and possibly imagined, and take place in the past present and future.

Light and dark for you all is governed not by the place of the sun in the sky, but by the mystical scenes which you view.

And so it is, as a final vision comes upon you - of churning cogs driven by water and steam, and chimneys belching black smoke, and trees being leveled and fed into fires of what look like great pot-bellied ovens, and animals driven out of meadows and verdant plains to be replaced by monolithic swathes of crop land, and just a complete subjugation of nature - with a black shrouded figure wearing a jagged crown of wrought iron, and eyes that burn like fire, looming over it all.

And in the end, those eyes seem to look directly upon you...

As this final vision leaves you, you emerge from the dissociating event to find yourself still in the clearing, next to the pond and waterfall, in the crook of the mountain draw.

You have a heavy animal fur lying atop you, and you feel as though you have been both sleeping for too long and awake for too long, at the same time. Hungry, but also a bit ill. Your head aches as if you've had it battered about some, and generally, moving seems like a tall order.

You can see the sun is either about to set, or about to rise, you're not sure which at first.