Quite exciting, really.

My subconscious, that is.  Yesterday I had quite a pleasant time with hamburgers and board games, but my dreams were where the action was at. 

Well, one of them.  My first dream consisted of being stuck for hours in a mazelike parking garage where I could not get a clean cell phone signal nor find the ride that should have been waiting for me.  There was more to it than that, but the details are lost. 

The second dream... at first, in the second dream, I thought I was in college again, in a dormitory hall, with a weird selection of people.  Then I realized they were weird because they did not all belong to the same time -- one of them was fiddling with an old-fashioned radio set, and everyone was afraid.  Except me.

We were dead, and awaiting judgement in the underworld, and news had already gotten out that our judge was a sadistic renegade who had been given freedom to travel anywhere in heaven and hell and do as he pleased to deserving souls, a power that evidently could not now be denied him as he skipped through the afterlife rending and torturing in gruesome, poetically appropriate ways.

When we saw him, he was dressed as a clown.

And I... still wasn't afraid.  He taunted us, I taunted him back.  He assaulted my roommate, I interposed and shoved him away.  Everyone kind of stopped and stared, clown included.

Then I told him that he might have been sent here to judge us.... but I was sent here to judge him.  And I raised my hand to commence an almighty smackdown, fueled by righteous fury.

And I noticed he was smiling.

No.  Okay, I was wrong.  That wasn't hit.  He and I stepped aside, both confused, to try to work it out.  He knew, at least, why he couldn't touch me -- I had died not totally sinless, but close enough that there was no karmically appropriate punishment for me... unless I incurred it opposing him.  Trying to kick the shit out of him would count in a way that trying to pull him off his victims didn't, and he freely admitted that he'd really like to see me slip.  He didn't know what my purpose was, either, but there was one and it freaked him out.  

Then I realized.  I wasn't his judge... I was tasked with finding his judge among his victims.  Only when found would the judge be empowered, and when I picked (rightly or wrongly), I would lose my protection.  So, we chased one another through time, emerging at various points of history among the dead or the soon-to-be-dead (lots of groups with heatedly arguing politicians or soldiers mustering for battle -- lots of defendants at trials), him trying to dodge me and have a little fun, me trying to determine which of the people he wanted to butcher was in fact the fate-or-God-appointed, karmically appropriate being to understand his crimes and levy out his punishment.

It was like being thrust into a nightmare... and then given power over it.

I woke up before there was any resolution to the matter.

AAAGH.

I had a link salad post nearly completed, then I hit the wrong button and erased it, and it only restores the subject line now.

Bah, humbug.  I was deleting each bookmark as I pasted it in, too, so reconstructing the post is way too much of a pain in the ass.

Now to go be grumpy while I eat lunch and put laundry in the dryer.

Grumble.

Narrer's End.

In the kingdom of Antarion, known to the vulgar-minded as The Allotment, in the Barony of Endworld, there is an island that once was called the Marrows, or perhaps (because only a shallow strait separates in from the mainland) the Narrows.  Little more than a rocky promontory, it never held any importance until Narerrant, gens-lord of the Ligurian gens Nar, decided to build himself a second castle there.

Narerrant's family was small and unimportant, as the lineages of mage-lords are counted, but Narerrant himself was a potent sorceror.  His staff, it was said, was so full of spells of wariness, vigilance, and warning that it could sense threats hidden in the hearts of men, and react before its master to defend him.  This was the greatest of his accomplishments, but it was only one of many.  He laid the foundations for his castle himself, a substantial feat of earth-magery, and directed its construction according to strange and exacting standards.  Then, he shut himself in it, and none but his family and his servants saw or heard any trace of him for many months.

Secretly (but not so secretly), Narerrant was a wicked mage.  His powers of command and conjuration, his skill at crafting, all of these he derived by a subtle mastery of necromancy unlike any other magus of his Age.  He knew, of course, that he was an evil soul, and that he had strayed far from the path to apotheosis the Winged Ones dictate -- the path that leads noble souls safely through the Misty Hells and ushers them into Radiant Glory, where they may collect the prayers of their descendants until they join the Winged Ones as one of their number.  The sins that weighed on his soul would draw him astray, lure him into  false paths, mire him, maze him, and lose him forever in the Hells.

As no sane man would wish this, and Narerrant was, perhaps, still sane, he sought a terrible alternative.  Beneath the foundations of his castle -- wrought of Mist-stone, the very substance of the Hells conjured into our world and persuaded to pretend that it was mere rock -- Narerrant built himself a model of Hell.  He summoned and imprisoned demons; he drew Mist through portals, he consulted dark texts and cast sinister spells, until under his home was a very near replica of the Misty Hells.  By studying this model and interrogating its damned inhabitants, Narerrant hoped to gather enough information on the dangers of his passage through the afterlife, so that even without virtue he could dodge the dangers of the Hells after death and worm his way into a reward not intended for souls such as he.

It was a clever plan, and a devious one, and perhaps it would have worked.  But while he spent day after day under the earth, someone in his castle grew nervous.  They had learned that Narerrant could open the Gates of the Hells; they knew he was obsesses with building something, and from this they drew a fearful and misguided conclusion:  that Narerrant was building a door to Hell, one which he intended to throw open once it was complete, and rule all Antarion with powers devised from warlockery and demonology, subjugating the living with minions ripped straight from the torments of the damned and the dead.

When word of this was brought to the Queen, along with some small proofs of necromancy, she wasted no time, but assembled her armies, her pyromancers and storm mages, her artificers with their siege-lightnings and silverbolts.  Straight to the coast of Endworld they rode, and rained devastation over the strait, crashing Narerrant's great castle down upon its foundations in a single blazing hour of spellwork.

Of Narrerant, his underground works, and his staff, no trace was ever found.  It is recounted as a bitter irony that he could have stopped any threat in the world from touching him with his wondrous staff; but he was so concerned with matters of the next world, so immersed in them, that his staff was too distant to sense the oncoming army and give him warning.

Now the island is called Narrer's End, and none live there.


But some two centuries after Narrer's demise, a princess, an apostate, and a renegade band of Royal Guards, concerned more with justice than with law, are seeking the staff once again, and if their luck runs terribly awry, it is possible they may find it.