Such was his pain that Leif Starchaser thought of nothing but making it go away, that nearly constant pain in the center of his chest and everything that came with it. If it had been a physical sort of pain, he could heal it away with his magic. It wasn't, unfortunately, and—so far, anyway—that was a problem.
The pain wasn't real—not in any physical way— and though he knew that, he still had a perpetual sense that things would get better. It was nothing if not blind optimism, he knew, but things had not been okay for quite some time and he repeatedly assumed that, based on the simple laws of nature that something good should turn up in his life. If that were true, he felt forced to admit, it was a stealthy thing at best.
The old familiar pain came in the form of something like heartache and loneliness and was a constant reminder to him that some unseen force lurked wherever he went, and thrived on making him miserable.
That same, hollow emptiness in his chest that cried out to him that he had been filling himself up with, that thing of guilt and not much else, only increased and never lessened. It was Leif's silent companion, an inadequate replacement for actual living persons in his life. He couldn't have living persons in his life, not anymore. Those close to him didn't stay alive for very long and though he craved touch and conversation, could never live with the result of such a thing.
Leif's memory was a great paradox, in his own opinion--it wouldn't let him forget his past when those horrific scenes he experienced every where he found himself, and was slowly draining his mind of things he would like to remember; something to balance the good with the bad. For too long he had been pretending to do something good in replacement for what he was really doing, which often was far short of good. It had to be that way, though; he wasn't presented with a whole lot of options in his life.
And yet ending it, something which he had given considerable thought, he simply couldn't bring himself to do. In the past, remnants though his memories were, he fixed things, and suicide could never be seen a solution. He would fix this. Had to. If he couldn't fix it, what good was his magic, anyway?
Leif's anxiety, which was considerable, was often relieved to a small degree by doing that which he knew he should not. Just that alone was incentive enough to keep fooling himself and pushing onward. He knew that he was seeking an absence of pain inside of him and that he would continue to do what he must; doing something forbidden as anything he had done before; that which could be called nothing less than a felony. Or treason, perhaps.
So, he did exactly that, pretended what he was doing was harmless, perhaps even noble. After all, it had helped him get through many tough times before in his short life, therefore, logic told him it would help him then as well.
He spoke the word gently and loudly, mostly to make sure he still had a voice, but also because the letters of the word had devolved into almost unrecognizable syllables strung together discordantly and not sounding much like a word at all. Felony, felony, felony. It then sounded so complete, so final, or so Leif thought. That thought didn't stay for very long, however. Just like everything else, it faded away into nothingness.
There once was a universe that made sense to Leif, or appeared to anyway. Things weren't always so completely bad. Once it got bad though, friends died; lovers, too. And then he heard in his solitary travels that the Philosophers Stone was allegedly found beneath a vast, yellow desert. There wasn't any other thought process once he heard of it but that he would have it at any cost.
The Philosophers Stone was made of glass and within it held all creation. Anyone who touched it would agree, or so he had heard. Manipulations and machinations were hopelessly fated to forget their purpose when in contact with it. It was no surprise to Leif that such a device should be found in a ruinous, mostly lifeless stretch of desert that was The Hallowed Dunes. It was truly an efficient prison for something as powerful as The Philosophers Stone. He immediately decided he wouldn't let that get in his way.
The area closest to the Stone was exponentially more desolate, arid, and uninhabitable than any desert had a right to be. The researchers who located it hadn't been able to retrieve it by neither magic or science. Making things worse, all but one of these persons vanished. And then once that young woman did her deed and revealed it's location, she also vanished.
Where they had failed, Leif would not; of that he was certain.
How would he come to such a place? He worried for most of the days that had followed the acceptance of the quest he had assigned himself to.
This was a question Leif often pondered aimlessly, one he never seemed to find an answer to. And though this was so, he was eternally confident that the Philosophers Stone would be his, could be his. There were ways to get to things without actually being there, or so he read—and from enough sources that it just had to be true.
Artifacts could do such a thing, and that he had discovered all on his own. Any good witch could tell you that, and Leif Starchaser was a very good witch. He also thought of meeting others whose lives depended on his every action and he on theirs, as troubling as he knew. This idea troubled Leif greatly because there were no others in his life in which to think of—what friends he once had breathed no longer.. It was far too dangerous to make friends any longer because it was too dangerous for them to even be near to him, let alone truly know him. And the thought persisted all the same.
In the beginning, he had thought there could be no others involved, that the transmissions he had been hearing were his and his alone. After all, it was only when he was alone that he received what he decided were transmissions, and not idle thoughts--after all, who would create them? And to what end?
Never being a religious man, he knew it wasn't the thought of a God. A God would deliver instructions in one voice, but the transmissions came in not only more than one voice, but in the voice of more than one gender; sometimes derogatory, sometimes kind, rarely human. Leif could only resolve they were magical in their route to him but as precise as science in calling for him to take action. He had all plans of doing so.
Never a stupid man, Leif knew something was happening, and it was something big. He thought it his duty to meet up with many that could somehow creep into his thoughts and give him direction towards the Philosophers Stone. It seemed rather unlikely to hope for, yet they did exactly that. The only real puzzle he found to those transmissions, those voices, was that they only appeared once he decided the Philosopher's Stone would be his.
Just whose work was he doing exactly? He thought uncomfortably. That they were doing the bidding of someone—or maybe something—he knew as clearly as he knew his own, almost oblong face that stared back at him each day. Sometimes he wanted to find that person but held back because he felt he needed more information before doing so. Most times, he locked it away in the back of his mind where it wouldn't so easily interrupt his focus, which was needed for other, more urgent matters.
With a fire burning inside of him, while he looked into the warm glow of the fire he would ponder those thoughts and memories at the back of his mind. Too much bullshit happened in the daylight, too many other things concerning him, dangerous things. There was nothing to look at but fire or darkness at night, Leif's mind unlocking his best efforts at compartmentalization as his mind dwelled on the mess his life had become.
In his physical body, Leif Starchaser sat, legs crossed and tucked beneath him, under a great brown oak that stood solitary at the top of a green, grassy hill, far from where his astral self that roamed the Hallowed Dunes, two days or more travel westward.
The limbs of that tree blew gently, an inferno of reds, yellows and blues blooming on its branches in a way that soothed the edgy tingling throughout Leif's nervous system, grabbing hold of him like spiders crawling on his skin and nearly lifting him into the air with its troublesome euphoria as a side effect.
A gentle breeze brought the stench of a raging oil fire from the south, and snatched some of those colorful leaves, blowing them from their homes and to the ground beneath them. The stench of those winds was bitter and a painful reminder that, less than a day before, there was no fire. Not until his being there in that small village was there trouble. He had inadvertently caused those fires, his malady showing its cruel, gruesome face once more.
These thoughts sometimes came to him like a fist to his chest. That he had to endure them more often than not, was a cruel thing all it's own. A part of his mind combatted those thoughts that were intended to convince him that he had done all he could and therefore couldn't be to blame for the tragedies that followed him wherever he went. In this he failed and reluctantly bore the weight of such tragedies on his shoulders that was heavier and heavier the longer his malady poisoned his very existence.
A waning, crescent moon hung in the sky like a jewel, twinkling brighter and brighter as daylight fled further and further west towards sunset. The spaces around the trees were mostly dead, decaying, and hideous.. Their ugliness was a trademark of the dystopian world Leif lived in.
Despite these things, Lief smiled brightly. Even while not completely residing in his physical body, the witch beneath the Oak tree sat atop a hill was self-conscious about those who may come walking by. More importantly, Leif wanted them to remember a smile from a witch beneath the moon, not a frown.
His mind raced in search of the Philosophers Stone. That night, he simply couldn't let it go. If only he could Draw it to him as iron shavings to a magnet, he thought often. That was the idea he had not told the other magicians he sometimes encountered as he moved restlessly from town to town. He avoided others as though they endured plagues and were contagious. Such behavior, Lief knew, would need to change and he was to abandon the role of pariah—a role he had, after all, selected for himself. Drawing, he knew, had become a crime with the rise of power by the Sari Empire. Of course they said it--it meaning magic of any kind-- was far too dangerous. They only said that, as all magicians knew very well, because their was no wealth in it. No fees, no transport costs for the Sari to collect.
One way or the other, Drawing or otherwise, he was to have it. He knew so because, when he was a boy and lived on his grandparents farm, he had wandered into the Opium fields north of the house and a gathering of faerie's told him that the Philosophers Stone would be his when first he approached them to ask the way out of those very same fields. While he knew that story was as true as any other of his reasons for searching out the artifact, he held it close to his chest. It wasn't lost on him how ridiculous it sounded.
He was only a child then, and later forgot all about the incident, insistent that it was the result of an over-active imagination. He didn't remember a single detail about that day playing in the fields until he had heard his precious obsession, The Philosophers Stone, was discovered beneath the Hallowed Dunes and was deemed, "sadly irretrievable."
The transmissions began, as though triggered by the memory of the care-free day with the faeries. He was nearly beside himself at times, trying to find something—anything—to credit for the disturbances Lief had endured, but hadn't been able to do so. Lief, had at one point, felt an obsession forming for the transmissions and had elected that the force he knew to be The Loop was more important than the transmissions—and thus locked up such thoughts that troubled him so.
Like a flash of light, bright and nearly blinding, Leif saw the Philosophers Stone through his Astral eyes: It looked fragile and alive. It was a throbbing, violet egg whose cracks revealed rays of a white-yellow light.
And then it was gone. It seemed like only a second in time that he had seen that image in front of him, but it wasn't an image easily forgotten.
Immediately afterward, he felt pain in the bottom of his feet, like shards of glass stuck in the bottom of them. Terrible pain. The pain moved, like his flesh was being flayed off. The witch clutched his stomach and rolled up into the fetal position without really wanting to; after all, it was a poison of some kind that twisted his gut. He wasn't sure exactly how, but he felt sure it was poison. Volts of electric pain shot through Leif's body for what seemed like a time beyond his ability to measure.
The pain was like nothing he had ever experienced before.
And, as quick as it had come to him, the pain fled. While the pain hadn't been real, he could feel that he wasn't lying in a puddle of his own blood of his own volition. No cuts or scrapes could he find, still there was that rushing of adrenaline that came when the body experienced great trauma.
What had happened? He often thought, unhelpfully against a pounding heart beneath his chest, evidence of the fight or flight response his body promptly provided.
Following the pain, a rush of cold wind and darkness became his reality. While he was scared, it was preferable to that terrible pain that came to him following seeing the Philosophers Stone. Was there a connection, between the Philosophers Stone and the pain, he had begun to think when unconsciousness took him.
The next memory he had was of a desert. It was dark and cold . He saw strange lights floating from one place to the next in no pattern he could decipher. He found he couldn't see very well, like the air wasn't clear as he knew it should be. What he did see, he didn't like much and was inconstant, wavering, and spectral. He heard voices, but they were muffled and distorted and sounded like they were spoken from afar. He tried to move, but his body would not comply. He felt pain again, though of a different sort, more of a throbbing than anything else.
Everything seemed a memory to him, both the way he felt and the way he thought. These thoughts and feelings, which didn't come very often, were short and dreamlike, almost like they hadn't happened at all, but a product of his imagination.
In addition to those occasional disturbances, he began to feel hands on his body after what seemed like a very long time. The more they touched and moved him, the more pain he felt. He assumed they still spoke, but he was in such pain from being moved that those voices might not have been there at all.
More Darkness. There seemed to be nothing but that. And pain of course—it was clear to Leif that there was an infinite amount of pain just waiting to twist and deform him, keeping him quite unable to move, or think, or speak. He felt useless.
And then there was light. It wasn't constant, nor very bright, but it was there. It was there, and it was different, and Leif was grateful for it. And while this was so, he wished there was more of it, so he might know where he was. Even more, he wanted to know how he got to be where he was and in such terrible shape.
Leif heard what sounded like the laughing of several people, the kind of laughing heard around a campfire. This made him angry. His anger didn't come from rage, but from longing. He wondered if he would ever be well enough again to gather and laugh without that dark cloud that perpetually rained upon him, the bane of his existence as it was.
In small amounts, the lights got brighter, and voices became louder. He could see faces again. The ones he seen were heavily tanned and looked so worried and sad to him. He had a feeling they felt pity for him and he did not like that. Pity was just one of those things that infuriated him, though he was in no position to voice how he felt; instead he just turned his head and hoped the person would go away,. Often they did.
He wasn't a man in need of pity. He was a man in need of finding the person responsible for the affliction he called The Loop. It destroyed everyone but him, everywhere he went and stayed for a great length of time and led to his friends dying—those he cared for, those he loved. And that was why he needed the Philosophers Stone. He had to stop The Loop and thought the Philosophers Stone could help him do just that.
There were long periods of painful movement as he moved from place to place. At first he thought he was on a moving cart of some kind, but a cart would be made of something hard, and what he traveled on had a soft surface, so some thought for his comfort had been taken into consideration. To several of the people--people who he most definitely thought were moving him from place to place--who would come into his vision, often smiling, he would try to thank, but his voice still seemed not to be working. Other than those smiling faces, mostly he seen only a deep blue sky, occasionally dotted by puffy white clouds.
At some point, a matter of days Leif guessed, the movement ended and instead of looking at a great open sky, he looked at the top a tent-like structure made from planks of wood and heavy canvass.
A short while later, a female voice greeted him,"Hello, sir. Can you hear me?" Though he still couldn't see well enough to see facial features, he got the impression that the woman was beautiful.
"Can you hear me? Your eyes say that you can, that your quite conscious. Can you give me a sign that this is so?" What he could see was that both her face and hair were fair in color, but he couldn't make out much more than that.
He tried to speak, but couldn't make anything that sounded like speech to him. Instead, he turned his head first to his left, and then to his right.
In reaction to this, the woman replied,"I would say that was sign enough." She laughed after saying so, and that sounded beautiful.
Sounds can be deceiving, remember that, some voice reminded him before bursting into wavering laughter.
His vision slowly returned, and so did his speech, as the days passed. The attendants gave him a bitter medicine that made the pain go away for the most part, but it seemed to him that he slept too much, mostly after taking the medicine. It tasted horrible and that wasn't even the worst of the side effects. All he knew was that they were very effective, and nothing else.
Although he could speak much better than when he had been brought to wherever he had been brought to—he hadn't asked where they were going, his body too weak and his mind too cloudy. Every time he did so, persons in white uniforms would rush over to his bed.
"Are you waking up?" A large, sweaty woman asked when he was in desperate need of water one night.
"Hello! Do you know where you are?" A young, enthusiastic man who had been mopping the floors on another occasion diligently asked.
Observing this, a stronger, well-dressed man in a rather quiet voice spoke, "Don't badger him too much, Nick. He's not going to be able to respond--really respond, that is---for some time yet." The man had a clip-board and carried himself as a man of authority.
There were a great many days that he spent in that bed. He thought mostly of things he wanted to forget and frustrating himself in the process
He felt like he had actually been in the Hallowed Dunes. Yes, that Hallowed Dunes, the one where the Philosophers Stone had reputedly been found. He had memories of going into that dangerous place, something he never would've done, a risk he never would've taken. Leif associated walking for what seemed like miles in that desert without being able to recall any specific direction in mind, but moving forward all the same with insanity. And yet he had done it, was even becoming sure of it.
Paradoxically, he remembered running away, always running. He remembered, and quite clearly, that the running had to stop. He didn't like going from place to place, always feeling desperate and alone. Lief decided this version of his memory was more recognizable to him. He knew that because he could still see the faces of the dead that died for no other reason than that they had become a friend to him. It was a painful thought, but it was a thought that tied the two versions of memories together. He must go looking for The Philosophers Stone. He couldn't stay where he was, because being where he was had put the kind people who had whisked his body from near death in danger of losing their own lives.
Another thought, another memory: he couldn't die. They, unwillingly of course, had put themselves in danger by rescuing him from his agony, but he likely wouldn't've died. He didn't know very much about the enigma he called The Loop, but he did know that, for reasons beyond his understanding,, he always survived In short, he felt that Death wasn't very interested in him.
These people had done a good deed, they had rescued a stranger from an unforgiving environment, and for that he would thank them. And then he would leave, whether he wanted to or not.