Aleris

(OOC Note: The purpose of this starting point is to give new characters an easy place to begin their journey in Aleris. If you post here, Tempesturo may respond. Other players may feel free to respond as well.)

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The Temple of the God of Summer is located in the South of Heruin, residing in an area forever shrouded in a dense mist. One might be lost forever in the fog if not for the massive fire that eternally burns at the peak of the temple. A beacon to some, a warning to others, the fire seems to grow larger the closer a person ventures to the temple until they stand before the front wall. Only then do the flames overflow from the temples peak, running down the Northern wall like liquid to create a "melted" entrance in the stone that had not been there before. The exterior of the temple is shrouded in mist and the grounds that surround it are coated in minimal plant life. The exterior walls are rough, hand crafted stone - as if they were made without the use of any tools greater than hammer and chisel.

Once inside the temple, there is only a large single room with no features at all, but like the human heart, the room is forever changing. To stand at its entrance one might see an empty floor, but once they reach the other side they might turn to find the room is now merely one of many, with doors that lead to other parts of Aleris, or to other temples, some even lead nowhere at all. Many have tried to find the God by besting his temple, and many have died or fallen to madness, becoming lost in the "maze" of Tempesturo. The psychotic screams of those lost somewhere inside are always faintly heard, testing the will of even the bravest being. It's impossible to tell why such a temple exists, what the reason for such a thing is, or if there is even any reason to it at all. Such is the nature of chaos.

His chest hurt. Hunching over with one hand on his knee and the other clutching the front of his shit, Mir panted. How long he had run, he did not know. It felt like it had been for forever, with the never-ending desert obscured by fog. The feeling was only further exacerbated by the lack of any 'end'. Mir had run, prompted by only a spark of primal desire, one that had not appeared for long time. Oh, he had tried running away before. Very frequently too, in the distant past. His master seemed to derive joy from hunting Mir down though, and failure after failure had taught the Changeling what hopelessness meant.

Until now.

Mir looked up again, still breathing heavily as he stared wide-eyed at burning flame at the top of Tempesturo's temple. From what scraps of memory he still retained from his past as a only-human child, Mir knew of the temple had a maze. Even though he backed away in fear as the fire flowed down and opened a path into the temple, Mir knew his decision to enter was near inevitable. The lurking fear that made him want, and not want, to see if anyone was behind him was overwhelming. It was now, or perhaps never, it had been so long since that spark had last appeared.

And so he did, running past the melted rock with both eyes closed. Not feeling anything change, he continued running until he reached the end of the room, meeting it head-first. Reeling back and Mir crumpled into a crouching position, both hands covering his forehead. With his heartbeat pounding loudly in his ears, Mir slowly opened his eyes to look around.

The wall he had run into was still there, but everything else was different. Different from what he had seen before entering. The entrance he had come in by was gone now, with multiple doors in its place. Shakily, Mir got up. Half-stumbling his way over to the nearest one, he reached for its handle and pushed the door open.

It is often said that a temple should be a sanctuary and as in the case of gods, it should be welcoming to people who would come to worship such deities. Temples are havens in so many ways, places that one may go to pray in peace away from the influences of the world (although certain prayers are often inspired by that same world). Tempesturo's home, The Temple of Summer, was anything but. The large room past the entrance was devoid of any decorations and was unwelcoming to say the least, holding not a single priest or attendant to greet the runaway Mir.

The slave from the desert was left utterly alone in the temple. One might usually question their options - was it better to face the harsh sands and sun of Heruin or the maze-like catacombs that compromised Tempesturo's stony temple? However, Mir appeared intent on shedding his past life with his abusive master and to press on no matter the cost.

In this instance, the temple changed and whether or not Mir noticed, it did not matter. The plain room he tried to catch his breath in was suddenly home to a great number of doors encircling the large room. Mir opened one of these doors, but would still not be met with any signs of life or welcoming in the temple.

Before him stretched out a long hallway with a distance so incomprehensible that it faded into darkness with no exit in sight at the end of it. The hallway was about five feet wide and eight feet in height made of a dusty colored stone that was native to Heruin. Either side of the walls were entirely lined with gears and cogs that fit snugly together, cranking and turning against each other. As far as one could see, these strange gears of all sizes continued to be hung against the wall as if they were part of some machinery. Suffice to say, there was a vast number of ticking sounds throughout the hall, some of them soft and some of them loud.

For those who had ever dared to enter the hallway, it was rumored that traveling down the length of it could drive a person mad. Some stated around campfires while telling stories that the gears were there to suck away a person's life - that as you walked by them days, months and years were slowly drained away. People stayed away from this hall, but as Mir stood in front of it, the fates probed with questioning.

Would Mir brave the hallway or leave the temple as fearful as many others who have tried to best it?

Mir stared uncomprehendingly at the revealed hallway, mouth opening yet not letting out any words. Innumerable gears turned endlessly, their grinding coupled with his own heartbeat filling up the empty space around him. The sounds seemed to push back at him, as if to silence and gag this intruder. Drawing his lips together tightly as he stood on the threshold, the changeling struggled to recall more about this strange temple. Looking back at the room of doors, he saw no sign at all of this being a place of worship. Where were the people? The idols, the murals, the tapestries? This was Tempesturo's temple, right?

No answers were given. Moments of hesitation and thought passed, and eventually Mir passed through the doorway. The door shut behind him, the sound of it closing barely audible above everything. Looking only straight forward into distant smudge of darkness, Mir walked. His steps lacked the urgency of before, possessing a different kind of heaviness. With a grim face he trudged for a unknowable time, the ticking noises reverberating all around only serving to control his thoughts. He only just managed to more than to keep moving. The gears Mir passed by never seemed to repeat, their own plain but unique designs lit up by a source-less glow that seemed to follow him around. Quiet dread simmering at the edge of his consciousness along with, once again, a sense of inevitability.

He half-expected to hear his master's inhuman laughter at any moment. His mind was going this way and that and the more his mind wandered, the more everything seemed to be something his master would like. Rooms that changed in the brief moment you looked away, corridors that never led anywhere, and of course, doors that weren't doors at all. Those were the worst.

Mir continued to trudge on, amid the mechanical squeak and multi-tone ticks. Steady footfalls came one after another, and even though the gears on both side of him came and went, Mir could not shake off the feeling of walking on the spot. His feet and legs resumed their protest from earlier gradually slowing him down to a stop. The end of the hallway was still shrouded in darkness. If it even existed. The ceaseless ticking reminded him how mocking clucks of his masters tongue, the overlapping nature of the staccatos only serving to reinforce the impression.

Clamping his hands over the sides of his head Mir attempted to shut the noise out, but to no avail. This was not the change he wanted; Mir forcefully grabbed one of the gears. His fingers reached between the gaps of the long rounded teeth, pulling on it with all his strength. Claws scratched at the at metallic surface as he fought against the gear's turn.

For some time, the gear Mir had grabbed onto fought against him. The teeth of the gear bit painfully into Mir's hands as he pushed against it, leaving grooves and red marks on his palms as well as scratching the surface of his skin. Despite the sting of the gears as they protested in response to Mir's hands, the wandering desert man proceeded on in an attempt to stop the gears, as if he might finally shut out the insistent ticking once and for all by just stopping this one gear. Although in reality only a minute or so had passed, in this room the time where Mir and the gear were connected seemed to tick on endlessly.

Then, at long last, the gear gave in. It broke free from the wall with such force that Mir might have found himself falling onto the other side of the wall. It was all but quiet for a few seconds and then suddenly the room began to shake with unmeasurable force. The walls groaned and the ticking sounds about the room faded together in an unpleasing cacophony. Louder and louder the noises grew and harder and harder the room shook. To Mir, it may have appeared like the whole temple was going to come down on him and he would have been buried in this forsaken hall, haunted by the ticking forever.

Instead, where the gear Mir had ripped from the wall once was, there was now a black hole and from this gap sand started to pour. It flowed freely and fast into the hall, then it began to pour from cracks in the other gears until the entire hall was gushing with sand. The sand filled the room, coming up to Mir's chin faster than he could think to turn back to the door for escape. When he might have thought himself doomed, the floor of the hallway gave in and opened up. Mir would find himself falling into blackness.

When he landed however, that blackness completely disappeared. Mir was surrounded suddenly by blue sky, a sandy beach and the gentlest of cerulean colored ocean waters that washed back and forth along the shoreline. In fact, there was no visible trace of the hall Mir was once in; if he gazed skyward, only the sky and a few wispy, white clouds met his eyes. It was almost as if he was never in that damned room in the first place.

The beach that Mir was at was completely empty, although there were traces of someone once being there. Footsteps left long ago by a skeleton named Blend. At the edge of the shore, nestled between the sand and water, something bobbed playfully as if trying to beckon Mir forward. In a glass bottle sealed with a cork there was a rolled piece of parchment. What contents it held only Mir would know, unless he chose not to know...

Not this -- Let me out!!

Mir's thoughts coincided with loosening of the gear. The gear came loose, and unable to react in time, Mir tumbled backwards now. He lay where he landed, a dazed smile dawning upon his face when he realized that there was silence. He picked himself up amid the noisy change that the hallway was going through, then suddenly found himself uncontrollably laughing. It could barely be heard above amid din but yes, Mir was laughing, his eyes narrowing into two thin crescent slits. Was the owner of this dollhouse angry that the doll was rebelling? Mocking thoughts filled Mir's mind for the first time, fueling his laughter. He continued to laugh even when the sand rushed in from the gap in the gears and rapidly crept up to brush against his chin.

He finally stopped, when the floor beneath his feet gave way. Panic flashed briefly across his mind, and the Changeling reached out for something to grab onto. He remembered then though, and was resigned. Mir closed his eyes just as his surroundings were swallowed up by blackness, not bothering to resist the free fall downwards. He fell, and fell some more.

It was easy to lose one's sense of self like that, and just when he begun to drift towards the edge of sleep, Mir found himself unceremoniously deposited somewhere. The landing had not been gentle, but the sight that greeted him when he opened his eyes stole all his attention away from the sensation of pain. Sand, the same as what he had almost drowned in mere moments ago. More importantly though, was the sky. Mir exhaled, letting out a breath he did not know he had been holding, and stretched out both hands. His fingers touched nothing, of course. Still Mir let his arms remain as they were, staring intently at the meandering clouds.

When he finally digested the realization that he was outside, Mir noticed yet another thing. An unfamiliar sound, vaguely like the rubbing of two sandpaper together but gentler, different. He turned in its direction, slowly moving towards it. He stopped upon finding finding that trail, suspicion and curiosity intermixing. Someone was here. Recently. Yet despite his wariness and instinct tell him to find somewhere to hide, the desert Changeling found himself somehow unable to resist the mysterious call he heard. Mir continued on his way towards the call, his initial pace changing rapidly from a crawl to a sprint when something came into view.

Sparkling, and the rarest shade of blue and green mixed together -- Mir knew what it was in theory, but had never seen it before. Mir ran, and fell to his knees at the shoreline, sinking both hands into the water. He watched, full of wonder, as it rushed in and seeped out between his fingers, again and again. The open wounds on his hands stung, making him want to curl his fingers. Bringing a wet finger to his lips, he licked it and found the water dripping off his claw to be indeed salty.

The sea.

Movement at the edge of his vision alerted him to half-floating bottle just outside of his reach. Not bothering to get up, Mir simply crawled over to the bottle. He clumsily removed the cork, fingers too long and too tired to coordinate gracefully. Dragging the parchment out with a claw, Mir unrolled the sheet with just the tips of his fingers in an attempt to keep the parchment dry.