[Lord Commander Erus]

Wrote this in an effort to clear my mind so I could sleep... Here it goes...

Sweat slicked his palm, trickling down his wrists, the cuff of his shirt stained a grimy and dingy grey. A heart two sizes too big for his chest thundered in his throat, ears roaring with the sound of an ocean from within.

Yet, despite it all, there was an unerring sense of calm, as if all the world persisted in a separate state from his own.. As if everything moved through a thick golden syrup of suffused light, every detail picked out in agonizing clarity and color.

Thoughts whirled in his head, rejected and back, a maelstrom of intellect. Some were his own... And others... Well, he would rather not think of where they came from. Shuddering, his young, angular face contorting in grief, the young man cried out in pain, dropping to his knees, eyes rolling back in his head as the curve of his spine went nearly parallel to the ground.

Constricting muscles twitched and sprawled his body like some macabre puppet, and slowly he rose, a fleck of foaming spittle at the corner of his mouth, eyes bloodshot and rolling. Something within him burned, almost itched, scratched at his very soul to be released, some monstrous thing of it's own will battered at his mind with a screaming need to be OUT.

Slowly, the man stood on his tiptoes, and with a sudden violent movement raised his palms to the sky and begin muttering, his mouth slack and drooling, half the words lost to all but him. What could be heard floating on the dead wind was pure chaos. The speech of a hundred peoples were being spoken over one another. A word started in one, and ended in another.

Step.

His foot thundered down, the sound unnaturally loud and exaggerated to his sense. He could her dust sifting through the air, smell the fresh powder of his feet as they ground minuscule rock to dust and wore the ancient flagstones further. A desperate desire to scream welled in him, but was battered down.

Step.

The thing in him howled now. It gibbered and clawed, a seething goblin of raw madness and potential nestled between his eyes and within his heart. His chest would explode. Already he was panting, usually fluid and well groomed hair in stringy, soaked disarray. He would go mad, he could feel it.

Step.

Whatever was in him was growing, pressing the contours of the invisible line of definition that constituted and separated his self from un-being and nothingness. White oblivion reached for him, it's siren call seductively peaceful and soothing.

The cool caress of the infinite was slowly enveloping his soul, and he found himself slipping away even though in his mind he screamed at clawed to hand to that one corner of the universe that was him.

Suddenly, a stinging and quiet shock greeted his hand. Hurtling forward, the universe screaming past his lost soul, he was slammed back into reality with all the scorn and force of a spurned lover. Sensations drifted to him, though with each one he craved the bliss of that white peace. The smell of blood, sweat, and acrid sting of ***** he was almost certain was his. Soft caress of worn leather, and the cold and distant kiss of steel.

Looking down at the blade before him, he saw a dangerous were-light burning in it's ruins. From sickly pale green, glowering red, entrancing blue and a seductive pink to the blank white of nothing, he saw it all. And from within him, the first feeling of his own volition in days came. A near roaring chuckle as he turned away, limply dragging the blade across black marble floors with grooves cut into them to resemble things he'd rather not think of.

As the blade clicked across the grooves, slicing new channels with every step, into the careworn floor, the crimson fluid within shifted and slithered, filling the new canals with a crimson trickle until at last the channels were full.

With every inch the blade was drug, and every ounce of blood it dipped to, the light in the runes dimmed, the steel dulled, until it seemed no more than a ratty antique some rather absurd man might hang on his den wall. Yet onward he stepped, over bones and bloated corpses and still grasping hands, onward to the light that beckoned him ever upwards.