||Starter for @yellingmetatron
Nothing had changed, so it was he who must have fractured as he stepped through ---and he was a creature fractured, aflame, a panicked thing in his dying throes, the seed of Madness of his blood upon his birth that had devoured through its fragile shell of sanity, he who was shattering here, he who not he but a many-self, his peoples accusations unleashing into fruition with wretched proof, he was the hidden parasite unleashed to enter through his pores and spine and the vast archives of his brain, a ravaging bloom of germination breaking into his most prized vault: the sanctuary of his mind and inner refuge. He was the broken mildew, and rot of a thousand spores. The Fates had been right.
The ancient's body, in this moment, he realised under the onslaught of fear in the first time for millenia ---if it was he who yet was capable, if did know anything anymore, if a King existed, if Hætta was his name, someones name, if he could but wrangle a last sliver of immense Will into a single condensed moment of war against his agony ---felt like a bow-rigid seizure upon the hot concrete of a decimated building. There was orange light above. A creature was screaming at him - perhaps himself, impossible as that should be, for he had not the oxygen, his lungs were cruel, petrified lumps of flesh, and it was agony and it was loud, it was a stake driven into both ears---
Sometimes, between the dogged harsh breaths, that texture beneath him came with a name - Midgard - the war-ruined - Midgard - NO - its ruins lost, lost long ago, lost to him - pulverised from him - into their void - Midgard- torn from his - his Self, his great Soul wound, a splinter gutted into the v o i d - the void expanding - he was Midgard - IT BURNED HERE---
The ancient's body, in this moment, if he struggled to know it, was cushioned gently upon a bed of cool, Seidr-singing moss. Night-causing, big-tree, they called him. He found respite here for a flicker of consciousness, cocooned in the near-dark of a living forest.
The ancient's body, in this moment, in his utter madness, his fraying sanity in the everything and everywhere, was jostling in insignificant, bright, life-affirming pin-pricks of pain against a riverbed, and in ecstasy half-beneath running water. Liquid silk. Against his skin, in his damp, needful breaths---
The ancient's body, in a hysterical moment of weakness, dreamed of a library. The scents stronger than they'd ever been, dust and lignin, vanilla and quiet, blissful quiet, he was a forgotten relic now in a locked room, of a vast place, carpet itching at his bare skin.
It was timeless. A soup of moments, of easing pain and an accepting the unknowing, in fits and starts. He was aware, in these calming, broken moments of attempting to wrestle his body, to try to converse, to fail and fail again. He could not die. Yet, if he was truly alive, this would be the last loss of his final duty, and this too ached, in a magnitude beyond his comprehension: he had become naught more than grains of consciousness, slipping through himself like sand despite the outstretching of his mind's fingers, and he was fixed in space and across time, so much time, in the single possible single point of it all, where there could be an anchor.
Meditation stole over him, as all his bodies began to breathe. To process vital, impossible air. Bloodflow. To his suffocating mind. Anchoring, and achoring, and anchoring again, hoping beyond hope that---
