frp

Roderick,

The glowing eyes of the creature surprised you.

They stood out from thin air for just a second - and in that second, they stabbed into your chest. The pain was intense, searing, and fleeting, and as the blackness flooded into your peripheral vision, you felt yourself fall.

Instinct told your muscles to stop the fall, but they refused to obey. When you hit the ground, there was no pain. And no sound. And you kept falling.

And now, below the ground, a deep darkness surrounds you and you begin to hear the screams.

At first, they seem distant, but then the fog in your mind clears and the noise invades your senses. Your heart shudders against the terror of what seems like a thousand souls shrieking. You turn to try to see them. To help them. But the darkness covers your sight in all directions.

In fact, you aren't even sure that you turn at all, as all sensation has fled your body.

It takes a few more seconds before your mind catches up. As the horror around you continues, a realization seeps its way into your mind. You are dead.

You have spoken with the others - especially Bigby - about their experiences on the other side, and you have read the texts. You even recall a long discussion with the high priest (before he was the high priest, of course). He had described the road to Godsland so vividly that you have carried that image in your head ever since.

But now that you are here, it is not at all what you expected.

There should be a fog - as on the ethereal plane. But here, the darkness and numbness is so complete that you are not even sure if you are where you think you are. The howls and screams around you make it difficult to analyze your situation rationally, but there seems to be no other explanation.

As the minutes tick by, the pain and terror around you begins to take its toll. Soon, you begin to feel (imagine) fingernails clawing at you. But your body is still completely numb - and in the darkness you aren't sure where your limbs are. Or even *if* they are. You try to pull your arms and legs back. You want so much to curl up into a ball to shield yourself from the tormented souls, but you cannot. Slowly and completely, the terror creeps into your mind and takes over. You lose yourself to it and feel yourself starting to scream.

For some time, you drift in and out of consciousness. The screams around you rise and fall like waves in a storm. Occasionally, one breaks above the crowd and you hear a word or two in an unknown language. In your mind's eye, you imagine yourself in a sea of floating corpses - all trying to claw above the water. All trying to push you down.

And then, a lantern in the distance jars you awake. The sea (or was it a lake?) of undead is revealed as just a dream. And the lantern is actually the end of a long tunnel of night. You are being carried toward it and it jogs up and down as if you are running - but you feel none of this. It is as if it is happening to somebody else.

The light from the tunnel grows brighter - and as it does, you realize the screams of the tormented are falling behind you. The end of the tunnel forms from a fog and becomes a gatehouse - ancient and crumbling. As you jog through it, the screams are silenced. In their place, you hear softer voices. Familiar voices.

While the light around you shines on a myriad of objects, it is diffuse and is being refracted strangely. Plus, the insanity of the dead had tried to take root in your mind and the constrast of the reality around you places you in a kind of shock. You find yourself back at camp and reunited with Lashmere and the horses before you can fully grasp what is happening.

Your body sensations have returned - though they feel very different. You are aware of a translucent cocoon around you that colors the world with a faint bluish tint. But through it, you can make out the rest of the group. They are mostly standing and sitting and you hear their voices faintly as they discuss something.

On the ground, one of them lays flat and still. And without the familiarity that comes from a mirror, you realize only after several seconds staring that it is you.

And then, the world tumbles and moves frantically, though you seem to remain still. A second later, the movement stops and the giant hand and head of Bigby looms over you, refracted and duplicated as if seen through a broken lens. He stares directly at you, though he does not make eye contact.

“This is interesting,” you hear him say. “These diamonds are deeply imbued with both powerful Healing and powerful Necromancy. If only I had a pearl, I could do an Identify.”

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