Light Against the Darkness

(yet not all is the same on the other side)

By Anabel B

As Niki stared off the edge she began to ponder. What was it that she had been so desperately trying to protect? The answer was but a distant haze in her mind. The fuzzy image of a boy she had tried so hard to protect and yet she had failed and he had disappeared. It was a grim fate that awaited her. She was glad to have been able to at least shield him from that same fate. For if she had not then she would have been forced to watch as yet another young soul was lost to the light. Eaten alive as the radiant energy that they were forced to weld slowly burned away at then leaving not but an empty husk whose tattered remains glowed a brilliant gold. No, it was better this way better to be lost to the infinite darkness and drown in inky nothingness than become yet another vessel of the light. The gods were cruel after all. Uncaring in the pain their vessels were forced to bear as time and time again they were forced to rise again and continue the fight against the primal darkness that the gods so foolishly fought against.

 Niki was one of the lucky ones with a patron who had been born from the inky nothingness that all eventually fell into. Yet she still had to fear for her life, her sanity. For while she had no burning light at her core she had something much worse and yet also much better. For she had a core of the weeping shadows that champions were forced to fight she was one of those who had lost again and again but instead of being burned away until she became a shell of herself. Still repeating the actions that had brought it to its sorrowful state still following the will of their god. She instead had been bathed in the shadows her very essence becoming infused with the creeping darkness that took over towns and cities alike. When she awoke she found her form changed, twisted to fit the god she had become a foil to. The god she had become bonded with in that moment when she had become overwhelmed by the darkness. Her body and her soul anchored to her patron. 

When she had gone back to the war, back to the fight she had found that things were different, the world she had known now appeared strange its vibrant colors swathed in glimmering shadows their bright colors subdued as the shadow's own colors that played on their surface slowly seeped into its very being. Dyeing it with the same blacks and blues that stained her own skin. It was not just the world around her that had been changed but Niki herself. When she walked her steps were light and airy only barely touching the ground. And she found it was all too easy to simply forget to constrain herself to the laws her body had once followed. It was second nature for her to phase through the world around her whether that be flesh or blade, stone or sky. In the moments that she simply let herself be, she found that she would drift away her body dissolving into swirls of multicolored smoke. 

When she was younger, when she had first been drafted without a deity to serve she had been told “Fath can be a curse”. And now all these years later she found that deep in her core it was one of the only things from that time long ago that still rang true. Yet she could not find her new life, her new form, to be a curse in any way. With it laid bare before her now, the choice had been an easy one, die again and again slowly lose yourself to the will of the divine, or join hand in hand with the darkness and those who were formed from its caring hands. She hadn't gotten the choice nor had she known options but if she had, she knew which one she would have picked. Now it was her job to give that choice to others and to hopefully save them from the burning light that had or would form inside them. The connection that would grow even when it had nowhere to go. The sign of having your fate determined by the gods of having your future, your agency ripped away and given to a being that sees you as a puppet to use in their plains. All touched by the darkness know that flame, that light in a person's soul marks them as nothing more than a pawn, a disposable piece to be sacrificed for even the smallest benefit.