Background for my main ao character (wip)

Writing General Writing
1

Impenetrable Life
Waves crash against the bleak, rocky shore. A flash of red light splits the sky in half, illuminating distant silhouettes of utopian lands and magnificent vessels, again and again. The light, as it makes contact with the surface of the raging water, releases a cacophony of entrapped voices. With their transient freedom, they fly and dance in the air, they wither and die by the deafening existence of the wretched seas. Again and again.

The figure on the shore is forced awake in these endless moments. Each time, one voice can be separated and given a name. A name, such as any other word, is strengthened with its every association. Such is the origin of metaphysical weight and gravity. One name, one voice separated from the mass is cursed with a weight from the figure’s memories. For the figure, that is the closure they grant the drowned. For the drowned, the figure believes that they do not feel the weight of the association because of their lack of a perceived reaction.

Grimm, a collar of thorns. Alistair, a softness in spite of strife. Lucille, the cold acceptance behind every smile. Joni, the burning desire to carry on. Alden, the guiding blindness by our side. Reina, the endless drift towards the next. Lavender, the mask of our pain.

The figure had seen, heard each of these names pass on while they sat on the shore. Each time, the red lightning would allow for enough light that a brief delusion would allow the figure to see their faces again. Each name given closure would allow the figure to recall a dozen more, even if that name only had significance due to an interaction, the figure had made it their personal duty to oversee each of them pierce the veil. To ensure each and every one of them would go beyond this hell.
Everywhere on the island would allow the figure to fulfill this task. No trees would obstruct the view, no phantoms or forces of the sea would ever try to intrude on the hollow haven there on the border. All that littered the island was whatever the waves would bring.

The waves and winds both served as messengers to those who clung onto existence.
They delivered many of the mirages the figure saw, voices and feelings alike. In these moments, the figure would feel the weight of its armor, which otherwise had been stripped of function, and take it all in. The figure had seen the many aspects of the sea, how they tore away at everything within it, and had decided to embrace the unending phantasmagoria they found themselves victim to. Their rejection of resistance through defiance had nurtured a resistance through intersection. The will burning within the figure was not its own, and neither was the will clawing at its skin from the outside, reducing it to nothing. Occasionally, these wills would converge, their desires arriving at a fleeting common ground.

It was in these moments alone that the figure would reconcile with two concepts of mortality. The convergence blessed them with brief lucidity, lucidity which would allow them to realize the severity of its fate, and how distant it had drifted from their self. The remaining lucidity naturally fell to consist of the only other remaining mortal concept - pain. The figure had endured this cycle for long, at first hoping that one pain would compound with another, inevitably and eventually snuffing out their burning drive to carry on. Since then, they had realized that what kept them alive was no product of their own merit, and instead the will of the divine gift in its blood that even still refused to falter. In one insignificant moment of lucidity, they came to peace with the fact that they still had matters in need of settling before they drew their last breath. They decided in that instant of misery, that they would only submit to the winds and the waves once they had helped their own name pierce the veil.

The figure’s patience for this ambition was boundless - when nothing else remains, determination towards this single goal was all but natural. They would wait until the tides consumed the very ground they sat on, and even then, even when their armor condemned them to sink, they would remain vigilant to the call of their own voice. It would not take that long, however. It would not seem as if this hell planned on keeping the figure waiting. The figure’s voice rang out from a pustule of anguish below the water’s untamed surface.

As they heard it, the figure called forth elements of nature with a practiced, yet deficient motion. A tiny pink mote appeared on their fingertip, and was quickly snuffed out by the rain. The statuelike expression that had characterized their face for uncounted days, months, decades began to crack as a smile crept across their face. To think this power was seen as a gift, something so illustrious that it would build and destroy civilizations, that it would decide the very fate of the realms. And to think that it was powerless to the last in such a crucial moment, when it had failed the figure and all the figure knew. In the face of the wrath of the drowned, those rent apart by such forces, it could only retain the life of one.

Yet, nothing. No ripple. No closure. The air was heavy with anticipation, the figure lifting their decrepit hands from the shore, but nothing would follow. For a single moment, the figure’s eyes widened before returning to their lifeless balance. They could not grasp the totality of the situation, and they finally gave into the weight of reality, closing their eyes in a delusion of respite. They could not speak. They could merely hold their hands to their eyes, letting nothing new into their mind, desperately clawing themselves infinitesimally closer to the past.

Names and wounds. Ships and splinters. Words and overwhelming, deafening silence.
Their grasp was slipping.

What the figure had learned about the sea, aside from its insatiable hunger for unanimity by way of destruction and its habit of never giving one peace, was that it exploits every moment of weakness. The figure had previously resisted this by embracing all the sea exposed them to, but now they could not resist in either way. For what felt like days, they kept their eyes closed as their last pitiful line of defense. The will inside them burned stronger than ever before, as if it was ready to burst through the skin of its vessel and finally take action. The wind met the flame’s might. The figure could not stand, though it never even tried.

In a silent infinity, anything and everything can only be inevitable. The figure hearing its own voice and being unable to give it a name, the figure removing a trembling hand from its eye and seeing an ocean ablaze, not by nature’s wrath from the clouds polluted by the divine, but by the flames of its own will, stretching all across the horizon and standing tall as if to reach into the sky and tear it asunder. Even something so asinine as the notion of escaping this hell, if it’s even remotely possible, it is fated to occur.

not finished (obvs), feedback welcome ^-^
i can give context but i prefer to do so after people have read the thing (my writing makes no sense on occasion)

6 Likes
2

I read allat

Good but feels a bit waffling on and on

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funny you say that, when i initially reviewed it and discussed it with a few friends we almost all thought that it wasn’t long and elaborate enough .p

4

Bit too much rambling for the level of purpose or insight into the plot

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I learnt a new word from this. :+1:

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i wrote more no way

For one who spends much of their breath restrained in thick, maddened air, the muted kaleidoscope that shrouds the horizon is always within reach. As much as this hell had created a sense of immutability, it was never more real and pertinent to its subjects than anything else they were exposed to. Paradoxically, its immutability was what gave it weakness. Whether or not this flaw was due to mortal error or whether or not there was any intent in the myriad of misery present here cannot be known, at least not by the subjects. If its gestures cannot be comprehended, an endeavor of understanding is hopeless.

It was natural for the figure, then, to conclude that they might be the center of the black sea’s torment. Bound to a hollow haven, forever seeing release out of reach. It was not so. When the sea would manifest a distortion of the figure’s previous memories, they had adapted to toss it aside. Another bolt of lightning, another approaching vessel. This one closer than any previous, its hull and sails an amalgamation of hundreds of others, intricate but clashing. As it approached, it wavered on the edge of reality as all else the figure could recall. Similarly, it seemed to display a predictable patience, waiting for weakness. Its patience manifested in a circling motion around the island, designating it as soon to be desolate under a deluge of cannonballs. There was no lit fuse. Instead, the encircled area narrowed until the figure could, with a slight but excruciating movement of their neck, look at the faces of the crew. All distorted in a disgusting parody of two kinds of life that never should’ve crossed.

Half a dozen of the crew leapt off the ship and landed on the ground with a pitiable ease. The figure followed their motions, even though the motions in question were entirely lacking in subtlety. The first of the crew, their face defaced into that of an eel’s, their beady eyes fixated on the faded statue of pure resilience they had found. Their teeth from a perpetually agape maw dripping the very same toxin that had forever been pouring onto the sea’s guests. Their hand rested upon a serrated greatsword, prepared to cleave as soon as the eyes found a suitably weak spot in the statue’s neck.

Another, this one with the face and claws of a crab surveyed the island, searching it in entirety and finding it to be exactly as desolate as they might’ve made it. It was, however, desolate by the hand of the statue and not the sea. The statue had done just as the sea had taught it only to oppose it. This ashen atoll could never erode, even after the black sea had assimilated all else. What shape the statue’s rejection took had never truly mattered. The sea would never honor it.

The first strike in a battle is that which sets the tone. All other strikes occur in accordance or deviance with the initial postulate.

It was reckless. Never could’ve been anything else. The statue felt the crude weapon pierce into their collarbone, as their armor splintered, finally released from its brittle petrification. Even with its blood, poisoned with its own determination, pouring out of its shoulder, flowing viscous, staining their armor in a faded swirl of red and purple, the statue would not yield. The eel-faced figure let loose a sound somewhere between a grunt and a whistle. In response, footfall of many, masked by the unending torrent. It flinched and felt a steadfast force grip its blade. The statue’s hand, now pierced and bleeding from the blade’s serrations, held it calmly yet forcefully, each finger running and tapping across the blade’s shape. A sound, not unlike the thousands of bones cracked without audience within the dark sea, drowned in the perfect sonority of the rain. Splinters of the broken blade cascaded onto the rocky shore, stained with the statue’s blood, sizzling with corrosion.

Needle-like shards protruded through the throat of the statue, some snapping as they reared their head to make eye contact with the eel-faced figure. Another of the defaced lunged forward, this one wielding what was unmistakably the tooth of a shark. With a swift, sweeping motion, the statue shaped the blood running from its fingers into long, thin strings which wrapped around their attacker, stopping it mere moments from its futile attempt at redemption. With their intact hand, they reached out for where the throat of a human of this height might be, but was met with rough skin. They snapped their head to face this one. Their eyes quickly ran across its appearance. Exposed upper body, only covered in chains. Crude rope belt with many knives of differing designs. Most seemed to be carved from bone. Bandages covering the hands and lower arms. The face of a shark, its mouth wide agape in an ambiguous expression.
Maybe it was fear.
A deep, guttural voice emerged from the shark-headed figure.
“Cap… tain?”
The statue’s intact hand made contact with its own poisoned blood on the shark-headed figure’s upper chest. A radiant pink light illuminated the frozen gathering, splitting the sky in countless fragments. An explosion echoed through the persistent nightmare.