Glade 1, 116
Deep in the trenches of his own self doubt, Aeraku wallowed on the busy streets of a land under the dark gloom of its oppressors, and yet... like sheep, their life went on under the tainted gaze of his blood-cursed eyes.
"How do they live so freely?" Aeraku oft asked himself.
There were the usuals. The homeless, the gutter-snipes and the filthy drudges of the lower class. Aeraku didn't appreciate their smell all too much, but they made for good conversation. Then there were the well-dressed well-to-do types, scurrying about to and from their place of work or busily partaking in markets beneath the ashen-gray towers of Silfanore's modern proper. Finally, as he passed beneath the droning of an electric lantern as the thunder of many boots raced by in a hurry, he didn't have to look to know there was a Dranoch manor to his side. Homes lit with steady, never-flickering glows were always filled with the bloodsuckers who'd done their damnedest to become some strange form of kin to him.
What a strange, perversely corrupt society it was. Nothing had been his choice, but here he was, following in the steps of his masters simply due to the fact he'd chosen the wrong person to learn from. The neighborhoods were so orderly, the castes so defined, the suffering so great, and for what?
"I would cleanse them all in a great flame," Aeraku shuddered from his mind.
"Monsters, all."
"I will not be like them. I will correct this land, someday... maybe. I'm just one, with a curse none can trust..."
"Maybe I should just leave it to the revolutionaries."
With a sigh, he paused at the large door to his master's estate and looked out upon the street once more with a shifty gaze. Friendship was rare in this land; who was to say he wouldn't eat the very person he sought companionship from? What of the hunger of his masters? Aeraku's eyes dipped down, and he skulked his way on through the door, the noise of the city blotted out by a glut of softly glowing, whirring lights.
Aeraku spied a smear of crimson starkly contrasting the carpet nearly immediately, lifting his nose and crossing a robed sleeve to hide himself from the pungent aroma that filled the place. "Why is he so sloppy with his food?"
"Why have I begun to think and talk like them?"
Trudging up the stairs, the floorboards creaked as he locked himself in the study he'd been provided, slumping down by the doorway in a hazy red fog that roiled in his mind. It had only been two weeks since he'd fed, but he was never really sated. Maybe it was due to the fact he could never bring himself to eat more than he needed, but those gluttons would feast like wild dogs, dissecting every piece and part, reveling in sucking the marrow from bone. Those vivid images only made the hunger grow.
Picking himself up from the floor, Aeraku shambled to his desk and twisted the dial to his lamp, flooding the room with more of that depressing light associated with death. Threading his tail down through the hole beneath the back of the chair, he sat back upon the hard wood surface and settled his hands upon his desk, rapidly tapping with a tit-dit-da-tat several times before he snatched his journal from some shadowy corner and yanked it close, thumbing open the pages 'til he had his eye upon the section dedicated to his studies.
The art of Negation. Practicing this would surely help to tear his mind from the grim patchwork of grimy, griseous tree roots pinching and suckling at his thoughts like a red-spewing teat. It hadn't been too long since he'd been in Silfanore, and his master was busy with other things. That left him to refine what he had learned on his own, experimenting beyond the barriers of his own knowledge.
Holding one clawed, padded palm over the other, Aeraku identified the point upon his biggest hand-hill that the Anchor would sit upon. Negation wasn't like the other disciplines at such rudimentary levels - it took lots of practice before blossoming into something useful in a pinch, or even with planning. Today, he would create a Quadrilateral shield upon his person, something he had never done before. Could he?
Craning his neck, he stooped down and slid over the desk to stare between his hands, eyes focused on that pin point as he drew upon some place deep in his mind, a muscle rooted there that squeezed the aether though his soul to recontextualize it into something else. Where his eyes landed, he associated the area with an anchor, and so one began to spark into life, an orb of billowing jelly rising from the palm. Taskless shielding material, malformed and without thought.
Linearity followed suit: he had to task it now. The concept had to be something he could easily test. As a novice, he stuck to broader concepts that were paradoxically limited; he could block a sword, but not specifically the metal nor the concept of a blade. There was a noticeable up-tick in the difficulty of a shield that could do somesuch, and it meant he could only make shields that could ward against at most swords in general, but not a steel mace nor a knife. For this experiment, he chose the quill upon his desk, mentally layering in the idea of a quill into the burgeoning material upon his palm.
Eyes concentrating steadily on the shield as it formed, he willed suffusion of concept upon it until the shield shimmered before his eyes, the desired changes in the matrix or identity of what it would be tasked against propagating through the material.
When he first began, Aeraku had to smooth out the shield with his hands, drawing it unilaterally. Today, however, it was practice. Mind would guide the shape he produced. Aeraku chose a small, triangular shape about yey high and began to bombard the shape with his will. At first the material rustled and quivered under his thoughts, but when it began to shift and thin, stretching in three directions, the Botchling grinned with those sharp teeth, tail doing a little wiggle of delight. "This will be my escape."
"This will be the promise to myself, that I will return to Atinaw."
"One day..."
As the shield stretched, Aeraku found lapses in concentration dulled the speed at which it grew This was taking time; it wasn't so easy. His master certainly made it look so. Watching the barrier thin into a smooth, invisible surface certainly helped provide a measure to how close he was to being finished. As the minutes flew by, he arrived closer and closer to the result, that triangle taking shape even if his eyes could no longer see it. He knew it was there, but it became a guessing game as to how stable and proper the new shield was.
Aeraku had a hunch it was ready when boredom for lack of a change took hold. Picking up that quill, he pressed it to his palm, delighting at the sudden barrier. Most curiously, the barrier absorbed all the force - he could not feel the anchor pushing at his palm as the birdsfeather pen bent and flexed around the invisible barrier at his pushing. Testing the waters, so to speak, he set the quill upon the table and placed his palm against the same surface, effectively shoving the shield through another material it was not tasked against. Pulling his palm up, he used the shield to rise through the wood and scoop the pen into his palm, delighting as he held his hand aloft at an angle, the pen seemingly gripped by nothing, held between shield and hand.
When he first began, his shields were fragile. Now, he wanted to try and see if they weren't. Would it be able to withstand his full strength again? He had to try. Rolling up his sleeves, he took the quill against his thumb and began to shove it up under the shield, close to the anchor. Hunkering down, he really put as much force as he could to that shield, but he couldn't feel it breaking at all. "Have my shields truly gotten so sturdy?" Puzzled, Aeraku continued.
"Hrrghk!"
He tried again.
"Hrrrnk!"
Thwuck. His palm went sailing through the air, knuckle clacking to desk as his heart raced in his chest. "Wow!" he exclaimed. The shield shattered, but it took a lot of force - after all, since becoming a Botchling he'd been given a bit of a strength boost.
"So it's gradual, is it? The more power, the more it can withstand..."
"Today, a quill. Tomorrow, a blade!" he said with a smile.
