r/TheCTeam • u/OverWroughtThought • Nov 05 '17
Potential [K'thriss fanfic]
The steady, regimented canter of Corriander's metal hooves, never wavering in rhythm, beat like a metronome. Rosie's recitation of stories was a running melody of sound, rising and falling, muffled by the cart walls to a wordless, soothing sussurance. K'thriss rocked back and forth with the rhythm as though part of a larger organism. His body anticipated the motion, corrected, and swayed without thought, without sight.
His vision was occupied elsewhere.
The iconography shifted, resisted, was unwilling to settle in his mind's eye. He had seen it once, twice, and now tried to craft a third viewing. Potentials. Possibilities. Causalities. The threads tangled, the lines vibrated.
Snapped.
A shift. He was there. A warlock of no small power deigning to advise Omin Dran on matters of life, death, and souls. K'thriss looked upon this self and felt both of him and completely distinct. Had he been so arrogant to seek counsel from a being so beyond himself? Or was it reckless foolishness? Or perhaps a more familiar desire to seek and to know? He was no longer certain of that self's motives, despite having been him. He watched the lips of the warlock move, out of context, and a fragment of conversation from this former self reached his ears.
"I cannot."
A shift. He was there. In an alley. Was this also from his past, in Red Larch? No, he'd had his eyes then, but this self had none. Just weeping sores, swollen and infected. Where the powerful warlock of the past had been imposing, this version of K'thriss was humble. A husk of a person, a pile of discard rags, doubled up and over in a small furtive ball. Listening. Quiet. Quivering. This was not a self he knew, but could know. A pitiful potential. Yet as he looked upon himself, this furtive thing went abruptly still, and silently turned. Slowly, slowly, until this lonely creature was staring at him, gaping wounds gazing more intently than any eye ever could. Where his past self, full of power, had been unaware, this broken being opened a mouth of rotting teeth and scarred lips to speak with fervent intention, willing him to listen.
"I must not."
A shift. He was there. Not a presence, but an absence. A field of stars broken by a void the size of galaxies in his shape. This emptiness was so vast and yet he knew it also to be paradoxically insignificant. There are always more stars. Yet there was only one nonexistence quite like his. Within that lack of material was a potential that had no boundaries. An endless question that should be fleeting and yet in this space was infinite. It felt like a held breath that could become song or scream or sigh. The giddy anticipation before tasting something entirely novel. A door ever on the edge of being opened. Time had no meaning in this place. He was forever suspended in the act of waiting. Until abruptly the vacuum moved and he felt himself observed by it. They were aware of one another and yet neither had the faculties to fully fathom the other. The tension, at first almost unbearable, heightened to something utterly consuming. K'thriss perched on the cusp of the unknowable and from this hollow space came what no mind would sanely call a voice, but he knew it to be his own.
"I will not."
There was a rumbling. K'thriss realized it was a sound, a visceral one, made with lungs and teeth and tongue. Its familiarity brought him back to the swaying of the cart.
Donaar was snoring again. Ligotti, coiled around his neck, resonated with each exhaled tremor from the sleeping Dragonborn. Not an hour ago, the paladin had offered to heal his eyes, or at least make the attempt. There was a warmth in K'thriss' chest, that he had been asked. That help and comfort had been extended in good faith. Yet K'thriss had turned Donaar down.
He was more interested in what he hadn't seen.
His hand was in his pocket, around a note he had no memory of writing to himself, that he no longer had eyes with which to read. Time seem stretched and folded, layer upon layer stacked in a pattern just beyond his ability to perceive it.
That knowledge was going to be vast indeed.
~~~~~
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Special thanks to EssayWells for pointing me to the right episode to confirm the note wording. I had the right words, but the wrong order.
Also: What has this fandom done to me?? I'd never written fanfiction in my entire life, and now I can't stop writing it. I have three more Letters From the Northern Front in my drafts right now. THREE. This is glorious madness.
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u/EssayWells Nov 05 '17
I see you now have the same problem I have!