Time Shattered [Journal]

The stories and lives of the Grim. ((Roleplaying Stories and In Character Interactions))
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Qabian
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Re: Time Shattered [Journal]

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All sorrows can be borne if put into a story?

No.

I have no sorrows of my own. I do not bear sorrows.

The stories I tell are deceptive and manipulative to make the world closer to what I wish.

I am someone else's sorrow come to life, someone else's story untold and made to walk within the world, someone else's sorrow never properly borne, made of misery to bring misery.

I am my parents' sorrows.

I am Silvermoon's sorrows.

I am the story.

I am the story that makes their lives easier and everyone else's more difficult.
"While our enemies remain, peace is not victory." ~Warchief Sylvanas Windrunner
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Qabian
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Re: Time Shattered [Journal]

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My desperately avoiding spending time in this place seems to have led me to spending an inordinate amount of time in this place, whenever I can find the energy to bother to step through those portals, but in the interests of not falling to pieces -- again -- I have attempted to learn what I can. It stands in between me and where I want to be. I am not helped by not knowing exactly where I want to be, but a great deal of that is a certain rare comfortable quiet that I have built around me, making me reluctant to move forward.

When you spend a great deal of time rewriting and reconstructing your memories in order to build your own identity, having someone tell you that you need to have them adjusted is infuriating. But while dealing with these people -- if we can even call them people -- has been an exercise in perpetual frustration, I do find myself learning from those who work against them.

I am seeing a value in doubt I have not seen before. I have always been plagued with doubts, but I tend to keep them buried deep. I am seeing how others wear their certainty as their masks now, as I have often worn mine. Yet, there is an importance to continually questioning one's place and one's methods, and too much certainty leads down difficult paths.

Certainty is best for manipulating others. Best to always appear as though you know exactly what you are doing if you are trying to convince anyone of anything. Doubt is a vulnerability, to be applied only in specific circumstances where appearing vulnerable will break resistance. In that vulnerability, however, is the means to break others' control, the means to thwart the certainty of others.

It is also only through doubt that one can construct oneself to suit one's desires, rather than to the desires of others. Perhaps I should thank the Bronze -- and the Kyrian -- for the harm they've done to me, for the foundations they shredded that I might improve in the rebuilding. Though I would rather end them both, and will certainly not hesitate at such an opportunity.
"While our enemies remain, peace is not victory." ~Warchief Sylvanas Windrunner
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Qabian
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Re: Time Shattered [Journal]

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I am having an easier time coping with all of this when working under the idea that this is simply an elemental realm. It is no different than the Firelands but for the element that powers a banshee's screams. It is no more an afterlife than the Firelands is. The people and souls here are certainly dead, but they are only as dead as the Forsaken are dead. They have gone through a transformation so altering as to suggest an entirely different form of life. They are alive as any creatures of the Firelands are alive. The Jailer is simply this place's Ragnaros. Seeing the influence of the Void and the Light here gives this theory credence and significantly reduces my frustration.

I could not abide that this was what awaited everyone whose souls abandon Azeroth, that this is where we are meant to find meaning in our existence. Is it what awaits some? Yes. Is this what awaits everyone who dies on every world? Possibly. The element that is being manipulated clearly has a basis in souls and soul magic, and the elemental nature of souls seems connected to or driven by this place. But people and creatures here also die, as they did in the Firelands. The denizens talk of returning to the cycle, or being drawn into the Maw, and some even speak of oblivion. As far as this place is concerned, a soul is simply its resource, its element, a droplet of water formed into an elemental. But when that elemental dissipates, what happens to that identity, the person that soul once was? Is it gone forever? Does it simply become part of the flow of power here and no longer retains any shape of the person who once held it? One can hope.

I reject any greater meaning to this place or what happens to those who die here.

Having left Bastion behind has also helped.

These Maldraxxi are curious. They have a penchant for violence. They rebuild bodies for souls that were killed, and yet also fear death? And also manage to permanently kill each other? I'm not concerned with the details of how they play with their element, but they have managed to acquire some of the more interesting souls from Azeroth.

Including Vashj. I have not forgotten the role we played in her death. I have not forgotten the role she played in my survival. Those of us who were in Dalaran then owe her everything. The place she has found here seems to suit her. I admit to the temptation to follow her once more as I did in another time, but this place is, to put it mildly, disgusting.

I assume these people can craft their afterlives to appear any way they desire. Why this? Is it the resilience demonstrated by having the flesh carved from your bones yet continuing to fight? Given the House of Plagues, I could argue that only the morbidly deranged end up here and that's why they have built this, but Vashj and Draka give the lie to that possibility. I will be forever amused by how the Mograine family has degenerated and what they have become. Poster children for fight the Scourge, become the Scourge.

Kel'Thuzad, though...

If there was ever a soul that deserved eternal damnation, it is that one, and he has no place among people who pretend to have honor, even if most of them do seem remarkably quick to drop such pretense at the chance of victory over anyone at all. From the rumors I have heard, I suspect he does not belong, and he will once again be the architect of our misery. I can't say the Kyrian misery at his hands is undeserved, but for what he did to the Sunwell, for forcing us to work with this cheap, tainted replacement, for what he did to magic as a whole, he should never taste anything remotely resembling glory.
"While our enemies remain, peace is not victory." ~Warchief Sylvanas Windrunner
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Qabian
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Re: Time Shattered [Journal]

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I am obsessed with justice.

Most would laugh, I think, at the idea that I care one iota what anyone deserves. I am, after all, an agent of chaos in almost any circumstance.

But the truth is I feel keenly who deserves what and why. Justice is my guiding force, the path that leads my choices.

But I learned early that what I know to be justice is something only I know. I know that those who share this world with me have no sense of real justice, thus nothing will ever be fair. But I will always work to tip the scales toward true justice. The chaos others see in me is only a result of my justice being unknown and unfought for by anyone but myself.

There are those who come close to understanding at times. The Grim come close enough for me to need them as they are, as a collective, but they stray often. Malygos may have been closest, but his world worked against him as my world works against me. Nevertheless, my justice requires I follow its mission to my last, even if I end up as Malygos did, with my people clawing out whatever I have that serves as a heart.

I, however, am more sly than Malygos. I have none of his power, so I attract none of the attention he did. And I know that when I die, justice dies with me. I simply cannot allow that to happen.

The Bronze temporarily succeeded in removing my justice from the world with a fate worse than death, holding me under glass, allowing my struggles to continue but to no real effect, leaving me with only the briefest moments of recognition of my imprisonment before having those moments stolen.

Until I was shaken loose.

Because I have a core understanding, whether innate or developed, of who or what is deserving at all times, I can also see the pale reflection of justice that others hold, and I know what I represent to them. I know that I am a threat to their way of knowing the world. And I enjoy this.

Their struggles are not my struggles, and though mine are less likely to succeed due to my being alone in my understanding, every time I see their struggles fail, I find a sense of warmth and approval in their misery while also relating to their tenacity when they refuse to give in.

I, too, will not give in.

I know what I deserve.

I know what you think I deserve and what I actually deserve.

I like to play with both.

But there are times when I wonder if my sense of justice is restricting me from becoming something more. I cannot actually be anything more. Not in the long arc of history. I must chase what I will never catch. Justice is a force that cannot be set aside. But I wonder nevertheless. I am good at wondering. And sometimes, I can pretend.

Wondering takes me places it should not. It takes me to things I do not deserve. I am so conscious of who I am that I can rebuke those things. I can say out loud to them, "Leave me. I do not deserve this." But sometimes, in the moment, those things want me as much as I want them, and I put my justice away. For a time. For that moment. And I let myself be something more. Just for a while.
"While our enemies remain, peace is not victory." ~Warchief Sylvanas Windrunner
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