Punslinger/Dream Of The Third Age
Dream of the Third Age
The desert of his nightmares has finally come to pass, the world he sees at last matches the warnings he tried to give so long ago, but he takes no joy in having been right. He would weep if he had not shed all his tears an age ago. Now, in the Third and Final Age of Man, he continues to walk alone amid the ruin of his world. The vibrant, hardscrabble cities and towns of his youth are gone, leaving behind skeletal ruins, charnel houses and plague pyres. Everywhere he looks he sees one form of ruination, or another. In every direction he sees the remains of the world he once loved, left standing only as monuments to the destruction of man. Monuments to his failure.
The world is broken beyond recognition, with half the land sunken across the veil into the lands of the dead and the rest beset by the Wyld and gates to the Desert of Cecylene. The tyrants he used to hate so intensely, the petty, human tyrants have been cast down, replaced by demons wielding scepters of bone, deathlords seated on thrones of skulls, and inchoate kings of madness. What a fool he was to fight against even the worst of his own kind when there were such things preparing, even then, to tread all mankind beneath their boots.
He remembers the last battles of the Second Age as if they were only days before, though it has been much, much longer. He remembers the whole of what once was the South torn between innumerable hordes of the walking dead and a flood of protean monstrosities from beyond the edge of the world. He remembers the plagues that came pouring out of Nexus, each one worse than the last. He remembers the hekatonkhire awakening and rampaging out of the control of even their deathlord masters. He remembers the inevitable attempt of the imprisoned Primordials to break free, with an Emerald Queen whose face he cannot seem to recall or comprehend leading their vanguard. He remembers the glorious battles of that age, when isolated heroes stood alone against the shadow and were, with only one exception, ground into dust.
For he was never defeated. He alone was never corrupted into one of the most dreaded Akuma demon-princes, nor remade into a pallid slave to entropy. He won countless victories against the champions of death, madness, and corruption. He remembers innumerable foes thrown down, the mightiest of the wicked taught to fear his blade. For in his long years of wandering before the world moved on, he did little but master the six-foot daiklaive. He was a swordsman without mortal peer, then without exalted peer, and finally, only the mightiest gods could best him. But in the end, it was a worthless endeavor, for the war was lost despite his martial prowess. The world shuddered, and died, and began to move on.
Somehow, he knows, he is to blame. Because of his pride, his blindness, he has damned the world. Oh, there were others who could have done what he did not, who could have found a way to win the war, but they did not, and besides, he has never allowed himself excuses. No, there was a way, but he was too much a fool to see it, and so by omission, he has murdered the world. He could have united all Creation against the fires that swept it away, but he chose to turn his back on his duty and wallow in self-pity and despair.
He stood alone against the most dire foes, he challenged and threw down the mightiest demon fetiches, and he dared step forward and defy the deathlords themselves when no one else would, but he is a coward. His duty, all along, was not to fight the shadow with only his blade, but with his hand, with his heart, with his whole being. His was the calling to speak and be heard, to stand before a crowd of terrified villagers and forge them into a sword for the hand of the Sun with naught but his words and the Truth. But he turned his back, finding that his pain and remorse were easier than duty, and so now he must forever witness the price of his cowardice. His failure.
And still, he wields his blade instead of his heart, doing what damage one lone, old fool can do to the monolith of damnation that has crushed the world. Mankind, all but extinct, hiding in their filthy caves and forgetting all that was noble and true about them, could yet become a weapon to cut out the heart of darkness. But he lacks the courage to face them in his failure, even after these thousands of years, and so their eyes dim and as one, they slowly die. His brethren, those who remain, have been tainted by death or corruption, and work even now to find him and put an end to him. He is the last line of defense between the dying spark of life that yet clings to Gaia’s corpse, and someday, he, too must inevitably fall, for while he has lived an age and more, he is only a man. A miserable, spineless old man.
Because he was blind, because he was weak, Creation is damned. Full of remorse, despising himself across the six thousand years the fading Sun has commanded him to live, the last solar exalt must bear witness to his failure.
