Visions of a Deliverer: Part 2

Introduction

Location

Planet: Xanti 

Event

As Dash Reynard lowers his Hand of Fate and refuses to fire at William Blake.

Voices

Dash hears in his waking mind the faintest whisper as he desides to let him live. “This is your chance[one life for greatness]{easy test, he’ll still botch it}.” As he tries to focus on any one of the voices, it seems to fade into the wind.
Dash continues to refuse: Again, the voices echo in his mind “There is no going back from this[failure now means failure forever]{Don’t fuck this one up too, dumbass}”…he feels his body and mind growing tense as the permanence of this choice begins to physically resonate through.
Final Decision: "You feel your branded ankle burn with a fire that seems to be trying to take your mind. You feel your vision grow cloudy as the pain jolts through your body and mind, almost as though it is trying to burn your consciousness from your physical form. You realize that it is a familiar, though violent, pull towards…something. You think you can fight against this to resist…or you can accept this visions control and whatever comes with it."

Vision Accepted

“You feel your mind ripped violently from your still-conscious body, pulled deep into the vast ethereal darkness. There is no burning symbol of Fate to illuminate this void. There is only cold and formlessness. There is only the faint winds and rustling, writhing form, or forms, of something in the dark.
The voices now hauntingly familiar to you address you again, but even the lightest voice that reminded you of wind in trees now sounds tinged with the crunching, crackling ambience of fallen branches. “We gave it duty[we gave it hope]{We gave it a fuckin job, we did}.”
The formless void begins to swirl around you. You hear the creaking of old, rusted wheels spinning on all sides of you. Around you, the void ripples and twists as if the blackness you are floating in is a thousand threads being turned to show you a picture, though one that surrounds you entirely. One that you lived, straight out of a memory.
You are back there, confused once again. Hand of Fate newly in the Hand of a Servant. A listless life, a complex life, turned to one pinpointed purpose in that one moment of finding it on your nightstand. You’ve forgotten everything and everyone from the life that was. From the moment you picked up the gun, this has been your everything. “We gave it mercy[We gave it justification]{We gave it the chance to be something greater, little fuck that it was.}” The wheels creak as the image twists and turns, strands of darkness crisscrossing your field of vision until you find yourself sitting across from Nathanial Scoxand, smile of hope and life renewed beaming on his face. It continues to twist and you find yourself, arm outstretched, holding a smoking gun at the now-vacated forehead of Doctor Adrian on Nibian 6, his blood pouring onto his research documents and the framed picture of his son. Again it twists, and you float in the darkness hovering above a crouched body of yourself. You kneel, gun across you lap, across a symbol of Fate welded to the wall in an ancient, hidden temple high up in a ventilation shaft. Again, it twists, and darkness surrounds you.
“It believes itself better than the future we have woven” Your world violently flashes to you standing on a platform overlooking an army stretching into the horizon. You stare at a sea of armored Krasian Soldiers, dozens of ships flying and hovering toward you, facing them all as they, to a man, stand at attention in your direction.
“[He rejects the destiny Originally chosen for him]” Again, the world around you flashes to show you at the helm of a ship, an unknown combat class to you, flying through the midst of what seems to be a truly insane ship-to-ship battle heading towards what you can only describe as a massive orbital station the size of a small planet firing everything your ship has at it. Strange bulbous ships send beams of light into your ship and the hundreds following behind you.
“{The bastard wants to decide his own path? Fine. We’ll weave a new one to face what is coming…}” The creaking wheels seem a cacophony as the images swirl around you. You see images of gun handles sliding open and slips of paper falling out, being grabbed, and unscrolled to read ‘Dash Reynard’. You see sword handles twisting open with scrolls inside, unwrapped to reveal the same. Dozens of images, dozens of unique gun and sword handles flashing by like a strobe light. The flashes finally stop as the twisting threads making up the scenes around you suddenly stop.
In front of you, a man leans over a table with his head downturned to face a single bullet on a table before him. His long, black robes seem to cover his entire body and almost reach his hands, both pressed against the surface in front of him. The black fabric only partially conceals what seems to be the bottom half of the symbol of fate branded on both of the backs of his hands. He slowly looks up towards you and you see the background behind him change from a blank wall to a large open window showing a sight you’ve seen once before, the top skyline of Krasia Prime’s capital city. The table before him seems to have turned into a gorgeous wide desk as his head turns up and his eyes open, revealing pure darkness where eyes should be. His mouth parts slightly in a smile…the smile of a Lion walking towards a wounded gazelle. The smile of a true predator. The smile of a monster that has already won.
Darkness. Pure darkness envelops you yet again. The wheels stop creaking, leaving you in pure silence that seems to stretch on for ages. “Enough.” The darkness itself, the void around you seems to echo with the voice booming in your mind. “He[is]{ours}…or he[is]{….worthless}.” The chant echoes and stops as suddenly. No more visions or words resound around you. You feel your still conscious body begin to move. The ever-familiar cold steel in your hand, bearing what you know is the Mark with your name on it, turns towards your heart.
You know instantly that you have two very important choices in this moment You can try once again to resist the control of this entity, whatever it is. You can try to regain control of your own body. This will be a flat Will 4 Check to regain control of your own hand. You know that you can’t use Fate Points in this moment to resist the will of Fate itself. Failure means that you are about to make an attack on yourself, resisted with straight Physique, and the only hope of preventing it is to hope your friends notice what’s happening, beat you in initiative, and stop you before it goes off.
The second option shines out to you like a thread of light…a lifeline perhaps. You realize that you can sever all of your ties with Fate, the benefits, the curse, the abilities, your aspects, and the very essence of what you are. You realize that you can force your hand open to drop the Hand of Fate. You somehow know that, and in some level may have always known, that rejecting this gun and the abilities, benefits, and duty it brings you, will weaken your bond with Fate and Fate’s express control over your life. You are fairly certain that the moment you let go of this gun and reject it with all that you are, severing all ties, it will never hit the ground or be in your hand again. But…it will not be in your hand with the goal to kill you in this moment.

Purpose

Manual Recording of a Vision

Type

Text, Religious

Medium

Digital Recording, Text

Location

Xanti: The Slush

Authors

• Dash Reynard