@Polybius @Dark Light @Pyromaniacwolf @DocRock @Voltus_Ventus

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"The plunge into the deep dark settled within your soul a sense of innate loss. It tore from you any semblance of direction, those literal and metaphorical, and left you agasp for air. No amount of struggling would shrug off the inky black, so down and down, deeper did you sink, until you settled upon the bottom. Your feet under you at last, the weight of the hopeless endeavor became crushing. Would you, could you escape this place? No matter what you thought in that moment, your fleeting eyes scoured the darkness in hope that you might. But there was and would clearly be nothing here. Just you and the darkness, here together. Nothing to be witnessed for a glimpse of hope."

"Yet in this wake, where dreams did live, came a fog rolling in from the seeming void far beyond thought. It crept upon silent feet, hugging low to the bed, until it too overtook you; perhaps this itself was as dreadful as the descent or a welcome reprieve from infinite depth. But with phantasmal caress did it free that voiceless inner terror and although the invisible bonds were broken, the world of this place without places was no less a prison. Still you existed in this plane which stretched beyond ken, surrounded by a shroud in the shallows. This moment of reprieve in the face of the unknown was all it took for you to regain composure, if ever briefly; the staggering, infinite loneliness was driven off for a brief time."

"So with a chord of rational thought returned, you were left to puzzle the obvious. Where were you? What led you here? Where was so much as here? Such a line of inquiry begged stranger questions still, the first of which was a primal reflection; that of the self. Some shred of it surely existed, could it not? Who were you? The thought bit back, as though it stung to sift through so many fragmented pieces as the stormed just out of reach. Yet there was nowhere else to start, at least not yet. They would need be parted through if there was to be any hope of escape, assuming there would even be."

In trying to gain a sense of self or semblance of assurance;

• Shout out loud greeting and pause to listen carefully.
• Run hands over self to take stocktake of clothes/items.
• Feel around the floor.

@Polybius @Pyromaniacwolf @DocRock @Voltus_Ventus

---

"When you call out into the emptiness, you find that it is either you that has not made a sound or it is this place that did not carry it. Instead there exists only the uncanny expanse, which in itself is devoid of even the faintest of sound, being made up of deafening silence. Perhaps here this is a place without, for as you attempt to find yourself, you find that you are without too. Nothing comes of the wandering thought to search your own person, which twists only more strange as you attempt to drive to action the feeling for the seeming surface below you. Not only is there nothing there, for while you may think, it appears you cannot so much as do."

"Seemingly cast into the ether, it is becoming more troubling that you are not but your own thoughts. Which leads you back to the questions you grasped for earlier, fumbling with these fundamentals. You remember not your name just as you do not your figure or features. All of them presumably consumed by the depths, leading to you here in the shallows with the eerie tide of fog. It becomes more urgent yet again to discern these essential aspects of yourself or like flotsam they, you, might disappear altogether."

"Unable to trust my thoughts, I use the only sense left unto me, my sight. I look to my hands. Are they strong? Belonging to a man?"

@Dark Light @Pyromaniacwolf @DocRock @Voltus_Ventus

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"The futile struggle of gauging yourself with sight fails once more. The perception of self is lost, as you are more not than you are anything else. However, the bleakness brings an unexpected reward upon the lens of scrutiny turned more unto yourself and grasping. If for a moment, you can visualize some aspect of what you picture your own hands to be, but they are hazy and indistinct, wherein soon like the depths you fell into, blur away into the mist. Such a momentary recovery is at least progress still; perhaps, just perhaps, with relying solely on the self could you visualize them better."

"Yet, more troubling, is the amorphous quality of this image that lingers in your scattred mind. Are they your own hands before they faded once again or did you merely imagine them to be? Their frequency seemingly unattuned, it was a foreboding of what was likely the rest of what remained. As in, no more. The only way to recover, recreate, or create them at all again would be through dire and desperate concentration. A lack thereof now would be, without doubt, only becoming more one with the shallows."

“With thoughts and the capability of, no matter how feeble, being the only current indication to an otherwise fleeting chance of existence I hold onto what I have and what I know.
I think and therefore I am. I do exist. My thoughts manifest from somewhere, so therefore I have a form. I strengthen and repeat that thought before once again looking towards my hands but first imagining what I shall see.
I conceptualise and imagine two strong hands, earth worn and proud. Aged by hardship but honed from experience.”

@Polybius @Pyromaniacwolf @DocRock @Voltus_Ventus

---

"The reward received for this triumph is meager at best but you have succeeded in some element now. Within the mind's eye you conceptualize hands but the image continues to twist and turn, your thoughts still tugging away at you in a million fragmentary directions. Each effort to wrangle them together is a challenge yet you conceive an idea of what your hands might well be. They are worked, dirty things, yet in the absence of all else that is the deep dark they are perhaps the most divine images you have seen. Yes, these could be your hands, aged and tanned."

"Although the seething black hasn't the same appreciation and soon the shadows creep over them once more. Before the speed of thought they are gone but now at least you know them to be there. Who else, what else might you be? Grasping at the underpinnings of memory, you continue the endeavor to visualize yourself. Perhaps your form was that of a farmhand? Mayhap that of a sailor? Or might it have been a machinist? All these bits, still none whole, tear back against the urge to steady them. More thought is needed, urgently, swiftly, as the seductress' song of nullification was all this limbo had."

I am a man, a man of strength, right? Having been rewarded this vision, I try again to visualize, to force something forth. This time, I try to force my arms to reveal themselves, trying to gain some understanding of who I was.

@Polybius @Pyromaniacwolf @Dark Light @Voltus_Ventus

---

"From your twilight stupor do you briefly break the bounds of reality that you were so oppressed by; the deep dark forced to recoil at your imagination's wiles. Your mantra, questioning and wavering as it may be, repeats itself within you, asking back with voiceless sound, "Are you a man of strength?" It tries you, perhaps as terribly as the foggy, inky abyss. Yet you prevail and imagine yourself to be a man of strength. Right or wrong only heaven would know, for here there were no answers but your own. Your own wordless truth, spoken back by your thoughts, reveal to you the arms you so imagine and they too are just as you picture them. They fade away once more as the will wavers and flags, leaving you fording the icy thoughts of your memory."

"Perhaps you were, rather are, indeed a man of strength. It might well be this wretched place with no coveted light toying with you or it might well be you toying with yourself. The sum of this mattered little, for what was ever so pressing was to assemble yourself - lies and truths alike - once more; a feat difficult enough for those in the stillness of the world beyond, not challenged by the overwhelming, devouring black. Now, and only just now, as you drifted in the battering storm of confusion where you were left adrift on waves of conflicting thoughts, did you see the fog had recoiled from the shallows some. A fell omen or a blessing in disguise? The moment passed and again it pressed upon you, that dim glow within spurred, that you need further elaborate on your person and be certain of your choices. After all, assuming you would ever escape, just who and what would you have become from such a harrowing journey to the bottom?"

I embrace the endless waves of lies and truth in my mind and then push them away, I push them to the outside with the icy thoughts of my old memories, whatever they may have been, to merge with the black inky abyss. I am a man of the sea now, it is right I am surrounded by the shadowy abyss and the endless torrents of the unknown.

@Polybius @DocRock @Dark Light @Voltus_Ventus

---

"It is unclear what came next, for your memory is as hazy as your eternal prison in the depths, but it is abundantly clear that you see yourself as a sailor. Was this reality? Perhaps it was things to come? Or had they already been? Your worked hands and displays of strength in the futile struggles to break free align well with this flight of fantasy. The call of the sea speaks to you within your mind where you meld it with the thoughts of this place. Maybe it were that you were a doomed soul to the bottom of the locker and this was where you arrived, but it mattered not. Whatever you had done in sum seemed to turn the tides literal and metaphor."

"The crawling mist receded further and more of the world around you became lucid in spite of being the dream of dreams. Like a thunderous crash of a wave, you felt yourself spinning out of control, tugged by the unseen undertow. The salt spray of the painful dark assailed your flesh once more. With every bit of sailing talent in you, you held. For all of reality came to spin more wildly; the urgency was dire now. As just as you had been drowning with your fall, so too were you drowning again in the black. Hastily, hurriedly, the question begged one last time, howling like wind, who were you?"

Up was the cardinal direction when drowning, to distinguish it from all other directs was life saving. "I had a body now, senses that extended to the tips of my limbs. I craned my neck backwards, to what I hoped was upwards, in hopes of seeing what there was to be seen." Life was preferable to whatever else awaited me in the dark.

@Polybius @DocRock @Dark Light @Pyromaniacwolf

---

"Like a pawn cast from the board, so too did you fall with a start. The shallows of thought behind you, you awoke with a start upon the sandy shore and beheld from where you laid a fire in the sky. A surreal glow filtered down from above, pocked with ash snow. The warm glow among the deep midnight and what surely were the stars beyond pulled your conscious to. This was no dream no more, you were alive again, or as alive as a dead man could be. There was no crow of gulls on the wing, no breeze through your hair, and nothing but the ambiance of the tranquil waves and the knock of wood that lapped against the beach."

"As fate would have it, the life of a sailor might well have saved you, only to confront you with wherever you were now; somewhere outside the darkness of your own fading heart. Still craning, now straining your neck to see, you managed to look down from your resting place upon your battered limbs. You were gouged here and there, red wounds open but not seeping, stared back at by the snarling pantherine tattoo that lined your inner arm, accompanied by a serpent and dagger on the other. The glow however, between your waterlogged boots, came from a tremendous blaze on the horizon, far beyond where eyes dared reach. Whatever had transpired there surely brought you here to this shore and called down the ashes that nested on you."

@Polybius @Dark Light @Pyromaniacwolf @DocRock @Voltus_Ventus

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"Prying yourself from the sand, you manage to come to seated. With great struggle of aching bones, you rise from kneeling thereafter and find your feet unsteady. The surreal encounter gone for the time being, you attempt to steep yourself in the reality at hand, assuming it was there so much as at all. Your surveying suggested little of initial use, aside from the debris upon the beach and that your situation may be only slightly better than the threat of oblivion. Here on this shore, behind you lies a sparse jungle, and beyond to the sea lies flames of catastrophe and the ashes of its wake."

"As fortune may have it, the warmth of the ambient environment made the cold chill of your drenched wear less miserable but it forewarned of other threats. Such an environment would be rife with insects and storms, experiences you are not uninitiated but would only serve to complicate matters. For now, the question became what to do first."

@Polybius @Dark Light @Pyromaniacwolf @DocRock @Voltus_Ventus

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"After some time appealing to your senses, with a heavy heart you realize that there are no clear memories or thoughts that stick with you. Not just that you should remember something, rather that what should be there is not there at all. This only adds to the mystery of your fate but it is clear in this moment there are more pressing matters, which you begin by stalking through the debris in the high hopes of salvaging something of use."

"Among the bits of wood and metal, some of the former natural and the latter all from what you can only assume to be the remains of the ship you were journeying upon, you come upon a chest. Its face buried in the sand and shoulders as wide as a man's, the trunk is soon pried free of its coarse hold. It strikes the wet sand with a dull thud as you wipe your brow, looking over your catch. Strangely, although it bears mounting for locks, only one hangs off a loop, the other likely lost to the sea or wherever it was you escaped from that was the impenetrable black."

Perhaps this chest contains something of use? I will attempt to remove with the aid of any sufficiently large metal fragments from the ship assuming it is still keeping the chest closed, if not I shall proceed to eagerly open the chest.

@Polybius @Dark Light @DocRock @Voltus_Ventus

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"Carrying on in your examinations of the trunk, you discover nothing is keeping it sealed. This oddity, which you stash in the recesses of your seemingly blank memory, strikes you. What good is a unlocked, now waterlogged chest when so clearly it was meant to be sealed? Carrying on, you fall to one knee and place your palms to the worn latches, flipping them up and open. Casting the top open, within you discover a series of badly damaged texts in the form of five leather bound books. Each one is in terrible condition as expected from surviving whatever scuttled the vessel and near doomed you to the abyss yet all retain distinct personalities beyond just the variation in tone and color. Each one feels different as your fingers trace their unnamed but ornately decorated spines."

"Aside from the obvious in the texts you find a drenched stack of parchment, with ink sliding from the pages into the seawater, as well as a glass vial of ink and writing utensils. Whoever owned such a thing was a person of great dignity and skill you can assume but the owner is nowhere to be found and in this moment you are uncertain if there were anyone else other than you in this dilemma now. Thumbing through the papers, you find some remains of the text that may be possibly read despite the damage."

@Polybius @Dark Light @Pyromaniacwolf @DocRock @Voltus_Ventus

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"After some pawing through the texts, you discern that the loose leaves of paper appear to have been a letter, one addressed to an unknown but now their words give the strangest inkling they belong to you. Not just in the literal sense of you being the apparent sole survivor, nothing nearly so inane and meaningless, but that the odds the still visible words of "And so these are entrusted to you." as the last line before the now lost signature seem a touch upon something within you. This understanding not isolated, in your fuddling with the sea desecrated pages you would swear on your life that the books were perceived with great musing and importance; whoever owned them attributed them strange quality."

"Setting the pages aside on the sand, doing your best to prevent them from being buried or blown away by putting a shell form the shore atop them, you meander over the books. Without any text to distinguish them from one another, you begin reaching for the first and seemingly most ominous text, one of dark, perhaps once black binding. No warning from the sun high above or the island behind you, your finger hesitates to touch the text..."

I long for answers, no matter how dangerous and foolhardy it may be. I steel myself, and reach forward with the finger, to brush against the surface of the first book, trying to ignore the foreboding feeling in the back of my empty thoughts.

@Polybius @Dark Light @Pyromaniacwolf @Voltus_Ventus

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"There is something troubling about this particular book, the kind that makes you shirk from it once your will fades. Whatever ill omen it brings, it disappears the further you distance yourself from it, even so small as the curling of fingers back into the palm. The next text nested within the trunk, in a deep royal blue, does not evoke this sensation but gives an impression of insight and reflection; perhaps it is the book or truly it is yourself, but your mind wonders just how wise a decision any of this is. On to the next, the contact of the rich emerald leather to your sand and salt stained hand puts your soul at ease. Whereas the other two might have alarmed you in their own way, a brief interlude of calm."

"For a moment you are left to pause before the remaining two texts, one burgundy, another tanned creme. Yet, for as you now ponder it, a disturbing trend has become apparent that mayhap to not have been so evident before; like the descent into darkness and the void of your mind, are these things too all fantasies?"