Soooo…still sitting on Chapter 25.2. I’m hating it just way too much to stand posting it right now. Hopefully I’ll post it soon. Here’s a little preview to tide you over. Just an FYI, this is subject to change:
Doorways carved from conflict led to new ways of thinking.
She was fretting over the ideas of freedom in the face of the materialist reality, where the senses were just the slaves of perception, and emotion was but an aftertaste of sensation. It was philosophical conjecture that had marooned on the shores of her mind, a castaway of a noble education. Idealism versus materialism. Materialism believed that there was an objective world that existed outside of the mind and spirit, not only known through senses, but through tools and science as well. Idealism believed the opposite, and stated that nothing existed outside of the mind.
The first time she’d heard of the concepts at the age of seventeen, she remembered feeling the sunlight and savoring it. She’d only stopped dozing when her instructor had used a burning home as an example for that day’s lesson.
What if they (the students) had walked through the door of a burning building? They could feel the heat, see the brilliance of the fires, smell the smoke…but was it all really there? Was the environment and the dangers therein illusions of the mind? The objective world was a thing of sense, but reports had come of individuals capable of ignoring such physical tethers through sheer willpower. Magic, too, was always reshaping the environment–was that part of the material world, then? Or was it further proof that their world was just a projection from their animus, and they could shape it to their will if only they could find such control?
Elmiryn remembered feeling intrigued, though her only question had been–
“And what about death? When you die, do you vanish, or does the world cease to exist?”
Her instructor–she had forgotten his name now–only chuckled and said, “Well I suppose it depends on how strongly you believe your own perceptions?”
The next day, her instructor had been dishonorably removed and replaced by another man, who went on talking about Halward’s supremacy like he were reading from a script, and the redhead had resumed her adolescent apathy towards her studies with zeal.
Imageless memories blurred into her present and confused her momentarily. Elmiryn gave her head a shake and her mind cleared enough to take in the scope of her situation.
She and Sedwick had gone to the first place they thought they could help–A half-timbered house that billowed smoke and flames with a woman screaming hysterically outside. Kind folk tried to comfort her, to take her to safety, but she fought them, screaming, “My family! My family is in there, dear gods, please!!“
Elmiryn was deep in the reaches of that very home, aware on some level that it’d been dangerous and foolish, but it had drawn her there. She could hear Sedwick shouting at her further away as he sent his water into the raging flames. She…had hardly thought about it this time. She’d just approached the inferno and pushed the flames aside with a thought, moving through the destroyed facade, a feeling like a fresh breeze greeting her before the notion was swallowed in the fury of the fires.
The ruined buildings around them were solid, real, and stark. The gutted giants of mortar and metal were stained hot by the fury of great big beasts, creatures who were too enthralled by their larger-than-life dramas to stop and take notice of the little skulls they crushed beneath a deadly step. They had weight. They were mammoths of life. Did might make right, here? Was their spirit stronger than the collective belief? Could she withstand such a reality?
Also Eikasia will be entering a HIATUS starting May 23. The tentative return date is July 17th.
Cheers!
...Prepare to Die. 