Aedmorn walked.
He knew not where. He knew not why, only that he must walk.
Out there in the grey and endless shadows, there must be a destination, the place from where he had first started. With no direction to reach it, he could only walk and would walk for as long as it took until he found it, even if it took an age and an age until the stars were extinguished and the seas boiled and the race of man fell to rise no more.
Weariness came over him and he rested, only to rise and walk again. Beyond the reach of time, the place was, and he felt neither hunger nor thirst but even so he could tire from the long distances he walked, the newfound sword ever in his hands. Here his powers were meaningless, with no life to reach for, to utilise. All he had was himself and the sword. The sword that held within it the hint of life that should not have been, for swords were instruments of death and things that lived not.
Onwards, again as he contemplated the sword, touching that hint of life in it, trying to access it, to manipulate it. To discover its means and purpose.
There was an awareness there, not a simple trace of life but a thing that went beyond that, and even in a place that was beyond time, it felt ancient. There were, of course, weapons that had a will of their own, but this was unlike them, for that was intellect without life.
For a brief moment, it was as if he touched the life within the sword, only for it to slip beyond his grasp, as ethereal and hard to grasp as the shadows around him, to be gone once more.
Within that moment that existed beyond eternity, it was as if he had glimpsed the farthest depths, the unfathomable heights, time unending, a mind that embraced it all, and more. He reeled back from it, mind o’erwhelmed by the experience, unable to comprehend what he had seen, what he had experienced. He stumbled on through the shadows, all but unaware for his mind was mazed by the vision he had beheld, lost within the flow and the warp and weft of it. That which was and were and could be and was not, all tangled together.
Dim came a name to him, his name, rising up through the haze of memories, no closer to the truth of what he had perceived than he had been at the start.
Yet not without reward had the experience been, for in the depths of it all he had perceived some hints of the nature of the place he found himself, hints that verged on madness-inducing, of the flow and shadows, the wash of the tides of the darkness that rolled upon the shores of grey, of the means to walk between the here and the now and the then.
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The key lay not in himself, or by any means that he could bring forth, but by the sword itself. Just so he held it, and just so he slashed through the shadowed light, for it to tear an aurora and a void in the substance of reality, to cut a path through the nothing, to a point beyond, both there and elsewhere. Through he stepped and the air rippled about him, a kaleidoscope of colour, shimmering like the frozen lights of the far reaches of the world. For an age and a moment, he tumbled through the void light, through the tear in unreality, until he emerged beyond, to the there.
If anywhere in the great endlessness of the realm of shadows could be called its heart, it was there, even if such a designation had little meaning. Yet there was, where perhaps the shadows lingered a little thicker, a little more solid, a little more real.
And more, there appeared above what seemed like, but were not, stars, a shimmer of pinpricks of light, ever-shifting, never still. They lacked the true intensity of stars, being but a shadow reflection of the reality, as were all things in that place. Shadows and mists, and memories of what was, and what could be, and what had been.
And in that place, the heart that might have been, he came once more upon the shadowy being in whose realm he found himself, the apparition whose form was as shifting as the shadows themselves, whose existence was transitory and eternal.
Aedmorn could tell not if the creature was alive or not, for it lacked features to convey emotions upon. It hissed though, as he walked between the weft of unreality, to emerge before it and the sword with its aurora of lights flowing across its blade.
“You,” it whispered in the voice of eternity, and all the echoes within.
“Me,” Aedmorn confirmed. “It seems that luck has guided my step.”
“There is no luck here, no random chance.”
“Then perhaps another will guided my steps, one that opposes your designs.”
“It can not be. This and all in it are mine, to shape as I see fit.”
Aedmorn slowly raised the sword so that it gleamed bright before him and the creature appeared to recoil from it, shape rapidly shifting and reforming, and billowing larger. “Does this bring fear to you?” Aedmorn asked quietly. “This simple thing?”
“Fool! I fear naught. And double fool you are, who should be the one to fear. Do you not realise that you are trapped in my realm, where all things are subject to my will? Your mind can not comprehend the things that I can do to you should I will it so.”
“And yet you have not done so,” Aedmorn noted. “Why would that be? Could it be that you can not, that your threats are as insubstantial as this existence, mere shadows of a thing?” He took a step forward, towards that shadowed creature, menacing with the sword, and in that moment it hissed once more and folded in on itself, to fade away into the nothingness, leaving Aedmorn alone in that place.