ORIGIN

The stag saw the world lurch away, felt a tug of something gripping him, pulling him, swinging him down and along the ground. His body hit the hard ground and tumbled, limbs flailing and antlers smashing off the rock. A few tines cracked and fell away, and he felt, with a vague and distant horror, the savage impact of the ground on limbs and flanks. He would, most certainly, badly bruise; and his fur had only partially protected him from a series of scrapes and wounds.

He lay there for only a moment, eyes wide and mouth open, his tongue hanging as he panted and gasped for air. He struggled, too, to stand--a prey creature's instincts driving him to get upright, to stand strong, to escape. But halfway up he staggered, the world still spinning around him, and he fell again.

Amras was near, and Pride turned his head somewhat so as to see him better. His body remained on the rock, and he scrambled--and fell back down--every few seconds. Each time he fell back more exhausted, and gathered his strength for only a moment before again trying.

Everything was still whirling chaos, and he tried to spit out the only thing that he remembered, the only thing that seemed to matter. To tell Amras. To pass the knowledge on, so that it was not lost.

"D-death is--a lie, it--it is eternal--..." For a moment, he couldn't remember what was eternal, and then he did, and he spat it out. "Pain! Pain--is eternal--death is a lie-..."

Another scramble, another fall, his eyes still rolling to their whites, his tongue still hanging out. Hooves clattered on stone and scraped as he fell, and blood began to stain through his white pelt from beneath.

The stag finally made it to his feet, standing trembling and panting, his head now hanging low. His legs shook terribly, so that several times he almost pitched over merely from standing up. His left flank held a rather bad gash, and blood spotted his coat here and there--and some of the tines had broken away from his antlers. One of the antlers, itself, seemed loose--perhaps brittle, and shedding?

Internally, Pride was struggling, heavily, to still his mind. His self-control was generally quite strong, and his emotions fairly muted; a more hysterical and emotional creature may have had a far harder time coping. As it was he found it hard to gather his fragmented thoughts at all. They were fleeting, barely-visible past the curtain of fear that drifted between he and his logic.

It took several full minutes of silence, even after Amras had spoken, for Pride's breathing to calm, for his shaking to somewhat still, and for him to be able to formulate himself at all. His words came stuttering and all at once, quiet, as he tried to throttle them out little by little. The thoughts themselves were still chaotic, so organizing them was difficult at best. "Definite... sentience," he reported, and the grey eyes rolled to Amras, still showing a thin crescent of white at their back edges, as though a moon were eclipsed by faintest shadow.

A gasp, a single trembling step as he reseated an uneasily-braced hoof, and he struggled to continue. "Chaotic. Came back to m-myself at--dark place. Sad, failed--lonely. Different beings--? Madness, rescued by an-... another victim or..." He shuddered abruptly, his entire hide flicking as if shaking off a thousand flies. "Or perhaps magic--not sentience--too powerful? Connection opens..." and he glanced more closely to Amras, as if struggling to convey what he meant.

To do so he tossed his head a little, antlers-first, as another might claw or strike at the air to make a general point of "violence." "C-connection, and then-... shock?"

First time, Amras, here, maybe opened it, maybe increasing magic, mania explained, overwhelmed, overrun, shattered. Voices? Source of voice? --Do not know. The stag again shuddered, trying to force his thoughts to be a little more coherent. What he got was a little more plaintive, though hardly self-pitying. I'm cold.

Pride stood shaking for a moment, though it was nearly gone, now--just considering Amras' words.

Walk? Could he--walk? He slowly turned, blinking, to glance over his right shoulder at the Spire. He was wondering, in a vague and rather broken way, if he could still do anything with this. Anything to learn. A tap into its past, perhaps, rather than its mind, itself..?

But Amras' words echoed in his mind. "You've taken quite a blow in the name of knowledge, haven't you?" Pride blinked and turned back, staring rather blankly at the gryphon for a moment, despite the fact that he'd finished speaking some time ago. Pride was merely mulling the words over--and finding that yes, he had taken quite a blow. To try to focus on magic now would be... unlikely to succeed, at best, and catastrophic at worst.

"I do not wish to... blind myself. Again," he explained, and while it might have been meant as humor, he rather forgot, for the moment (and could perhaps be forgiven given the circumstances) that Amras had no idea how he'd come onto this train of thought. The poor gryphon had no way of knowing that Pride had considered further casting, and didn't want it to backfire--but to the stag, it held perfect clarity.

He bent down, cautious and slow. Despite his wounds and shock, he politely and carefully browed on the mushrooms for a moment, grazing. Once they had been eaten, he started off, his hooves clicking unsteadily on the stone. "Thank you," he said. "...Raises... more questions. Trying to think if th-there is a way to tell--s-sentient from... simply... too-powerful magic? Wh-what would happen if mind was linked to... magic, pure... no mind behind it? No--sentience?"

Perhaps they could think of some way to test all of this out.

Pride did not bother to inspect the little cave all that much, himself--he was exhausted, for one, and secondly he had already decided that Amras' common sense was not in any way particularly lacking. He might have a bit of a sense of adventure in terms of dangerous experimentation--but then, so (apparently, he thought wryly) did Pride. Plus, nothing jumped out at him as immediately wrong with the place, and that was good.

The stag ducked his head down to allow passage beneath the low ceiling. He walked in and, rather than grazing, he simply dropped into the gem pile. He looked around, slowly, nostrils flaring as he took scent. A little musty; uninhabited, then? He could also smell the faint metallic odor of his own blood as it stained the stones. He saw no food to be had, but that hardly mattered; he was not particularly hungry, instead being simply exhausted.

And thirsty, but that would have to wait.

He looked to Amras, tired but alert. His faculties were returning to him, though he found that much of what he'd experienced was too... esoteric, to put into words. He was uncertain if it had been as he'd thought--his consciousness shattering--or if that had been the logic that his limited mind had fallen to in order to explain the perception of a powerful, magical shock to his mind. Perhaps only his thoughts had shattered, and more coherent thought had been impossible..? It was so difficult to qualify that he could not even remember much of it, now.

"I think," he began carefully, after a few moments' rest, "that to understand the Spire and it--it's n-nature, we m-may need to find another way to-... ahh." He paused, his words briefly flitting away on a cloud of dark butterflies, and he blinked at Amras. He had to focus, for a moment, for them to whirl back together. "To find out what--happened." He paused. Well, that had been a terribly lame way of phrasing it. He attempted to clarify. "To d-discern whether magical shocks have the same or similar... effect. There may be two... beings or it may be--merely overwhelming power but-..." The stag trailed off for a moment, tilting his head.

"B-but I do believe that there was at least one being. The one that spoke those words--I could feel beneath, emotions. I d-do not think that was... my own thoughts, or feelings, echoed or--given form."

Pride looked again to Amras, thoughtfully, as he began to rub antlers on the piled gemstones. One antler felt loose, sore, and he couldn't help but realize that he might be shedding them. It had happened before, when he was still growing--he'd rub them heartily when they itched, and first the soft gray velvet would fall away. Eventually the antler, too, would fall off, only to be replaced, larger than before. I hope they do not get too much bigger, he thought glumly. They are already unwieldy enough as they are--magnificent though they may be. He paused, mentally, and evaluated what he'd just said to himself: yes. Relief. His mind was forming complex thoughts, again, as scattered as his emotions were. He was not permanently damaged, or so it would seem.

Pride considered Amras' question in silence, for a few moments. Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, he found himself even more tired--and found that the stabbing pains from his wounds were most distracting. He shifted uncomfortably, wishing he had some way to mend his flesh, and forced himself to focus on his thoughts as best he could.

"I think..." he began, slowly--giving the idea the cautious consideration that it deserved--"...it was not hostile. It--grieved, I think? And if you were to be believed, it released you quite deliberately, and though that... may have been a shocking encounter, it seems no true harm was done. When my mind was-..." Pride paused, here.

There were, so far as he saw it, two possibilities. Perhaps three.

With the first, the being itself had made contact with him, and through madness or malice, struck out at his mind. He dismissed this as quite unlikely; the initial shock and--whatever had happened, the bits which were now slipping from memory... Well, he knew that these had not held the same feel as the being.

The second possibility, and the third, was that the Spire had been a different entity altogether, to begin with. Either he had made contact with pure magic (or the Spire itself) and been badly harmed, and accidentally run into this being--either it was near, or feeding off of the Spire, or trapped, or what have you, or it was simply brushed against by Pride's mind, same as the Spire itself. The third possibility was still that the Spire was an entity (or magic), and that this being had actively found Pride being harmed, and had drawn him in and hurled him back into his own body, and into consciousness.

Pride considered, and spoke very slowly. "I believe it may have been an accidental encounter, but coincidences... they never merit true consideration. It is possible that this being is either bound to the Spire, or found me in very dire straits and deliberately aided my mind in retreating from the shock delivered to it." One thing he did distinctly remember was the sensation of... landing on familiar shores, so to speak, yet shores so foreign and alien as to frighten him, had he been capable, at that moment, of fearing it. Shores of a strange mindscape, full of grief and loneliness--that was where he had washed up. Had this being pulled him there, drawn him in from drowning, and deposited him on the only beach it had?

This metaphor worked well to describe, to himself, what had happened, and Pride found himself rearranging his memories somewhat to fit it. The memories themselves had been fading fast, and so now he could in some sense retain them, categorize them--he had been drowning in a riptide of magicka, and was dragged onto a beach.

But that wasn't quite it, was it? It was more like being dragged down into a whirlpool, drowning, and falling out into a black cave below.

He looked to Amras, solemn. "I cannot say for certain. As for the golems--it is one idea. Alternatively we could attempt to find another powerful source of magicka, and perhaps test it on Lessers. Given our idea of sentience and power, it is possible we could create sentience in--say, a rat, or a bird. What do you think?"

He paused in this thought, and added--"I wonder if I were but instants from ascending into a new form. Or, perhaps, if doing what I suggest might send a lesser into simple shattered madness, as I believe I just skirted round the edges of." The first bit was given with humor; the rest, not so much.