ORIGIN

A clawed hand raised, black fingers dipping to touch the oil streaking from his eyes. The hand then pulled back, Black looking at it.

Finger and thumb swept briefly over one another, testing the oil's viscosity; and then the hand pressed down again, half-touched by the goop as palm touched rock.

"You would understand," Black explained, though his voice, and mind, were both distant, "if you but listened."

The Dog then seemed to fall into his own mind, once more ignoring Qisziux: the ground beneath him slicked inky black, oiled, the shade spreading around him in all directions. The rock darkened, reaching, splaying, spiderweb lines like cracks--but corruption alone--stretching across the stone.

Then the Black Dog stood, and began to walk off, toward the Spire.

Black paused, glancing back only briefly, the shaded blur as his vision gradually returned showing him the flailing little lizard on the ground. What had it done..? He could not tell, but it didn't seem to be well.

"What is said with truth cannot be madness," he answered, his voice calm and distant, an eerie hollow quality to it. And then he turned and continued to stride away.

Ahead lay the derelict Spire: long-abandoned, shining with a magic that was not curated by, to the Black Dog's knowledge, anyone. Left to... what, guide them? Provide them energy, power, without supervision? Black did not know. He knew that there were cracks in it, now; he knew there was a darkness lurking beneath. He did not presume to know what it meant.

He spoke, still, as he knelt closer to it, again pressing palms to the rock. "The Crawler sees..." yet before he could continue, it felt as if something had gripped, strongly, one shoulder. He half-turned, sharply, to stare--but nothing was there. And though he stared for a long moment, nothing appeared.

Strange.

"...what it fears. But the Dog is a guardian; it does not bring harm." He spoke as if distant from himself, as if another being, as if he were floating outside the chaotic whispers and dark urges that rustled past like some cold wind. He focused, instead, on his task, single-minded as he could be.

He knew, now, that he would need to return to the altar after this: to calm his mind, to soothe the chaos blossoming through it.

It truly seemed to be all-or-nothing, this magic, and so he found himself simply knelt again, nothing happening; though not too close to the Spire, he was nearer to it. He looked up, eyes half-closed against what was, to him, a near-blinding glow, and waited.

Black paused, the brief flash of light at the edge of his vision enough to blind him, for a moment. He ignored it, for the most part, though it was beginning to... irritate him.

Yet some part of him acknowledged this as good for the meditation; a little irritant would be a good test of his self-control. He did not need sight, in any case, to continue his task, and he did so, blindly pressing his corruption into the rock. Another bloom of dark stone began to slick out from all around him, and only after it had begun to spread did Black speak again.

"It speaks," he rasped, "of right, and wrong. Of good, of morality. As if a shadow can be evil. The Dog asks it, then; if it believes itself to be good, and the Black Dog no longer a guardian: why is it attacking, and the Dog not striking back..?"

He glanced half-back, at this, as if to emphasize his point, his blind eye staring back at Qisziux.

"The Dog claimed not that you were causing harm," Black answered in his absent, echoing rumble.

He pushed up, and paced forward, closer now to the Spire. Bathed in its blue light, he knelt once more. "These shadows whisper of battle. But it is not battle. One beast kills another out of malice, little Crawler; is this bad? But now, I tell you of this, later; is the tale itself a menace? Is learning of a thing-that-was, evil?"

Once again, he knelt; once again, clawed hands pressed to the stone. Black began to twist and spread from him, flowing out around him. By now, the path he'd walked was clearly-defined, a broad, dark swathe painted across Polaris' rock.

He stood, again, as he finished, and began walking broadside to the Spire.

"Are whispers and memories wrong, then, little Crawler? Are warnings to be ignored, for the horror that they bring?"

Black paused, that esoteric murmur bringing him more than glimpses, now, of imagery. He began to speak to it, aloud, and it sounded as though he were speaking to himself: quizzical questions with a perhaps unintentional mockery to the words.

"...Is it stupid, perhaps? Does it hear, 'attacking,' and then believe the word 'hurt' has been said? Does it hear information, and hear 'complaint?' Is it a fool; is it only a child? Is it arrogance, or is it idiocy? Is it both?" All of this was delivered in that same slow and thoughtful rumble, and Black stepped forward once again, completing a semi-circle at a wide distance around the Spire.

He knelt.

And now, he addressed Crawler more directly. "They are no instructions, little Crawler. Perhaps it should listen, instead of merely hearing."

Darkness bloomed up one last time, flooding the rock out around him, crackling and popping with an oily sheen. When it had finished he pushed up, and then simply strode away, leaving darkness in his wake and no further words for the tiny lizard to bite at.