The Awaking Cycle

Desert Seer - Oddex

        Eurasel was only 12 when his first vision came to him.  He was in the fields with the rest of his family when he stood upright and stared into the face of the sun unblinking.
         There marched an army of dead toward Carthage. The General wore a white cape that covered the entire army of marching corpses.  Where the dead walked sulfur and salt feel from them.  Burning everything to the dirt then poisoning the land so it would not grow a single stalk of grain.
        “Eurasel! Wake up child!” his grandmother was screaming in his face and shaking him.  When he came to the world went black to him.  Blinded by the light of his vision, he was marked useless by the rest of the workers and sent to sit in the house with his eyes closed. 
        “Do not move from this spot child, or you may end up falling into a fire or tripping and hurting yourself in a way that I cannot help you recover from.” his grandmother told him.  So there he sat for weeks on end looking hard into the pitch that had fallen over his eyes until one morning light filtered through the darkness and began to settle on his eyes once again.
          Within a few days Eurasel was able to pluck grain from the stalks and do work again.  Excited to be out of the house and working again,  he began talking with all the other boys his age about what he had seen.  They all laughed at him, called him a liar and stupid for looking at the sun.  Leaving him and his basket alone, Eurasel was left to pluck grain by himself. 
        It was like this for many years after too.  Eurasel would have a vision while doing something important and end up harming himself or others.  He was branded a curse and was not allowed to work for the city anymore.  No one spoke to him, they only spoke of him.  “There goes the curse of Carthage.  How does he still live.”  This continued on until in his seventeenth summer Eurasel was out in the woods seeking a seer's pool to look for the future.  He stumbled over a root and cracked his head on a rock.  Blood seeped out of his head and into a fire pit left from the night before by travelers.  Conscience, he watched the blood and ash mix. A great wind came then and flung the ash and blood mixture into the air and into the leaves of a nearby tree.  Recovering from his fall Eurasel reached up and plucked the leaves that had his blood and the fires ash on them.  He seen words, and promises.  Images of death and change strewn across green, grey, and red. 
         Eurasel sat in the cold of the night and laid down leaf after leaf, picking them up, and laying them down again.  A story only for him was unfolding, a story that seem to lack an ending.  It was on the 21st day of unbroken storytelling his grandmother came to him in his fit and spoke to him.
         “Dear grandchild of mine, you are mad with the sight and you can not control it.  Eurasel continued to read the leaves and every time he put a new one down or picked one up, the story became longer.  A story so complex that no man could write it down in one lifetime.  Shethriala found a large stick and beat Eurasel until he lay bloody and still.  Sobbing Shethriala tied the young man’s feet together with rope and dragged him through the dust and sand to his house where she waited and nursed him to health for thrice the moon cycles.
         Fevered and lucid dreams kept his muscles tight, and his forehead hot to the touch.  It was in this sickness the Prophecy came to him and spoke his name. 
         “Eurasel, The Pattern Seeker, Cobweb Walker, The Prophet's prophet, Leader to the strange paradise, Oddex Arcadia, all of these things shall be true Desert Seer.  Listen to these words I give to you and do not ever let them go.  Bind them to you Eurasel.”
         A pool of water sat placid on the wall of his house.  When he stood to look into it, the pool cracked like clay and began to fall away.  He began trying to catch the pieces and put them back into the pool.  Though when he caught them, the pieces cut his hands like a blade.  When the pool had fallen away he stood up and looked behind the pool into pitch.  A great darkness lay on the other side, but there was something in the darkness.  Reaching inside Eurasel felt cobwebs wrap around his hand, pulling his hand out covered in cobwebs he began to hear whispering.  Franticly he dashed around his house trying to find the source of the voices.  The harder he looked, the louder the whispering became.  Entangled in cobwebs he now stood at second story window looking out over a desert full of men and women of all shapes and colors.  All of their eyes reflected the moon.  Looking out over the desert people Eurasel pushed his head out the window.  With an outpouring of cheer the people opened their mouths to him and begged for sustenance. 
         It was only now Eurasel felt the urge to speak of what he had seen in the leaves of ash and blood. 
         “I have seen the mirror shatter brothers and sisters, just as you have.  It can be whole again, it WILL be whole again.  It is I who am the Seer and I shall see the way.  It is a strange new land that we will reside, but it will be a land for our people. A land of milk and honey, and land of blood and the moon.”
         When he spoke, his words floated down into the crowd covered in cobwebs and fell into their gapping maws.  Then they in turn spoke his works and they fell out again covered in more cobwebs into more open mouths. 
         “Feed them madness, and they will spill out truth.” A voice echoed from the back of Eurasel's skull.  He spun looking for the echo's master only to find more darkness.  A soft breeze blows through him and the cobwebs fall away into dust.  Standing in a pool of water looking at his reflection he begins to pass out. 
         Eurasel awoke to the sound of water.  Someone laid a cloth of cool water across his brow and spoke softly too him.  The sound of his heartbeat bested him and he let his body rest again.
         The sun cast down life into his chest the next morning.  When the dawn struck his window Eurasel awoke and found no sign of the forest or the leaves.  He did find his grandmother crouched in the corner of the room praying that her grandchild would be given back to her. 
“Grandmother.” a whisper raced toward Shethriala.  Startled by the noise she jumped to her feet and snatched her walking stick out of the corner.  Her eyes lit with joy when she seen her grandson standing there in front of her, healthy and strong.
“Grandmother, I must go out into the wilderness.” Shethriala began to sob and beat Eurasel on his chest with frail fists.
“No! I've spent three full moons caring for you! You must stay.”
“No, I have seen the patterns I seek and you are no longer a part of my pattern grandmother. Thank you for your love and care.  I am to leave Carthage as soon as my pack is full.”
Shethriala fell to floor and sobbed quietly as he filled with pack with bread, fruit, cheese, and wine. Walking out of their house Eurasel stopped and spoke softly without looking at his grandmother.  “I am to be a great man grandmother, though, it will not be in your time or even in mine.  My legacy will make me great. Thank you.” He walked out the door and toward the city gates.  Everywhere people spoke of him when he walked past him.
         “There walks the madman grandson, they say he died by her hand and feeling the guilt of a demon she wrested his soul from the underworld to bring him back to life to apologize. “
         Eurasel cast his lot again with the wild.  He went the edge of Carthage and built a hut of mud and stick, brick and straw and there he tilled his garden.  In his garden flourished every seed under the sun, vine and tree, flower and grass.  Surely, he was a master of his land. 
         In his nineteenth year, the Romans came to Carthage under a flag of truce and destroyed it.  Fleeing from his land he hid in the wilderness and watched the grain fields burn while Romans marched through them.  The pure hatred of this was enough to make him sick.
         Eurasel was forced to flee deeper into the wild with the beasts and unknown.  It is in a dense forest when the moon was pregnant and high in the sky he cried into his lap and wept for his garden, and wept for his city, and wept for the people that turned from him.  He wept into the forests and screamed, “I am cursed as the Murderer of Able, forced to wonder the wild and the world of men to turn against me.  What is it that I have done to deserve such a curse?  Where are my visions of answers when I need them most?” 
      A voice called out amongst his wails “Be still child of Seth, your answers are many years away.”
        He stood and walked about looking for the voice that could calm him with but a word.  “Who calls to me in my moment of shame and grief?”
        A moonlight pale women dressed in a ragged tunic and sandals put a hand on his shoulder.  Eurasel let out a small gasp followed by a shiver.  The woman’s touch was like the dead curling a hand over a victim. 
      “You shall have your answers my son.  You shall have so many you shall not know what to do with them all.”
Eurasel turned to face the woman and looked into her dead eyes.  It was true, the dead had found its victim and she made no qualms about showing her true face.  The women embraced him close, whispering into his ear.  “I am not sorry for what I am to do; I regret what will happen to the one I have come to love.”  Bitting deep into his neck, a flash of cold pain stiffened him.  A sea of ecstasy engulfed him, erasing the memory of pain.  He fell limp in the woman’s arms as she drank deep and long of this young man’s blood.  The blood was strong and thick.  His madness would be the same.
The shadows crept around him slowly.  So slowly, in fact he did not notice they were upon him until they had encased him in their cold embrace.  Eurasel floated for what seemed a thousand years.  Then, whispers.  Soft voices drifted into his left ear and he turned to face them.
      He was almost as pale as the woman was when she pulled herself away from his neck and laid him in the brush and leaves of the forest floor.  She knelt next to him and wept softly letting her tears of blood drip down his throat.
The cobwebs where everywhere, surrounding him as the shadows had just done.  The echoes of madness plucked at his mind.  Ripples of insanity pulled him in and out of the pools of tears. 
The weight of the world crushed his lungs as he tried to draw breath into his freshly turned corpse.  He tried again and drew a deep panicked breath springing to his feet.  Covered in urine, feces, vomit and blood, he screamed utter dementia into the night sky.  The crescent moon shown a silver blade into his eyes as he fled through the trees.  White hot hunger throbbed in every inch of his skin.  He knew what he needed, he did not want it.  How could he tell this new hunger to still itself?