Ages passed before his helpless eyes…or perhaps minutes. Wherever they had put him, time had no meaning. Neither did space—he was not bound, but moving his limbs seemed to have no effect. He couldn’t even tell if he was moving through the emptiness he found himself in. All he had to go on was the stars, though their movements were consistent neither to a specific time nor place, as far as he could tell.
At first he thought he could measure time by the strength of the bond to his worshippers. It waxed and waned, though more the latter, and before he had divined the pattern it had dwindled to barely a trickle. He struggled to remember the calendar of their festivals, the scent of the sacrifices, the sound of the songs. Little and less came back to him. He remembered the high points longer—the battles, where heroes would lunge at their foes with his name on their lips, and thank him afterward for having preserved their lives. Had he done so? Were these memories even true?
He remembered as well contending with other gods, each strengthened by the faith of their followers on the Material Plane. He also remembered when the four had cornered him in his stronghold, rendering him helpless with some force he hadn’t had time to understand. What were their names, and why had they hated him so? The one with its face constantly in the shadow of its cloak, who had bound him with ropes of shadow…the one with shining hair and armor, whose sword had been at his throat…the one with too many arms and legs and eyes, who had held his mouth shut so he could not call for help…the green woman whose word had frozen him in place…were they evil? Had he been?
After a time, none of that seemed to matter. The trickle had died down to a drip, if that, each drop a shock reminding him that someone remembered him, the spaces between allowing him to forget that he had ever existed. How long between the drops? The answer was no longer meaningful to him. For a time, the stars winked out—how long until they returned, he did not know. In that time, he conducted a thorough investigation of what he did know. He was neither hot nor cold, hungry nor thirsty, could feel neither pain nor pleasure. He could move his limbs, and knew that he had two arms and legs, but could not locate any part of his body with the hands and feet he could freely move.
When the stars returned, he devoted his energy instead to tracking their motion. He memorized each one, though some seemed to vanish and return, or be replaced, and others moved with no recognizable pattern. But over time—the question of how much was meaningless—he noticed a place where no stars ever went. This merited further investigation, and he bent his every resource to getting a closer look. Eventually he realized that he had moved himself closer, or the space had moved toward him, or had grown larger. The sublest of shifts in the ambient starlight, observed over another unknowably long amount of time, revealed that indeed he was moving—the first time he had definitive sensory confirmation since his imprisonment.
He did not know how long it took him to reach the door, but it punctuated his existence into two periods—before and after. For it was a door, and made of a material he could not begin to guess at – smooth to what he could not help but call touch, firm, and the color of a darkness beyond dark which swallowed all light. It had no features but its presence—it extended beyond dimension in a way that seemed to curve all space toward it—it was not that there was no way to get around it, or nothing beyond it, but that the concept of ‘beyond’ or ‘around’ had no meaning in relation to it. He studied the door for ever, and only slowly realized that the trickle of worship that had sustained him in earlier eons of imprisonment had come through it. For even now, he felt the occasional pulse. No longer adulation, or praise tinged with request, as he faintly recalled, but more curious wonder. Yet it came, slowly and irregularly, and each time it did he could feel a slight bit more himself, whatever that was.
Then the pulses faded, and he dreamed alone by the door for another unknowable time. When another hit, this one the largest beyond his reliable memory yet small compared to what he thought he knew he had known, he was astounded to awake and find that the door had gone. In its place was a gap, from which he felt the faintest of what he might describe as a breeze, were there air where he was. But the featureless door was gone. It took him long to summon the power of will and control of self to move toward it, and when he did still longer to overcome the slight but strong pressure pushing out from the gap, but reach he did, and touched the edges of it, and pulled himself forward until he tumbled into it rather than pushed away. And then—the pain.
He’d felt nothing for so long that the wracking presence of unimaginable torment took time to register. But the agony crept up until it overwhelmed him. He writhed, and realized he could writhe. He screamed, and realized he could scream. The pain went on for what seemed like centuries, and he realized he could perceive time. It relented, and he collapsed in exhaustion, and realized he could feel fatigue.
When he awoke it was cold, and he was lying on a forested hillside, naked but covered by a cloak some kindly passerby had thrown over him. He was hungry, and, wrapping the cloak about himself and putting up its cowl over his head, made his way down the road. The path was steep, but before long, he found himself standing before a shack at the entrance to a compound. Within, he could see others shuffling about, mainly wearing similar garb to his. At the entrance sat a short, stocky man who registered dimly in his mind as a ‘dwarf.’ The man gruffly called him over. “Drunk in the woods, were you, eh? What happened to your clothes?”
What had happened? He didn’t remember. The man’s suggestion seemed as plausible as any. He nodded, ashamed at whatever carelessness had brought him to this pass. The man seemed unpleasant, but oddly unbothered by his response. “I’ve had worse. At least ye came back, stead of running off to town and making my men fetch ye back. D’ye remember your name?”
He didn’t. Long ago, he’d had a name, but now even the prison beyond dimension seemed a faint memory. He touched his face—yes, he had a face—where he felt a large rough patch covering most of his cheek. The man laughed. “Admiring your battle scars? Where’d ye get such a welt? Or is that a birthmark?” The man then shrugged. “I’ll call ye Mark then, til ye remember something better. Get to the purser’s house, he’ll get you a new set of clothes. ‘Twill come out of your wages, but I shan’t have you die of exposure ‘til ye work your debt off. Off with ye.” He went in the direction the dwarf was pointing, and so became a miner.
There he spent the better part of a year, learning all he could of the land he was in and the sort of people who inhabited it. Dimly he remembered heroes and bold deeds, and was unimpressed by the scrabbling miners, but from where did those memories spring? He could not place it. Slowly, however, he began to dream. At first it was merely starscapes, but slowly the stars came to speak to him. “You are of us,” they said. “We are your dwelling, your stuff is mixed with ours. Do our bidding, and you will learn…you will learn…”
What would he learn? First, to see in the dark. He awoke one day from particularly unsettling dreams, and found that although the torches had blown out in the windowless room he shared with two other miners, he could see the door, his fellows, and all in contrasting shades of grey. Second, he learned that there were weaknesses to this form not shared by others. He was slow to react though swift to perceive, and often found himself stumbling in response to dangers he had seen coming before others who responded before he could. But most importantly, he learned that he was not merely a miner who’d gotten drunk one night and forgot himself—the childhood and past that everyone else had and he lacked was not due to his forgetfulness, but due to the action of some sort of Power, a Power that still had interest in him.
A few of the other miners were tired of the mistreatment and planned to escape. With his darkvision, grace, and odd confidence, he was a natural choice to be brought in. The group managed to break out of the compound, and he was in the world, a free man. But who was he, really, the man who still called himself Mark? And which of his fragmented memories and bizarre dreams truly reflect who he is, or was? And what dark force from among the stars is guiding his steps? He is determined to find out.
The concept here is based loosely on Pham Nuwen of “Fire Upon the Deep,” as well as Morgoth of the Morlindale and various Lovecraftian references. A god, imprisoned/slain by his fellows, with a jumble of what’s left of him crammed into a mortal human body. What has survived from his divinity is an air of confidence and powerful personality, plus penetrating senses driven by having lived in a reality realer than the one he is now in, but he has only a year or so’s understanding of the world and no confidence that his memories are accurate. What sort of person is he now, what sort of God was he back then, and which will inform his actions?
Adventure hooks include his attempts to understand people and live as a human, exploration of what the Dark Tapestry wants of him, as well as what happened with his old rival gods and their worshippers, those thousands of years ago.
