Abyssal Child

Background

This story was originally posted by Gamemaster Armifer in the Guild Events folders of the Moon Mage folders of the Dragonrealms forum on 8/16/2008.

Abyssal Child

A handful of astrologers every decade report encountering a "storm" in their prophetic trance. The experience is invariably violent, lashing the mystic with as much psychic force as he could possibly draw through the planar void. The psychic maelstrom is suspected in some fatalities, though it is impossible to isolate that from the handful of other exotic deaths that visit very unlucky seers.

Approximately four hundred years ago a former Grandmaster was the first to encounter the maelstrom and possess the mental fortitude to examine it in detail. After an initial flurry of violent psychic pulses, the Grandmaster reported that the scene resolved into an idyllic paradise. He spent the next six pages of his journal detailing the specific features of his paradise.

In summary, he identified the maelstrom as an extremely dense "cloud" of semi-physical emotion. Initial entry into the cloud provoked fear and suspicion, which then morphed into a blend of curiosity and glee. Everything within the visionary experience was conjured from that rarified material; the Grandmaster's mind was in contact with a little world built entirely out of joy.

After an indeterminate time, the Grandmaster gathered his wits and continued to explore the mental landscape. At the conceptual center his personality was nearly obliterated by contact with a mind of unimaginable strength. The Grandmaster realized at this point that the cloud was an aura; the unconscious babble of a godlike intelligence.

The cloud-mind reacted poorly to the Grandmaster's probing. The emotional theme dove with maniac speed into screaming rage and hatred. The Grandmaster's visionary body was slowly torn to pieces by spite grown into tidal forces. He describes, among a sundry list of horrors, seeing tiny specks of psychic energy thrown out of the cloud in the alien mind's fit. These specks formed into Voidspawn, each a living manifestation of inhuman rage.

After the Grandmaster recovered enough from his experience to eat and bathe himself again, he wrote the account that has been paraphrased and a forgettable work on the intelligence of the maelstrom. He never bothered to explain why he dubbed it Abyssal Child, and the only contemporaries that questioned the name were single men.