Abraxas

Silver Pocketwatch Trinkets This pocketwatch is in excellent condition, but the time it keeps is always too early. 90

Abraxas the Cursed To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.

Memento Mori Generation 4 Bloodline: Nascentes morimur Dutiful | Empathetic | Diffident

Memento mori (Latin: "remember that you have to die") is the medieval Latin Christian theory and practice of reflection on mortality, especially as a means of considering the vanity of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits. Memento mori has been an important part of ascetic disciplines as a means of perfecting the character by cultivating detachment and other virtues, and by turning the attention towards the immortality of the soul and the afterlife. This curse would be traced down his lineage. All Vigil's children were destined to die, like any dragon. But they would be given a second chance. It was up to the children if they would accept the bargain.

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Abraxas was born with his skeleton marked on his skin; not so unusual, for most dragons, of most bloodlines, but it had always seemed ominous to him, given the curse he'd inherited from his mother, the little brother who'd died in the shell. Even so, even with that hovering over him, he had obligations to fulfill, two family legacies to carry on, two storied lineages to live up to. There was only one path he could take - he had to become a warrior.

He found a clan seeking young warrior trainees. For territory defense and keeping the peace internally, they clarified; if he wanted to be exalted, he'd need to find some other clan. That was fine by him. He wasn't some glory hound; he just wanted to do his duty, find his way, get a berth in some clan barracks and do the job they gave him.

He was apprenticed to a scarred and intimidating (to put it mildly - "terrifying" crossed his mind more than once) veteran named Kotone. She'd lost one leg and one wing, replacing them with prosthetics made of living wood. Her prosthetic wing had leaves. And she still swatted down and tore through the hostile specters of the Ghostlight Ruins like they were flocks of sparrowmice. It was frightening. It was impressive. And it made him feel a bit bad for all the spirits.

Maybe that was where he went wrong. Maybe, looking into the mad, glowing eyes of a rotting creature that used to be a unicorn, he hesitated. Or maybe not. Maybe he was just too slow. Either way, it was fatal, and as he fell, bleeding from a gash in his throat, his last thought was Now I know how it feels.



Now he knew how it felt. He knew pain, he knew the silence and eerie bodilessness of death, the shadowy, hard-to-recall otherworld. And he'd come back, accompanied by the sound of wings. The Corven at his side seemed to be a creature of this world, still, but he couldn't be quite certain. And neither, he learned, could the Corven. Karasu, the creature called himself, though it wasn't his name, just a designation.

His mentor, Kotone, had believed he was dead, and hadn't known of his family curse. In retrospect, perhaps he should have mentioned it. He'd felt out of place enough in a large, bustling clan, situated in Light territory but home to dragons born to every flight, without bringing up the two legacies he carried. Kotone had summoned help to bring his corpse back to the clan's territory; when she led a gleaming purple guardian back to him, they found him sitting upright, preening the blood off his feathers, and listening attentively to the croaking and squawking of a Corven Reaper.

Explaining his condition to the clan was a daunting prospect, but they were a diverse group, making room for all; a possibly-undead, cursed warrior was less of a concern to the clan leadership than tensions between Pearlcatchers and Imperials, and while there were certainly those who viewed him with suspicion or revulsion, he was clearly welcome to continue to make his home here. Kotone was willing to continue his training - "Try not to get killed again, okay, kid? I don't know how often you can pull that trick" - and while some of his fellow warrior trainees were uncomfortable with him, he had a private room, and he'd always been a loner.

And he had Karasu for company. Karasu, who was less certain than Abraxas himself as to which side of the veil of death claimed him. Karasu's role had been - and still was, when they returned to the Ruins - to hunt those fellow Corven who'd been corrupted by dark magic, or their restless souls, and give them peace the only way he had left. But finding those corrupted Corven had brought him into constant contact with the darkness, in both a magical and a metaphorical sense. Each of the Corven he hunted had had some reason to explore dark magics - seeking to protect those they loved, to contact the beloved dead, to obtain something desperately needed - and he'd carried the weight of those stories. Grieving families would ask him to save their child, their parent, their brother or sister, and he'd reassure them, knowing the only salvation from the darkness was death.

At Kotone's suggestion, Abraxas visited the clan's library, where a Serthis scholar wove nimbly between the Imperial librarian's legs to greet Karasu in a sibilant tongue Abraxas had never heard before. The Imperial herself lowered her head to his level to listen to his halting, awkward explanation of his curse, and then brightened into a smile. "You must have so much to tell us!" she exclaimed.

He didn't, yet. He supposed he could. He knew the way back to the Underworld, now, and he made a return trip that very night, not long after darkness fell; he spent what seemed like hours in conversation more in-depth than any he'd experienced in the living world, experiencing all the joys and sorrows of a long-dead Snapper's rich and well-traveled life. When he emerged, though, barely an hour had passed.

He spent the rest of the night transcribing the story, feeling the whole time the inadequacy of words to what he'd felt in the Underworld. When he delivered the manuscript to Alexandria and Ashurbanipal at the library, he nervously wandered the stacks, occasionally peeking around corners to check their reactions and then fleeing whenever he caught a snatch of his own words (the manuscript was Skydancer-sized; Ashurbanipal had to read it aloud to Alexandria.) He was stunned, though, when he saw Alexandria weeping. "It's beautiful work," she told him, after they'd read it in full. "I know it's someone else's life, but you were the one who chose the words and wrote the narrative."



Abraxas and Karasu would wander the streets of the village, one of many bordering on Lanternlea Port. They browsed the markets, watched the hatchlings at play outside the school, and visited the library with more historical accounts, more stories gleaned from the dead. He began to notice the presence of the dead among the living - a little ghost Guardian among the clan's living hatchlings, an animate scroll that was clearly some sort of spirit accompanying a Pearlcatcher he often saw at the library - and he began to wonder if ghosts were really so harmful.

He began to wonder if he were really so different from them.

Oh, there was certainly need for defense against hostile spirits, and he'd use his warrior training to that end as needed. And if he could use his skills and his ability to communicate with the dead to reach a peaceful solution, to help hostile spirits become less hostile, or even to move on - that would be an even better solution. But what he lived for were those times when he was able to really converse with a spirit, to learn what they'd loved and hated, how they'd lived and died; when he was able to glimpse a lost memory some dead soul had never shared before. The gleam of sunset on a beloved hatchling's face. The first glimpse of daylight for an Earth dragon hatched in a cave deep underground. The fear and hope experienced by a Nocturne concealing her firstborn egg in the leaves of a haunted forest.

He couldn't bear to let so many of the dead be forgotten.