[Nin`]

Out of Character: Again, thoughts are italicised, whereas sub-vocalised thoughts are italicised with quotation marks.

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Caught in the continuing reflection of his mask, Lucid stood distantly ahead of him.

He approached the entranceway with strident gait, his cloak swaying vacillatingly around him like an erratic black flame, as the fortress continued to loom overhead with riven statuesque.

As Nin drew nearer, the flash and flicker of his eyes shimmered lustily against the backdrop of a forlorn empyrean.

His mind was still in the process of decelerating after accessing its neural quantum state. The subjective effect was normal consciousness, but at an accelerated rate. It was as if his brain had been supercharged, able to process thoughts at a rate of twenty times faster then any normal mind. He could watch an apple fall from a tree and compose an assiduous disembowelling before it had reached the ground. Or watch the depressor and elevator muscle flex and twist in a hummingbird’s wing.

Lucids words coursed fluidly into his auditory cortex, intermittently, syllable by syllable at a time. He knew everything Lucid was saying, even before his brain could processes the frequency vibrations. It was something else he had learned while his mind was in superposition with its various parallel future states, when acquiring the knowledge he needed of the Draconic gates internal structure.

Then suddenly, without warning, his advance came to a swift halt as a squad of Master troops appeared from all sides around him, quickly encircling Nin with a thicket of spears all pointed towards him; and some had bows in hand, with arrows already fitted to the string, while others bore rifles of some arcane design.

This was unexpected. But Nin knew well that not all things could be so foreseen.

Nin quickly noted that those holding firearms were not soldiers, but technicians. By withdrawing his legions he had obviously given them all some sort of valiant encouragement. One strode forward toward him, a tall man of the castle guard from what Nin could judge, glancing at his armoury and uniform. He advanced until the point of his spear was within a foot of Nin’s breast. But Nin did not stir; momentarily, with an evanescent flicker of his eyes, Nin glanced back toward Lucid, yet the pillar just stood there before the open entrance of the gate, almost as if he were in a state of reverie, and completely unaware of his surroundings.

'Poor boy,' thought Nin to himself as the Pillars words continued to filter throughout his auditory senses. He steadily turned his attention back to the guard in front of him, his mind continuing to decelerate with the world still moving slowly around him. He could quite easily have forced his neural deceleration and restored his mind back to its natural processing speed instantly, but he didn’t want to risk overheating his glial cells or suffer any brief information loss. Better to let it restore itself naturally, he thought.

“Who are you, beast! What business have you in these lands!” Yelled the guard, viewing himself in the reflection of the stranger’s contorted shaped mask.

Nin remained silent, maintaining his composure as he viewed the guard with little more then a stoic gaze. The guard was quickly infuriated by his unmoved mien and apparent show of audacity.

“Beast! We are willing to die for our homeland!!” The guard lunged his spear toward Nin’s breast. But Nin continued to remain still, even as the spear hit - yet its edge failed to pierce any part of him. The guard’s eyes went wide with shock, before his countenance sharply contorted with ashen horror. Reaching out his right arm, Nin pulled the guard in closer to him; gouts of blood splashed against the ground below, while the remaining Masters each backed away like a flock of fearful birds.

“Willing to die for your homeland are you…?" Muttered Nin, almost teasingly.

"That’s very fitting, because I’m wiling to kill for it.” His words echoed malignly through the small band of Masters. The guard’s spear had struck his torso cleanly, but, unknowingly to him, Nin was adept in violently twisting space-time around him, over certain areas of his body. The weapons reality had been bent around itself, to such a degree, that it was propelled in the opposite direction, now impaling the guard on his own spear.

As revelation struck them, the remaining Masters each turned to flee, but to their despair they were unable to move… their minds had been petrified with fear; Nin had locked each of their amygdalae into a state of perpetual dread.

'These minds should do nicely,' he thought to himself satisfingly.

Then, from out the swirling blackness of his cloak, a mass of twisting black shapes, like great arched vines of shadow, loomed up all around him; like a slithering, restless dance of ink like arms on many scales, mimicking the way an octopus moved through the water. Almost no remaining light was visible beyond the absolute shifting black of the tentacles, accept for a flickering mauve light within them.

Clouds of smaller black shapes attended each major assemblage, and as the assemblages neared each other they threw out extensions between themselves, like umbilical cords of flowing darkness. Waves of energy pulsed between the main bodies, as the tentacles rapidly fissioned and merged with one another. The purple lightning continuing to flicker between the inky shapes with intensity, occasionally forming a geometric shell around Nin before collapsing back into something which appeared much more random. Despite the certain feeling that they were going to die, the Masters found the approach disturbingly hypnotic, like watching a finely orchestrated group of dancers, each locked in sinuous lithe. But it was also sickening: simply looking at these black and ink-like tentacles inspired a hollow feeling of dreadful nausea, for they were apprehending something that had clearly never been shaped by human intelligence; and in their minds the Masters knew that they had terribly underestimated their enemy. Veins of shadow crept closer and closer, malignly, oozing tightly around their prey.

Limned in violent arcs and sprays of lightning – quivering sheets and dancing baubles of contained plasma energy – the arcs of shadow probed inwards, obscenely and hungrily. The pointed ends of the forming arms suddenly bifurcated – rushing at the guards with unrelenting haste. They grew via oozing waves of pulsating darkness along the lengths behind them, the shadows swelling or contracting before locking into their fatal positions. Bifurcating and re-bifurcating they now formed a many fingered black hand, poised before each of the Master’s faces, ready to be plunged into eyes, mouths, noses, ears, even through skin and bone.

The Masters were forcefully held up in mid air like an array of puppets as the shadowy arms taut their quarry, gripping their faces in a show off pitched horror and tonal discord - like fingernails scratching sharply against a blackboard. The bifurcated hands delved deeper and deeper into the guard’s heads ravishing every orifice they could find, drilling through bone and muscle, until they had reached the cerebral cortexes. The arms were interrogating them, retrieving neural structures and synaptic transmissions, deep from within their encephalons.

The shadowy arms, like wild gluttonous monsters, sapped the Masters of everything they knew, including the Draconic gate and its defensive systems; drinking and stripping them of their very identities in the process, before feeding them directly into Nin’s mind. After their skulls had been emptied, and completely hollowed, the lifeless band of Masters were discarded like rag dolls as the arms of shadow hurled them outward in multiple directions, before quickly regressing back to the depths of Nin’s cloak.

Now that he had secured the data on the gate the information could be used and passed on to other, and various parallel states of himself - throughout the endless multiverse; and thus continuing the cycle.

He smirked, directing his attentions back toward Lucid, just as his mind restored itself back into its natural acceleration rate. Subjective reality normalized once more; his surroundings flowing in steady synchronisation with his conscious perception of them.

"How foolish to think that you could breach the gate so easily..." Came the Pillar of Minds voice, almost convincingly from what Nin could detect in his tone.

'Is this fool deliberately trying to play mind games with me?' he questioned to himself, eyeing Lucid, when suddenly his thoughts were interrupted with the presence of another: 'I do wish you would refrain from that Nin, or at least give fair warning before hand. Accelerating your mind like that is horribly erratic'.

'Thought I told you to be silent… besides it was necessary,' replied Nin, his tone cold and betraying no emotion.

The presence took a moment to respond, as it sometimes did. 'Yes I see, you made quite a mess… so this is the Pillar of Mind?' It questioned, turning its attentions towards Lucid.

'Tell me Chronos, what do you make of him…' asked Nin.

Chronos almost chuckled to itself in response. 'You call me by name, and ask of my opinion, all in the same sentence? My, my; and what’s got into you pray tell… don’t you already know?'

'I know only the basics of him. I could infiltrate his mind, but it would mean lowering my defences. So tell me what you see, use the warp if you have too.' Nin could feel Chronos’ thought processes churning somewhere behind his own. The experience was a bit like possessing a subconscious mind actually being able to communicate with you.

'Hmm,' murmured Chronos, 'it would appear that he is, what you would call, a duel soul being. He seems to posses both the soul of a demon and a human; acquired rather then inherited I think. Kraai is the demons name, quite a unpleasant little creature.' Chronos continued to delve deeper. 'Now lets see, Lucid… it seems he tried distorting your mind, which in turn appears to have distorted his own, allowing him too see what he wants to see…'

'I thought as much,' responded Nin, relatively unsurprised considering the power of his death mask. 'But lets be sure…'

He looked down to the rubble beneath him, picking up a shattered piece of debris in the process with a slight of his mind, before grasping it in his right hand. He analysed it for a long moment, allowing the structural information to wash over his tactile senses, passing through into the depths of his mind. Satisfied, Nin crushed the rock with near-effortless ease, allowing it to crumble back down to the ground below. That was all the evidence he needed.

Nin mused silently to himself over the pillars prosaical words, before addressing him directly. “Your tawdry arrogance dissimulates your fears well… or perhaps it ignorance...” An echo of dark laughter followed in his words like a myriad of sweeping shadows, as if a thousand other voices had surrounded him from some bleak and unknown place.

“You’re a surrealistic mind I can see, but it will not aid you against me…” The wind suddenly died, and all the air stood still as if quenched of hope.

His voice crackled with a faint laughter.

“Your illusions and ignis fatuus won’t work on me, boy.” His laughter grew, sinisterly.

“Anything which you attempt to mentally project, affecting my mind, is directly reflected back unto your own. A weakling like you cannot distort any part of my mind from me, nor can you control it.”

Extending his mind once more, Nin psychokinetically raised up the aggregated mass of rubble around him.

“Unfortunately for you, your illusions have just become your own,” the aggregation fell back to the ground with a thunderous crash, as he released the wreckage from his psychic grip.

“I’m afraid your gate is still very much in ruin. In attempting to distort my mind you’ve only succeeded in distorting your own,” he up looked toward the sky, watching the ongoing battle raging high above them with minor interest.

“Perhaps this is ample explanation for you regarding my mask… perhaps not. Given how easily fooled your rabble is, it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to learn that you still don’t understand. Think, however you might try,” he mocked, turning back to Lucid with a scorn.