Post by Solomon Moon on Nov 1, 2019 4:23:59 GMT -5
Solomon
Night had fallen, or at least, dusk had fallen. The sun was drooping behind the crest of the towering mountains that ringed Haven Forest like the wall left behind by a race of giants, and had filled the caldera with gloom like a witch's cauldron overflowing with shadows as they rushed out of the crags to reclaim the land. There was barely enough light to see by, and if Sol had any sense at all he would have been high tailing it back towards his camp, and be making ready to hunker down for the night, but unfortunately for him, and many others over the course of his life, Sol had precious little sense when it really counted. What sense he had to speak of was being drowned out steadily by his growing desperation, which made far louder and much more persuasive arguments. A sense of dread had fallen upon him over the past few hours, as he had watched the sun descend and eventually retreat behind the soaring peaks of Haven's round mountains. Simply put, he didn't feel as if he'd done enough towards his mission objectives, and without any means of navigating by night, the only progress he was going to gain in that direction was what he could scrape together by the time night truly fell.
Given the choice between failing the midterms for a second time, and having to fumble around blindly in a pitch black forest populated by man-eating horrors from the darkest fancies of a demented god, Sol had predictably chosen the option more likely to result in his gruesome death. In a more introspective mood he might have questioned why exactly the accomplishment of this arbitrary task, set down by the indifferent faculty of the academy would weigh more to his reason than the perpetuation of his own existence, but as it was he was far too concerned with trying to move quietly and quickly, and finding some other sign of intelligent life to pay much mind to philosophy. Besides, any conclusion he could have drawn was likely to be far more depressing, cynical, and indicative of weary self-loathing than actually useful. Given his current frame of mind, which still churned slowly in his skull like boiling poison, after the mean trick that Shadecloak had pulled on him that morning, any conclusion he may have drawn would more likely have been simply harmful.
He couldn't afford to be losing his temper, now more than ever. The cold-blooded thing that came out when he finally fumbled his always tenuous grip on self-control was not the kind of thing suited to subtlety or problem solving, unless the problem in question was something that could be killed or burned down.
He could feel it there, that urge inside him, like something made of oozing darkness peering over his shoulder, just waiting for permission to slip free of the disguise it wore named Solomon Moon, and do the only thing it ever did. That thing had saved his life more than a few times, but to thank it for that small mercy, smaller and meaner by the day in Sol's opinion, would be to forgive the unforgivable. It would have been to ignore the truth of what it was. That reptile inside him was not a thing that saved lives, and only did so by accident. Its only purpose, its only concern, its only wish, was to do exactly the opposite. With how blurred the line had grown over a dozen years, over a hundred engagements, a thousand close calls, and a butcher's bill too high to even estimate, it had become harder and harder to tell where he ended and the animal inside him began. Men did what they needed to do when their survival was on the line. Men became whatever they needed to be to survive, and if they didn't, then they didn't. It was that simple and Say one thing for Solomon Moon, say that he was a survivor. He'd done an awful lot of surviving, and precious little else worth a bloody damn in his own opinion, and he'd done an awful lot of changing, none of it for the better. Love couldn't sustain a man who was starving. Compassion could not staunch a gunshot wound. Morality was a flimsy shield, and humanity a weak thread to hang one's survival on. Give one man virtue and the another a blade, the man with the blade won every time. Trying to hold those things in his mind was like saying them into his hand and trying to hold the words in between his fingers. It was all just wind. Problem was, if those things, foundations upon which society was balanced, were just wind, then it wasn't very far to stretch to say that everything but the meat of his body, everything but the hard wired chemical impulses in his blood and the electricity in his nerves, was just as ephemeral. It wasn't a huge leap of logic to say that the world only allowed things like right and wrong, justice, redemption, to existed when it was forced to, often at the end of a sword.
What he'd become, he had no idea, but more and more it felt like the part of him that could even ask was just a mask. Like a shipwrecked man adrift and feeling the turbulence of the dark things in the abyss below, Sol knew that he was never much more than head and neck above the water, and he wondered if the next time he was pulled into the darkness beneath the scraps of humanity he clung to like so much driftwood torn from his grasp, if it wouldn't be the last time the part of him worth saving saw the surface. He couldn't be certain it hadn't happened already. He didn't really feel like there was much left of him worth saving after all.
A decent man would have died already. A decent man would have died rather than become Solomon Moon. Maybe it would have been when the rebels ambushed him, chopped out his father's throat and burned the command center to the ground. Maybe it would have been when Yoshito cut off his right arm and left him for dead. Maybe it would have been any one of the thousands of other chances he had to go back to the mud, only avoided because of luck and better men than him taking his place. Maybe it would have been before he'd ever been born. Maybe Sol had just been born a worthless monster. Maybe the decent man had never existed at all. How decent could a man, whose truest expression of his character, the quality of his soul itself given form, was to simply lay anything with arm's reach to ruin, to be a force of destruction, actually be?
Sol realized his mind had wandered, and pulled it kicking and complaining back to the task at hand. The thing that lived inside him had been all too happy to take the reigns while he was off in the mire of his mind, and he was holding something strange in the fingers of his left hand. The dark thoughts that he seemed to gravitate towards with some sort of axiomatic force whenever he did not consciously grab his mind by the scruff of it's neck and force it to pay attention, while nice and accurate as far as he was concerned, did not mean Sol was without any, if not positive qualities, at least some useful skills. He'd served alongside some of the most skilled warriors that could be coaxed out of Remnant's wilds by the promise of a competitive wage, and he'd picked up a few tricks when it came to surviving the wilderness.
For example, an assignment to a band of north-men from the Atlesian highlands, had put him in contact with a very gifted scout who had gone by the name of "Dog", possibly on account of a mouthful of sharp yellow teeth and a most uncanny sense of smell. Among other things, Sol had learned how to track game, though that was before life had reduced him to the shell of a man that he was now and it was probably not a great idea to put much faith in a skill fallen so far into disuse. Unless prescription strength painkillers made good bait, Sol wasn't likely to be feeding himself just off the bounty of the land, even if he had any weapon to hand that would have been even remotely appropriate for taking down a foe without reducing it to pink mist or charred wreckage. Sol wasn't Dog with his bloodhound nose and lifetime of scouting for some of the meanest warlords in the north, but Sol knew a snare when he saw one.
The line was barely visible in the failing light, and Sol wondered how he'd managed to find it in his distraction, but now that he'd noticed it, it was clear that the cord of braided wire, drawn into a broad loop at about shin level between a pair of saplings couldn't be anything but a small game snare, likely to catch hares or similar diminutive creatures. Sol peeled the glove off of his hand with his teeth and tested the wire between finger and thumb, running it through his fingers where it hung like the world's most grizzly wreath, checking for signs of corrosion or fraying that might give an indication of how long it had been there. The metal was smooth and still tightly wound, which meant it probably wasn't from the last midterm expedition, which had seen a terrific storm that would likely have produced some sort of wear on the cord, even if it had somehow managed to remain undisturbed in the position which it had be installed.
Sol considered the discovery carefully, and then turned his solitary golden eye towards the last rays of light that were manfully cresting the elevated horizon. He tried to control the hope that was blooming like a flame in his chest. It was just as likely that this was another false ray of deliverance in a long line of disappointment, so he bludgeoned the battered emotion about the head and threw it's carcass back into the hole it had crawled out of. It was a very deep metaphorical hole, and the metaphorical thump that answered the exercising of his ego took some time climb out. Still, this was the closest he was to finding another person since he'd left Jr. in the forest nearly half and hour prior.
He cautiously grasped the snare and followed it back to where it was fixed to the tree. He was nearly surprised and not a little impressed to see a short length of cord with the pods of some local tree ingeniously fastened to it, running parallel to the braided snare. The musical rattle that sounded at the slightest disturbance of the wire confirmed that it was some sort of alarm, probably meant to alert the trapper to their snare capturing a potential victim. It was enough to give Sol pause, because it meant at least two things. One, the trapper had to be nearby if they had stayed close enough to hear the alarm, and two, this might not be the work of a Haven student.
Sol had been racking his brain since the discovery, working through the roster of students he'd encountered since arriving at Haven. Though the list was hardly comprehensive, as he was somewhat of a pariah among his peers, the one eyed mercenary couldn't imagine any single one of the classmates he'd encountered thus far to be capable of such ingenuity. Add to that, that this was the work of someone who might mean to survive in the wild for far longer than the twenty four hours that the midterms called for, and it was seeming more and more likely that the mystery trapper was someone unaffiliated with Haven, and living in one of the most hostile environments known to man. The lists of reasons why someone would secrete themselves away in the wilderness overrun with Grimm, and what reasons could possibly justify that risk, was a short and troubling one. Bandits, and insurgent cells were the first to come to mind, both of which Sol had some experience with.
All in all, it called for caution.
Sol wrapped the fingers of his gloved right hand around the hilt of his sword and quietly, carefully loosened the sword from it's sheath. With machine precision he sliced the alarm from the cord, and caught it in his left hand before it could make enough sound to be heard over the ambient rustling song of the forest around him. He gripped the collection of seed pods carefully and felt their dried contents rattling against his palm as he slunk back into the low branches of a nearby bush, slipping into the leaves until the olive drab of his camo had dissolved into the confusion of green leaves, shifting his weight until the black of his boots was hidden beneath a small mound of dried leaves. Having made himself as inconspicuous as possible, with the aid of his forest camo combat uniform, and Dog's nasally voice whisper into his ear across the years, Sol drew up the hood of his jacket and smeared dirt across the flesh of his face.
Then he threw the pilfered collection of makeshift chimes out towards the snare. As expect, a sharp chattering rattle of the seed skittering about inside their pods rose above the din of the forest, much louder than expect and making Sol actively wince.
Then he waited. Scanning the gloom for anything coming to investigate the commotion.
Given the choice between failing the midterms for a second time, and having to fumble around blindly in a pitch black forest populated by man-eating horrors from the darkest fancies of a demented god, Sol had predictably chosen the option more likely to result in his gruesome death. In a more introspective mood he might have questioned why exactly the accomplishment of this arbitrary task, set down by the indifferent faculty of the academy would weigh more to his reason than the perpetuation of his own existence, but as it was he was far too concerned with trying to move quietly and quickly, and finding some other sign of intelligent life to pay much mind to philosophy. Besides, any conclusion he could have drawn was likely to be far more depressing, cynical, and indicative of weary self-loathing than actually useful. Given his current frame of mind, which still churned slowly in his skull like boiling poison, after the mean trick that Shadecloak had pulled on him that morning, any conclusion he may have drawn would more likely have been simply harmful.
He couldn't afford to be losing his temper, now more than ever. The cold-blooded thing that came out when he finally fumbled his always tenuous grip on self-control was not the kind of thing suited to subtlety or problem solving, unless the problem in question was something that could be killed or burned down.
He could feel it there, that urge inside him, like something made of oozing darkness peering over his shoulder, just waiting for permission to slip free of the disguise it wore named Solomon Moon, and do the only thing it ever did. That thing had saved his life more than a few times, but to thank it for that small mercy, smaller and meaner by the day in Sol's opinion, would be to forgive the unforgivable. It would have been to ignore the truth of what it was. That reptile inside him was not a thing that saved lives, and only did so by accident. Its only purpose, its only concern, its only wish, was to do exactly the opposite. With how blurred the line had grown over a dozen years, over a hundred engagements, a thousand close calls, and a butcher's bill too high to even estimate, it had become harder and harder to tell where he ended and the animal inside him began. Men did what they needed to do when their survival was on the line. Men became whatever they needed to be to survive, and if they didn't, then they didn't. It was that simple and Say one thing for Solomon Moon, say that he was a survivor. He'd done an awful lot of surviving, and precious little else worth a bloody damn in his own opinion, and he'd done an awful lot of changing, none of it for the better. Love couldn't sustain a man who was starving. Compassion could not staunch a gunshot wound. Morality was a flimsy shield, and humanity a weak thread to hang one's survival on. Give one man virtue and the another a blade, the man with the blade won every time. Trying to hold those things in his mind was like saying them into his hand and trying to hold the words in between his fingers. It was all just wind. Problem was, if those things, foundations upon which society was balanced, were just wind, then it wasn't very far to stretch to say that everything but the meat of his body, everything but the hard wired chemical impulses in his blood and the electricity in his nerves, was just as ephemeral. It wasn't a huge leap of logic to say that the world only allowed things like right and wrong, justice, redemption, to existed when it was forced to, often at the end of a sword.
What he'd become, he had no idea, but more and more it felt like the part of him that could even ask was just a mask. Like a shipwrecked man adrift and feeling the turbulence of the dark things in the abyss below, Sol knew that he was never much more than head and neck above the water, and he wondered if the next time he was pulled into the darkness beneath the scraps of humanity he clung to like so much driftwood torn from his grasp, if it wouldn't be the last time the part of him worth saving saw the surface. He couldn't be certain it hadn't happened already. He didn't really feel like there was much left of him worth saving after all.
A decent man would have died already. A decent man would have died rather than become Solomon Moon. Maybe it would have been when the rebels ambushed him, chopped out his father's throat and burned the command center to the ground. Maybe it would have been when Yoshito cut off his right arm and left him for dead. Maybe it would have been any one of the thousands of other chances he had to go back to the mud, only avoided because of luck and better men than him taking his place. Maybe it would have been before he'd ever been born. Maybe Sol had just been born a worthless monster. Maybe the decent man had never existed at all. How decent could a man, whose truest expression of his character, the quality of his soul itself given form, was to simply lay anything with arm's reach to ruin, to be a force of destruction, actually be?
Sol realized his mind had wandered, and pulled it kicking and complaining back to the task at hand. The thing that lived inside him had been all too happy to take the reigns while he was off in the mire of his mind, and he was holding something strange in the fingers of his left hand. The dark thoughts that he seemed to gravitate towards with some sort of axiomatic force whenever he did not consciously grab his mind by the scruff of it's neck and force it to pay attention, while nice and accurate as far as he was concerned, did not mean Sol was without any, if not positive qualities, at least some useful skills. He'd served alongside some of the most skilled warriors that could be coaxed out of Remnant's wilds by the promise of a competitive wage, and he'd picked up a few tricks when it came to surviving the wilderness.
For example, an assignment to a band of north-men from the Atlesian highlands, had put him in contact with a very gifted scout who had gone by the name of "Dog", possibly on account of a mouthful of sharp yellow teeth and a most uncanny sense of smell. Among other things, Sol had learned how to track game, though that was before life had reduced him to the shell of a man that he was now and it was probably not a great idea to put much faith in a skill fallen so far into disuse. Unless prescription strength painkillers made good bait, Sol wasn't likely to be feeding himself just off the bounty of the land, even if he had any weapon to hand that would have been even remotely appropriate for taking down a foe without reducing it to pink mist or charred wreckage. Sol wasn't Dog with his bloodhound nose and lifetime of scouting for some of the meanest warlords in the north, but Sol knew a snare when he saw one.
The line was barely visible in the failing light, and Sol wondered how he'd managed to find it in his distraction, but now that he'd noticed it, it was clear that the cord of braided wire, drawn into a broad loop at about shin level between a pair of saplings couldn't be anything but a small game snare, likely to catch hares or similar diminutive creatures. Sol peeled the glove off of his hand with his teeth and tested the wire between finger and thumb, running it through his fingers where it hung like the world's most grizzly wreath, checking for signs of corrosion or fraying that might give an indication of how long it had been there. The metal was smooth and still tightly wound, which meant it probably wasn't from the last midterm expedition, which had seen a terrific storm that would likely have produced some sort of wear on the cord, even if it had somehow managed to remain undisturbed in the position which it had be installed.
Sol considered the discovery carefully, and then turned his solitary golden eye towards the last rays of light that were manfully cresting the elevated horizon. He tried to control the hope that was blooming like a flame in his chest. It was just as likely that this was another false ray of deliverance in a long line of disappointment, so he bludgeoned the battered emotion about the head and threw it's carcass back into the hole it had crawled out of. It was a very deep metaphorical hole, and the metaphorical thump that answered the exercising of his ego took some time climb out. Still, this was the closest he was to finding another person since he'd left Jr. in the forest nearly half and hour prior.
He cautiously grasped the snare and followed it back to where it was fixed to the tree. He was nearly surprised and not a little impressed to see a short length of cord with the pods of some local tree ingeniously fastened to it, running parallel to the braided snare. The musical rattle that sounded at the slightest disturbance of the wire confirmed that it was some sort of alarm, probably meant to alert the trapper to their snare capturing a potential victim. It was enough to give Sol pause, because it meant at least two things. One, the trapper had to be nearby if they had stayed close enough to hear the alarm, and two, this might not be the work of a Haven student.
Sol had been racking his brain since the discovery, working through the roster of students he'd encountered since arriving at Haven. Though the list was hardly comprehensive, as he was somewhat of a pariah among his peers, the one eyed mercenary couldn't imagine any single one of the classmates he'd encountered thus far to be capable of such ingenuity. Add to that, that this was the work of someone who might mean to survive in the wild for far longer than the twenty four hours that the midterms called for, and it was seeming more and more likely that the mystery trapper was someone unaffiliated with Haven, and living in one of the most hostile environments known to man. The lists of reasons why someone would secrete themselves away in the wilderness overrun with Grimm, and what reasons could possibly justify that risk, was a short and troubling one. Bandits, and insurgent cells were the first to come to mind, both of which Sol had some experience with.
All in all, it called for caution.
Sol wrapped the fingers of his gloved right hand around the hilt of his sword and quietly, carefully loosened the sword from it's sheath. With machine precision he sliced the alarm from the cord, and caught it in his left hand before it could make enough sound to be heard over the ambient rustling song of the forest around him. He gripped the collection of seed pods carefully and felt their dried contents rattling against his palm as he slunk back into the low branches of a nearby bush, slipping into the leaves until the olive drab of his camo had dissolved into the confusion of green leaves, shifting his weight until the black of his boots was hidden beneath a small mound of dried leaves. Having made himself as inconspicuous as possible, with the aid of his forest camo combat uniform, and Dog's nasally voice whisper into his ear across the years, Sol drew up the hood of his jacket and smeared dirt across the flesh of his face.
Then he threw the pilfered collection of makeshift chimes out towards the snare. As expect, a sharp chattering rattle of the seed skittering about inside their pods rose above the din of the forest, much louder than expect and making Sol actively wince.
Then he waited. Scanning the gloom for anything coming to investigate the commotion.
@tag | 2280 words | notes |
Velvet of WW