Welcome to Gaia! ::

Aleksander, Silver Fang Ahroun
From a post set

Another dead end. Another dead end in a long line of nothing but shattered hopes and dead ends. Wasn't there a road in all of Gaia that led me somewhere useful? I slid into the chair and held my head in my hands for a moment. Damn that woman. I blamed myself of course. It was all my fault. If I had only been there. I don't care what anyone says. I know she was waiting for me to leave. If I had stayed... if I had only stayed, none of this would have happened. But I couldn't stay. I had duties to preform. I had promises to keep... and in doing so I broke the one promise that mattered most. To protect my cousin.

Poor Tash... I could only imagine what had become of her in all this time. I wondered how the years had changed her. I could have passed her on the street and I wouldn't recognize her. No, that wasn't true. I would know her scent as sure as I knew any of my family. Still, so much time had passed, and I was beginning to fear damn woman's ramblings were true.

It hadn't taken long for my Uncle to know something was not right. His wife and daughter were suddenly gone... as was the car Sophie used for her errands. It wasn't like her to leave without saying something. When she failed to return by nightfall, my Uncle had come to find me. The worried look on his face had sent me into a panic the moment he had come into the room. I just knew something had happened to Tash. We looked, searched, and finally hunted for them, following a trail that looped like a crazy drunken spiral upon itself, and I had worried the worst had happened. Every moment we chased, the trail seemed to grow colder, the scent fading into the wind and the smells of the cities we went through.

Finally, we had found Sophie at the side of the road. The car had broken down, and she was rocking back and forth, laughing softly to herself. My Aunt had finally lost her mind. To my horror, Tash was no where to be found, and her scent was so faded from the car that I knew she hadn't been in it for a while. No amount of pleading and shaking could bring my Aunt from her state, and we feared that Tash had been taken. Perhaps it was the Shadow Lords who had taken her, or the minions of the wyrm. Worst of all, Dancers... No matter where we looked, we could not find her.

Then, one day, in her half crazed muttering, my Aunt had a moment of clarity, and she looked at my Uncle and stated, "You'll never find her. I made sure of that."

I thought my Uncle was going to come out of his skin at that bit of information. For a moment, I thought he was going to kill his wife. For a moment, I thought I was going to kill his wife. Here, the whole time we had suspected foul play, but never had we expected my Aunt... his wife... to be the center root of it all. She had taken Tash from under our noses and done something with her. She was to blame. Family. Family was at fault. Not the Shadow Lords. Not the minions of the wyrm. My aunt, who had stepped outside her mind and sat rocking back and forth most days. My dear, crazy aunt had done this to us. Damn that woman.

Sometimes my Aunt would say that Tash was safe and would be taken care of, other times she would say she had killed her and buried the body. We doubted that she had done such a horrible act, mostly because we would have smelled Tash's blood when we found Sophie. Still, that didn't mean that Tash was not dead.... And that thought ate at my Uncle, almost as much as it ate at me.

It was all I could do not to kill the woman right there... and it's been a battle in my heart these last six years. I want to kill her. I think she deserves to be put out of her misery. Mostly because I can see her insanity as a foothold for the wyrm to poison her mind. If my Uncle didn't keep her under lock and key, I would fear she would seek out the Dancers and try to join them. Maybe he fears the same thing. In any case, she is not right in the head, and I fear it makes her not right in the heart.

Still, we keep her around, hoping that one day she will again say something that will lead us to Tash. In the mean time, I slowly hunt for her. I look for her... I follow every lead I can. I have to. She's my cousin, and I swore I would protect her. I made her a promise, and I must keep my promise. What kind of a cousin would I be if I did not keep my promise? What kind of a Silver Fang? I will find her... somehow.

But not today it seems. I have reached another dead end. Every lead I get, turns to sand in my grasp. I never thought it would be this hard to track someone, to hunt someone... I never imagined that six years later, I wouldn't have found her yet. It eats at me. It slowly kills me inside.

I'm Ahroun. It is my job to be the warrior. I have to be strong, and hold out hope when others see none. I have to fight the tough battles that would make others run for cover. I have to uphold the honor of my station. But inside, I am dying. She's been gone so long, and every day is a reminder of how I failed to protect her. Six years of reminders... Six long and lonely years.

At night, I lay in the bed, wondering where she is. I remember the times before she was taken... the nights I would protect her from nightmares and anything else she feared. After a time, I knew she didn't need me to protect her from bad dreams... but I needed her. I had grown used to guarding her. It gave me purpose. It was meaning in my life... and so I continued to protect her each night, as I had for so long. Until... I failed to protect her when she needed me.

Poor Tash... I wonder where she is. Merciful Gaia... lead me to her. Let me find her and right this horrible wrong that eats at me. Lead me to her and help me bring joy and happiness back to our family. Lead me to her and let me guard and protect her once again. I will not fail a second time. I should not have failed the first. Tash... where are you? Where are you?


***

Yet another dead end. I was nothing if not consistent. I shook my head and laid down on the bed, wondering what I was doing wrong. My aunt had been crazy, still was. How could she have hidden Tash this well? How could she have kept her from us this long?

I knew the scent trail was all but dead at this point. I had known that for a while. It didn't stop me. I kept looking. I had to. I had a promise to keep. I had a cousin to find. The only problem was, I wasn't doing a good job of finding her. Nothing I did seemed to change that fact. I kept hitting dead ends and having to back track to find new leads, only to have them turn out the same way. Why did I feel like Tash was slipping further from me every time? I rolled onto my side and curled up a little, trying to think. My aunt had maintained for years that Tash was dead. Of course, she had also told us for as long that Tash was hidden from us where we would never find her. She couldn't be alive and dead at the same time. Could she? The thought was horrible and I pushed it from my mind. My aunt was crazy, but I doubted she had managed that one. No, either Tash was alive, or she was dead. I hoped she was alive. I prayed every night to Gaia that she was alive. She had to be.

I rolled back onto my other side and kept thinking. My aunt had made all kinds of crazy loops and backtracking and anything else that she could think of to confuse us. Or she had been confused herself. Tracing her exact route had been nearly impossible, so I had started by following it as best I could. When that came up empty, I started hitting places close by where I had gone, thinking she might have gone five miles this way, or ten miles that... Now, I was so far outside the original path that I felt like I was in the wrong state half the time.

My eyes closed and I kept thinking. Where could she be? What was I missing? What was I doing wrong? Where had she vanished to? Why hadn't she come back to us? Why? What? How? The questions swirled in my head until I thought I was spinning right along with them. I felt as if my life, my world, my own sanity was spinning out of control. I felt so helpless and so lost. For six years I had looked for her. What if I had lost her? How would I find her now, after so much time had passed?

And then I did something I had never done in the entire time since I had gone through my first shift. I broke down, and I cried.

***

At some point I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, I was dreaming. I knew I was dreaming because Tash was there in front of me, twelve years old again and looking scared out of her mind. I called out to her, but she didn't seem to hear me. She was curled up on a bed, her knees pulled to her chest, and she had been crying. I could tell. I tried to go to her, but the more I moved toward her, the further she moved away from me. I had to stop, for fear of losing her completely, and again, I sat down and cried. I let the rage inside of me out, screaming and yelling and tearing at my hair and flesh.

"WHY?!" I screamed into the darkness of the dream. "Why can't I find her? Why can't I get to her? Where is she?"

There was no reply. I hadn't expected one. Dreams can only tell you what you already know on some level, and if I had known how to get to her, I would be there already. Tash's image faded from the dream, and I was left alone in a dark place. I knew this place. I knew the horror of it well. The emptiness that was my life. The darkness that tried to wrap itself around my heart. The darkness that had poisoned my aunt and stolen Tash from me. I growled and snarled, not that it did any good. It was just darkness, after all, and it was in fact, my own mind I was fighting.

I stood, if one can ever really stand in a dream when there is no floor or indication of direction. I refused to give into my own insanity. I refused to give in to my darkness. I tried to wake up, but I couldn't.

"Try telling me something useful for a change. I know she's gone. I know she's probably scared out of her mind. How do I find her? What is it I've been overlooking?"

Again there was no answer. Again, I hadn't expected one. I had nothing left to go on. I had no where else to look, no where else to go. I was at the final dead end, and I was refusing to give up. I knew I would eventually go back to the beginning, start over, start from the same place I had started six years ago. And I hated to think of it, but I had a horrible feeling that in another six years, I would be back here in this same hotel room, having this same dream, and realizing I was still to stubborn to give up, and that I would be starting over yet again. Like a rat on a wheel, I would be stuck in this circle until I found her or I died.

***

The cell phone finally woke me up. I opened my eyes slowly, unsure if I was still dreaming or not. I felt like s**t. I felt like a giant furry failure and my eyes burned. I reached for the phone and flipped it on.

"Privet?" I asked in Russian, knowing the only one who would be calling was my uncle. I listened as he told me of another possible lead. I fumbled with the light and began to write down what he was saying even as I was trying to wake up from the dream. I thanked him, "Spasiba " and I hung up the phone, rubbing my eyes and looking for my shirt. No rest for the wicked, they say. Gaia only knows how I felt I deserved this. I had failed Tash... I had failed and now, I would not stop until I had fixed what mess I had made.

Makayla, Human
From her Introduction set

"I don't care who you have to talk to, who you have to bribe, who you have to sleep with to get it, just get me that information. I don't want to hear excuses. I don't want any sob stories or hard luck stories or any stories at all. You get that information for me, or you'll wish you had."

The phone clicked and the silence that followed rolled in upon itself until it was almost maddening. The soft tick of the clock on the wall seemed to roar each second, like a hammer. She imagined what that hammer struck... in her mind nails drove deep into the palms of someone's hands. Her right hand went instinctively to the cross around her neck, fingers curling around it. The irony was, she no longer believed in the images the cross represented, the promises it made to her as a child now rang hollow. Still, she wore it, and still she found her mind and actions drifting back to things she'd swore off over a year ago.

Humanity needs their crutches... and that was what religion appeared to her now. It was nothing more than a crutch for people to lean on when things were too hard for them to handle. It was a rock to hide behind when they didn't want to own up to things. How much eaiser was it for someone to say that the devil led them astray or made them do something, rather than accept the blame for their actions? She'd seen it first hand. Well, sort of first hand.

One year ago, a man had walked into the building where she was working, and opened fire, killing people around her. She'd dropped to the floor when the first shot rang out, knowing full well the sound of a gun. She was a hobby shooter, out on the range once or twice a month, sighting in the guns, doing target practice. The sound was nothing new to her. Hearing it at work had been, and reflexes sent her to the floor, and under a desk. She'd hid, and well enough to escape the subsequent rounds that the mand let off, leaving a total of ten dead before one of the security guards got the gun from him and pinned him to the floor. It was only later when he was facing charges, that the man had claimed he had been possessed by an evil demon, and that he wasn't to blame for what had happened that day.

The way he tried to use religion to get the charges dropped or changed had sickened her. She'd lost good friends that day. One, she would never get over. When there were some in the religious community who tried to side with the gunman, her faith snapped. Everything she'd been taught since birth crumbled around her, and she shoved it away.

Now, still holding the cross in her fingers, the sound of the ticking seconds loud like a hammer, brought her back to the moment. Every second that passed, the nail drove deeper into her palms, until she realized her own nails were digging in, breaking the skin and drawing blood. She opened her hand, and looked, the cross glinted crimson in the light from the overhead.

Whatever it took... in the end, there would always be more blood spilled before this was finished.