Public Sensoriums

Next day, I had Splinter send us to the public sensoriums. I sampled stones there, and the experiences they contained.

The experience ‘unavoidable pain.’

The experience was a short and violent one: struggling with another, slightly stronger man on the edge of a blazing-hot stream of molten lava, my weapon-hand was slowly, inexorably forced ever closer to the magma. Beads of sweat evaporated the instant they appeared; the hair on the back of my hand blackened and smoldered above the awesome heat. Finally, my howls of suffering echoing from the canyon walls around me, my hand and the axe it held plunged into the lava and charred to ash in a few, agonizing seconds.

Pain was something I had long familiarity with, even in the short time for which I had memories. I had known pain as bad or worse than this.

The experience ‘tender love.’

My eyes were closed; I could sense myself standing on the tips of my toes, pressed against someone tightly. Soft, soft lips brushed against mine, giving me the most gentle of kisses… my heart seemed to flutter in my chest, and I felt as if I could fall backwards and simply float off into space…

There was an innocence to this experience which echoed what I must have felt every time I began a new incarnation, bereft of memory. Yet, from the same beginning I had followed many paths, mage and soldier, good and evil…

The experience ‘mind-numbing tedium.’

The experience couldn’t be more than a few minutes long, but hours seemed to pass… a long, boring lecture in the driest, dustiest hall in the University of Chalm in Sigil. I looked about the vast hall, hoping to catch someone’s eye to pull a face at — but the other students were either asleep or staring listlessly into space. I dropped my quill pen, picked it up, and dropped again… just for something to do. I considered stabbing myself in the eye with it, just to see if my senses hadn’t been wholly numbed by the incredible boredom…

Perhaps there was some benefit in not remembering, an immortal’s years must include long stretches of tedium.

The experience ‘bitter loathing.’

Venomous tears of pain brimming in my narrow yellow eyes, I gathered the tattered remains of my small, scaled, red wings off the floor. I humbly backed out of Groba’s study, gritting my needle-like teeth beneath sealed lips.

Sure, I was only a spinagon — least among devils — but that was no cause for a pit fiend to tear my wings off because he didn’t like the message I had brought him! What would my gelugon master do, now? He certainly couldn’t say anything to Groba, and what use was a spinagon without its wings? I would probably get cast into the Pit of Flame for ‘incompetence!’

Vengeance out of the question, there was little to do but shake my clawed fist and hate, hate, hate Groba with all the loathing my hard little black devil’s heart could muster…

Besides the many I had killed in my lives, there must have been others, the friends and lovers of those I killed, anyone who stood in my way, who had loathed me.

The experience ‘pure glee.’

Dancing and leaping about in rhythm with the wood elves’ bouncing festival music, I and a dozen other dancers spun through the forest clearing like a whirling dervish, smiling and laughing like mad. As the cheering forest dwellers whooped, clapped and danced alongside me, fairies careened through the air above our heads, leaving sparkling trails of colored light…

I was in a rare good mood for some minutes after this experience.

The experience ‘consuming impatience.’

I stood debating with Amnas the Horribly Slow, Keeper of the Lion Key, as to whether or not my quest was important enough for him to relinquish the artifact into my care. The whole experience was an exercise in sheer torment… each and every one of his words was followed by a significant pause; each and every point he made was reiterated time and again before he let me speak. I presented an argument… then waited, and waited, and waited while he made his counterpoint. To which I shot out a snappy counterpoint of my own… then must wait yet again for another of Amnas’ drawling, meandering, seemingly endless counterpoints. It was everything I could do not to simply lop the fiend’s tusked head off and snatch the key from the twitching corpse…

This reminded me of my frustration at not being able to read the language in which the journal I found was penned.

The experience ‘grim determination.’

The entire hall was in ruins and still in the process of being destroyed, as dozens of combatants hurled weapons, deadly, arcane magicks and themselves at one another in a desperate struggle to be the last one standing. Plumes of acrid green smoke rose from the pile of limp bodies I dragged myself out of, having barely escaped the wrath of some fiendish spell. There it was — across the way, through the battling throng, through the bloodthirsty battle ahead of me, sitting untouched on a miraculously upright table — my pint of mead! And I'd get it back, if I had to kill every last one of the brawling tavern patrons to do it!

I thought back to the barkeep of the Smoldering Corpse, and how he said I had busted the place up some fifteen years ago.

The experience ‘supernatural lust.’

I found myself coupling with a succubus, a creature of such intense, otherworldly beauty that even her fiend’s horns and thrashing tail give me no pause. She gasped under me… I desired her so completely that the whole of my existence seemed focused towards this single goal. As my life exploded from me in a starry burst, I heard the delighted laughter of the succubus as she drained me dry, leaving my body but a soulless husk…

I glanced at Fall-From-Grace, and realized she had come about as far as was possible from what I had just experienced. I also wondered how the recording had been made, whether a Sensate had deliberately attracted the attentions of a succubus just to leave this record.

The experience ‘horrible regret.’

I stood on the deck of my flagship, the Divine Hammer, as it floated over the continent of Agarheim, held aloft by the winds of magic. The very landscape roiled and shuddered beneath the bombardment of my fleet, one thousand ships’ cannons and bombards hurling their sorcerous fire down like vengeful gods. The shockwaves had begun to hit my ship only minutes ago — a constant vibration that sent shudders through the whole of the ancient craft and moved my very bones — accompanied by a constant, rumbling bass. As the land’s mountains began to sink and the seas that surrounded it begin to boil off into the atmosphere, my first officer came to stand beside me.

“My Lord Admiral… permission to speak freely, sir.”

I nodded my acquiescence, my stomach sinking as I guessed at his question.

“My lord… forgive me, but how? What gives us the right? A billion lives…”

I spoke without turning to him, unable to take my eyes off Rhumos, the nation’s vast capital city, as it vaporized into a cloud of super-heated gasses twelve miles across and growing ever-wider. “If you only knew the full treachery of the Agarites, First Officer Felm, one which is beyond most any man’s comprehension… then you would know. You would speak of our right to annihilate them? We've no right to let them live.”

“But… sir? Traitors, all of them? Surely, among the hundreds of thousands. How many innocents—”

“Silence! Speak of it no more — our king has spoken, His will be done. The task set to us is a horrible one, not fit for contemplation or questioning. There is no room for pity, no room for remorse – only duty.”

The two of us stood silently for a time, watching the last minutes of Agarheim. At long last I sighed… a low, stuttering exhalation that sounded as if something had broken inside me. Beneath the brazen plate that covered the ruined half of my face, my dead eye began to weep…

“Falm… my friend… I would have you understand. I know now, as I look down at what I have wrought here, that were I to think upon what I have done… what I have truly done… I would be struck mad. A deed such as this… the anguish would overwhelm, destroy me. So, First Officer Falm, it must be that there are no innocents in Agarheim… no mothers, no children, no people. Only traitors. Vile, cunning traitors, who deserve no less than the full brunt of our most Holy King’s wrath. Do you understand this?”

“Y-yes, m’lord.”

“Good. Now go… I wish to be alone, here.”

“By your command, Lord Admiral.” Falm bowed his head and returned below deck, leaving me to stand over the end of a civilization.

The fact that this experience was here at all indicated the admiral must later have had second thoughts. The crime committed was horrible, awful, almost inconceivable, yet I wondered whether I had done worse.

The experience ‘indescribable frustration.’

I could see it now, the crown of Haephon, gleaming upon a marble pedestal. No more than twenty strides away, it was… with it, I could wrest control of the armies of Aethanopolis away from my treacherous brother and restore my father’s kingdom. A fool, my wretched brother was… I smiled grimly at the thought… to leave the king’s only daughter alive, thinking she could do him no harm.

A sound! The creak of leather sandals, the softest hiss… over there, by that third pillar! She was close now, Polaphi the Medusa, jealously guarding the crown her servants had stolen for her so long ago. Crouching behind a wide pillar, I wrapped my hand tightly around my trusted Thrice-Blessed Javelin. With my Helm of Swiftness and the Hundred-Mirrored Shield, even a beast such as Polaphi would be no match for me. Any moment, now, she would round the pillar and meet the sight of me. Even if she turned away from the shield, my javelin would surely find her throat…

Suddenly, there was a gentle touch on my shoulder. I gasped, spinning around to face — of course — the Medusa. Accepting the inevitable, I only had time to loose a piercing cry of frustration before my lungs… and every other part of me… solidified into cold, gray stone.

I was glad now I had not gotten a good look at the prostitute Marissa in the Brothel of Slaking Intellectual Lusts.

The experience ‘shock and a rise to seething vengefulness.’

I stood somewhere in the nether regions of the Planes, a sweltering place where the ground was beaten copper, and the sky was of brass. Here, the bodies of sinners — petitioners in this horrid place — were rolled amongst iron brambles and bronze scorpions until their bones were fine, gray dust.

I squinted at the horizon, the bone-dust rising with putrid-smelling gusts of wind that carried with them the sound of agonized moaning. There was nothing but flat, metallic landscape as far as the eye could see. The dust was everywhere, in everything… it stung at my eyes, coated the insides of my mouth with a pasty film. I spat, wiping at it with my finger, but it was of no use: the stuff’s taste had fouled my mouth completely.

I looked down at the ‘key’ in my hand… a minute platinum orb… and pictured the man’s face who solemnly swore to me the magical portal I just passed through — now gone, of course — led to the green fields of Bytopia. Someone, by all the Powers and their proxies, was going to pay for this one.

I wished my problems were so minor.

The experience ‘slowly dawning horror.’

“How good could it be?” I thought, regarding the burgundy liquid carefully. Across the table from me, the twisted old man smiled slyly.

“Please, sir, try.” he whispered, his hushed voice the sound of dry leaves blown over a roughly cobbled street. “Thou shall find it more than lives up to thy expectations, I am sure.”

I nodded at him and lifted the crystal goblet into the air, watching the light play through the crimson liquor. I'd come a long way for this drink… searched long and hard for this old man… and I'd be damned to let anything rush me, now. The moment was to be savored.

I raised the glass to my lips, inhaling the stuff’s aroma. The bouquet was light, sweet, intoxicating… almost dizzyingly so. I'd tried countless drinks… written tomes about them, their flavors and smells, means of manufacture, in my journeys across the Planes. But this… this stuff was supposed to be legendary. No living man I'd found or heard of had tried the stuff. The stories were ridiculous — nothing could taste quite so good — but if there were the slightest bit of truth to them, this would be some fine liquor indeed.

At last, I drunk of the goblet, a cautious sip…

Incredible! Indescribable! As the flavor washed over my palette, I fought the urge to shudder with delight. Nothing… nothing I had tried in all my long years had tasted quite like this. I looked up at the old man, startled to find my glass empty — I had drained it all in a single draught. I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, not entirely sure when I had begun to cry.

“Tears of joy, eh?” The old man laughed softly. “Quite pleasing to the tongue, is it not? Wouldst thou like some more, perchance?” He smiled at me once more.

“Yes… yes, if I might…”

“Surely.” he replied, refilling my glass. Try as I might, I could not resist downing it in a single gulp. I thrust my finger into the goblet in an attempt to find some last, hidden drop of the stuff. Several times more did he fill the goblet, and each time I gulped the stuff down as a starving man would devour a feast, unable to control myself, to deny myself another exquisite taste of it.

“A drink such as this… a man wouldst do anything for it, no?”

I nodded without hesitation. “Yes, a man would…” Looking at him, his sly smile suddenly took on a whole new meaning. A sense of horror began to creep over me, even as I began to yearn painfully for more of the blood-red liquor…

“Yes, yes…” The old man grinned, his yellow eyes gleaming. “A man wouldst do anything, in the thrall of such a drink… even the most terrible, the most heinous of deeds… as thou shall see, my newest servant.”

I thought of what I had been learning about my incarnations, and how, with some exceptions, I had found bitter truths about myself. I did not like my actions, nor their consequences, and had come to realize, with something approaching horror, that I was probably doomed to repeat my actions. I would eventually lose my memories again, and start over. I must find a way to end the cycle, once and for all.