StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I've broken up the first bit of it into parts for other people that I've had read it, so I'll use those, based on what the Forum responce generally is. If you guys want more, I'll post more, etc.

Ashe to Ashes


Intro

The shovel bit deep into the soil, and another scoop full of dry earth was removed from the pit that Ashe Cole toiled in. His neck craned upwards, and he looked towards the dwindling red/gold skies overhead. Night was coming, and with it the blistering cold. His eyes shifted back down to his work. The grave pit was not nearly as deep as he would have liked, but there was no other choice. Ashe reluctantly tossed the shovel back up over the lip of the pit and scrambled out.

By the fading daylight he could see the wasteland laid out before him. Barren, and void of the lush forests and sloping terrain he had known as a youth. Youth. Your body is not aged, but yet your eyes convey a story that only years could compile. Ashe pushed aside his thoughts and looked towards the crimson-stained, white linen-wrapped form resting on the ground beside him.
“Mother…” the word passed from his lips like a cry of anguish.

He could feel the icy tears streaming down his dusted cheeks.

Ashe knelt down beside the form of the woman who had brought him into this world and pushed the stained linen away from her face. Sorrow swept across him as he saw the milky globes of her eyes rolled back in her pallid face, long brown locks twisted and caked with dried blood, and still that terrible look on her face that she had had as she begged for him to help her.

And he had been unable to do so.

As the tears flowed from his face like two tiny streams, Ashe drew up his mother’s corpse into his arms, held it above the half-completed burial pit, and released her to the place of rest. Pain twisted within his bowls and up through his chest, as if a twisted blade had been plunged deep within and was slowly being pulled up through his body. She had called his name. She had begged him to help her. And he was completely helpless to do so. He had been forced to watch them destroy her.

“She’s gone boy. There’s nothing that can be done now,” an only slightly saddened voice came from behind Ashe.

The boy turned about to see the man that had been his father looking on as his son began to shovel the dirt back into the pit.

“If only I had known it would come to this end…” Joey Cole reflected aloud.

“You should have. You should have been there to protect her.”

“I saved you, Ashe. Is that not enough?”

“No. It is not enough. This is the burden that you left me to deal with while you became intoxicated on the power you had discovered.”

“I was wrong.”

“I could have told you that from the start! And I tried to!”

“But then I did not understand. Now I do.”

“All too late,” Ashe responded to his father, releasing another shovel-full of dirt into the pit.

“I lost it all, in the end. I played with fate, and this is what became of it all,” the older Cole stated, gesturing toward the demolished wasteland of a world stretched out before them from the top of the mountaintop plateau on which they stood.

“Nothing. Nothing left now.”

Ashe dropped the last bit of dirt unto the shallow grave and turned about to face the man that had brought him to this world. And that had taken a vicious part in destroying that very same world. Son leveled father with a gaze that froze hell solid. A gaze in which Joey Cole could see the lifetime of anguish, loss, sorrow, and guilt that his son bore like a heavy cloak on his soul.

“I cannot change what has occurred, for the powers in which I have discovered would tear my existence to pieces if I even attempted to do so. But there is a way, Ashe. There is one way. It might destroy me, but there is a way that you can set things right again. Undo the mistakes that I made, that we all made, and stop this future from ever occurring.”

“Tell me how it is done.”

“You cannot yourself do it, but I can. If I were to channel all my energies into a great pool, there is a possibility that I could focus them and guide them to create a tear in space and time. A rift, as it were. One which may or may not send you back through time to the past before all this occurred.”

“And then what?”

“Destroy Aegis. He is the key to this all. If you strike him down before he rises to power, he will never begin this vicious cycle that has resulted in this forlorn day.”

“Then there is no other choice,” Ashe replied to his father.

“Very well…”

Joey Cole, as poisoned and corrupt as his essence had become, had still that single spark of goodness left in him. That tiny shimmer had reawakened his mind. But all too late. He had reawoken into himself only to find his only living son nearly dead, and his wife destroyed by the very men that had planted the seed of darkness within him. And with that, the shimmer of hope that existence simultaneously with that tiny shimmer of goodness within Joey Cole was gone. His hope, his love Lyta, was destroyed. He had not the will to remain alive in this desecrated world which he had created.

The older Cole reached out to the wasteland around him, drawing in what little power he could from the few small life forms that still existed in his world, and then called out to the blanket of dark energies shrouded across the world that mass-genocide and armageddon had caused. These energies rushed into his body and soul like fluid into a empty pitcher. He poured his essence into this mix of light and dark power, forging and fusing it into one joined creation. A great wave buckled outwards and washed across the mountaintop, throwing Ashe backwards and onto his back. That shudder of energy seemed to withdraw itself, recalling back into Joey Cole’s body as quickly as it had exploded outwards from it.

Ashe watched as his father slowly began to loose consistency before his very eyes. Solid tissue mass, a solid body, suddenly flickering away into a transparent guise. He could see the fading shade of his father looking outwards from the maelstrom of energy that had collected about him. And with that last glance, the being that had been Joey Cole collapsed upon itself. The powers that had been held in his body and joined with his soul were suddenly imploded inward, and with nowhere else to go, they pressed outwards into space and time.

And tore it.

When sight befriended Ashe once more, he found a shimmering gash where his father had once been. The rift stood upon before him like a terrible wound, jagged pulsating. His father’s last act of life was to sacrifice himself so that his son might have the chance to stop this all from ever occurring.

“Ashe…before you leave this realm and set out on the quest laid before you, you must know this. The power exists within you. Within your blood. You alone have the power to wield my blade. You alone will be able to harness and control its awesome power. And perhaps strike down Aegis…”

And then his father’s voice was gone.

Ashe looked down to the ground before the rift. Lying their, rippling in the wind where his father’s last precious belongings. Two silver rings-both his fathers and mothers wedding bands-the black long coat the man had worn in life, and the twisted metallic hilt of the blade-less Legend Sword. He drew up these items to himself, pulling the long coat onto his body, and stepped through the gateway to the past…



CH. I The Cycle Begins Anew


Flowers. The first rush of sensation that came to him was that fresh floral scent that he had not smelled in such a long time. Ashe groaned, and rolled over onto his back, his eyes still closed. He could feel the soft touch of the grass against his cheek as it swayed back and forth in the gentle breeze that caressed his body. Not the horrible incessant heat or bitter cold winds that he had known for the last few days of his life.

Am I dead? Is this the paradise of the afterlife? “Heaven”?

Ashe Cole opened his eyes to a magnificent sight around him.

The sun was high in the midday sky. Its golden rays were warm and gently, not searing and intolerable. Gazing up as he lay in wide field of grass at the edge of a dense forest, he remembered what his world had been like before them. He rolled over onto his knees, coming half up to his feet, and looked out to the beauty of the forest to his right, and the wide green field of grass to his left. Birds were singing happily, not the lonely soundless days and nights… He brought his hand up and beneath the black denim of his father’s long coat to press it against his skin. He could feel his own heart beating steadily in his chest.

He was alive.
And he had made it to the past.

But how far back?

Ashe quickly came fully up onto his feet, and looked all around him. Nothing but slopping green and brown mix of the woods, and the wide open light green of the field for miles in every direction. Where was he? Where had he been taken? Ashe felt something jabbing into his side. He reached down, and felt the bulge at his side jabbing him in the ribs. His fingers curled around the twisting curves of the metal and drew it out. The hilt of his father’s weapon, still missing its blade as it had as long as Ashe could remember.

What had his father meant? Only he had the power to harness it?

Ashe curled his fingers around the cool silver metal, tracing the curing lines of the knot work that made up the hilt. The bodies of two serpents intertwined, twisted upwards until their upper bodies separated to make up the crosspiece. A shimmering red gem rested between the fangs of each serpent’s maw.
Ashe gazed down into the two crimson jewels, and suddenly began to feel slightly light headed. A low hum came to his ears, and Ashe looked left and right for the source of it. But nothing there but the field and the trees. The hum began to grow louder, and Ashe finally realized that it was coming from the sword hilt itself. He gazed down at the crippled weapon and his eyes beheld the slow pulse of light emanating from each gem.

As if the sword were speaking to him without words and telling him which way to go, Ashe began to walk into the woods.


His feet were blistered and bleeding within his heavy leather boots. His legs were aching from continued use, and his body stumbled with each force step. But despite all this, Ashe Cole was compelled to continue on. With each limping step forward, the two crimson jewels within the crosspiece of the Legend Sword began to pulse slightly brighter. Day had faded to night, and Ashe had walked on only be the muffled light of the moon and the soft glow produced by the gems themselves.

His body felt as if it could endure no more.

Would this forest go on forever?

Exhaustion finally defeated him. His legs buckled, and he spilled to the forest floor. He could feel his vision slowly fading away into the realm of unconsciousness, but yet he still managed to clutch the Legend Sword’s hilt tightly in his hand. The last sound he heard before he passed out was that of a carrion bird’s caw.




A scent of candles burning. Ashe Cole’s eyes fluttered open, and he felt the intense pain in his legs. Muscle worn from exhaustion. He rolled over onto his right side, and his parched lips opened to inhale a long breath. The side of his face was numb, as well as part of his arms. The sensation that he had been laying on those particular body parts for some long period of time without moving.

The room was dank, and congested. Unfurnished, except a few pieces of discarded litter and empty bottles, and the stained bundle of rags meant to serve as bedding that he was laying on. In the dim light, he could make out a partially closed door, and the fringes of flickering light beyond it.

Ashe slowly stood to his feet, feeling the only slightly lessened ache in his muscles. He stood a stumbling step towards the doorway, his hand reaching out for the door. His touch sent it open a few more inches, and his eyes struggled to adjust to the incoming rush of light. He pressed the door open wider, and stepped out into the main room.

A drinking hall, or tavern.
Ashe stumbled away from the doorway, and towards a dimly lit corner.



He sat alone in the wooden booth in the darkest corner he could discover. The tavern bustled with activity before him for his eyes to behold. But he was withdrawn from it all. Ashe Cole was burried deep within his mind, trying to unlock a past that he had no key to. He found himself stumbling over bits and pieces of memories that he could make no real sense of.

There were very few things he actually could remember of his life. Ashe ran through those that he did. That he was not from this time. That the time he had come from had been the future of this world. That in his time he had lived a life of great pain and loss, but he could not recall specifically the details of much of it. That in the future of this world a great Armageddon was caused by a group of warlocks known as The Sacred Seven. He knew The Sacred Seven had raped his mother to death. He knew he was someone forced to watch this and unable to help her. He knew his father had sent him back in time to kill the leader of The Sacred Seven, Aegis. And his father had given him a weapon he truly did not understand how it worked or how to use it.

And all this left him ever the more confused.

In his reflection of the little facts he knew of his life, Ashe had failed to witness the events taking place around him. People coming and going. People drinking and enjoying themselves. He failed to witness a group of such people enjoying themselves just a little too much…

Until something caught his attention.

“Another round!”

“You’ve had enough…” the barmaid replied, sighing at their incessant demands.

“We’ll be the judge of that!” another countered.

She was sitting cross legged on one of the many barstools, facing the drinking group that was rapidly becoming more and more intoxicated. A sigh left her black painted lips, and it was as though that sigh had somehow reached across the room and into Ashe’s very core. As if he had heard it before. He brought his eyes to bear on this woman. Her body was slightly less than average height, but still quite thin and lithe. Two pools of swirled blue rimmed with black, gazing out from behind a halo of red locks. A visage of a dark angel was her face: high cheekbones, smooth pale skin, and long angled lines that framed her face and made up her jaw and chin. Her crimson hair fell down just below her shoulders, with strands from her bangs resting just alongside each of her shimmering azure eyes. A black velvet gown hugged the sensual curves of her body, while the long slits in the legs revealed her pale thighs and knee high black leather boots. She absently toyed with a long straight knife between her slender pale fingers.

I know you…
Where have I seen you?
I know your face.
I know everything about you.
But I do not…

Ashe’s mind struggled with his own thoughts. They were choking him. Too powerful ignore, but yet to veiled to figure out. He could nothing but stare at this woman, taking in her every movement with awe as he tried to force his mind to comply to his need to remember.

She rose from her perch atop the barstool finally. The last few drops of fluid had been drained from the roudy customer’s mugs, and know it was time to give them more. She reluctantly moved back behind the bar to claim the bottles and brought them forth to their table. Her arm extended outwards with the bottle in her fingers to fill a mug, and that was when he saw the man’s hand shoot up to grasp her small wrist.

No.

“Our desire to drink has faded lass. But our desire for something else has risen from its ashes…” the man said to her as he rose to his feet, still holding her firmly.

The others in his group stood as well.

Ashe Cole looked about desperately. Where were the other patrons of this tavern? Where had they gone? Were there not people in here before besides these men? Ashe glanced quickly to the nearest window, and he saw that the afternoon sun was long gone, and in its place was a unyielding darkness. How long had he been watching this woman who felt he knew but could not place within his mottled mind?

They must not had seen Ashe Cole lurking in the shadows. For at once then all advanced on the barmaid. She drew her blade, the very same one she had toyed with for what Ashe could now figure to be hours before the time came for her to fill their glasses once more. She slashed wildly at the man holding her wrist, and a long thin crimson line streaked across his cheek. Shortly thereafter, drops of the same crimson began to streak down his cheek from that line.

They rushed on her.

She swung like a madman. The sliver blade flashed in the dim light of the tavern, and a few times Ashe could hear the sound of metal biting flesh. But they were too many for her to fend off. They took ahold of her arms and legs, twisted the blade from her wrist, and drove her down to the floor.

Ashe’s mind flashed with memory. His mother Lyta, pinned to the floor. The Sacred Seven gathered around her. Ashe himself unable to help; forced to watch this terrible atrocity occur. Lyta calling his name over and over, and him unable to answer that call. Lyta lying broken and dead on the floor, that same terrified look on her face that she had when she called to him.

Ashe rose from the corner both.

Something was guiding his hands and he reached beneath the folds of his father’s long coat and withdrew the hilt-with-no-blade that was the Legend Sword. Both his fingers curled around its elongated handle, and he held it out vertically before him. His eyes gazed down into the tiny black jewels that made up the eyes of the twin serpents on the crosspiece. It seemed they returned his gaze. The crimson locked in their maws began to flicker a faint glow, which drifted slowly up the crosspiece that was formed by the serpents upper bodies and heads, to the very point where the silver blade had once been.

Within your blood…

Thunder crackled through the tavern, drowning out the drunks laughs and the girl’s pleas for them to stop.

Concentrate your will.

Ashe closed his eyes and pictured the weapon begin whole once more.

They turned, still holding her down with their tree trunk arms to see the tendrils of power twisting around Ashe’s forearms. It arched out from his body and coiled around his arms like snakes formed of magickal potency. Twisting and contorting in and out of his flesh, and spiraling there way down to the sword’s hilt, they raced to the point where the blade had once originated.
The power flared outwards with another rumble of thunder. Pure magickal energy raced upwards from the hilt and into the air. It grouped together, solidifying. What had once been a seemingly uncontrollable web of electricity pooled into itself to form a solid mass of power. It condensed to form long straight lines and perfect angles.

A blade.
A blade he willed into existence.

The thugs released the girl, suddenly forgetting the malintentions that had for her. A threat had arose, and they wished to eliminate it. They shoved her away and rushed towards this man, this dark clad man with flowing raven locks who wielded a massive broadsword who’s blade was formed of pure energy. They charged at him with all their six plus numbers hoping to overwhelm him.

They failed.

With each sweep of the blade, a low growl of thunder came. With each sweep of the blade, a groan of agony followed. Weapons flashed in the dim light of the back corner of the tavern. Blood spurted, bodies were severed in two and sometimes more. Men cried in agony, and then cried no more. And when it was done, Ashe Cole stood gazing down at the defeated.

Damn. Lots of views but no replies. Any comments/critcisms, etc?

Hmm, what should I say?

Continue writing
This seems quite promising. So far the writing is superb. And the story seems very interesting.

Thanks D. Turtle. In that case, I'll throw up another section. Hopefully I can get more replies after that.

CH II

“Who…Who are you? And what is that weapon?” she asked of him, gazing in awe as he stood above the pile of corpses at his feet.

He looked up at her, and then down to the weapon he now held loosely in one hand. Was this what his father had meant? Unleashing the power of this sword? As if the blade heard his uncertainty, a subtle crackle of thunder drifted out from its core mysteriously, and the blade dispersed just as quickly as it had formed. Ashe slide the once-again hilt back beneath his coat and tucked it into his pocket as best he could manage.

“Ashe Cole. My name is Ashe Cole.”

“You saved me,” she replied. “Though I could have taken them.” She added with a slight bit of confidence.

“You seemed like you needed the help. I didn’t want…”

“I’m a big girl, I can handle myself. Besides, it was you who needed the help when I found you in the woods last night.”

Ashe bit his tongue before pointing out to her that it didn’t quite seem that way a few moments ago, remembering how he had passed out in exhaustion..

“Who are you?” he asked, gazing intently into the deep pools of her cerulean eyes. A sense that he had somehow, somewhere, sometime gazed into them this way before washed over him, and he began to feel faint. He stumbled down to one knee, and she hesitantly came forward. His head rang as if metal had struck metal, and he clenched his forehead with his own palm.

“Are you alright?” she asked him, coming another step closer. “Did one of them get you?”

He never got to reply before his vision swam and he sank to the floor.


There was a cold wetness on his forehead. A dull heat ached within his chest. He tried to raise his hands, but they felt like two massive stone slabs. Tiny pinpricks of pain raised over his arms and down his body. He tried to open his eyes, but they too seemed impossibly heavy. His lips parted slightly, and a soft sigh rushed out from between them. But there was something more.
His skin was feverish. He knew it even despite the fact that he could nice raise his palm to touch it. A brief need to vomit passed over him, and Ashe’s chest began to heave rhythmically. He could feel the bile mixed with the contents of his stomach rising up in his throat, but knew he would choke if he did not turn his head. But his body resisted any attempts of motion.

And then there were the hands.

Soft. Delicate. Small and silky, like ten strips of satin touching his face suddenly. They turned his face to the side, and the vomit spilled out from his mouth with a choked cough. The last of it left him, and she turned his head away from its vileness, wiping at his lips with a soft rag to clear it of the debris that had clung on desperately. She lifted the towel positioned next to his face in anticipation of the act, discarding it and the contents it held in a garbage receptacle.

And then the hands returned.

They lifted the moist rag from his forehead and placed it back into the cool pail of water at the beside. They rang the excess from the cloth and then brought it back to his boiling skin, gentle wiping at his face and forehead with it. As if they had cleaned away the glue that bonded his eyelids shut, his eyes suddenly flickered open to swim desperately and then slowly focus on this form that hovered over him.

“Where….where am I?” Ashe heard his own voice ask, echoing within his own ears and sounding like it had came from the opposite end of a long tunnel.

“The back room of this tavern. Again. You passed out pretty much right after that fight,” the pale-faced barmaid with her dark rimmed blue eyes and painted lips that he’d been watching earlier replied.

“Who are you? I’ve seen you before…” Ashe asked her, again his voice sounding disconnected and distant to his own ears.

“I should ask you the same thing…” she answered, dabbing again at his forehead with the cool rag. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you before. Other than when I found you passed out behind my place. Perhaps you have mistaken me for another… Is that why you choose to interject? Because you thought you knew me?”

“I do know you…” Ashe said, knowing he meant those words, but could find no reason as to why.

“Then who am I? Answer your own question.”

“I cannot,” he said. “I’ve seen you before, but the memory is…clouded.”

“When I was born, my parents named me after a beautiful violet flower than grows in the highlands to the north. But they’re long gone now…Most people call me Kitten. The Dark Kitten.”

Dark Kitten.
Kitten.
I know you. I’ve known you so very well.
Who are you? Who are you to me?
“Why Dark Kitten?” Ashe asked, struggling with his choked mind and its faltering memory.

“Take a look at my eyes, and you’ll see why I’ve gotten the nickname.”

Ashe did. He focused his attention on them, and suddenly realized that he had been looking at them the whole time and hand not realized the radical difference between them and his. The pupils were not round, like his, but curved slivers. Cat’s eyes. Black set on iridescent blue. It was intensely unnerving, but yet at the same time even more intensely intoxicating. Almost sensually erotic.

You’ve gazed into them before.
Many times.

“Yes. They are shocking, aren’t they?” she said, piercing his silence with her words.

“I…I like them. I find them…enthralling,” he told her quite honestly.

“Many have. They were one of the features that drew me a crowd…”

“What do you mean?”

“I was referring to what I used to do formerly, before I inherited this tavern.”

Ashe gazed dumbly at her.

“Danced. Entertained men with my body in motion.”

Ashe blinked.

“You…bared yourself to them?”

“I had to survive. It provided me with the ability to do so,” She answered, obviously not proud of her former line of work.

Ashe shook his head, displaying his disapproval of the idea of dozens of perverted males throwing their lurid glances at her naked angelic form contorting on a stage for their pleasure.

You’ve felt this way before.

Ashe reached up with his hand, grasping his skull. That voice. His own? It pierced his concentration, and made his consciousness swim almost to the point of blacking out again. Kitten saw the change in his face, the look of pain his face formed as it clenched up, and became obviously concerned.

“What is it?”

“Nothing. It’s nothing. My head aches.”

“It seems you’re not in that great of shape. Whatever powers you used when you wielded that weapon of yours seems to have drained you, and nearly dangerously so. And I cannot conceive where you got the strength to use it in the first place. When I discovered you, you were in some sort of exhaustion-haze.”

“I’ll be fine,” Ashe muttered while propping himself up by one arm.

His eyes met with hers. Two pools of a blue that seemed to glow. There was something there, something more. Something within those eyes that he didn’t see in anyone else. She stared at him, wondering what he was looking at. A quiver of pain shot through him, and he turned away from her. Some fleeting flash of his contorted memory. He understood, for some small second, and then it was all gone. Leaving him empty and unknowing the whole truth, but realizing that there was something more, something he did not comprehend.

“What?” she asked him, sitting forward slightly.

“Nothing.” He replied softly, his hands moving to his own temples.

“Here, lie back,” she said, applying the cool, wet cloth to his forehead once more while pushing him back down to the make-shift bed. “You need more rest.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“I’ve treated others before. The fever won’t break unless you rest. Besides, I believe you have much explaining to do, Ashe Cole…”