Brazen Wolfe Tabletop

For three hundred nights he returned to the same place, the same four walls started to haunt him. For three hundred nights he questioned the darkening room if the his insanity was imagined. On the three hundredth night the darkness answered back.

It wasn’t that the task was impossible, it was barely difficult most of the time it was just that it was different. Instead of joining the others of his family in their habits and rituals he put pen to paper and wrote. He wrote for the hell of it, he wrote for fun and he wrote to get the voices from his mind into a book. Somewhere they wouldn’t intrude upon his waking moments.

The voices at the beginning were scattered, unbridled and unfocused. Erratic at best but cohesive at the same time. A true complex being like none other he had dared to imagine before. With time they became structured, reigning in that power within the void of his mind he channelled the raw potential towards tasks. And from power, quiet and darkness life was born.

At first it was simple things, little things. People and places, things and occurrences. Good and bad, happy and not so much. Inspiration was taken from day to day life and that spark of creative energy created a torrent of imagined fire that tore across the pages of the paper and etched in an image of a world foreign yet familiar.

The darkness spoke, the pages questioned and the darkness answered in time.

Parents, brothers, sisters, wives, husbands and friends all came forward with questions. Requests were spoken and the solution was murmured to the darkness where the heroes lay in wait to answer their call. They answered the call to write the wrongs, to find the lost and defend the defenceless. The wrong doers, the villains of this sprawling world contained within his mind fought for control and supremacy of thought. Some nights they won and the heroes in the dark corners of the room were forced to seek aid from high powers, from others.

Puppets on strings is all they were, but the puppeteer was not to be seen. The forces of good and evil both waged a war that was predetermined from the initial conception of their weekly fate. A course set in the stars, in the charts of man and the paths of beasts determined where the sword fell and where arrows soared.

For three hundred nights the man returned to the dark room. But, darkness has a strange way of finding the light. As the light grew the temptation to reject the raw power the dark offered. The comfort in silence and in numbness to the outside world. In the dark there was nothing more, no colour, no person, nothing to distract from the task. In the dark the monsters battled the heroes of the nightly test and he witnessed it all and scribed it down.

A chamber of dark is prone to summoning the light.

For in the light there were monsters as well. Oh yes monsters dwelled there too. In fact he learned that for each positive force of creativity there are equal and sometimes more powerful force of deconstruction. Deconstruction as opposed to destruction as these monsters taunted from around the chamber. Across the room hidden behind barely visible forcefields the monsters called out for him. They begged for release, for the attention they craved and they needed. For they could only survive if attention provided them opportunity to take the power that dwelt within the man.

The power waxed and waned as his attention drifted. The more the creatures pulled his pen from paper the harder it became to return to the dark. They moved his mind from transcribing the world that only he saw one that only he could record. These beasts, not always terrifying and horrible sometimes beautiful barred his path. One which would see him return to the power of creativity. The one he wielded with deafened ears and closed eyes.

For three hundred nights he contemplated what the purpose of his scribbles were. The recording of a world that a random few were privy to, one where everything was intangible yet very real to him. The rises and falls of power of those that inhabited the land ceased to exist when pen forgot paper. The creatures milled arounds hills and marshes and looked at the settlements of men. In fact they could only ever just watch. For without the spark of creation, the inspiration of the scriber they were unable to move and to fulfil their purpose.

The time to summon the dark again beckoned but the scriber was adrift.

The heroes grew tired and rusty. Indeed, no longer were they able to perform grand acts of bravery for without him they were nothing but shadows in the corner of a room. Light had worked its way into the life of the scribe and with it brought a sense of peace. The voices were muted behind the lights and the distractions the light brought. Gone was the sharp focus that the darkness had brought to him. Others of his kind had infiltrated the chamber of scripture and pulled him away from his task with promises of merriment and leisure. At times the he forgot the power that the darkness had offered him. With the fall of the darkness the voices that spoke to him of people, creatures and places also fled from the light.

However he did not anticipate the power the darkness held over him and his mind. Soon the voices became disorganised and rose in volume. Creatures began to preach of revolution. Heroes pillaged and burned and the villages that had been built over three hundred nights vanished. He looked upon the world he was a guest to and lamented, what had he done? Nothing was the response from the darkness.

Picking up the pen was the easiest decision he had made in a long time, in fact three hundred nights to be exact. Gazing into the world and extinguishing the light he plunged his mind into darkness again. Blocking out the sound of life throughout the attached chambers and retreating back to those four hallowed walls he put pen to paper. The heroes returned and marched against the forces of evil. Villages rebuilt, creatures scurried and thundered across plains and through forests and the great god-beasts of his mind bellowed out.

Back to the darkness to save a world hidden to all.

The darkness had brought him back, had shown him what the distractions the light had to offer. He realised that there was power in the darkness, in blocking out the noise of the light. In fact the same power that powered the spark of creativity also powered the distractions the light offered. He realised that now and a world with both light and darkness awaited.