Rhiannon Lee (rhiannon_lee) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2021-03-29 14:06:00 |
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Entry tags: | elfleda, rhiannon lee |
Executioner
Who: Elfleda, Rhiannon
What: A Job
When: Recently, Evening
Where: Rhiannon’s Trailer, Searchlight, NV
Warnings: Language
At 3:00am, the temperature was forty-five degrees, chilly enough that the air coming through the open gaps in Rhiannon’s windows brought out goosebumps on her arms. She usually cracked them when she was painting, even if it was with acrylics instead of oils. She didn’t paint as much in Searchlight as she’d done in Detroit and Chicago. There wasn’t any room to store supplies and it was harder to air out the chemicals. Instead she’d often draw and work with smaller tools, but sometimes she got the itch. She’d put on an old t-shirt and a pair of drawstring shorts, tie up her hair, and paint until her shoulder ached or she realized she was starving.
On her canvas, a house had taken shape. The one she’d lived in with her father was a small, 1-½ story bungalow with a low-pitched, gabled roof and a front porch that listed to one side. The one on the canvas was two stories, brick, in a state of disrepair. An upstairs window was boarded and two porch spindles were missing like broken teeth in a comb. A small, blue recycling bin was full of glass bottles. The driveway was empty.
Rhiannon picked up a Miller Lite she’d gotten at the truck stop and took a sip. Taste didn’t transport her back in time, but smell could. The smell of that beer made the house stretched on the wooden frame seem real. Two weeks ago, when she watched her uncle’s tail lights disappear on I-15, driving northeast from Las Vegas to Chicago, it wasn’t to return to this house. He’d moved out last year. She wondered who lived there now, if anyone.
Rhiannon set down her brush and backed up to sit on a kitchen stool she’d dragged into the living room. Her bare foot rested on a trunk where she kept small weapons. Wincing, she tipped her ear towards her shoulder and tried to stretch the stiff muscle that ran along the side of her neck.
Another smell wafted into Rhiannon's conscious thoughts. A scent of burnt sugar. Light, but it was there. The lighting flickered a little, as if a heavy vehicle had rumbled by, but no such noise could be heard from outside. Acrylic paints tended to sit where they had been squeezed out, awaiting the touch of an artist's chosen tool, but something was causing the black and white to melt, pooling towards one another on the palette.
From within the trunk, something began to shudder and jump excitedly within its confines.
Something split the air vertically, silently parting it like an unzipping curtain of shadow. Elfleda's face loomed out like a great white shark rising from the depths and she stepped forth, motioning a hand to calm the activity of Rhiannon's deadly gift.
"Executioner..."
As always, Elfleda's voice began with a strange half-in, half-out quality, as if the act of speaking was necessary to bring her voice fully into this realm. The term of address was a newer development and functioned as a reminder of their agreement; which meant her arrival was provoked by more than just casual interest. A glance was spared for the canvas and the ethereal diplomat slowly tilted her head, reading the artistic creation. Feeling it. A hand raised and fingers seemed to retrace the exact motions Rhiannon's brush had made, moments before, inches away from where the paint now dried.
"Family," she observed and looked Rhiannon's way. "A home... Yours have taken on added meaning, of late, have they not?"
“I wouldn’t say added,” Rhiannon replied. “But they did make things clearer for me.”
Though her foot had lowered to solid flooring, Rhiannon could still imagine the tremble of the strange, black dagger in the trunk, vibrating against the arch of her foot. She kept the weapon wrapped in thick cloth at the bottom, as much to protect it from its holy surroundings - water, crucifix - as to shield herself from it. The thing had developed an influence if she kept it close at night. Sometimes she dreamed of killing, of sliding her hand and wrist into the glove of an open wound. Others, of falling off a sharp cliff into nothingness. She wasn’t afraid of what she saw in her sleep, but waking up every few hours was problematic, and Cian didn’t need a sentient weapon creeping into his REM cycle.
At least it was quiet now, brought to heel by its mistress.
She wasn’t as shocked as she should be that Elfleda unzipped hell like a dress and slipped into something a little more comfortable - her living room. The smell had given her a few seconds to compose herself. What was strange was that she realized, maybe for the first time, how little color Elfleda had. Rhiannon thought about the photography trend where people ordered photos in black and white, but left a wedding bouquet in color. She was that, but in reverse.
Life, desaturated.
The hunter brought herself back to the question of her life. “I’m starting to see who I am. Before, I only saw myself in contrast to other people: what they did, how they viewed things. I’d do what I wanted, and then chew myself up questioning why I was different and if my gut could be trusted. It was dead weight, and I think I’m done carrying it.” Rhiannon got off the stool and stood next to Elfleda, staring at the house on the fabric. “I’m the person I’m supposed to be. It feels like shedding skin.”
Elfleda's interest was not rhetorical. She held a genuine curiosity for what motivated others and how they reacted to things. Rhiannon was proving to be one of the more fearless, treating her periodic visitor with a respectful equality, even if their respective positions were quite different. Without their recent agreement, that would still have made the hunter interesting. With it, Rhiannon had become less of a potential adversary and more of almost a prospective student.
"Many can stand, but few learn to walk. You're taking some of your first true steps, Rhiannon Lee. The heaviest chains are sometimes those we don't see are binding us."
Elfleda softly blinked away from one canvas and to that of her hunter's face. There had been a pause before doing so, implying a mental reflection on the themes of Rhiannon's picture. To where did Elfleda's thoughts drift upon thinking of family and home?
"But this lesson has been learned at a price. Those you have deterred might now have proven useful," Elfleda spoke, though without implied judgement. There was a stiffening of the spine as Rhiannon's ghostly benefactor spoke her message and a hand reached out with casual grace, taking a proverbial dip into Rhiannon's innermost auric field. "My warning to you... A threat to our shared interests has arisen. Something, once shackled, has been set free."
Rhiannon crossed her arms. The idea Elfleda broached - that chasing off a band of dyed-in-the-wool hunters could go sour if disaster ever struck - was one already considered. She shored up her position. “Hunters aren’t much use to me if they’re stabbing an ally for every enemy.”
She held her ground under the exploration of Elfleda’s fingertips, wondering as they danced along the amorphous boundaries of her energy what would happen if the Lady touched her. And why she didn’t. Maybe it would be like the instant before two mouths met… A sense of pulling, as real as if one placed the north and south poles of two magnets near one another. It was hard work keeping them apart.
Or maybe it was simpler and she awaited invitation.
Rhiannon took a sip of cheap beer. “What happened?”
A smile whispered across Elfleda’s black lips in response to Rhiannon’s strategic thinking. Good. She would need it. They all would.
Nevertheless, there next came a moment where Rhiannon’s visitor had to make a decision. A judgement call. Inclining head, those same lips silently parted to draw breath, as their owner deliberated how best to compose a response. Elfleda, for all her regal bearing, was not emotionless and tactfully veered to one side, walking slowly forth. The hem of her dress wafting across the floor like an animated shadow.
“I was raised with teachings considered relevant to my station. And some not,” she added, raising a hand to the light in study. A consciousness being cast back in time, casting a mental net wide for memories of old. “Politics were amongst them.” Elfleda’s head turned and, just for a moment, the way she was outlined against that same interior lighting made a difference. A glimpse of a figure shining across time. Then, moving, her shadow crept back across nearby furniture, like the blanketed webbing of some giant spider. “A power is never truly vanquished, until its followers are as dust.”
It was the first tentative hint of Elfleda’s origins which had been imparted since they met. Not much. Not even truly a clarification of what she was, now or then, but still of value and she knew it.
“Tell me, Rhiannon,” she asked before continuing. A rare moment where Elfleda had not used the formality of a full name. “Your kin, your hunters… Did they speak to you of extremes? When adversity had them reach for solutions once thought forbidden?”
“Of course.” The damp beer turned between Rhiannon’s fingers. What was she doing with Elfleda if not reaching for a forbidden lever and pulling it? She was sure that her uncle had considered it ‘facing adversity’ the first time he killed for money alone. There were other examples, times when temporary allies had to be made of enemies, or cruel actions had to be taken for the sake of getting information. One learned to keep a stiff upper lip.
“They’d say that things are forbidden for a reason. If you break the rules, you have to be prepared for consequences... Those hardships you can’t see waiting on the other side of your problem.” Rhiannon set the can on a coaster. “Why?”
“This is not the only world on which these battles have been waged,” her guest elaborated. “On some, there are victors. On others, there is no harvest. No garden to be tended. Only one thing remains… Desolation.”
From Elfleda’s silhouette, the air before her seemed to cloud forth in gaseous form, spreading the blackness of shadow like a gesso-soaked canvas suspended in the air. Something like an elongated finger bone extended, wand-like, to be used like a pen across the floating mass. Where it touched, it seemed to hook into the material, pulling it across and leaving swirls of colour in its wake.
Rhiannon watched the images unfurl, the vivid contrails of color hanging aloft.
“Upon one such world, there was a soul who devoted much thought to darkness. Not its embrace, but prevention. How best to combat shadows. How to kill that which cannot be killed.” The etheric picture was being gracefully sliced into being. Like cuts of a knife, an angular, vehicular chassis was taking form. “Until a singular truth dawned… That such things have their place. That one cannot undo subversion or darkness, any more than flight can be taken from a bird. But this was not an obstacle thought insurmountable,” Elfleda continued; her gaze firmly on the image she was crafting into life. “Instead, this being arrived at a calculation. That if life… All life… Could be controlled, restrained, then there would be nothing to influence. Nothing which would remain vulnerable to… As they saw it… Deviance.”
The hunter turned to view Elfleda’s profile as she spoke, watching the black lips form around each word in her peculiar way that was both audible and telepathic. “It sounds like a world without souls.” Rhiannon thought of the ways that humanity had devised to remove urges, desires and free will in the past. If it wasn’t through physical bondage, fear, and psychological manipulation, it was chemical or neurosurgical.
The image was becoming clearer now. It was a setting not too unlike what might be recognised as a laboratory. Different, not of human design, but similar in its purpose. Something in the middle, crab-like, was attached by cables to its immediate surroundings. Once finished, the basic visual formed the rest of the image by itself. Unlike Rhiannon’s painting, this one moved. As Elfleda continued her narration, so her artistic creation animated like a cartoon.
“There was no crime nor death, Rhiannon. There was only stasis. A waking imprisonment, enslaved to the machine, cursed to live. This was no scientist as your world knows it… He understood matters of the arcane. But to keep such souls from the touch of hell, is to keep them from heaven, too. And, so, they lived. Lived within a hell of existence.”
The images portrayed it all. Not human beings, but a civilisation, certainly. Beings forced into subjugation, kept protected by occult measures - isolated from anything spiritual. Reduced from distinct personalities to an emotionless mental soup. An unending, eternal torment of becoming the system. Unable to die, but equally, unable to truly live. Not just the dominant civilisation, either, but everything. All forms of life.
It had verged on a religious crusade and its legacy was a great, dust-ridden landscape of nothingness. Nothing could any longer be corrupted or reached by entities of demonic realms, no. But nor could anything be reached by those of the light. The one behind it had succeeded in their aims, but at a great cost: Life, itself.
“But this would not be permitted to continue,” Elfleda interjected, lifting a finger as the picture swirled and destruction unfolded. A planet’s worth of souls freed from bondage, screaming into the ether. “The light saw it as an abomination. Darkness perceived it as an appetite denied. The one responsible… That one could not be harmed. Instead, there was captivity. But there were always followers. Those who saw this cause as just. And it was their whispers who set their master free. A master who now walks on this world.”
Rhiannon’s reaction, while understated, was perhaps an understandable one. “Well, that’s not good.” She rubbed her arms, the soft sound of palms on her flesh the only one heard within the trailer. Even the electrical systems in her home seemed to go quiet upon Elfleda’s arrival. She moved on to running her fingers gently across knuckles that often bruised, cracked and bled after fights.
“I was raised Catholic,” she said. “My belief in it never faded, not even when I learned there was more. I just made adjustments. I always knew, or I guess sensed, that spirit moves through the world. It connects our world to others, no matter what you name it. People think of religion as bondage, but belief liberates, if you’re lucky enough to have it. It can make you strong. It’s necessary. Even atheists call out to something when they lose themselves.” She took a breath. “And that’s not saying anything about how bad we all need to want things. Good or bad.”
To eat, drink, sleep, and breathe, those were necessary. But without desire, without temptation, what was the point of getting up in the morning? Passion would be reduced to work, curiosity to absorption of knowledge, conversation to words, sex to breeding. No risk, no reward. Just doing.
She sat on her couch, fingers interlocking and flexing. It kept her from pacing. “You want me to put it back in its cage?”
Elfleda could be very like a statue when listening. Stoic, patient. It went to the root of what black represented in Far Eastern magical philosophy. A colour which draped across her ghostly pale form, like giant curtains across a snowy field. She watched as Rhiannon reached her conclusions, coming to a similar calculation. No reaction was needed. Not until the inevitable question of consequence was asked.
What did she wish of her?
The levitated moving image coalesced to form the image of a machine with lenses shining an inner turquoise glow, then was dispersed with a slicing touch of Elfleda's stylus and the haunting figure in black turned her head down to the trunk, where her weaponised gift to Rhiannon stayed. Then back to the hunter in question.
"Your instrument, yes... If you can. Destroy it, if not," Elfleda instructed. There was something of a more decisive tone and speed which accompanied that last sentence. Clearly, she regarded this being as a threat. Wanted it dispatched, as soon as possible. Or was there something more? Was there a loose end? Something Elfleda wasn't telling her? "I would not recommend allowing yourself to be captured," she warned, raising a finger. "It walks, now, locked within a metal beast. A thing which shields it from etheric touch... This is why your strengths are needed. You are of the physical realm. You can best it."
Therein apparently laid Elfleda's dilemma: She was being forced to reach out. This thing had found a way to be untouchable by the supernatural world. Someone like Rhiannon, literally, was better than an army of demons at facing it down. Which, in turn, led to her visitor's thoughtful pause before what she said next.
"What might I offer you in this hunt, Executioner? More tools? A guide, perhaps?" A smile. "Friendly competition?"
“No…” Rhiannon tipped her head, considering. She was certain of her path, and needed neither coercion nor convincing to align herself with the Lady. A task like this was enough to spur her to action. But the episode with her uncle had left her feeling drained in a way she hadn’t expected. What she could use was the spiritual equivalent of having her battery recharged with exactly the elements the creature wanted to take away. There might be an advantage to that kind of thinking.
She got up off the couch and took a few small steps. It was only a hypothesis but Rhiannon thought there might be two ways to prepare for proximity with this entity: one, become like it - an empty vessel, the way a follower might aspire to be - but then she might lose the impetus to challenge it; two, she could become its opposite.
“Can you mimic the effect it would have? Make me feel that emptiness, at least superficially? Or the other way around...” The brunette paused, uncertain how to word her request. “Make me more of what it wants to cut us off from? Like an inoculation.”
If Rhiannon was beginning to have a pattern during her interactions with Elfleda, it was a habit of surprising her. Those inky pools set in ivory orbs widened subtly at the unexpected request, head reared back and Elfleda seemed genuinely taken aback. She… Wanted this? After what she had described of it? Oh, there were easy ways to take advantage of it, but Rhiannon was as much of an asset as the dagger of flame had been to Rhiannon, herself.
“Not so much playing with fire, as stirring an inferno,” Elfleda mused, dancing that ebony gaze of hers up and down her elected champion. “Very well. A momentary taste… If this is truly your wish? But you must trust me. Must offer yourself, freely invited. Completely. Removing you from play is not in my interests. Having you play your part is. ”
There was a sense of warning static in the air. The type which raised hairs in wariness of a shark looming suddenly out of dark water. This was one of those forks in the road of destiny, whereby Rhiannon had the power to allow or disallow something. Whatever passed for the hunter’s spiritual guardians, her guides, were likely making her aware of the weight of this decision - whatever she might choose.
Elfleda raised her arms, reaching out in an offer for hands to be clasped.
“Just for a moment,” she reminded. “Do you trust me…? With your soul?”
Rhiannon stared at the pale hands. She imagined them cold, corpse-like. Was that how it would be? Or more like the heat that came from below? She closed her eyes. Her Were was not there now to step in the way, to whisper their secret code to her. There was a white-gold cross that dangled on a hook beside her bed; if Rhiannon could see it, she might detect a subtle vibration along its chain. A flash of distorted light on the pendant.
“Yes.” Rhiannon blinked open her thick, black lashes and squared herself before Elfleda. “For just a moment, I trust you with my soul. Because I know you’d only take it if I offered. That’s the whole point.” Her fingers hovered over those of the Emissary, reminiscent of a composer about to disrupt the sanctity of a music chamber with a dithyrambic chorus. The air left her lungs in a calming breath.
Rhiannon took Elfleda’s hands.
There was no contact between flesh. Or if there had been, it was too fleeting to even register. Hands closed, but the connection wasn’t bodily, it was beyond that.
Because the moment it happened, Rhiannon was no longer in her body. She was pulled outside of it with a magnetic yank, pulling her outward like a hooked fish on a line. Somewhere in peripheral vision could be seen, felt, shining lights - the spiritual presence of what was there, always, to help guide and protect her. Ahead, Elfleda and the warped entrancement of her shadows.
And everything… Everything... Was sharper than it had ever been. As if being removed from physical senses was like removing a mask which had dulled and muffled her surroundings. Sight, sound, smell - probably other methods of perception Rhiannon had never even considered… Even colours were now almost impossibly vivid. The phrase ‘crystal clear’ had only been a sentiment before, but now the purity of that clarity was brought, literally, into focus.
As was Elfleda, herself. Out here, Rhiannon could observe the sheer ghoulish nature of her. There was a horridly sickly cloud which clung to the shape of her, billowing around in its etheric toxicity. Rhiannon hadn’t been able to perceive it in her body, but now she could. The essence of corruption, itself, swirling like it had when being formed into the painting.
And a key to her nature.
“I-see-you,” Elfleda smiled in a sing-song tease. Her hands might still be physical, somehow preserved, like those of a vampire, from a time long ago, but she had been given invitation. Permission. Her hold upon those of Rhiannon’s soul could not be ghosted through. She was anchored to her.
The voice was more telepathic now, too. Somehow louder, clearer, than before. But so, too, were others. Thoughts of people, even animals, drifting by, as though carried on some unseen breeze. Mostly in visual form. A glimpse into the world a psychic might perceive.
“This,” Elfleda spoke, beginning to explain, “is life. Life in all its form. What before the physical realm blinded you to... And what would be no more, should you fail.” She tilted her head. “Is your curiosity sated?”
Did Rhiannon still need to know more? What the opposite of this would be?
Rhiannon drank in all of it - Elfleda. The private thoughts spooling out of thinkers. The dim awareness of being a tiny speck within a massive framework. Somehow, the only part that kept skittering away from her scrutiny was the source of that warm glow.
The comparison did not come close, but the only reference point Rhiannon had for this extraordinary perception was being high. How much of what a person saw while in a drugged state was real versus hallucinatory? But this bleeding through of the spiritual and soular world was beyond such a simple concept as ‘real’ or ‘imagined,’ and no mere explosion of brain chemistry. She felt like a kite on the end of a very long, feeble string, coasting on unseen currents, some dim part of her afraid the cord would snap and she’d never come back to the tactile world a hunter inhabited: closed fists, open wounds, wet splatters of gore, the casual cruelty of inhabiting a frail bag of bones covered in tissue.
But really, would that be so bad? Leaving her body behind and becoming a part of this?
The Emissary’s voice broke the reverie.
Before she could back down, Rhiannon said, “Now take all of it.”
Where their hands had clasped, spirit to flesh, a curious form of binding had manifested, like the blackened roots of an old tree. It was a bond Elfleda used to hold her fast, as the mouth of a portal grew from behind her, surrounding them. Without moving, it seemed as though they were hurtling through it, into inky blackness. The further within they rushed, the more tangible it felt, like the very atmosphere was in some way solid. It had swiftly become unsettlingly like Rhiannon had found herself dunked head-first into thick, liquid clingfilm, which was surrounding her on all sides, wrapping the hunter's soul in an impossibly tight cocoon.
The contrast to before could not have been greater. Where there had been a perfection of clarity, now everything was muffled and far away. Where there had been previously unknown forms of sensory acuity, now it was as if everything had become numb. Where there had been freeing mobility and the purity of awareness, now everything was stifled in a horridly imprisoning tightness.
It was isolation's embrace and no way to extract herself from it. No way to even scream out for freedom. All one could do was to surrender, for anything more was futile. There was not even warmth, it was just... The slowly dawning realisation of abandonment. A sensation of sharp, biting ice setting in, as one's sense of identity began to ooze and sink into the proverbial mud. To ebb into and become one with whatever was surrounding and crushing her.
Suddenly snapped like a towel, Rhiannon was not only freed, but found herself instantly back in her body. Elfleda's grasp eased and released her, standing before the hunter with a curious lifting of brow. "One trusts these lessons have proved instructive for you?"
Rhiannon’s legs felt like warm gelatin. She sat on the floor. For a moment all she could do was stare at the writhing hem of the Lady’s dress. In comparison to the void, everything earthly brought comfort, from her threadbare carpet to the draft coming into the cracked window. She licked her lips and blinked. The hunter was tempted to cry and mourn a thing that hadn’t happened yet, but could. She had woken up from the terrible nightmare of absolute solitude, of emptiness, and now she craved comfort. Even tears were a luxury. “Fuck… We should’ve done that in reverse,” she croaked.
The hunter rolled onto her knees. Her forehead rested on her hands. Unconsciously she had taken up the posture of a supplicant. The way she did in fights, Rhiannon gave herself a count of three to pull herself together and then she got off the floor.
“You’re good. I’m feeling learned,” Rhiannon confirmed. She shook the memory away. If she was still for long, her brain tried to roll backwards to reflect on one of those altered states, and it seemed that the void was an easier mental leap. It made her want to move and connect. It made the oft-appealing idea of alone time seem insufferable.
Elfleda hadn't made any moves to help her recover. Educating Rhiannon had been helping her, so far as she was concerned. So, the ethereal visitor in black stood there, impassively watching on. Observing how Rhiannon reacted to the very lessons she had requested.
"You're feeling many things... And simply to feel is, no doubt, now perceived for the luxury it is." Elfleda did lower to a crouch, but more for the purpose of waving the palm of her hand over the trunk, sensing for the connection of the tool she had bequeathed to the hunter's possession. Her gift. Its presence was rewarded with the smallest tug of a smile and Elfleda whispered something to it, before turning back to stand and face Rhiannon, again.
"My mention of friendly competition. It was not wholly in jest. Others will be drawn to this hunt. You'll need to better them..." Elfleda reached to one side and her hand sank, in mid-air, into another dimensional realm to retrieve something. A blue crystal with black wire wrapped possessively around it. "This will sing if placed over the beast's location on a map of your choosing."
Rhiannon took the crystal when it was offered. There was a large paper map of Clark County folded in the trunk of her car, and two smaller ones of Searchlight and Las Vegas. When it came to maps, sometimes it paid to go old school. The brunette turned the small object between her thumb and forefinger, then looked at the Lady. “How would you feel if someone else got to it first? I don’t mean in terms of claiming a kill. I mean, is everyone drawn to the hunt for the same reason as you, or is there another angle?” It was better to know who she was up against, if there were more than followers to consider.
Elfleda turned slightly, taking in her Executioner’s profile for a moment. “In a word… Disappointed. Placing my faith in you offers a potential for great reward. But so, too, does it make me vulnerable. You see risk in reaching out to me? Allowing my assistance, my advice?”
Giving time for that question to be pondered, Elfleda moved back to the painting. Once more, the symbolic image of family and home played its part; memories stirring within the same skull which blinked attention back to Rhiannon, again.
“My role is not exclusive to me. I have my competitors, too. Those who would… Paint this alliance as a weakness, not the strength I believe it to have. These detractors would rather see older strategies at play; brutality, isolation. Damnation has its place, Rhiannon,” she smiled, caressing fingertips a hair’s breadth away from damp acrylics. “But to damn consequences is why they fell from favour. My approach is more measured, more…” Subversive. “Progressive than their own. Acknowledging your potential, working with you to eradicate mutual threats, can achieve great things.”
“I’ll try not to take offense,” Rhiannon said. The hunter watched Elfleda with the painting of her uncle’s old home and decided it would have to be destroyed. She wasn’t sure what she’d been thinking, laying herself so bare anyway. “Okay,” she agreed simply, moving to clean up her supplies. “I’ll get there first. Have a room ready.” She looked around her living area, thinking ahead to what she needed to gather, who she should call, and - for the first time in a long while - who she wouldn’t tell because they’d get in her way.
“Be careful, Rhiannon. Capture would be most undesirable. You know why now.” Elfleda turned and, as she did so, the edges of shadow seemed to lick at her outline, allowing the monochromatic emissary to slip into its embrace noiselessly. No thunder and lightning, no theatrical sound effects; just calmly walking from one dimensional realm into another.