Post by Katsuro Hachi on Apr 1, 2016 21:17:11 GMT -5
[ FIND THE KEY TO FIFTY MILLION FABLES ]
It began with an irrational, inexplicable urge, as these things tended to.
It rose in him, starting in the very pit of his stomach. It drew him to the wind, it drew him to take to the glistening new pair of wings upon his back, and it drew him to roam: but more importantly, it drew him west. The sandsea beckoned on the horizon; and as the green turned to yellow on the floor, the air threw itself in beating, scalding lances underneath an unrelenting yellow sun.
The dunes continued for forever, he concluded, hovering atop one, creating ripples with every insect wingbeat. There was no sandless horizon for the sun to rise over as it dimmed from harrowing yellow to a pulsating orange, the burning ochre-tinted red readying itself within digital sunlight. He stood there and wondered for a moment; it was the first time he had ventured more westerly than the drylands in the Digital World's centre. There was a kind of peace here that the bustling populace of Terabyte City or of the southern coastlines did not understand.
It was something primordial, something that no amount of roaming Digimon or Tamers, even in all their volume and number and ignorance could alter. But his moment's philosophical standstill and a sweep of his empty, desolate surroundings were complete; they had yielded nothing of note save for food for further thought. He took to the winds once more, to address the feeling in his gut that still tugged and tore at him.
More long hours under the nestling sun soaring over the sand passed; and eventually the grit and endless golden-yellow sea seemed to fasten and take hold, forming into primitive rock structures on the very fringes, before the plateaus which still seemed to be somehow woefully distant. They were arches and pillars, overhangs and outcrops, weathered and beaten, turned a brown-orange by the sun and cast into a kind of rounded, artisan jaggedness, which still remained naturally inexplicable somehow. There were many of them, cast off into the distance, twenty, thirty maybe dotted across this immediate stretch of desert.
This was where his instincts were drawing him too. He flew atop one and cast his gaze down, wondering precisely what it was he was looking for; there was no further or more specific tug to that urge, that wanderlust that had brought him here and wrought this journey upon him. It was indiscriminate, almost as if, within this area, he was to look for what he wanted without knowing what it was he wanted and why in particular he wanted it. This "Spirit" thing was starting to alienate him.
He examined everything in his plane of vision; the moon was out, now. A silver-white crescent in the sky, its light fleeting as it danced across the sands in fresh, fickle slivers. He moved to another structure in the desert, and looked again. Nothing but sand, stone, and sandstone for as far as the eye could see. Another structure. Nothing. Another. Nothing. Rinse and repeat. The sun was cresting on the horizon now; the night had passed with this journey. There was an exhaustion in him, physically and mentally, but his soul would not abate or rest until it was found.
And just as he found himself on the last of the slender sandstone pillars, he caught site of it; the metal edge nestled half-buried in sand underneath the arch furthest north-east. He bounded to it, forgetting to fly for the first part, remembering his mortality -- his humanity. He dug it out and scraped it up, gazing upon it with awesome wonder in his eyes. He still did not fully understand, but he was getting closer. It was an egg, as big as his head, with two black spines equidistant at the bottom, and one protruding from the top.
It was yellow and rough; he ran a hand over it, and even through the thick skin of his newfound form, through the hands of the Hive's first spirit, it felt unusually so. Almost scaled. There was a black symbol in the very middle; a circle with eight scythe-tipped lines on it. He held it close for a moment, and it began to crumble, vanishing into glistening specks of white-gold data upon the air. Katsuro panicked, for a moment, before he realised where it was flowing -- into him.
He knew the name of the crest, now. "Vigilance."
