Thread: The Light and the Dark in the Soul (Anaeria and razerwing)

size The Unicians were a brilliant race, who lived aeons before humans became known to the planet. Over the ages they ruled the world, kept it clean of disease and that filth known as jealousy and anger, hatred and such emotions that corrupt. They were a long lived species however, and it was very rare to see children amongst the Herds. It was nearing the end of the Third Starroughly thirty thousand years or so after they became the rulers of the earth that Humanity appeared. Brute beasts with violence in their cores and suspicious, frightened minds. The Unicians taught them of other ways, about forgiveness and gentleness, how to care for each other and how to love, and for a time, humans and unicians were close, they prospered.....until Ra'Zeilen. Ra'Zeilen was what people would term today as a psychotic with paranoia and multiple personalities, all of which were violence incarnate. He was also a wizard. Humans held a great gift for magics, and the Unicians had taught them much of what they knew. And Ra'Zeilen had learned it all. And he twisted it, turning it dark for his own purposes. He wasn't known of by name until it was too late, and he had killed off every Herd in the world but the Herd of the King, Aroon. Aroon had been blessed shortly before their homeland was put to the torch by a mob of humans brainwashed by the greedy, evil Ra'Zeilen, and he and his pregnant wife Kamali ran for their lives across plains and fields, the straggling Herd following after them with the humans hot on their heels. It took months before Aroon and less than thirty of what had once been three thousand of his Herd to reach the Gods' Forest, the one forest in the entire world that was entirely riddled with magic, it WAS magic, sweet to the taste, light to the eye, with not a single negative thing to corrupt it. Aroon and his Herd took refuge there just as his wife went into labour. Shortly after that, she bore him not one, but two healthy foals. A male and a female, the male whiter than snow, as his whole Herd was, and Aroon was proud. The childs' sister however...was pitch black. Her hide was blacker than the night sky, and when she opened her eyes, they were black as well, though stars glittered in them though it was midday. She also had a horn, small though it was, and her brother was weaker than her, unable to lift his head even as she was exploring the small den of thick vines and thorns that her mother had chosen to birth her and her brother in. None of the Herd knew what to do with her, she was purer than all of them it seemed, entirely innocent, perhaps innocence itself, and her brother was the same, though they were literally polar opposites. He was weak, whereas she was strong. It was ten years before the Humans found them, the evil Wizard having gathered and trained an army of the most heartless, cruel magic users around, and they encircled the Forest and set siege to it with fire and poison and evil spirits. Aroon, and the remainders of the herd except for Kamali and her children, went to fight the humans, their horns and wings shining so brilliantly that the night skies became day. And they failed. Ra'Zeilen was both wickedly amused, and furious however, when the Gods' Forest refused him and all like him, entry into it's depths, physically rejecting him with vicious plants and trees that shifted on him and those he sent in, who came back out raving lunatics with not a drop of dark magics left to them. He plotted for three days afterwards, and finally, as all evil does when it obsesses about something, decided to get rid of the source of the good magics in this world. He, and his remaining forces, created a hole in the fabric of the universe and their cruel, evil magics covered the forest, physically lifting it from it's foundation in the earth. They shoved it into the Dark Space, a strange place unknown to time and laws of earth. It was a home of creatures that would make even high level demons fear, and they were always, always ravenous. The evil Wizard overestimated himself during this, and the Gods' Forest took from him everything that he was, tearing his soul from his body in order to make it wander the earth for eternity, his body ravaged and turned to dust. Those who helped him died as well in less than pleasant fashions. And the girl-child, now ten years old and able to gain a human form that was a mix of black and white and a beautiful shade of colour to her eyes, was left alone, witnessing first hand the deaths of her mother and brother by the claws of a Rathgnarl, a batwinged, gargoyle-esque creature more soulless than hells evillest demon. It's been a thousand years in the Dark Space, longer in the humans' world, and the girl, Imalia, has become a Predator, becoming the Queen of her Forest, which has become tainted slowly, the animals warping into grotesque creatures, though most remained innocent. She protects them that she can with a fierceness that is bordering on manic, and her mind shattered long ago, leaving her less than pure, she even enjoys killing now. And the Seals that kept the Forest in the Dark Space is unravelling. It's only a matter of time now before it returns to the world it was originally in. It was dark, as always, when Imalia returned to her den, a specially fortified circle of thick thorns and thicker vines that grew up and curved around her place of dwelling. Her hooves and horn, as usual, were coated in muck and gore, and blood the colour of tar dripped into her eyes and made the deep black, star specked pools sting. A single touch of her horn and the thorny vines shifted aside for her equine form, the elegant black Unician female heard her hooves chiming, the sound muffled as it had been since her arrival with this forest a thousand years ago into the Dark Space, a place between time and dimensions. She grew to adulthood and remained that way, the animals flourished and then died only to flourish again, and she was Queen of it all. Though of course, with every kingdom there were malcontents. Rathgnarls, nasty beasts that appeared part gargoyl, part bat and part alligator, mixed with something entirely of the Dark Space, had attempted yet again to kill her as she'd grazed on the pale grasses that grew here. She was thin enough, without sufficient nutrients that she could have had on Earth, and yet she was also stronger, much more so than on the planet whose humans she was certain by now had died out due to their warring idiocies. Slipping into the clearing that was her home where she could relax more so than anywhere else, Imalia sighed and her four legged form faded from sight, replaced with the perfect figure of a pale woman with black hair and eyes the alternating colour of amethysts and rubies. They changed as her moods did, and at the moment she was simply tired, so they were a near perfect blend of deep violet. Settling herself into the only clean pool of clear water that was available to the Forest. Most of the animals there had evolved to not need as much water to survive, but several species shared the liquid gratefully with her and she allowed it. Imalia sighed again as she began to clean the gore off of her body, the magics inherent in her body cleansing the impurities as the muck and gook slid from her arms and legs and belly, her head and face and back. Nude as the day she was born, she had never had to wear clothing, and didn't understand the purposes it could hold at all. Within minutes she was clean, and wandered to the soft mossy bed that was her own in order to sleep to reguvenate her body and power. It had been rougher than expected to deal with the Rathgnarls again, and was getting tougher by the day. As Imalia slept, the Forest went through a change. Unlike when it was so violently torn from the earth it had been set into to protect, the Seals on it placed with violence and hatred and jealousy, anger and greed and all of the negative things to put into magics, when the Seals broke it was with a single whisper of sound, like a faint chime of a bell in both the Dark Space, and the center of the city where the Forest reappeared, buildings entirely vanishing as trees took their place, people finding themselves confusedly standing outside of the forest itself on concrete sidewalks and the like. Cars screech to a halt as a cloud of black winged creatures took to the air, darkening the skies around the island and the people who watched the dark, forbidding forest shuddered in terror as the sounds of ancient beasts howled and called in surprise of their own, to see sunlight for the times in their shorter lives. The first rays that woke her up had Imalia looking about in a panic, her mind frozen for a split second before she was running. An hours' sleep or less, she wasn't up to her full potential of power and the sudden shifts in the winds had her sensitive equine nose sniffing the air as she bounded out of her clearing on all four hooves, hooves that rang with the sound of chimes clearly for the first time since her childhood so long ago. Little more than animal instinct was driving her, her mind frozen still with fear and hope and dread and sudden, pulsating hatred and the desire for revenge that twisted her eyes into red, burning coals of spite and anger as the black unicorn headed for a border, any border, of the Forest that she guarded so hellishly well.