Ebon Skull Archives: The Story of GloomShade the Wraith
From Atlantic Roleplay Wiki
This is reposted from OES documentation for the pleasure of the Atlantic Community. Story by Gloomshade of OES.
Ewan Fitzgerald was a simple man who lived in the wilderness between Yew and Minoc. He asked little from life, and that is what he got in return. He would spend his days in the forest around his modest cottage and hunt with his bow. He didn’t have too much in the way of possessions, but he treasured his moments during the night when things were quiet and he’d smoke his favorite pipe. He wasn’t much at carving, but he had spent the better part of a month working on a pipe, and had made himself a decent one. He prized his pipe and his house the most, since they were both wrought by his hands.
One Winter’s evening, he spied a large buck in the near woods. Hastily grabbing his bow and arrows, he set out to provide himself good meat for a long time. Ewan carefully stalked the buck in the same practiced way he was becoming good at, and let loose his first arrow. A hit! Instantly proud and amazed, Ewan knew he had hit the massive buck in the chest. The chase was on. For hours, Ewan tracked the buck, following the broken twigs and blood. Twice more Ewan hit the buck with arrows, but the buck ran on. Ewan was now entering woods that he was not familiar with.
The forest turned harshly into swamp, and the ankle-deep water covered the dying animal’s tracks. Ewan lost the buck, and finally returned home after an exhaustive search.
What he saw there was the undoing of his life.
His front door was smashed in, pieces of his favorite rocking chair were strewn about the front of the house. He charged inside to find that any and every possession he had ever held dear was gone. All was either stolen or destroyed. He desperately ran around the cottage, looking for signs of those responsible, but found only bootprints outside. He tracked the men to a river fork, and lost the trail there. Despondent, he shuffled back to his ruined cottage and searched for the one thing that gave him comfort…his pipe.
The pipe was gone of course, and Ewan sunk quickly into a deep depression.
He fell into a despair so profound that he had trouble grasping the difference between day and night, and between being asleep and awake. He could not focus on anything, and he could not tell how long he had been sitting on the ground. He felt hungry, but it was a distant feeling now. He wandered off to the swamp to look for the buck.
He drifted and wandered about, and he had no existence. How and where his body died has little meaning to his ghost, except that it was the time that the call from beyond came to him. In the darkness of his mind glowed something so dark that he could not see it, but shined so brightly that he averted his eyes. It called to him, summoned him. It promised him power and purpose, and told him he need never fear the living again. He looked down, away from the black thing…a skull was it? The thing was shining so brightly that he seemed to cast a shadow, a sad, drooping shadow.
At once, he reached for the darkness and it embraced him.