Marieya’s Horror

A scream.

A shock.

A step.

A sprint.

Whatever had caused that loud of a noise could not be good news, and Marieya knew that her friends were in danger. She didn’t know what it was or how powerful it could turn out to be, all that mattered to her was grabbing her gear, channeling her innate shadow fey powers to quickly teleport from where she was keeping watch before dashing towards the source.

It only took under half a minute for her to reach where the combat was taking place. Jørgen was attempting to cast an ice-based spell and having it pass through the ineffable form of the ghost that was assaulting the rest of the party. Honesty and Milo were using their ranged weaponry to try to damage it, and whilst the arrows & bolts were leaving visible trails of web as they exited the spectral opponent; it was not having nearly enough of an effect.

The same could be said of Fauna’s attacks, with her choosing to adopt her war ostrich form in the hopes of maximising damage to similarly frustrating results as the ranged attacks.

“Alright,” Marieya thought to herself, “It’s just an undead, you’ve dealt with these before.” She raised her hand and channeled a spell, a skeletal hand forming itself into existence before launching at the ghost and latching onto it. “Right, that’s the spell done, now-”, Marieya’s thoughts were cut off by the ghost turning around and screaming at her and Fauna.

“…that did nothing except piss it off…”

In its rage, the ghost chose to ignore the two members of the party at the other side of it and charged straight at Marieya and Fauna. Passing through the former harmlessly apart from some shivers and being slightly freaked out.

When it came to passing through Marieya however, that is when the situation became a little more complicated. Instead of continuing on its path the ghost pulled itself into the shadow fey’s body, possessing Marieya and locking her into her own mind, this change confirmed by the glowing blue eyes and the piercing scream that was emanating from her.

“Oh Seggotan. Oh crap. Oh fuck.” Marieya said out loud in her mindscape, able to perceive what is going on through her eyes but completely unable to control herself. “Come on,” she said, panic lacing her voice thoroughly, “I can break free of this, all I’ve got to do is…”

“There’s no getting out of this one killer,” a similar voice echoed from behind Marieya, and she turned to look at them in horror, “This time, you aren’t stopping me from taking control.”

Before Marieya stood a mirror of herself, a manifestation of her past mistakes, guilt, trauma, and fears. A self-created image of what could have happened if she let her loathing and hatred get out of control, they wore a long black robe covered in red gemstones, a hood pulled up to shadow the face entirely except for eyes glowing a fierce orange, carrying a red staff emblazoned with fiery imagery and a flame burning at the top that seemed to never need fuel or stoking.

“No!” Marieya cried, trying to conjure a geyser of water underneath the manifestation standing before her. In response, they waved their hand gently, and the beginnings of the geyser faded into nothing. 

In a fit of fury Marieya tried another spell, this time hoping to use an intense ribbon of water to throw the manifestation to the ground. With but a stomp of their staff a wall of fire blazed into life in front of them, quickly evaporating the ribbon into nothing. 

Before even letting their opponent try cast another spell, the manifestation used their quicker reflexes to lunge forward with their staff, tripping the shadow fey onto the ground and pinning her. Outside of this mindscape the others were trying in vain to non-lethally bring down their friend, attempting to grapple with her and similarly knock her prone on the ground, but the ghost was utilising its host’s natural reflexes to dodge out of the way.

“Would you look at that?” the manifestation said, laughing gently in a mocking tone, “your little friends are trying to save you, aww, that is so cute…”

“It will make all the sweeter when I kill them.”

Marieya tried to struggle free from under the staff, attempting to use what little strength she had to break free, as the ghost attempted to use her weaponry against her friends, thankfully failing in this pursuit. Faintly, she heard Jørgen speak to her, “I’m very sorry for what I’m about to do.”

And in that moment, he placed the tips of his thumbs together and spread his fingers apart, blasting out a cone of red hot fire against his possessed friend, causing a scream of pain and intensifying the sweating Marieya had been experiencing.

In any other moment, confronted with that much fire directly in her face would have caused her to lose her nerve and consequently lose control over her suppressed powers. But faced with the prospect of the darkness within her hurting her friends, her resolve steeled, and she was able to focus on keeping things in control.

“Oh that is just too fucking good!” the manifestation said, raising their voice and laughing loudly at its prey still pinned under the staff. “One of your allies is using your worst fears against you, all because you couldn’t hold your nerve against a ghost!”

Scared, and worried for the safety of her friends Marieya managed to briefly pull the staff off of her and roll away, launching herself to her feet and assuming a combat stance as her real life counterpart dodged Fauna’s snake staff that had attempted to constrict her.

“There’s no use fighting this you pathetic girl,” the manifestation said, chastising the cleric before them, “you’ve failed in keeping me suppressed, and now, all of them are going to see you for the monster you are, what a sight… seeing little Marieya, all scared and alone, becoming a cold, ruthless, murderer.”

Rage boiled up inside Marieya, as she felt her dominant hand warming up and the outline of fiery phoenix wings formed around her. A blaze conjured itself around her hand and soon spread across her arm as the wings fully formed and the visage of the phoenix formed around her head. 

“No. One. Messes. With. My. Family!”

She lunged forward as the manifestation turned to face her, trying to quickly prepare a counterattack but failing as the flaming punch impacted hard onto their face, knocking them to the ground where they quickly evaporated into black smoke, once again retreating to the recesses of Marieya’s mind as her vision turned black and she fell to the ground both in her mindscape and reality.

The others had caused enough damage for Marieya to become unconscious, the finishing blow coming from Fauna using a spell to heat the sword within Marieya’s hand to both disarm her and damage her, forcefully expelling the ghost from her body.

Initially everyone else planned to go over to her and quickly stabilise her condition, but this was cut short by a spark releasing itself from her chest, rapidly forming into a similar phoenix-like form that had appeared in her mindscape and exploding in a ten foot radius around her, hitting the ghost with a burst of magical flame that did moderate damage to it before she fell onto the ground heavily damage, but conscious.

“Oh no…” Marieya thought to herself as she touched her hand to her chest and flooded her system with healing energy, “I have to explain what the hell just happened to them, Jørgen’s gonna be so angry that I hid this from him, I’m gonna have to leave the others and go back into isolation…”

Whilst she went through internal panic on the ground; everyone else used this opportunity to launch an all out attack at the ghost to prevent it from either repossessing Marieya, or possessing anyone else. Fauna’s snake staff bit into it, Jørgen bashed it around with his quarterstaff and Honesty snuck up behind it and dealt the fatal blow with a cunning surprise attack.

With the situation now much calmer, the rest of the party turned to Marieya, looking concerned but in more of an “are you okay?” way than feeling threatened by her. In between sobs of panic, she was able to speak, “So… before I was cleric, I was a sorcerer. A phoenix sorcerer, to be precise. The power of fire literally lives within my veins.”

She paused, taking a sharp breath before carrying on, “and it’s caused me nothing but grief ever since… an incident, so, I just lock it away, and it only really comes out under stress.” She turned to Jørgen with pleading eyes and began crying properly, “I… understand if you hate me now Jørgen, I know that I’m nothing but a filthy mageblood to you now… I can also understand if you want me to leave…”

Jørgen adopted a soothing tone, and sought to assuage his friend’s worries. “Marieya”, he said, not a hint of anger in his voice, “when I spoke those words, I was referring to those with uncontrolled wild magic in their veins. You both make an effort to restrain your powers and your innate ability comes from the phoenix, a most noble creature.”

Fauna concurred, saying, “Yeah, we honestly don’t mind that about you, we’re just glad you’re safe and that you felt comfortable telling us.”

And finally, Honesty chimed in. “Big fire bird go boom?” he said, having the point well and truly go over his head.

Marieya laughed, still with a hint of worry in her voice but relieved she hadn’t alienated or harmed another group of friends, pulling herself to her feet as they all went off to resume their sleep for the night.

As she lay down in trance, it quickly became a very easy rest to get through. No nightmares, no intrusive thoughts, no dwelling on the past, only a single phrase passing through her mind:

“You’re my family now, and I promise you, so long as I’m around, no one is going to hurt you. Absolutely no one.”

Inspiration

It has been far too long since I’ve written a Marieya story and it honestly feels great, especially as the last session I had it was finally time for the full party to uncover part of her backstory, specifically her Phoenix Soul sorcerous origin.

Though I will admit it was also completely anxiety inducing considering that I essentially had control ripped away from me as this ghost attempted to attack my friends whilst the DM informed me that I was completely aware what was going on in this state.

Whilst that is terrifying, it gave me a bit more room to expand on Marieya’s Manifestation, previously introduced in one of my backstory articles (Marieya’s Torment if you’re interested).

Writing for the manifestation is interesting, because I treat them as both a physical and nonphysical entity. Physical in the fact I keep a sideline character sheet for them to inform me of their looks, abilities, and equipment, and nonphysical in the fact that they’re essentially just a figment of Marieya’s psyche.

Admittedly, the way that I write her is based off my own mental struggles.

Because what’s a better coping technique than projecting your issues onto your characters right? (This is sarcasm, pay no attention to me, get the help you need if you need it.)

In seriousness, the manifestation is based off my own problems with intrusive thoughts and how they can be based on things that have happened in the past or paranoia about things that you feel could happen. Marieya has lost quite a few friends for various reasons, either by her own selfish actions, or through inability to take a meaningful action, and this ends up weighing heavily on her with the rest of the party because she feels that these actions are doomed to repeat themselves and she’ll lose the new friends she’s grown incredibly close to.

This is also why I made it a point to put try put emphasis on Marieya calling her friends “her family”, because this is also an important point to her character and another thing I’ve lifted from myself. Whilst I get on with my family, it’s often my friends I tend to rely on more for support, guidance, and a lot of things generally.

In general the concept of “found family” is always something I enjoy seeing, as when done right it allows people and characters to find a place where they are comfortable. Home doesn’t have to be four walls and a roof, home can be a hug and a heartbeat.

Unrelated to anything, I did a lot of dialogue in this story, and was specifically using a worksheet/guide to try help me, as dialogue is one of my weaker areas when it comes to punctuation. Let me know how it turned out, as always I’m very happy to hear whatever feedback you may have.