[Iron League] The Dancing Stones

[Revenant]

[Closed to Philomel and Shinsou Vaan Osiris]

A flash of vertigo accompanied William’s transition from the real world to the Citadel’s magically created chamber. A handful of years had passed since William had been one of the arena’s regular combatants, long enough for him to lose the affinity that he’d had for the place. Back then he’d been in and out of the Citadel so many times that he wouldn’t have noticed the dizzying sensation, but like everything else with him, times had changed.

A couple years wouldn’t mean much to most people. Sure there were those who lived active lives and could measure the difference of a couple years in leaps and bounds, but for the majority of Althanians, years passed in and out with little change. William was one of the former, a mover-and-shaker in the ways of the world, but even among that crowd he was an outlier. The last few years hung heavy on William’s shoulders. He’d experienced multiple events which had completely upended his existence one after another. No one could go through that amount of turbulence and come out unchanged, and William was no exception. In fact, he was still struggling to come to terms with exactly how much he’d changed and who he now was. The Citadel was his way of doing that.

Straining himself physically had always been both mentally and emotionally cathartic for William. There was something that he found freeing about throwing himself headlong into a task, whatever it may be. Back in his time as a woodsman, he’d found solace in the ritual of felling a tree and then rendering it into something useful. Hours of repetition spent stripping a tree into precise, functional shapes left his mind free to turn over his problems.

This practice had become even truer following William’s transformation into a living weapon. The act of violence freed him, however temporarily, from the constant state of rage and pain that he existed in. But that was part of the changes that he’d gone through. He’d mastered the spirits whirling within him and was no longer the mindless savage he’d been when he’d first set foot in the Citadel. No one guided his destiny anymore but himself, he’d seen to that. Now he just had to figure out what that destiny was.

So it was that he found himself tracing the familiar paths through the streets of Radasanth. His mind clutched the problem tightly, unwilling to let it go but unable to make heads or tails of it. What he needed was to lose himself in the old ritual. He’d fight hard, focusing on the combat and letting his subconscious free itself to tackle its own issues. After all, everyone knew that there was no growth without conflict.