Just a random little snippet from a role-play session months ago. My fellow role-players and I decided to write up this part, because it was so intense. The characters in here—namely the narrator—are owned by me, and the other people involved. Enjoy and review!

This place was mine. I had raised it from a mere shell of stone to a grand temple to the grandeur of my talents. It was my domain, and I knew it better than even the captain knows his vessel. Better than anyone should know a palace built of rock and ideals. Yet, two imbeciles ruled in my rightful place. I could tolerate this, however, because I always dropped hints of who truly did control things, of who held the reigns of this beast of a kingdom tightly in my fists.

They called me “The Ghost”.

And a ghost I was. Those who saw me only caught brief glimpses of a moving shadow, a whisper of cloth and pale echoes booted feet against silent stone. Most felt it was merely the disturbances of their puny imaginations. That is, until they found a stairwell, doorway or passage mysteriously moved to a place nowhere near where it should have been. This was my doing, of course. So much had gone into the design of this place, including trapdoors, secret walkways, switches that moved entire rooms; so much that people could go mad for merely stepping across the yawning threshold.

There was only one who knew I was not, in actuality, a phantasm. She was… that is to say… I… I had great affection for her. She was the only one who could calm the insufferable roils of my soul, soothes the deadly aches of my being, comfort and console me when all that she had taught me suddenly flew from their monolithic perches and landed, gargoyle-like, in my mind. She was the only one I could trust. The only one I… dare I say it?

The only one I truly loved…

When she left for her routine travels, the “hauntings” increased in number and in quality. There was no one who knew how to calm the rage of “the Ghost” during the time she was away. They had tried appeasement, wards, and even employed a human who brazenly assumed the title of “wizard” to drive me away. None of it worked. I was in power. During these times, they discovered servants disappearing from their quarters, only to turn up, babbling about the hypnotic beauty that was my music, in the stables, courtyard, or even the woods far beyond the castle.

Ah, my music. Such wondrous power there was in my music. When I played, those with lesser minds, lesser willpower than my own, instantly submitted to the ultimate splendor coming from my instrument. Through the power of the song, I forced my will down upon those insignificant fleas, compelling them to do exactly as I pleased. None were safe from my might! NONE!

…Not even her.

This horrid fact was realized on a day that SHOULD have been my triumph, my amazing and overwhelming victory. It would have been, had she not come. Had I not learned of the overwhelming pain my music had the ability to cause… I would have beaten the pathetic worm into the ground from which he had crawled! Oh what I would have given for that sweet, melodious success… I would have given anything… anything but… her.

It occurred on the day she was due to come home. As I usually did on these days, I was waiting for her. Pacing in the darkness, brooding over the timekeeping devices I myself had invented, musing over my volumes of music, none of it occupied my attention long enough for the hours to safely pass without anxiety. I worried for her safety, pleaded with whatever misguided gods, who decided to take the time to eavesdrop on my prayers, to bring her home to me in a single, living piece. Had you lived in a world such as the one I was doomed to dwell in, you would worry as I did. She and my… child, were the only living things that kept me sane. If anything were to happen to either one of them… I… I don’t know what that would do to me. And if such harm came from my own hands… it would likely drive me to insanity.

It never would have happened had that nuisance not walked through my gates, strutting about like some over-dressed, and clucking fowl. He sang his praises throughout my halls, their hideous echoes ringing in my head like some badly played sonata, like some poor ignorant filth screeching a bow across a hurting fiddle string. He claimed his musical skills were at the same level as my own. He claimed he would take the place of the rulers of the castle by the use of his “mighty” abilities.

I could not allow this blasphemy. Those two idiots nearly lived in fear of the Ghost who haunted this castle. Every now and then, I would remind them of whose unseen hands really conducted business by simply slipping a noose around their necks, tightening it to a frightening strength, then letting it go, allowing it to fall limply to the floor in front of their egotistic feet. And so, they stayed out of my way, permitting me to easily go about my business. But who knew how another would run my castle? I most certainly didn’t. I had to stop this incompetent fool from ruining all I had worked so hard for.

Every switch was pulled, nearly every passage rearranged into an impossible maze that not even the veterans of my traps could find their way out of. And still that fool persisted. Still he insisted that he would win acclaim from those two bungling morons that had deluded themselves into thinking they were actually in power. I don’t know how it happened, yet the pompous little “minstrel” made his way to the throne room doors, his disgustingly colored trappings flapping in the breeze of his swaggering passage.

I was waiting for him there.

The petty words we exchanged have little matter here. All that matters here is what occurred with music, not with words. All that matters here is our music, our war with those notes, scales and scores we composed, all in the name of my superiority. I have no idea how long we dueled like this, letting mundane music flow from our instruments. He felt his was superior, merely because it was a rarity. Mine was truly of better quality. While he preferred to use uniqueness as a talent, I brought out the true beauty of an instrument most would see as a simple tool to produce sound.

Dark where his was light, my glorious instrument made a deep, rich sound that, when asked, could soar to amazing heights. He crowned his treasure with a frivolous name in some foreign tongue, while I gifted mine with a far more fitting jewel of a title. What sort of incompetent, pathetic worm gives a—I will admit—beautifully tuned creation such a mouth-filling name such as, “Sang av Aere”? Does he really think the hideous masses will pass down that confusing gibberish to their offspring in frightful, whispered tales over the fires of winter? The world will one day hear of my precious fiddle. It will hear the name, “Shie-Dei’a”, and it will fall under the beauty of its amazing spell.

I had no idea time had passed until a new sound joined the group. A female had appeared, and had joined in the pretender’s song. I played harder, throwing my will into the music. Perhaps my will could drive back the dark ripples I had begun to see flit across my vision.

It was then she joined me, her own fiddle in perfect harmony to mine. Silver took over, driving back momentarily the darkness I saw. I took heart from her presence, and my music soared to a level I had never dared take it. All of my will went into the song, every emotion I had for her flowed from my fingers, from my very spirit, into the music. It flowed around us, blending, harmonizing, and fairly dancing in the sweet air around us. The darkness was gone, replaced with a bittersweet silver. Never had I played like that.

And still I needed more.

I could NOT let such an arrogant FOOL beat me in my own domain. I admit, to no one but myself, that I did do a foolish thing. I would not even tell my love, in the darkest recesses of my passages, in the most silent hours of the night. Ignoring everyone around me, I cut loose the bonds that held my emotions in check. For so long, they had been there, guarding against the turmoil I would soon feel. For so long, they had held me tied safely to sanity, kept me from feeling the seas of hurt, of rage, of jealousy and of fear.

Everything now flowed through me, entering the music of its own will and wrapping itself around the living beings in the room. All the jealousy, all the anger, the fear, the great surges of power, it all overcame the splintering barriers and went, soaring free on the currents of notes. Only my music persisted in the room, drowning out the little fool’s pathetic attempt at a song. I played faster, harder, letting the strings sing under the bow. Emotions I didn’t know I had even bothered to repress because of their untold danger tumbled out, filling the room with a great blackness I assumed only I was able to behold. It filled me with a great sinister feeling. Yet I persisted.

Nothing in me would let me allow him to beat me. Not in my own domain. Not in front of her…!

I let it all flow. I held nothing back. I heard her scream, her cries of pain, her begging me to stop. But I could not. I was under the spell of the music. So deep was I, that I could not even feel when my own music began to tear my very soul apart at the seams. The world was awash in blackness, steeped in shadow and wreathed in the red flames of hatred I had no idea my soul possessed. It took me over, willing my hands to play, willing my soul to lay bare all it had to offer the now-diabolical music.

I was drowning, lost, in that horrific sea that smashed against another barrier with more force than I knew I had in me. My will feebly attempted to force back the shadow from my love. I tried. All the soul I had left in me tried. I never wanted her to come to harm. I never wanted to hear her pain. And I never wanted it to fuel the monster my fiddle had birthed. With more effort than I thought I had left, I forced my music to set her free. I willed it to.

Yet, no matter how much I threw into the works, nothing helped. She remained trapped within the horrible vortex of power that my bottled emotions had created. My mind reverted to the little life we both cared for so deeply. What would happen to him, if both of us were lost to this musical demon? If our souls were torn from our bodies? Something had to be done. Something to protect them. The child never knew me, barely saw the flitting shadows across his walls, barely heard my whispers of affection. Why would he miss me? The Ghost that merely haunts. The Ghost that is never there, never tangible. Who would miss the chill that permeates a room when I enter? Who would ever, in their frail, sane minds, miss something that is never there?

Who would miss a phantom?

Nothing in my being was saved for myself. The music robbed me of all my will for self-preservation. There had to be something I could do to save her. Something, anything to free her soul. And so… I let myself go. I relinquished my hold on the physical. Perhaps, this sacrifice would allow the monster all it wanted to eat and, in exchange, set her free. I felt myself falling, drowning in the waves of music that still, unbelievably, continued playing. Now despair filled me. There was no way I could free her, not while my physical hands were still clasped tightly around the bow and neck of my precious Shie-Dei’a.

Something slammed into me from the realm of reality, knocking the fiddle from my grasp and abruptly putting an end to the music. I felt her soul being torn back to reality, away from the horror in which I was now trapped. That alone brought me some small comfort. I drifted, wrapped up in the black and red vortex my emotions had so carelessly created. While the music had stopped, the horror it had brought had simply retreated away, waiting, lurking, until someone called it forth again. I would be dragged with it, submitted to its every whim, while my body rotted back in the planes of reality. Without intending it, I had become the ghost I had tried so very hard to become. Without intending it, I had destroyed the bonds I held to reality. Everything I cared for was back there, everything I loved.

It was then, I truly knew… I had lost.