The Final Path
- The Final Path
- True Shivae History
By Minku
All shivae, due to chemicals that course through their veins, have the unique ability to travel from one place to another in a straight line, reguardless of obstruction. This is known by many names: some call it slideing, others shifting, going Cold, etc., but it all means the same thing. A shivae concentrates on where they wish to go and step into an oblivion known to most of them as the Cold. To any passenger, the Cold is an absence of everything. There is no light, no sound, no life. Only four things exist: the shivae they entered with, the sounds that shivae makes, the heat that shivae produces, and the lethal cold that embraces your blood and chills you from the inside out. This cold cannot be escaped by artic gear, heaters, or anything else other than a shivae's body heat, and even that dwindles far too quickly for most people's comfort. It makes no difference if you enter naked or clothed, the cold will frezze you just as quickly. To a shivae, there is far more to behold. A shivae can travel through the cold to anyplace its been before, simply by concentrating on that spot. Upon entering the Cold, a path lays before the shivae. It is perfectly straight and at the end is a window to the spot the shivae is trying to reach. Once on the path a shivae runs the equivilant distance to that area as though they were traveling a straight line. Far off in the distance to either side (or not so far as the case may be) a shivae can very dimmly see other paths it has used. They seem far off, random, and disjointed. To move off of the chosen path and onto another is called jumping paths, and is tatamount to suicide, for if you lose the path you lose everything. You cannot turn around and go back, for distance is a relative thing in the Cold.
Every shivae, upon being born, knows one path (excluding those that exist in the room of its birth.) This is known only as the Final Path, and it leads to the only structure that exists in the cold. No shivae knows how it came to be there, though there are many legends. This path is one way: once you set out to walk it, you don't come back. For this reason, no one can give a truly definate explanation as to what it looks like, but it is said that whenever you feel the hand of death near you, whenever the wind blows frigid and your blood runs cold, if you slide then and look to your left (or right, the legend varies) you will see it. It will not be disjointed or obscure, but will be solid and visible. Few shivae will risk slideing if they have so much as goosebumps, for it is said if you stare at the final path too long you will find yourself upon it, never to return. Those who claim to have seen it describe it as such: a long path, about a mile, ending at the gates of a castle of ice. Others say its granite, and still more say it is the very substance death is made of. Those who go to check do not return. There is no returning. Legend says the palace is full of the bodies of those who have entered it, frozen like statues and placed on display by the wraiths said to inhabit its walls. To this day (for good reason, since the Final Path does exist) "walking the Final Path" is a shivae term used for someone dying, or someone wishing to die.
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