BIO

Corban Skillånder is a musician and producer based in the UK, known for his passion for storytelling through music. As the sole permanent member of The Austringer, he creates progressive rock music designed to captivate and intrigue.The Austringer is a project designed to always push the boundaries of Corban's creativity and to explore new ways to tell his stories through art.

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The Medium has awoken, and found himself running away from an unknown enemy through a series of train carriages.In the first carriage he entered, he was confronted by the interior of an old-fashioned steam train, where a heist was currently taking place.He narrowly survives, and escapes through the next door:

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THE MEGALOMANIAC - PT. I

The door fastened shut behind him.He steadied himself and begged his pupils to adjust to the light - or rather, the lack of it. This car was markedly different from the last: the ride was much smoother for one, and everything was completely silent. Which made no sense.Being able to hear himself think was heavenly. The total lack of the clickety clack of the track, he thought madly.His heart rate was still dropping from the encounter with The Outlaw. The cacophony of the passengers' screams, the clamour as the guns started crashing. He allowed himself a moment to process what had just happened, drew himself short, and feeling a panic set in, completed his ritual: relax jaw, regulate breathing, inhale, hold, exhale, repeat. After a moment, he took in his surroundings.He was in another train car, but again seemingly on a completely different train. Outside, what initially he'd thought was the inside walls of a tunnel took shape to him as an impossibly dark landscape, so dark one could easily trick themselves into believing that the neon city skyline cracked across it was actually floating alone in a dark void.Surely not, he thought.The city looked to be taller than it was wide, and enormous. This vertical city was a complete mass of colour, reds, blues and greens so saturated they felt almost sweet to look at. Rich, even. Despite this ocular decadence, the city looked cold and dead: the lights were on, but nobody was home. He thought of a movie he had once watched where a man wandered through the abandoned streets of London, and shivered. Somehow, he knew, the streets of that city were dead and empty, once filled with exuberant, luxurious life that had at some indeterminate point been ripped away from it, or perhaps slowly fizzled out like an ember under water. The feeling of loneliness crept up on him, and he knew, he knew, that he was the only one looking out at that city, and that another living soul had not seen it for a long, long time.
He tore his eyes away and looked inside the car.It was sleek. Every surface was a matte dark navy, and accent lights lining the skirting and reaching across the ceiling leaked out an eerie, dim, neon green. This didn't seem like a passenger car like the last, it seemed like an office. A desk sat at the other end in the room, and between it and him sat a chair facing away from him. He couldn't see into the chair, but if he had been able to, he would have seen a vague folded mass wrapped in a dark navy cloth, and had he listened, we would have heard that quietly, it was hissing.Between the wide windows on either side of the car what looked to be bookcases filled the walls from floor to ceiling. Books bound in the same shade of navy lined a few of the shelves, and others contained odd, aggressive-looking artefacts and sculptures - small explosions of sharp angles and concrete spike. The Medium thought of the word "brutalism", but wasn't quite sure if that was right. They did not help with his anxiety.Despite his knowledge that there was no-one else here, he couldn't help but notice that none of the shelves or anything on them were dusty. They looked well-maintained, meticulously so. The detailing that had gone into keeping all of the nooks and crannies of each sculpture completely clean was almost inhuman. It gave them an even eerier quality to him, as if they had just been torn out of packaging and placed moments before his arrival.His eyes lingered slightly on each sculpture, but stopped entirely on the bird skull. It seemed to be made entirely out of gold, and alarmingly, carved into the forehead, was a familiar symbol.His hand fell to his hip where <weapon/mjolnir/arrow> sat. He held <it> up before the skull and compared the symbols. They were identical. At his realisation of this, his head imploded again, and just like the first time it felt like it came from inside and outside at the same time. He knew, with absolute certainty, that it was coming from something behind him on the train. That he was being chased. That he had to push forwards, and fast. With the pressure slowly removing its weight on his head, he turned toward the desk and took steps toward the door just on the other side of it.The lights in the car flickered as the pressure relieved completely, and the Thing in the chair started to whir and click.*

Finiendum ad Infinitum

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