“Wait, how many
children have you adopted?” Erythis looked over at Alorinis with incredulity.
They had been walking for hours, though the latter seemed to not feel remotely
tired, though the sorceress herself knew too well that she had been spoiled by
a more magical means of movement: teleportation. The heels in her boots, though
only two squat inches of wood, pounded back against her heels painfully,
chiding her for having been so lazy.
The ranger whose person she had discovered was covered with
unseen pouches full of strange baubles brushed his gloved hand on his pants,
dislodging a rather unpleasant looking smudge. “I think it’s around thirty…
ish. You know how it is.”
She shook her head, “No, I don’t. Because I have not adopted
thirty children.” She took a worried glance at the forest around them, “Where
are we anyway? The path was safe enough.”
Alorinis shook his head, stepping over a protruding rot, “We
were being followed.” This caused Erythis to stop, and turned to face him.
“There are a few people following us.” He looked over his shoulder, “The forest
told me.”
“Did they now? Well, I’m sure you wouldn’t mind if I took a
look.” Now it was Alorinis who cast an incredulous look at Erythis as she
settled herself on the ground with legs crossed. “I will cast my mind into the
land around us and find our stalkers. If we can learn who they are – and I have
a good idea – we can know how to lose them.”
The ranger cast his gaze around the forest, before nodding:
“We seem to be on our own. Go ahead.” Erythis nodded once, and loosely laced
her hands together. Taking a slow, steady breath in, the unseen powers that
permeated the world, unseen and unfelt to so many, drew toward her. In her eyes
they shimmered and glowed as they crested like waves.
It was a beautiful sight, one she pitied all those who could
not take in the spectacle of shimmering waves in the air. They cascaded toward
her with more vehement action the closer they were to her, washing over her.
She shut her eyes, and the world became visible.
In her now unseeing eyes the world unfolded as few could
see. The arcane eddies were like the azure waves of a tropical paradise, but so
faint and transparent that through them she could see the world alight in pale
green, purple, red and so many colours that she could not describe, let alone
name.
Her breath came in with an equal peaceful nature. With it,
the world around her became much smaller as her mind’s eye entered the sky, and
looked over the vista of her home country. To the north, a distant but
immensely bright collection of spires, alight with gold shimmering. Below her
was a smaller figure – her own – alight in a fiery crimson hue. Next to her was
Alorinis, stooped over her, evidently watching her physical form as she did
nothing. Unlike her, he was lit up in a cornucopia of colours: violet, a blue
so pale it bordered on white, and around both a verdant shell in his likeness
locked them in.
Erythis disregarded herself and Alorinis, and instead moved
on to observe the forest. From the north, halfway from the capital, she found
two grey specs in the faint greens of the forest that defined their nation.
Behind the faint colours an endless blackness. It was bottomless, and to stare
into it too long, she worried that it would end in her demise.
As she focused in on the two figures in the distance, the
sorceress found her attention divided between them and a force to the south. It
thrummed a dull heartbeat of power, enticing her to investigate. It pounded
against her physical body. Vaguely recognising a hand on her shoulder, the
sorceress moved her mind’s eye south. The forests glittering below abruptly
stopped as they reached a long, jagged set of peaks: the Bulwark Mountains.
They were but a dull brown in her mind’s eye, easily seen through to the
endless black that surrounded her.
Erythis pressed forward with her mind, and felt the strain
of looking so far from her corporeal form. The throbbing grew more pronounced
and her head pounded painfully along, eager to join in harmony. It is
impossible, of that she was aware, for such to occur. Yet it intrigued her all
the more because of the impossibility.
Her mind’s eye passed through the mountains and overlooked
the highlands that comprised the northern territories of the Albion Union. It
was a land of savages whose preoccupation with industrial conquest was on that
precipitated the rise of the Bulwark range centuries ago. Erythis loathed the
beasts who lived in that land, but it was in their land that the powerful magic
source thrummed.
She pushed on, her mind feeling stretched beyond its limits.
The sorceress had trained extensively in offensive magicks, and now she felt
pangs of regret among the ripping pain in her head for not working more
diligently at divination. Finally she came upon the capital of Albion; Lordaeron,
the economic driver of the continent. The city glowed with contrasting, ugly
colours of bronze and yellow, signifying the immense pollution that was below
and above. Between them the stately grey of dead buildings and what she
considered dead people milled about.
There in what she assumed was a parapet in their capital
building was the source of the magic. It was black. Blacker than the abyss that
surrounded her. It pulled at her, and she willingly allowed her curiosity to
stretch her taxed magical mind further. It was become clear, she could almost
make out the source of the power, but as she grew closer, the pull was
stronger.
Closer.
She pushed further, her mind screaming in agony at the
extent of the stress it was being put under. It was a man, and not one of
Albion. His person, unlike the grey, unmagical folk of Lordaeron, burned a
powerful, bright azure.
Though she observed him for too long and suddenly found
herself no longer in control. The vacuum of power the azure figure concocted
was too powerful, and she was being dragged in. She screamed, feeling her
physical throat vibrate as her body thrashed against the pain.
It felt as though her very soul was being stretched, pulled.
She thrashed in her mind’s eye, but was helpless. The figure she had risked so
much on did not move, nor seem to recognise her torment. The vision around her
began to fail, the lights wicking out one by one with such speed it felt like
death itself had arrived to take her.
Erythis fought, screamed at it, sending more of her magic
into the vision, but it only seemed to accelerate her descent. As her mind
failed and she was upon the verge of entering the vortex with her mind only,
she could see a perfectly cogent scene for only a second: a fiery haired woman,
tall and statuesque, her magnificent robes of a crimson colour sprawled out
around her collapsed form. Her ears were like daggers, her eyes afire with jade
flames, though dimming. They stared at Erythis’s mind’s eye.
It all ended with such an abruptness that as her eyes
snapped open to the failing light of the real world, she could only comprehend
the taste of blood in her mouth and the dull sound of Alorinis’s panicked
voice, demanding she stop. She needed to return to that vortex, but as she
closed her eyes, a dull pain exploded across the back of her head, and
everything went black.
0 comments:
Post a Comment