She envisioned the dead man at the tip of her dagger back in the Guilder’s study. She dreamt of Wren between her legs. Death. Life. Bound together.
Discomfort, deeply rooted in her soul, bellowed in internal strife. The roar brewed from the ground through her feet and knees, up her tense spine, and finally into her brain. Shooting urgency, aching, and destroying.
O Zenith, it hurt.
Her arms shot out into the mist; it curled lovingly around her limbs, especially the one with the odd bangle, but the torment within her body wracked her. Back arched, head thrown abaft. A silent scream erupted. Her eyes squeezed tight to keep in the hurt, tears forming at the edges. Every rune tattooed on her left arm radiated in fulguration and snapped in flashes of lurid brightness. Right arm a shadowy black.
“Ashe,” more frantic came the words from far across the chasm of Life, but she knew the girl was still beside her. Yet, they seemed leagues apart. “ASHE!”
Pounding headache, a thousand hammers all battering against her skull, echoes boomed as each forging head struck bone. Ashe clawed at her hair trying to make it stop. Body shivering, not from cold, but of empty life. The mist poured over her in great fonts, as if a giant was standing over her tilting a wine glass of effluvium. The healing, soothing, poisonous-to-all-but-her fog washed over in waves, covering her entire body in aether. It wrapped around her in a cocoon, the feeling of Life and Death.
“Ashe, I can’t see you.”
Distant the words were. But she didn’t care. All there was was the pain. O it hurt.
Her runes synapsed, striking aglow as Aere cycloned. Ignis burned. Aquis stormed. Terris rumbled. Body alight with the aether of Eminence’s Shards. The Tenets rising and falling like the tide.
It hurt.
It felt like murder.
Murder.
O Zenith, was this the tithe for her folly with the Guilder’s servant?
The mist drove into her and cleared away her drunkenness. The pain brought on a clarity.
Like a tragedy upon the stage, the actors set. Fade to black.
Slowly, Zenith’s cock, ever so slowly the pain in her body began to recede.
It was flushed from her as rain clears waste within the aggers on either side of the cobblestone walk. Yet, the mist spun around her unending, unyielding. She opened her eyes, lids blooming with a sudden grey light, almost as if looking into a diamond prism anew. Her mind untangled the phosphorescence to form the shapes in which were outlined by the illumination. Clearer the pictures came into focus. Silhouettes hardened by the mist. Yet, it wasn’t normal, there was no sheen, no aura around the forms sending her mind pictures of emotions and wants.
No, this was different. Darker, surreal. Visionary.
A cloaked figure appeared in the mist, a woman? Something held in their arms. A child. The babe wailed, they ran, throwing out their hand, aether sparking in fonts of Aere and Terris. Flung toward something chasing them. Daemons. Garbled words, the figure hurried. The child screamed bloody void, a fierce ray from within the swaddling.
The woman led her through the darkness, almost straight through a tunnel. Then stopped.
Ashe was there, within a tower. Marble stones as tall as she. All around was a vast open chamber, fluted columns holding aloft a massive dome covered in roots. High above a massive tree, so large, so encompassing, it felt otherworldly. A spire protruded downward from the ocular opening at the top like a stalactite, piercing the roots. A humir-sized crystal of all colors and none bathed the room in rainbow. Shadowy forms moved about her. People, she realized. A throne dripped red as blood. A single figure stood before the crystal; hands outstretched upon its surface. Their body blazed in pure white fire. Giving their life, the crystal taking it.
Her mind wandered the chamber, taking in the corpses of shades. She reached for the crystal with gossamer fingers. Hand going straight through the diamond-like object, piercing wails grew, sounding like that of the void. All around her the wails, the vision turned black like obsidian, then bloodred again. Back again to clear, the crystal reformed. The wails’ tenor grew, near deafening, then a shatter. Under her hand, the bangled hand with the diamond eye, the crystal exploded in a thousand pieces. Her body shivered with the explosion. Mist poured out of the remnants, driving into the eye in the center of her palm.
And then she felt it, felt the pull of her own soul toward the cracked crystal.
The woman turned toward her, holding the babe, both faces hidden. ‘Godsblood,’ she called. ‘Daughter of the Pentax Gods and Nightingale. Royal blood, royal. Royal. Godsblood.’
Zenith protect…
The mist circled around her, closing in and she was within the Sea of Mist. The setting changed; the actors ready for the next scene of the play.
The woman, hair billowing silver in the Sea. The child in her arms was asleep now, a quiet thing. The woman faced her. An elfir with pale skin, nearly see-through. Her eyes were bi-colored. One black, one white. The woman held her arm out and pointed.
Ashe looked.
She could smell the bog, taste the mustiness on her tongue. Swamp as far as could see, and a shadow hung over, where she saw the face of a man within the clouds. An elfir, his face resembling the woman’s. Siblings. Glaring ice blue eyes with a pupil of yellow, hidden within was pain and suffering. A polished, thin, golden sword with semi-circles of braided gold was clasped in the man’s hands, radiating the color of peridot. Shadows beside him. Figures tall and short. One with large keratin horns, the other flattened, elongated ears. Drakken and lapin.
The Sea of Mist turned crimson all the way up to the moon. Bright red it was, dripping with scarlet tears down into the marshlands.
Screams of terror filled the vision, not like the wails from the void of the Meadows. These were humir mixed with creature. Daemon eyes blinked within the mist. Gunfire burst, cannons blasted within the red Sea.
The man, drakken, and lapin waited, watched as the daemons surged toward them.
The woman and child fled the Sea, aether crackled all around the swamp. The daemons hounded her every move.
Close it was, so close she could feel the screams in her bones.
Please…
She blinked. A change of scene. A flip of vision.
Opened her eyes anew and was deep within a city.
Buildings all around her reached toward the sky. Cluttered and sprawled on the edge of a desert. A temple with a rolling dune like a wave in a circle through the sands. Hovered over the city was another city. Gargantua.
She ran, frightened. The bikromi seer and the babe huddled in the frayed streets, blood seeped from the bi-colored eyes like tears, puddling at her feet.
A man with tight curls and a scar ringing his neck, clenched his fists, stared at the hovering city as anger billowed from him like the wind. He had a crown about his temple, a king, a true leader. Royalty. His eyes were pupiled in emerald surrounded by sandy brown, the emeralds breaking as the sands behind him exploded upward, a giant vvyrm punching upward toward the floating city in behemoth rage. A hammer in his hand, a green crystal shattering.
