The world storm, p.15
The World Storm, page 15
“What in the hells happened?” Matthias asks, his stern voice carrying no threat or anger, rather a pleading despair.
“We did our best,” Welby says in a small voice.
“How did you think that was a good idea?” Crobane says through gritted teeth as he towers over Welby.
“Well, as I said, I didn’t intend to release her without trying to figure out what was wrong first.”
“You couldn’t tell us, I don’t know, ‘this creature we’re looking for has the power to destroy the entire planet’?”
“The situation was dire, and I thought that if Crimson found out he would overreact. You can’t possibly blame me for this outcome,”
“There is no avoiding what we have done!” Crobane shouts, in the greatest display of emotion I have ever seen from him. “Clever Welby, you cannot wiggle out of this responsibility.”
“Crimson struck the object that held her soul, you saw what happened!” Welby shouted back, finally erupting in anger.
“But you dredged up the artifact. There is no question that if we hadn’t retrieved the item, the world wouldn’t have been cleaved in half!”
“What do you want me to say? That it’s my fault!? Sure, but what good would it do? I tried to do something about a cataclysmic problem. We had no choice! We’ve been here for months, and we have accomplished next to nothing while our home is devoured. You, most of all, have seen the consequences of inaction,” Welby nears hysteria as Crobane seems to hit all of the points that Welby was most unwilling to admit himself.
“What exactly would you call the storm happening above us right now?” Crobane asks.
“This was never my intention, I’m explaining my goal,” Welby growls.
“Your goal be damned! Plans don’t always go as they should, and now I wish we had just left The New Day Wizards to solve The Void problem themselves. Yes, they may have conquered the world, but at least there would have been a world to conquer. How many people died due to this ‘entity’?” Crobane snaps back rhetorically.
“The entity is called Lori, she is nature incarnate—” Welby looks to go on.
“I don’t care what it is called, releasing it was a mistake,” Crobane snaps at the exhausted Welby.
“No, you’re wrong,” says Welby decisively, “that force should not be contained, she’s a living creature like the rest of us. I was going to release her the moment I knew it was safe to do so.”
“Lori was caged for thousands of years, and the world was fine without her. Maybe she was trapped in that gem for a good cause. We made the choice, and now we bear the consequences of our actions, for better or more realistically, for worse,” he finishes grimly.
“The world was fine without her until it wasn’t,” says Welby, narrowing his eyes menacingly at Crobane. “The biggest problem with intelligent life is that they never value that which they cannot reap.”
“What does that even mean? The world was just nearly destroyed and you’re spewing out tree-hugging soliloquies?” Crobane yells into Welby’s face, “Is this even going to deal with The Void rifts?”
“When I spoke to her, she begged me to release her. She said she would try to destroy the rifts and any creatures that entered,” Welby says, in equal anger.
“Give it a rest would ya?” says Matthias, who is pale and wide-eyed. He looks as though he is about to be sick from the grief of everything.
“Give it a rest?” Crobane says exasperatedly. “We just doomed who knows how many to death, and you want me to drop it?”
“Screaming at each other until you're blue in the face won’t make the sun rise tomorrow,” Matthias growls in a threatening, yet monotone voice.
“Are we safe here Welby?” I ask, attempting to change the subject before the argument continues. It is everything I can do to keep tears from my eyes and sobs from my throat. He frowns slightly and shakes his head.
“As safe as we can be. The branches are magically reinforced, and the biggest threat is the tidal wave that is no doubt about to make landfall on the coast. I’m at a complete loss to understand why we’re still alive at all, given what we just witnessed,” he says.
“What exactly did we witness?” I ask, despite having seen it myself.
“She took the good parts and left us here,” says Crobane. “She’s going to kill herself and us along with her in an attempt to cleanse The Void.”
“Do you really think mother nature would kill herself?” Matthias asks, as a remorseful silence falls over our wet burrow.
“No,” Welby says quietly, “she split off the parts that have not yet been infected by The Void in case she can’t win this battle. She won’t give up without a fight.”
“We couldn’t possibly know that. You said it yourself that she was unwell before she was released. This could be entirely malicious with no redeeming factors,” Crobane says stubbornly.
“Even if that’s the case, there’s nothing we can do about it. Let’s get some rest, we’ll talk in the morning if we still can,” Matthias says, as he shoots a look at Crobane.
Despite my exhaustion, I do not fall asleep straight away. I am up trembling and nearly hyperventilating for hours. It only seems fair that if I am to be taken by this storm, as so many others have been, I should suffer in the time leading up to my death; a penance that I am ready to take. Crobane is right, we did this. Regardless of our intention or how cautiously we had approached releasing Lori, it is still on us, on me. Being responsible for a few innocent lives as I was before was a tragedy that could take a lifetime to redeem, but the millions of lives I am now guilty of snuffing out is a statistic. Forever, I will be associated with a loss of life heretofore undreamt of. My mind shuts down after a time. My exhaustion whelmed as strongly as the wave created when the water fell back into the ocean.
The sound from outside is completely unchanged from when we descended into our underground nest. The droning of the wind and screams of trees being uprooted and then promptly crashing to the ground is accented only by constant claps of thunder, barely muffled by likely a mile of dirt above us. Every shake of the earth and every crash of thunder makes me very aware of how easy it would be for Mother Nature to simply bury me. Welby sleeps for the longest time of us, and the bliss of sleep covers his face with an ignorance of what happened only hours before. The pain returns when he opens his eyes and returns to us.
“What do we do now?” he asks, in as close to a business-like tone as he can muster. The soreness of my muscles and the strain magic has created on my brain do not compare to my dulled, emotionless state of mind. Each of the others seems to have synched up in their emotional response. No one hints at a smile, or a frown, just a dead stare as they grieve the gravity of The Void Walker's collective actions.
“Well, what do we know?” I ask the room, as Miss Liz lazily crawls out of my robe’s chest pocket and onto my shoulder. Even her juvenile mind recognizes the seriousness of what is going on.
“We’re alive, so others may have survived,” says Crobane.
“A Tsunami larger than any will have swept the world and decimated miles inland on every coast. Certain mountain ranges may protect some cities. Those that are left unaffected by the wave will be pelted with unrelenting storms that grow out from the source,” Welby says.
“Will the storms let up?” Matthias asks.
“Probably not.”
“Will people survive, halfling?” Matthias asks, angrily emphasizing the essence of his question.
“I can’t say,” Welby says in a distraught voice as he throws his hands in the air. “Everyone knows that something catastrophic has happened, there's no doubt about that. Keilsbail? Stonewall? If they can protect from and mitigate some of the storms with magic, maybe they can survive. The average person living in one of the inland countries likely doesn’t even know the tragedy of what has occurred yet.”
“Keilsbail,” Crobane says thoughtfully, “The New Day Wizards are still active there, and they had the wherewithal to spy on us.”
“True enough,” I say slowly, not seeing where he’s going with it.
“Do we even care about what they’re up to though?” asks Welby. When no one speaks further, he goes on. “No really, think about it. Why would we even think about them right now? We could use our magic to perform humanitarian relief.”
“We could do a lot of good with our abilities,” I say reasonably. Crobane looks to go on, but Matthias beats him to it.
“Listen, I like saving people as much as the next guy, but we’re the only people who know what The New Day Wizards are planning. No, listen here!” he says, flaring up as Welby looks to interrupt him. “If the Wizards are looking to benefit from all this loss, I say we stop them. Tomorrow there might not be a world, but if there is one, we better be damn well sure that we fight for its freedom.”
“There’s a large complex in Keilsbail,” Crobane says, “I’m not sure what they’re planning, but I don’t want them to succeed either.”
“I like storming N.D.W. complexes as much as anyone, but what will this accomplish?” I ask.
“This Nyx character seemed important, and there were many members of The New Day Wizards in the meeting. Perhaps we will be able to squeeze the plans out of one of them, and if this Nyx guy isn’t there, maybe we can get his whereabouts,” he says.
“It could work...” Welby says, not sounding overly convinced.
“You could teleport us there, right Raz?” Crobane asks. While he’s right to assume I’ve done the research required to competently cast such magic, he’s missing a key part of the spell’s requirements.
“I learned how to do it in Elfsong, but I’ve never been to Keilsbail and certainly don’t know of any rune circles I could use to get there,” I say.
“Could you get us back to Moridia?” he asks. “That would save us a lot of time.”
“Is travel even possible with the conditions above ground? Even from Moridia, it would take us weeks to reach the capital city,” I point out. The storms created by Lori loom in the back of my mind. By the time we reach the city, there might not even be a city left to enter.
“I can get us from Moridia to Keilsbail fairly quickly,” Welby says.
“Moridia could not be there at all,” says Matthias, silencing all but Namira’s breathing. “What? Isn’t it possible that Moridia is on the other side of the world that got torn off?”
“Well, I suppose it is…” says Welby, breaking an uncomfortable several seconds.
We spend the next countless hours going over possible next steps. Many options are presented with only a few being even remotely constructive. Matthias and I both take a stab at our priorities, namely rescuing his mother and Ella’s group, respectively. We are both reminded that with no means of locating them, the effort would certainly be in vain. We are resigned to the hope that Elfsong had a robust and safe evacuation plan that involved enough magic to teleport them away, or otherwise protect them from the worst conditions imaginable.
When it is finally decided that we will attempt to teleport to Moridia using The New Day Wizard’s Academy rune circle, I begin to draw the arcane symbols into the moss in a circle around us. To my great frustration, this is harder than I expected it to be. The ground is sopping wet and more than once, Namira stomps upon the crudely shaped arcane runes. After correcting the circle in full for the third time, the runes begin to glow, finally correctly etched to match The New Day Wizard’s rune circle. The final words leave my focused lips before I reach out and grab Welby and Crobane’s hands to complete the circle.
Chapter 9: The Descent of the Elves
How long had I spent at Raz’s treehouse? I had thought it was only a few hours, but now the night is in full swing and only the stars light my path. Traveling through Vesperia had destroyed my sleep schedule, but it did not prepare me for this level of insomnia. I’m coming up on thirty-six hours of being awake and those hours were packed with events. I had my heart broken, got drunk on cheap booze, and killed a woman in that short period. Despite multiple deaths and several more near-death experiences, I can’t stop my mind from showing me the same scene repeatedly. Raz and I are in an embrace while Symmone is attempting to kill Welby behind me.
I knew it would have to be me to initiate that kind of contact, but I never anticipated it being under such conditions. The death of Raz’s friend Sigil on an ordinary day would be a cataclysmic ordeal, but with everything that has happened, it doesn’t even make the top three in what’s occupying my brain as of this moment. It is simply overwhelmed with conflicting emotions, and none of them have been properly processed. I am excited for what is to come of Raz and my relationship, but I also have a crushing guilt for the murder that I have committed. To top it all off, the trauma from the recent danger is causing me to jump at the slightest of noises.
The truth is that for the better part of a decade, all I wanted to do was shove a blade into the chest of those who’ve wronged me; my sleazy parents and the Hawthorne boy I was meant to marry, to name a few. Now that I’ve done just that, I long to turn back the clock. There’s no question that the foul woman deserved what she got. Still, I never imagined it to feel like this. Trained warriors hack and slash apart their foes with such ease, but the blade did not slide seamlessly into the torso of my enemy gracefully robbing her of life.
The sword caught on differently textured tissue and bone on its way through. When it reached something too hard to fully puncture, it veered off in a different direction lubricated by the very substance I thought I desired. Blood. I was covered in it. I look down at my hands to find that my arms are still discolored by crimson stains, I am plastered in dried and peeling blood. I found out after the skirmish that I had a long, deep cut of my own in my right palm. I didn’t feel it at the time, but as I went to extract the weapon, it was so coated in scarlet blood that my hand had slid off of the pommel and onto the blade itself. This motion caused my hand to run the length to the razor-sharp blade, spilling my blood almost as an atonement.
My discomfort with the new threshold of deeds I am willing to commit expresses itself in a strange paranoia. The road back to the city is littered with odd-looking trees and brambles that could be an angelic woman waiting to barrage me with chaos magic. On one occasion, I throw a shadowy dagger at what I swear is a human waiting to ambush me along the path, which at closer inspection turns out to be yet another tree.
When I reach the inn that Wrenn, Phanuel, Easton, Lilith, and I decided to stay at, not a soul stirs in the ground level of the common room. I know that the bell at the front door likely woke the elf who runs the place, but I can’t think of a less pleasant thing than a conversation at this time, so I hurry up the stairs to my tiny room. After washing the blood off of my hands, I collapse face-first onto the straw pillow.
I wake up for the first time in months without either imminent danger or a long list of commitments to fulfill. The sun laps at my dirty hair, eventually penetrating it and causing me to stir. I feel as though I’ve slept for a full day and could continue for several more. The desire to lay here indefinitely is short-lived as the prospect of seeing Raz looms over me. I have a feeling that Raz is the perfect person to talk to about the anxiety I am experiencing regarding yesterday's events.
Feeling no need to spend excessive time getting ready, I tie my hair into a lazy braid and make for the common room of the inn. I find the rest of my friends gathered at a table, glancing about the place confusedly. There is not another soul in sight, and judging by Lilith’s frowning face, this is an oddity. I approach the table and join their uncomfortable conversation.
“…I’ve taken a look outside, it’s a ghost town,” says Lilith nervously.
“All of the elves are just… gone?” asks Wrenn.
“Where is everyone?” I ask, joining in on the cluelessness.
“Ella, I’m glad you're here,” says Lilith, in a foreboding tone. “The entire city has been abandoned, not an elf in sight.”
“None of you saw anything?” I ask, knowing that Lilith spends far less time sleeping than the rest of us.
“I was up an hour ago when I heard a high-pitched chiming sound, like a bell almost. I didn’t think anything of it,” says Lilith.
“If there is trouble, I need a few minutes to ready my spells for the day,” I say, scolding myself internally for wasting time lying in my bed. I crack open Raz’s mother’s old spellbook onto the table and hastily study the runes within the pages. Each spell I select burns the runes into my mind so that I can recreate them at a later time. Just before closing the book, I check about a third of the way into the tome where I have not yet scribed spells into it. In normal circumstances, I’d be ecstatic about a new spell from Raz’s deceased mother. Today, I am too rushed to appreciate the situation, so I examine it briefly.
The page is titled, ‘Ersatzreal’. It is an illusion spell that can create an object that, as long as it is perceived as real to the one affected by the magic, it becomes real to them. I could summon a sword to my hand and stab my opponent with it, were they unaware that it is an illusion. I select it as my last engraved spell for the day and rise to my feet telling everyone that I am ready to investigate.
We emerge from the tavern's main room onto a deserted street on the east side of the city. As lush and vibrant with life as the view is, something is missing. Not a soul lingers amidst the market stands, and no crier shares the news of the city from the small bell tower stairs. It reminds me of a natural forest rather than one grown to accommodate the lives of elves. There is a stillness in the air that hints at a predator stalking its prey.
“What should we do?” I ask Wrenn, whose level head I’ve grown to trust.
“I’m not sure, but I don’t like this,” he says, in a defensive stance.
“We should find Raz and the rest of his friends.” Even as I say this, Lilith shakes her head doubtfully.
“What good would that do?” she asks patiently. “I think we should go to castle Elfsong, someone is bound to be there to tell us what is happening.”
