Cool wind swept across the rocky steppe, gently rustling brush in its wake. The Pale Moon’s light, dim as it was, cast eerie shadows that played at the edge of vision along the twisting rocks that lined the path. Night-blooming marigolds and cacti covered the faintly metallic aroma of the landscape with their own sweet scents. Each constellation hung in the sky like a carefully crafted painting, and Amelia studied them along her walk. She was no stranger to these dry wastes and walked this path countless times in her dreams.
“Only two more miles to go, come on, Amelia...”
She muttered to no one. To have traveled one hundred miles by foot was one thing, but traveling alone was always difficult. Through the entire journey, Amelia camped out of her pack, subsisting on little more than meager rations of hardtack and thin strips of dried squirrel meat. Amelia pulled her black cloak tighter to keep warm against biting cold. Between her own brief utterances and the quiet whistle of the wind through the dry flora, the only other sound she’d heard the last few days was the sound of dusty gravel crunching underneath her well-worn boots. Her stomach growled, and her body ached, but her goal was near.
Ahead stood an outcropping of rock atop an otherwise barren mesa. It stood in the wastes casting its gaze out to the distant horizons as a sentinel. This wasn’t a sightseeing trip. With every step, the rocky outcrop became closer, its details becoming clearer. Carved stone blocks neatly stacked into a monument pointed upwards at the starkly empty Veil Scar carved into the heavens, where there were no stars hanging in the sky. The Pale Moon was almost at its zenith, and Amelia’s heart pounded with either anticipation or exhaustion; of which, she wasn’t sure.
She dropped her pack against the outside ring of stones encircling the shrine. A shiver crept across her as a gust of wind brought fresh chills to her fingers. She drew a large cloth blanket from the pack, still struggling to regain her breath from her march, along with a blackwood box adorned with silver. The moonlight glinted from its surfaces as her hands were clawed by a gust of frigid air.
Concealed in the shadows of the monument, Amelia spread the black fabric out at its base while mumbling the mnemonic for the ritual she’d studied. The fabric bore a design: a nine pointed star of silver thread encircled by concentric silver rings. At the top of the star, which she’d oriented to the north, was a large white circle symbolizing the Pale Moon. She placed eight silver ornaments at each of the other points of the star – two bells, four platters, and two amulets shaped in opposing crescent moons. On the circle, she set an empty obsidian bowl.
Amelia placed twelve candles along the circle, slowly and deliberately reciting the words from her memory.
“Ker yaetatar rurlan bat tirken.”
She drew a sigil in the air with a finger, summoning a small flame at its tip. She raised it slowly in the air, and the candles ignited, stealing the flame she held.
“Ker bashatar veut.”
The candles burned a soft white, illuminating her auburn hair as she worked. She held her pale arms out under the moon and candle light, drawing glyphs of protection all over her arms with a grease pen.
“Hoi veut likroav an krurprer?”
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She stood at the center of her ritual circle, arms outstretched, reciting the eldritch language. The shadows of the monument retreated as the Pale Moon reached its zenith. The candles extinguished, leaving trails of wispy smoke filling the space as the wind died completely. Tendrils of shadow stretched from the haze, wrapping around Amelia and tracing the silver lace woven into the blanket. When they reached the white circle, the moon above began to be overtaken with shadow, reflecting its effigy on the ground as the shadow reached the obsidian bowl. The world around her was plunged into darkness, and a narrow column of silver light pierced the black void above and filled the obsidian bowl.
A dark fluid began to bubble up, its hue appeared to her a stygian blue that seemed unfathomably darker than its perfectly-black vessel. To her awakened eyes, the liquid wove threads of forgotten dreams set against a midnight sky. Traces of iridescent black tendrils snaked across the impossibly dark blue, slowly swirling into a vortex of depth. The color alone brought whispers into the back of Amelia’s mind, promising power and secrets found only in the unexplored corners of the human soul. The world around her faded, the stars themselves seemingly extinguished of their light. In the perfect dark that surrounded her, the arcane fluid seemed darker still, a testament to the impossibility of its existence. Amelia uttered one last phrase before collapsing in a shivering, sweating heap at the ritual site.
“Ker avashuv.”
Amelia awoke in a liminal space, plunged in an uneasy darkness. She couldn’t tell if her eyes were open, and outstretched her hand to test her sight. The black shadow of her hand moved in her sight within an unnaturally dark and impossible void. A voice tugged at the reaches of her thoughts, sounding at once like the gentle lapping of waves on a nighttime sea shore and the stillness of a perfectly dark room.
“Amelia Preseaux, you sought my secrets?” The voice whispered on the edge of her perception with slow, deliberate words formed in her mind..
A single eye opened in the deep, narrowed as it bored a hole into Amelia’s soul. The iris swirled with color, a color Amelia could not describe, but to say the colors of emptiness. The colors the eyes create when staring into absolute blackness for too long.
“Caelisnyx, as those before me called you, I come to offer you my pledge.”
The eye opened wider, and Amelia could’ve sworn she saw the vague shifting features of a face draped in shadow against the infinite dark.
“Caelisnyx, as I taught the those who came before you to call me.”
A line of light traced where the horizon would be, fading upwards into a flurry of stars, forming familiar constellations above. Faintly in the distance, small pinpricks of light that looked like no other stars hung in the middle of the void, illuminated by a small spark of fire in the center. Amelia recognized it as Vessel, the world she called home, encircled by the eight Thrones and the Pale Moon, illuminated in the darkness by their sun, Sol.
“Amelia, you have come here to the Veil on the anniversary of an important day. Amelia, you have crafted your glyphs in accordance with threats known and unknown. Amelia, you have thrust yourself into the works of gods. Amelia, do you understand?” The words came to her mind too quickly for her to grasp but their echo came slowly, to punctuate their gravity.
The vague shadowy figure pulled in a cloak of starlight, with torrents of color swirling in streams across its form. Underneath the hood, the single eye stared unblinkingly at Amelia. Tendrils of shadow stretched across what Amelia could only assume was solid ground towards her.
“Caelisnyx, I understand.”
Amelia felt a warmth in her heart against the coldness of this space, and the eye squinted as one would with a smile.
“Amelia, do you know of the Veil? Amelia, do you know the truth of this place?”