Seth found himself stalking down long time-worn stony halls lit with red orb light when his mind came to. The last thing he remembered was talking to a healer in a moving caravan and a splitting headache. He rubbed his forehead and looked around the place he’d found himself.
The bricks were darkened and crumbled at the edges, and the very ground he stood on cropped upwards and breathed dust, with bits of broken, decayed furniture scattered about. The hall leaned left, and the heavy door to his left was cordoned off with a heavy rusting gate with a powerful darkness rune etched on a metal strip at its center. The red orb light that gave the halls light hung directly above the gate, and Seth found himself staring intensely at the rune. It felt intimately familiar with him, something he’d always craved for, but never really had enough time and resources to understand, master. Looking farther into the hall, he found even more barred doors with orb light.
He deduced that he must be in some kind of tower, and he’d been somehow transported there by the General, or more likely a vampire-- going by the darkness runes.
But I was rescued, he pondered. Did the vampires attack us again?
He turned around to the hallway behind and found only darkness. No orb light lined the stone walls behind him, and the light from the door only reached a few paces at most.
“So, we’re going up then,” he muttered to himself and took a cautionary step forward.
Each step took him higher into the tower and lost time stopping at each door to observe the runes before he moved on to the next. Each rune started out as unique, but before long he found repeating runes and combinations.
How large is this tower?
Seth must have passed hundreds of barred doors before he stumbled upon an open room. He rubbed his eyes when he saw it, unsure whether it was entirely real when he laid eyes on it.
Light peeked out from under the heavy wooden door behind an open grate. It bore a rune identical to the first he’d seen, and he pushed the door back to reveal a mostly empty room with a blood-stained high table with a battered body on top. The walls and floors were worn stone, with red orb light sitting on opposite ends for illumination.
Morbid.
Seth thought the person on the table dead until a low whisper escape its lips. It was scratchy, almost nearly incomprehensible and he took unsure steps forward until the body came into full view.
It was of a dying man. His muscles were atrophied, his skin dark, and he only made out his hair was white from the white roots, the rest of his hair was matted and caked together with blood. The wounds that covered his chest, abdomen were deep and festering, swollen and oily with black blood and pus. His chest rose and fell with a delayed rhythm.
“How are you still alive” Seth whispered to himself, but the man seemed to have heard him, and shifted his head slightly as if to look at him and croaked.
“Heal us.” Its breath was odious, his voice scratchy.
“What?”
“Heal…us,” he rasped again.
“I…can’t do that,” Seth said, taking a step back. “I am no healer.” The man felt dangerous. He couldn’t explain it, but the way he spoke, it gave him pause.
“Please, you… can heal us,” he croaked again.
“I’m sorry, but I really can’t help you,” Seth said, backing further out of the room. He was near the door now.
“Please… don’t leave,” the voice pleaded “You’ll kill us.”
Seth paused at the gate and considered the man. As odd and unnatural as he felt, he didn’t want him to die. He was the only person he’d met since he’d entered the tower. It would be foolish to let his only lead die, just because he was afraid.
“You said, ‘us,’ is there someone else in the tower with you? A healer perhaps?”
“No one else… but…US,” he rasped again, his voice nearly cracking on the very last word. “The markings…they can heal us.”
“The Shadow runes?” Seth asked slowly, with some surprise. Was the man asking him to use a shadow rune to heal him?
As far as he knew, it was impossible. Blessed ones didn’t need runes to use magic, and Runescrivers could only draw on mana conductive metals and materials. Only high priests directed by the gods could draw runes on flesh. In fact, he’d only seen shadow runes in one other place before. His eyes widened in understanding.
“What are you asking of me?”
He waited for a moment for a reply before finally realizing none might actually come.
“No, no, no. You can’t be dead.” Seth rushed over to the man and listened for a heartbeat. He had to wait a long moment, but a low thump told him the man still lived, but not for much longer.
Struggling not to panic, Seth’s eyes roamed the room for hints to the markings he was referring to. He’d seen hundreds of runes on his climb. His eyes found the gate and it clicked.
He paused briefly to consider what he’d used for ink. After all, he heard that Runescrivers used liquefied mana to make their inscriptions, but then he remembered the ritual he saw and the shadow mage’s grimoire, it was both written in blood. With a grimace, he dabbed his index finger with some blood from the man’s open chest wounds and sought to mark the only area on his body that wasn’t mutilated—his forehead.
He doubled back and fell on his back when he saw the face under the bloodied clumps of hair. It was his. “Us,” he said, finally understanding the dying Man’s words.
He gasped. He was the dying man.
Pushing aside the hundreds of questions buzzing in his mind, he hurried to his feet and grabbed the forehead, and began to draw and write as precisely as he could. When he was done, he searched the body for change, signs that the rune was healing, but nothing changed. Then he recalled the horrible spell the vampire used to torture him and called out loud.
“What is the incantation?” he asked, but the body offered no answer. Time was running out, and just like the vampire’s spell, he needed the right words to make the runes work.
“What is the spell, damn it?” he demanded, a sudden fear gripping him, but again no answers came. He searched the room for hints, writings, anything that could help him, but the room and adjoining hall were bare.
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None of it made sense. He came back and took another long look at the body, shaking his head.
This can’t be real. I am here, not dying on a table.
This was probably some fever dream. I had a serious headache after I was rescued, maybe this is my mind expressing that. Yet, some part of it made absolutely no sense. The strange runes he’d never seen before, the body laying on the table, the tower. Why any of it?
Without lack of a better explanation, some part of him admitted that some of it might be real. And if it was and he was really dying...
“Fuck,” he whispered
Desperate, he closed his eyes and tried to draw on that part of his mind that was obsessed with figuring out how Runes and Magic worked. All the years he’d spent gawping and pestering any knights that would talk to him for information and spending his nights leafing through the only books on runes, everything felt like it was leading up to this moment.
He felt a vast stillness sweep through his mind, and his mouth creaked open and a clear word came to mind. “Curor,” he spoke and he felt the blood spell bloom to life in his vast mind space.
His eyes flicked open just the body jerked to life. His body glowed with crimson light and all his wounds sealed up at a visible rate. His craggy eyelids flipped open to reveal endless darkness just like the Vampires', and it reached out in jerky movements, its fingers dripping with black ichor. Before Seth could react, it jumped him, and everything went dark as he screamed.
Seth started awake in an airy bed, tangled in soft silk sheets rimmed with silver embroidery. Panicked, his eyes swept around to find that he was no longer in the stone tower, and was instead, in a room fit for a noble.
The room was spacious. An unlit marble hearth sat far from his bed, and to his right sat a small gathering of ornate furniture with rich blue coverings and large silk pillows. A large glass chandelier hung overhead with beautiful orbs of light sprinkled through its crystalline frame. The wall was a mix of Azure and silver, with azure being the mainstay decorating the walls and silver patterns and swirls punctuating its cautious beauty. The wooden floors of the room that let out a wide balcony shielded by fluttering drapes that revealed a city of light.
His mouth was open, frozen with no small surprise at the splendor that laid before him. Looking low, his arms roamed down and he felt for his wounds, the ones covering his chest, sides, and stomach. Only a tight network of interconnected bulbous and discolored flesh remained.
I survived?
It was a question more than a realization. Flashes of the mission came to him. The torture chamber. Blackfire; losing to a monster, and getting hit by his spell. It was the cause of the largest scar on his chest, sitting at the very crook between his chest muscles. It formed a small network of ill-formed runes he nearly recognized.
He quickly drew his palm away from the hardened flesh, covering it up with his chest, suddenly conscious at what it meant, and it was then another memory came.
A darker one.
He was in the tower, where he healed a dying version of himself with a powerful blood rune and nearly died to it.
It is just a dream, Seth reassured himself, and shook his head furiously, eager to put that particular memory far behind him.
In fact, he thought he’d be better off if he forgot everything that had happened from the very moment they stepped into the fog land, but it all remained painfully clear, up until the second he was struck with the ball covered in red runes. After then it was all broken flashes.
Seth knew he should want answers, but he found he was not hard-pressed for them, happy enough just to be alive.
It’s all fucking over.
He climbed out of his bed and took the entire room in. He swished around, his eyes darting from the furniture chandelier and wallpaper, and drew in the air.
I don’t think I’ve breathed in air this clean in years, he beamed with a smile.
Drifting forward, his bare feet, scuffed the polished wooden floors, and he found himself nearly gushing at how smooth it felt. Even rich people wood feels different. He swept past the balcony drapes and found himself overlooking the city.
Rows and rows of grey stone building stretched out in all directions, punctuated by towers and banisters of egg-white stones. He saw rows of terraced streets, streams of diverse people in colorful garments flowing each way, and dozens of floating stone and metal structures supporting a handful of sagely looking individuals dressed in flowing robes. The buildings thinned out at the base of an intimidating Greystone wall hundreds of feet tall, with Trebuchets, Wizarding towers, and runed metal monstrosities that spat exploding balls of fire dotting its very top.
The wall seemed to stretch in each direction and if everything Brick told him about Brightmont was true, he was in the Upper Ring, the seat of the Empire.
We made it, he thought, his eyes glassing over. The knights must have made it in time. A warm smile crept on the corner of his cheeks, and it let is spread until his entire face was lit up. “We fucking made it!" he shouted into the city. All his worries seemed so distant, so leaned into the railing and just stood there, appreciating the view.
He found himself content there for almost an hour until he felt his stomach rumble, and he looked back in, at the fruit bowl with apples, pears, and other exotic fruits he’d never or tasted. He slinked towards it, and picked up a meaty fruit with yellow skin and nearly bit into it, before deciding to use a silver knife he spotted to the side.
I should use a knife. I’ll be hobnobbing and dining with nobles soon., he snickered.
The blade slipped free a thin strip of fruit with a bit of fruit meat in it, and he tasted it and sucked at his lips.
“So, this is what I have been missing.”
He scooped the other non-delicious tasting fruits out of the glass bowl, carried the rest, and settled back on his bed, and began to eat. After finishing two fruits, he let out a small sigh and said, “I could get used to this.”
The door to his room creaked open and Ellie peeked in. She was dressed in a plain blouse, with breaches, and her rapier strapped to her side.
“Seth!” she cried and rushed and rushed him, shoving him hard into the bed with a big bear hug. “Ellie,” he whispered as he hugged her back, squeezing nearly as hard. They stayed there together for what seemed like forever, grateful to be rejoined.
Ellie was the one to break the embrace and she stared deep into his eyes and touched his cheeks
“I am okay, Sister,” Seth said, grabbing ahold of her hand.
“You were only asleep for only two weeks, but it felt like years. I feared you would never wake,” she choked back a tear at the last part.
“I’m awake now,” he said, and then gripped her hand tightly. “We are at Brightmont,” he said in a near whisper.
“That we are,” she said, her face lighting up in genuine pleasure.
“How did we get here, the last thing I remember was the vampire subduing me, and striking me with a powerful spell,” he reached for his chest, phantoms of the ordeal still replaying in his mind. T
Ellie went over everything that had happened after he seemingly got knocked out. Harkness’s rescue team, healing ministrations during his journey to Brightmont, and the General setting them up at an inn in the Upper ring. When he asked about Brick and Sera, the answers seemed to come slower.
“Brick is staying with the Seno’s in a villa closer to the palace. I’ve… not seen much of them since we arrived, but they’ve come to visit twice.”
“We should go see them as soon as we can. I bet Brick is just loving the villa” Seth said, imagining Brick lounging around in a bath, having an attendant feed him fruits. Then he recalled how wounded he was at the end of the fight.
“How is Brick? Everyone was barely hanging on towards the end?”
“We all healed up fine,” Ellie said, settling down beside him. “You’re are last to wake.”
“That’s a relief,” Seth said, his lips forming a tight smile. He remembered how terrified he was the morning of the mission, and how horribly it all almost turned out. Hanson had saved them. He’s saved, everyone.
They sat in the room for a bit longer before Ellie dragged him up to his feet, and said with a bright smile. “Come on, let’s take a walk. I know you’re dying to see the city. I’ll show you one of my favorite places in the city, and we can also grab some real food.”
Seth glanced back to the knife and fruit bowl that laid beside his bed and gave a sheepish smile. The fruit was good, but he could still eat.