At the price of their Past and their Present, they see the Future.
~ Dracule Sangre, High Lord of the Sangre Kingdom.
As Lirael knelt in front of her mother and let the red-haired woman lovingly run a hand through her hair and along her cheek with a guileless smile on her face, she was reminded of the reason she couldn't really bring herself to blame her father. After all, who wouldn't resent the one who regressed the love of their life into a child trapped in an adult’s body.
No. Not even a child. The price exacted by the Dungeon of Prophecies from its bearers for short bursts of clairvoyance was a thoroughly shattered mind. And it was complications during Lirael’s birth that had forced her mother to promote her Embryonic Dungeon to the next stage.
The Prophet Lineage of the Sangre clan were followers of the Goddess of Destiny and Time. Their order was exclusive to females with the Dungeon Mages holding the title of Saintess and their leader bearing the designation of Holy Mother. The peculiarity of the Lineage meant that while the members retained their sanity as mortal mages, condensing their Dungeons meant losing their minds under a constant barrage of incoherent snippets of the future.
The members of the Prophet Lineage were also famed for marrying outside their country, forming a network of diplomatic ties with highly placed men across the Vampire territory. Her father's marriage with her mother was one such union.
Lirael clasped her mother’s hand against her cheek and gave her a watery smile. Even though her mother hadn’t been there for her since her childhood, it was testament to the strength of maternal love that she responded to her presence with such happiness despite her addled mind. Leaning forward, she hugged the woman tightly eliciting a squeal of childish joy. Burying her face into the crook of her mother’s neck, she cried -- huge breathless sobs that wracked her whole body.
Ellimere cried out in wordless concern and rubbed her back, seemingly picking up on her distress.
The intensity of Lirael’s sobs reduced under her mother’s ministrations, until only the occasional sniffle was left. Letting go of her mother, she straightened up and rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. Looking around, she found that she was surrounded by her mother’s handmaidens – all twelve of them.
Because of the threat of lunacy forever looming above their heads like a naked sword, the Prophets put great emphasis upon the training of Thralls who would be intelligent enough to take care of them when they weren’t in their right minds. Her mother’s handmaidens were Thralls who had been carefully groomed by her to excel both in combat and housekeeping. The emotional distress of their Mistress had drawn them over.
A little embarrassed by all the eyes trained on her in her vulnerable state, Lirael coughed and got to her feet. Sitting down on the bed beside her mother, she waved the attendants away. “Everything’s fine here. You can go back to your duties; I’ll look after mother.”
Nodding in eerie synchronization, they moved away in utter silence and busied themselves with their respective tasks. Lirael shuddered slightly. Her mother’s attendants were a large part of why she hadn’t liked visiting her mother as a child. She had found their mechanical behaviour rather creepy.
Ellimere still seemed a bit distressed from the sudden tearful episode and now it was Lirael’s turn to comfort her mother. Hugging her from the side, Lirael hummed a soothing tune as they watched the fish circle each other in the pond. Slowly but surely, the older woman began to drift off to sleep with her head resting on Lirael’s shoulder. Once her breathing grew even, Lirael gently positioned herself so her mother’s head rested in her lap. Leaning her back against the stacked cushions and running her fingers through her mother’s silky, scarlet hair she settled down to watch her mother’s attendants at work.
All the handmaidens were Green mages at the very least, with most of them being Blue mages; and the strongest, her mother’s Champion, an initial stage Violet mage. It was only after she had been introduced to magic and started her own training in it that she had begun to appreciate exactly how much of an expense maintaining this huge cohort of Thralls really was.
She cast a quick glance into her Embryonic Dungeon. The Magma Basilisk in the central pit was slumbering deeply to recover from its injuries from fighting the Evil Infant. Leo, on the other hand, had recovered from the upheaval of the Dungeon in the aftermath of the fight. This had led to an imbalance between the fire and ice Aura in her Dungeon. This problem was mitigated slightly by the fact that the Basilisk was stronger and more mature than the little blue Frostmane Lion. And this was just one of the many complications one would have to take into account while managing her Dungeon.
Right now, Sand was in the process of doing just that. Using the Control shard as a console, he was manipulating the Weeping Willows scattered across the Dungeon in order to adjust the speed at which time flowed in different parts of it. The trees near the central pit began to weep bloody tears that evaporated in the heat and rose up to the sky as a bloody mist, speeding up the flow of time there, while the trees scattered across the mountains wrapped their vines around themselves and sank into a period of dormancy, bringing the flow of time there close to the outside world’s. Done correctly, this would balance the rate of heat production and absorption in her Dungeon and stabilize the flow of heat from the centre to the edges. And Sand seemed to have everything well in hand.
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Dungeon management was quite a calculation intensive process and unless one had a great deal of talent, allowing them to intuitively adjust the settings, trial and error was the only way to go. Having someone capable of doing it for her freed up a lot of her time for other activities. And that person had to be a Thrall, otherwise she would be placing her life in the hands of someone whose absolute loyalty wasn’t assured.
She had been inclined to believe that the huge expenditure on her mother’s attendants was a waste. After all, seeing enough resources to fuel her advancement to a Dungeon Mage twice over being poured into mere Thralls had been quite grating. But now that she had a capable Thrall of her own, she knew that these twelve attendants were worth their salt.
For the members of the Prophet Lineage, their insanity wasn't necessarily permanent. As the size and strength of their Dungeons increased, the future became more coherent and they became capable of resisting the onslaught of broken glimpses of possible futures. The mages at the higher rungs of their organization progressively regained control of their mental faculties, up to the High Mother – who was wholly sane… except for her eccentric choices in fashion.
In fact, the members of their order treated this period of mindlessness as a rite of passage -- a time when they were closest to their God.
Unfortunately, as an Enzeal Lord’s wife, there was very little chance of Ellimere becoming the Holy Mother, or indeed advancing her Dungeon any further via inheritance. The sacrifice of her sanity was likely permanent.
Lirael sighed. Even if her father wasn’t willing to treat her like his daughter, she still had a lot of things going for her. A whole new industry waiting to be exploited. An uncle and aunt who treated her like their own biological child. A talented Thrall who could potentially take over the task of managing her Dungeon completely.
And a mother who loved her despite a shattered mind. She couldn't really complain.
She looked down fondly at her lap…
...only to find her mother staring back, black and white fog swirling furiously within her wide-open eyes.
Those eyes were mystical vortices dragging her mind forcefully into their depths and she felt powerless to resist. Then she was falling and falling and falling down a well with no bottom as black and white mist swirled all around her, obscuring her sight. She screamed, but found she had no voice to scream with. She flailed, but discovered she lacked the limbs required to do so. She tried to breathe but found she didn’t need to. Time seemed to lose all meaning as the instant seemed to stretch to an eternity and an eternity, to an instant.
Suddenly, she wasn’t falling anymore. Looking around, she noticed that though her sight was still obstructed by the mist, all of it was black instead of the mix of black and white she had seen before. And in looking around, she found that she had a body again. Though it wasn’t the one she originally had, or indeed even remotely human. She was a phoenix. A majestic bird with flaming feathers burning with pure white fire.
She called out in surprise and the cry was a resonant trill that echoed out into the dark mists. She flexed her muscles and her wings swished down with a mighty beat that blew the fog away and shot her upwards. Or at least, towards what she thought was up. There was no sense of gravity in this place and for all she knew, she could be hurtling towards the ground instead of the sky.
She flew on and on for what seemed like an eternity, covering what her perception told her must be miles, but she didn’t reach the end of the mist. It remained unchanged, not thinning out or intermingling with the white mist like she expected it to. If not for the powerful, rhythmic beat of her wings, and the trail of white fire she left in her wake, she would have thought that she hadn’t moved at all.
Then, as suddenly as she had been dragged into this odd place, she passed through a barrier into a world painted white. Everywhere she looked only pure white mist met her gaze. Her brilliant flames merged with her surroundings, like she was the fire and the world a transient construct of her smoke.
Despite this change, there was nothing other than the mist in her surroundings. Despair was slowly creeping upon her. The bone-chilling despair of ever leaving this place. Turing tail, she flapped her wings hard, blitzing back towards where she came.
Despair turned into a certainty of doom when the barrier between black and white she had expected to find didn’t appear. No matter how long or how fast she flew, white smoke caged her in from all sides, suffocating her.
She cried out; her fearful trilling warble lost into the all-encompassing mists with nary an echo.
Then with a mighty roar that reverberated through her very bones, a huge scarlet dragon burst out of the mists and bore down upon her.
She barely had time to respond to the behemoth’s sudden appearance before it had hooked the wicked talons of its hind legs into her wings. Her call for aid turned into a shrill screech of pain. Then they were both plummeting through the mists, carried by its momentum. The dragon was nearly twice her size and no matter how she struggled, she couldn't shake its grip. Her own talons barely left a mark, creating trails of incandescent white sparks as they scrabbled helplessly on its scales.
Suddenly, they burst through the barrier between black and white she had been searching for and the dark mists surrounded her again. But she couldn't bring herself to rejoice because of the ferocious dragon entangled with her. Her cries were drowned out by its roars as they tumbled through the fog.
First one, then the other, the dragon tore her wings off and her world devolved into pain as it felt like chunks were being ripped out of her very soul.
When she recovered, she was just in time to see down the crimson depths of the dragon’s gullet as its open jaws bore down upon her head. A strong smell of blood blew towards her along with the fetid stench of its breath. The scent she normally found pleasant now nauseated her as she waited for her inevitable death.
A streak of greenish-black flashed at the edge of her vision and she was able to catch a glimpse of the tiny snake that lunged out from within her flaming white feathers and sank its fangs into the dragon’s leg.
Dark flames tinged with green raced up the dragon’s body like fire upon oil and, within moments, the ferocious beast was reduced to a charred skeleton with noxious green flames burning at scattered spots upon it.
Feeling the grip of the skeleton loosen, Lirael relaxed.
She was just about to try and locate her mysterious saviour when, suddenly, the skeleton’s claws tightened their grip again. Snapping her head up, she found herself looking into two clumps of pure green flame burning in the hollows of the skeletal dragon’s sockets.
Lirael jerked awake with a gasp, drenched in cold sweat and breathing hard. Hastily looking down, she found her mother curled up on the bed, sleeping blissfully with her head on her lap. The fish were still circling each other in the pond. The attendants were still hard at work. All was as it should be. As though that vision had been nothing but a dream.
She knew better, though. It hadn't been a dream she had just woken from, but a glimpse of her future.