It’s been three days since the elven checkpoint and my body lies exhausted in the tent.

That’s where I left it anyway. I hope it’s still there when my spirit gets back.

Until then, I’m back in the Tower of Magi again. Back just as I left it. Which is unfortunate because where I left it was not great.

The whole room is enveloped in ribbons. They flow from the onyx like water from a faucet. The guardians scream. I do as well, but no one can hear it in my ghostly form.

“Behind me!” Professor Yahn shouts. But the room is in a panic. Some of the students are fleeing down the steps, but are caught by the ribbons before they can make it. Others form a pack and try to use their own powers to counter the darkness. But they are gobbled-up before they can even ignite their own light.

Then a blue flashes against the blackness and crystalizes into walls and shields that form barriers against the ribbons.

At last some organized defense.

The renaming faculty and students huddle behind the hardened crystal. The dark strands are momentarily blocked as they twist and turn through the air looking for holes in the defenses.

I swear it’s like the ribbons are alive.

Two professors leap out from cover and blue light streams from their fingers and then hardens into flying icicles aimed directly at Lillian. The sorceress just smiles and a void opens before her, just like the one I saw with King Leo when I first arrived, and the icicles just disappear into the darkness.

Unbelievable.

The sorceress spins her staff and little black darts shoot out. They smash against the blue wall like pebbles against a wall. The crystal cracks, then breaks.

The mages blast the floor with blue light freezing the stone beneath the sorceress’s feat. The crystals spreads around her and up her legs like roots from a tree.

Yeeees!

Lillian slams her staff down and it clangs like iron against the crystal, sending reverberations through the blues light and causing it to shatter.

Noooooo!

The sorceress points her staff at the mages and a flaming black oil shoots toward them. Desperately the mages conjure more shields but they are too slow and the blackness burns many.

The screams are blood curdling.

One woman remains unscarred though. Professor Yahn rushes forward and as she does light bursts from her pours. Her body is encased in crystal armor that even encompasses her from head to toe. The sorceress tries to cast her darts but is too slow.

The professor swings her staff and forces Lillian back. The sorceress tries to cast again but the professor won’t give her the space. They each swing at each other as the professor forces Lillian into a duel.

For the first time Lillian looks afraid, her anger drifts away and all that’s left is a young woman overmatched against a far more experienced mage.

She can’t be more than seventeen.

One more swing and Lillin is knocked down. Pinned against the wall, with the professor towering over her. Yahn looks like a frozen ice monster moving in for the killing blow.

The professor raises her staff, and I just barely hear the muffled words, “Goodbye, Lillian.”

The staff falls but Lillia lounges forward and under its blow. She strikes with the onyx itself, the stone colliding against the professor’s crystal armor. There is a flash of black light and the professor is thrown back like a rag doll; her body hurdles through air against the far wall. Her crystal armor cracks and then shatters revealing a dazed and bruised woman.

The sorceress stands and points her staff again toward the professor. There are no ribbons or darts this time though. Instead a ball of darks begins to form in the air, a congealed orb of thickening ooze that writhes and contorts with power. The professor staggers to her feet and reforms her crytaline armor. The ooze explodes.

Like a bomb it blasts apart not just the professor but everything around it: wall, floor, and ceiling. The whole left side of the tower explodes in an impressive shower stone, and mortar. In fact it may be too impressive.

As the professor falls to her doom. Another body floats beside her.

“Gwen!” The sorceress shrieks.

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The blast is so large it even hits the huddled Gwendolyn who’d been cowering in fear and trepidation during the battle. Now her scarred body wafts downward with the other dead professors and students and there is nothing Lillian can do but watch in horror.

The tower is silent. Not a silence of peace but one of death and of absence, like the void the sorceress conjured has somehow consumed the room.

Lillian dops her staff and falls to her knees. “Gwen,” she says again softly. And cries. She cries like a little girl.

“What have I done,” she mumbles. “Maker, what I have I done?”

A good question if you ask me.

“What have you done?” the demon answers, sitting beside her. “You were defending yourself. That’s what you did.”

Lillian shakes her head. “Gwen is…”

“Because of them.” the demon points to the charred bodies of the guardians. “And her.” She points to the crystalized corpse of the professor as well. “If you hadn’t done what you did. If you hadn’t grabbed that stone. It would be you splayed out on the ground right now. And poor Gwen would be dead either way.”

The demon is so earnest and so confident even I start to believe her.

Why had the directress taken the onyx stone if not use its power? Why were the guardians so quick to denounce her? What were they hiding? Who else knew about the onyx?

“The difference,” the demon continues, “is you can use the onyx for good, to overthrow the temple and the king. Create a new order. A better world than existed before. Free of the tyranny and corruption you understand so well.”

Lillian quivers and looks at the demon. Her face contorted in pain, anger, and maybe even a shred of….hope.

“Lillian Andrews,” the demon says slowly. “I believe you are the chosen one.”

Holy. Shit.

----------------------------------------

Rain streams outside my tent. It’s been raining for three days. Enough that even Dauntless is sick of it. I curl into a ball, feeling ill after the vision. What a time for a vision. Like I don’t have enough going on without living through history.

I think I prefer the rain.

I look down at my sleeping mat. The thought of going back to bed after my experience is not appealing. The vision could always come back again.

Maybe I really do prefer the rain.

I certainly don’t fear getting wet. There’s no cover on the mountainside so all of us have already been soaked to the bones by this deluge. I step outside and the raindrops feel comforting in a way. Their pitter-patter helps drown out the voices in my head: the ones asking a thousand questions that I cannot answer, and doubting everything about myself and everybody else.

Maybe if I just asked myself better questions I wouldn’t get such lousy answers. Instead of just focusing on the negative.

We have found no caves yet, no goblin sentries, no travelers of any sort. It’s like the whole area has been stripped of conscious life.

“Higher-up,” Myran always says, though he doesn't seem quite sure himself. These goblins seem about as rare as Komodo dragons back on Earth.

Maybe Lord Erriam should put them on the endangered species list.

I extend my hand and shine my light. The soft ray ripples from my hand and feels comforting after the darkness of the vision.

The ground itself is less comforting. It’s just a soup of mud and rocks. I shine my light toward the path ahead and it’s much the same, a reminder that our progress tomorrow is likely to be slow. Just like today. And yesterday.

I sigh.

“Would you like me to cheer you up?”

I turn to see Eeyore staring out at me from under a bush. Unlike the horse his smaller size lets him slide under it for sleep. Not that Dauntless minds of course. He says that sleeping in the rain builds character. Whereas the donkey complained the bush was too thin, that it didn’t block enough of the rain.

Very different creatures, those two.

“Would you like to hear a joke?” Eeyore asks. “I know some real humdingers.”

OMG. Can you imagine?

I walk to the donkey. “That’s alright. Why are you up anyway? Is it the rain?”

“No, I don’t think so,” he responds. “I suffer from chronic anxiety. I worry about the future, and the present, and the past.”

I squat down to look the beast in the eye. “That’s a lot to worry about.”

“I know. And I worry about that too.”

I laugh, just a little.

“That wasn’t a joke,” says Eeyore.

“I know,” I say softly. “That’s why it was funny.”

I ruffle the donkey’s mane which he seems to like, even though he won’t admit it, and I feel better myself. Almost like how I would pet my dog when I was feeling down. That physical connection, even with an animal, is gratifying.

Eeyore suddenly goes tense, every fiber of his skin goes tense under my fingers. “Did you hear that?”

I pat his head. “It’s just the rain, Eeyore.”

“No. It’s not.”

His voice is unusually strong. And certain.

I stand and listen. All I hear is the rain. Or at least I think it’s rain.

Hell, now I’m starting to be paranoid.

Dauntless is still fast asleep.

The donkey stands, its ears twitch this way and that.

Those ears.

I read about donkey hearing once. They can even hear a human heartbeat apparently.

I don’t have my sword.

I turn toward my tent, thinking I should retrieve it.

Then I see the eyes.