It was a flurry of knocks to her chamber door that roused her. A woman well past her youth disentangled herself from her sheets and made her way to the door, groggy and a bit disoriented. The knocking did not cease. Finally she was able to yank the door open and there on the other side was one of her assistants looking rather panicked, hand raised to knock again.
“I’m so sorry to bother you this late, Grand Wizard Sahayna,” the words came out in a rush. “It’s just that Grand Wizard Teramyn is back from the Breidelle temple and the situation requires your attention.” Nimel was still young, hardly an adult yet, but Sahayna knew them to be rather reserved and level headed and seeing them so ruffled lent credibility to the urgency.
“I’ll be right down.” She gave them a pat on the shoulder and dismissed them. She wasted no time in throwing on a thick overcoat and palace shoes, grabbing her hat off the hook by the door before following after them to the entrance hall of the great sanctuary.
She quickly understood the alarm the young oracle had displayed when she saw what awaited her. There in the foyer were two gray-clad acolytes, or at least the uniforms they wore were once gray. Now they were covered in dark stains that could only be blood. Before them was another man clad in the robes of a high priest, equally covered in gore. All three people looked absolutely hollow, long stares of unseeing eyes. As she approached she turned again to the young oracle who’d woken her.
“Nimel, please wake some others to help take care of them. Run baths and get someone cooking something. Return to me when you can.” She said gently, sending the young one off before stepping up to the green robed wizard covered in blood.
“Are there more with you?” She asked first. From close up she could see the way his face was lined and weary. His eyes were barely staying open and he looked dead tired. The man nodded, clearing his throat.
“Not many. Barely a handful,” he croaked.
“And Teramyn?” she asked with an edge of hesitance.
“Already gone up to the tower.” Sahayna was a bit taken aback by this. She could hardly believe he’d left the others and rushed off. She couldn’t imagine what was so important but she knew whatever it was couldn’t be good given the state of those before her.
“I see. Please tell the others to come in to get cleaned up and we’ll find them space to rest.” Sahayna peered around the wizard, to the two gray clad acolytes and nodded to them, tipping the large brim of her hat to dismiss them. They quickly turned back toward the front doors and slipped out.
“Please come have a seat and tell me what happened.” She spoke in a soft, even tone, placing a hand to the man's back and steering him toward a room off the foyer, a sitting room. The man released a sigh so heavy when he sat down it sounded like he was deflating. He opened and closed his mouth several times, trying to get the words out.
“I…I don’t know what it was. I’ve never seen anything like it.” His voice shook as he said it, his gaze fixed on a point on the rug somewhere between himself and Sahayna. “It was…a monster. There’s no describing it. I saw it and I don’t even know what I saw. But it…it pulled people apart from the inside.” He finally looked up to Sahayna, meeting her eyes and there was no denying the terror in the depths of his. “I still don’t understand. Was that…it? It can’t be, oh gods it was terrible.” His voice took on a watery edge, just barely managing to hold his composure.
Just then Nimel stepped into the room as well, with them a tray with an assortment of herbs and medicines around a steaming teapot and two mugs. He brought the tray over and set it on the end table nearest the man.
“I’ve brought some baane for your tea to help you relax.” He pointed to the herbs placed on a small plate next to the tea pot. When Nimel saw the man’s shaking hands reach for the pot they instead took up the teapot and poured the water over the leaves and stirred in the herbs, handing the mug to waiting hands. The man thanked Nimel, who then stepped back and over to Sahayna, taking a seat on the end of the couch.
“I only have a couple of questions for now and then we can talk to everyone else once you’ve had time to rest.” She spoke softly, afraid to startle the man.
“Right.” He nodded but his eyes were far away again.
“Where did this monster come from?” Sahayna asked. The man shook his head, staring down at the mug in his hands as he spoke.
“We intercepted a Pod of Solahrans landing on the loren shores. We performed the ritual as directed by Grand Wizard Teramyn, with Nolstone and everything and…we thought they were all dead…Next thing we know some….thing is ripping everyone apart. It was going inside people first and pulling them inside out. I…I…” He began to stutter, his hands shaking so bad that he spilt a slosh of tea on his hand, hissing at the heat.
“Thank you for that information. Only one more question for now. Where did it go? How did you and Teramyn and the others get away?” she asked, just as gently as before. The man stared down into his tea, eyes unseeing and far away.
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“Someone else…they came out of some kind of rift and hit the thing with some kind of light and it just…collapsed? I don’t know how else to describe it but when it did there was just a girl. A Solahran girl…but she was dead, burnt out, I’m sure of it…they all were…” The man shook his head. “The other person and the girl, they just disappeared.” He was still shaking quite badly. He brought the mug to his mouth to take a long sip of the calming brew.
“It’s okay. You’re safe here now. I will alert the other Sanctuaries.” Sahayna stood, seeing the royal temple’s doctor approaching the doorway from the foyer. “Let our doctor attend to you and please, get some rest.” She waved the doctor over to the man as she made to step away, Nimel at her heels.
“Wait-” the man blurted before they could leave. Sahayna turned back to the man, his eyes still wide with fear and bloodshot. Between that and the blood and grime covering him he made a rather unsettling sight. “The last thing I know-” he rasped, “her name… I think it’s Mezalie.” She thanked the man kindly before leaving him in the hands of the doctor.
Sahayna rushed down the hall to the stairs, quickly taking the steps up the tower. She resented having to take so many stairs in the middle of the nente. The brim of her hat softly slapped against her shoulder blades where it hung as she went round and round and her palace shoes tapped softly against the steps. Nimel was silent, a shadow on the steps behind her and if she didn't already know they were there she wouldn't have any other indication.
When they finally reached the top she took a moment to catch her breath, one hand braced on the smooth sanctuary wall. She huffed and puffed for several moments, vindicated when she saw Nimel place a hand gingerly to their side to soothe a pinch, even if they didn't seem out of breath. When she'd regained her composure she pushed herself off from the wall and hurried the last few paces to the Prophecy Room. She saw the door was ajar but she didn’t need that to know she would find Teramyn there.
The royal Sanctuary tower, like much of the entire compound, was immaculate in design and decor. The marite floors were a beautiful, gleaming cream color with swirls of white or almost-pinks and they were kept so clean that the bottoms of her palace slippers still looked virtually new. The door that stood ajar was made of panels of light, dusty brown tok wood. It was a lightweight material and easily swung aside when she pressed a light touch to it. Just as suspected it revealed Teramyn stood at the center of the room, bent down low over the raised pool there,
After seeing the state of the others downstairs she was surprised to see Teramyn looking mostly fine. However as she got closer, motioning for Nimel to close the door behind them, she saw that he did appear a bit worse for wear. Where his robe hung open in the front she could spotted a rumpled, dirty looking undershirt. His face held traces of grime in the fine lines and wrinkles between his nose and his chin, likely from reaching to stroke his beard as he often did.
Now his eyes were white, rolled back in his head, mouth slack just above the water's surface. He surely knew she was there but he did not disrupt the process. His breathing was so soft that he appeared statuesque as a tiny fingernail-sized blemish sprouted and began to swell from his forehead near the hairline. It swelled only to the size of a torzjosha berry, tiny and dark where the blood pooled beneath the skin. Finally the skin gave way and it burst releasing not only the blood and fluid but also a small round stone that fell with a plunk into the bowl. Teramyn gasped loudly, finally coming out of his reverie. His eyes rolled back into position and he shook his head gently back and forth a few times. He reached a hand up to the wound and held his fingers over it for several moments before releasing a hiss when it started to burn. When he removed his fingers the wound was shiny and pink, healing over already. He stayed bent down and pushed the sleeves of his robes all the way past his elbow before reaching into the bowl and fishing the tiny object out. When he pulled it from the water, exposing it to the air, it quickly turned a yellowed off-white. Sahayna crossed the room to him, just an arms length apart across the bowl from him.
“I hear it did not go well,” she said evenly. She kept the ‘I told you so’ from her voice as best she could. Teramyn did not answer her at first, glaring down at the bead between his fingers, like it was the source of his frustration.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” he ground out between clenched teeth. “I have never had a vision that indicated a living vessel was possible.” He took a sharp breath in through his nose and reached across the bowl, offering the bead to Sahayna.
“As much as I loathe to say it,” she lied, “I did voice my concerns that there were far too many unknown variables involved.” She did not reach out to take it yet, instead looking him in the eyes, searching his face for something she wasn’t sure of.
“We are running out of time,” he hissed, shaking his hand and the bead at her. She finally reached out, taking the bead in hand.
As soon as it touched her skin she felt its warmth radiating from within and then she felt the strange dizzying effect of a foreign fen mingling with hers. It spread slowly, tickling up her arm and then settling low in her chest. She waited for the vision to come, a memory of Teramyn’s in vivid detail, so visceral that she could feel the wind on her face and the smell of the sea on it. She watched the scene unfold with no small amount of horror but when the thing, she could only call it a thing, when it screamed it was awful. It was such a horrific sound that she startled and dropped the stone from her fingers sending it rolling across the gleaming floor. Nimel swiftly stepped in to retrieve it using a cloth set aside on one of the tables to pick it up before handing it back to Teramyn.
“That was it then? The infinite creature?” she asked. The images of whatever it was were strange and difficult to understand, ever shifting and changing even in her mind's eye. What persisted though was the shiver that ran up and down her back at the memory of the noise, the blood, the terror.
“Yes. The God of Infinity heard our call and answered.” The words escaped him with such intensity. Sahayna watched as he fished the bead back out of the bowl where she’d dropped it. “This is a setback but not one we cannot overcome.” He pushed to his feet and crossed the room to a cabinet along the far wall, pulling the doors wide to reveal several clear cases, inside of which were rows of similar tiny, lumpy spheres. He reached for a case that was about half full, opening it to place the bead in the next open space. “We will find the girl soon enough and complete what we started,” he said with confidence.
Sahayna said nothing, still reeling from what she’d seen. She had had her doubts before but now…now she couldn’t help the feeling in her gut that this wasn’t going to be as easy as Teramyn proclaimed. She had a bad feeling that this was going to be much messier than she’d been led to believe.