The shadows dripped across the floor like viscous oil.
As Arryn descended, he realised he was holding his breath and shakily let it out. It was so dark he couldn’t make out any details. Reaching out, he touched the cold rock of the tunnel, reassuring himself that something was there.
His hammering heartbeat throbbed in his ears, and so he grounded himself by counting with it, distracting himself from the desperation to retreat and run back home.
One, two, three…
Time moved strangely in the tunnel as his heartbeats faded together.
…100…
The walls had become damp.
…200…
Icey rivulets of water had begun to run down his arm.
…300…
A faint glimmer of light appeared in the distance.
By the time he reached 400, the stairs had ended and he had come to the source of light —a lone flaming torch, valiantly keeping the darkness at bay. Arryn lifted it out of the wall mounting and held it in front of him. Slowly making his way along the now gently declining tunnel, until a great set of double doors loomed out of the darkness.
The wooden doors weren’t particularly ornate, but they were large and heavy, capable of withstanding the tests of time and whatever tribulations it may bring. He braced himself and pushed with one shoulder, keeping his torch steady with the other arm.
The doors let out a horrible squeal and ever so slowly juddered open on their hinges until there was a small Arryn-sized gap to squeeze through. He sucked in his stomach and forced himself through, torch first. One of his coat buttons popped off with a loud ping, making him wince.
The first thing that hit him about the cavern he entered was the smell. A sharp and heavy tang stabbed into his nose; alcohol fumes and medicinal herbs.
When he had recovered from the odd stink he surveyed the place. Heaps of equipment piled up all over the floor, Some of it was old mining equipment, and some of it was glass alchemical equipment, and in a few places the two technologies had been combined to create great sprawling machines of unidentifiable purpose.
The space was lit up by dim red crystals that shone in various warm hues of orange. Most of them were attached to the ceiling, but in a few places glass orbs full of powdered crystal that shone far brighter, hung from chains, almost too bright to look at. However the size of the space made the ambient light dim at best.
There was a crash behind him and he saw a tall ropey man hunched over a dirty table holding a scaly struggling creature. “DARN IT YOU IMP, STAY STILL!” The man stabbed something down, and with a hiss the creatures stiffened for a moment, right before suddenly leaping up as it shoved the man aside and bound away into the darkness.
The man sighed and looked around, finally spotting Arryn. The Mad Shaman of Pteroshka looked confused for a second, but quickly an excited grin spread across its face.
“What is this I see? Could it be? Has a research assistant come to me?”
Arryn blinked in confusion as the light from an orb illuminated the Shaman. This was not what he expected. When someone had the title shaman it was generally expected they’d be a hunched small man, covered in blood and tattoos, surrounded with a haze of smoke. This man was well —the opposite of all that.
Not even noticing the question, while he thought he answered “yes” automatically.
“Excellent my boy, hurry, hurry, help me pin this next one down.” He reached into a cage beside him, bringing out another struggling imp dangling from one leg.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to inject them with Luminance crystals, but they just won’t… hold… still!” He thrust the creature at Arryn, who accidentally grabbed it by the neck somehow, releasing the torch int the same motion.
The shaman stared at him, impressed, while the torch spluttered out on the floor beside them.
“Luma… what, why?”
“To see how it affects their mating habits of course! Now hold it still before it bites one of us…”
“Eww, no, no, no” Arryn exclaimed, scrunching his nose in disgust.
The creature bucked out of his hand, and decided to leap at the shaman, who managed to impale it on the syringe.
“Oops…” The shaman said, looking down at the creature, “I didn’t meant to inject that much”
The creature pushed itself off the needle and dashed away into the darkness, making whimpering noises and already beginning to glow.
The Shaman turned to him, “Bravo Boy, you might actually be competent!”
Arryn decided to clear the misunderstanding. “Well you see the thing is I’m not really an Assistant… I kind of came here because I heard you can fix problems? You see I’m sort of blind in one eye.”
The shaman stroked the wispy beard, his only stereotypical shaman feature, “Are you fully blind in it, can you see nothing at all?”
“Well it was a shallow cut, but yes.”
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
The shaman murmured to himself for a few seconds, lost in thought.
“Anyway I’m Arryn,” Arryn said, raising a fist over his heart in the customary Skylarkin greeting.
The Shaman snapped back out of his thoughts and copied the greeting “Sharman at your service!”
“You're a Shaman called Sharman?” Arryn asked with a strange expression.
“Yes.”
“It’s not a very creative name is it?”
“Do you want me to help you or not?” The man snapped, snarky.
“Oh yes please, can you do it?” He said immediately, taking a pleading tone.
“Can I do it? Hah hah, are you serious? Of course I can! It’s positively easy; I’ve fixed countless peoples eyes, you’ll be fine. However I do need a new research assistant, after the old o… don’t worry. Would you be willing to help me finish off these imps if I fixed your eye?”
Arryn stammered “O-of course, but how would you fix my eye? The last shaman said it was beyond his healing abilities!”
If it was such an easy operation, why did the other shaman have no ability to do it? Arryn pondered.
“Aha, don’t you worry about that, I am an adept in rituals, have you heard of that branch of magic?”
“Do you mean the things fanatics and cultists use to communicate with the gods?”
“Yes exactly, that’s one use for them, but when you get down to it they are simple spells for transference, and communication is just a transfer of information.”
“But aren’t they really dangerous? I’ve heard of entire cults which have been decimated by a ritual gone wrong.”
“No, don't worry about that, they were communicating with overwhelmingly powerful beings. We will just be transferring locally, if we make a mistake the power will just dissipate harmlessly. Let’s just take half your vision: your ability to see colour and give it to the other one.”
“NO, I don’t want to half see —that would be worse than how it is already, can’t you just fix the bad eye.” Arryn said, raising his voice.
“Oh sure, and of course you know how I might do that, well you can just leave, go on, fix it yourself.” For a moment sarcasm dripped from the Shamans words, but then he took a deep breath, his face softening as he looked down at the anxious adolescent before him. “Look, it’s quite simple: one of your eyes will be able to see colour and the other shadow and brightness, your mind will combine the images from each eye exactly like before, you’ll be able to see normally, and have your depth perception back.”
“What if it doesn’t work?” Arryn said quietly.
“Then we can just do the spell in reverse to set everything back to normal, we can try as many times as you want. Maybe we could try giving you an animal's sight if it doesn’t work with your own. It would make your eye look weird, but no worse than it already does, and if you don’t like any of these changes we can just put you back to how you are now and you can just go home having lost nothing. You could even come back another day for more attempts, I’ve done this sooo many times, you’ll be thanking me within the day I reckon.”
“Is it that simple?”
“It’s that simple.”
“How soon can we start?”
“I just need to draw the runic circle out, give me say half an hour at most.”
“O-Okay, Thank you!”
Sharman patted him on the back and then led him over to the back of the cavern where a large slab of stone protruded from the floor, matt black and perfectly flat. The shaman produced a stick of chalk from somewhere, before drawing a wide circle on the floor and starting to surround it with complex runic patterns.
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When Sharman had finished drawing the circle and runes the diameter of the entire inscription was around twice his height. In the middle was an empty circle big enough for him to lie in, there was only one drawing in the circle, and that was two eye symbols connected by a line. Surrounding this circle were 7 evenly spaced runes, each a masterpiece of intersecting geometries, most were too complex for him and hurt his eye to look at, but he reckoned he could have drawn at least two of them.
Sharman stood up and stretched, his back and his knees cracking. Then he itched the side of his nose and turned to Arryn. “What are you waiting for? Lie in the circle and keep your arms and legs outstretched.”
Arryn felt conflicted for a moment but lay down anyway. It was his decision to come here and he would be disappointed in himself if he didn’t see it through.
Sharman assumed a meditative position beside the circle and raised his hands so they were overlapping and parallel, but not touching. He closed one eye and stared down at Arryn with the other.
“Just you see, I bet we’ll succeed on the first try. Hah, why, I’ll eat my glider if we don’t!”
The joke reassured Arryn enough to clear away most of his lingering doubt, and he eagerly lay down.
Sharman closed the other eye , steadied his breathing and then started chanting, while Arryn lay as still as possible.
At first nothing happened, but then he felt a slight pressure around his working eye. Slowly the pressure increased, and with an impossible to describe sensation he felt something illusory and conceptual in nature begin to vanish and his vision start greying at the edges.
As his vision faded in one eye, colour bloomed in the other with returning sight.
It’s working!
Soon a perfect balance had been reached. In one eye the colour had been leached away, leaving only black and white, and in the other he could suddenly see again! He started laughing with joy, but then stopped as he remembered he mustn’t disturb the shaman.
HURRAH, I CAN’T BELIEVE THAT WAS SO EASY!
Then he felt a momentary pressure, not near his eye, but in his core.
He wasn’t sure if he had imagined the sensation, but then, like a wave it appeared back again, each second getting exponentially more intense.
What is this?? Oh- OH SHIT, NOT NOW!
His magic was manifesting.
It couldn’t have happened at a worse time.
When a child's magic manifested, the accumulated impure magic energy was blown out of their meridians by a huge burst of unattuned magic. It was at this moment that it also gained its attunement.
Arryn screamed as a flash of white energy burst out of him, burning out of his meridians and into the air. A shockwave of magic bloomed outwards.
Then the magic met the ritual circle and instead of escaping, there was a vortex as the magic was instantly sucked in and absorbed, the circle lighting up brighter than the sun.
Arryn heard a brief yell of fear from Sharman, louder than his own screaming, before a new pain appeared, completely outstripping the pain of his burning meridians. His good eye vanished, like it had just been gouged out. Light exploded in his face as his newly healed eye merged with something —his other eye. For a moment there was a great feeling of wrongness pervading the air, like the ritual was refusing to complete, it could not place an object where something else was already. Then the burst of energy from his manifestation broke through that barrier and everything converged into a point.
All was still, the ritual complete.
Arryn was left sobbing as blood bled out of his empty eye socket.
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