----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
Even so fall it shall,
These words won’t be written in scrawl
burned blisters thy riches
growing out of foul Crown Gal
Past’s lineages cocooned in lament’s purple shawl
-
Sintoriela,
High Priestess of Nesande
First Sibyl of the Coven.
Partially destroyed alabaster wall-size tablet (herein the south wall) inside the ruins of Nesande’s massive temple complex in Elauthin, known as Crimson Palace.
The pre-empire (?) prophecy (?) –here only the last lines of it- and part of the Seers Floor inside the temple (the specific room called 'Dialogues') is impossible to reconstruct due to lack of context after over three millennia and of course the absence of any living witnesses.
-
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
Ena, ‘the Mad’
Third Sibyl of the Coven
A gnarly smile
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
Fire.
Hurts more than steel.
Quick… quick! Qerrali screeched, nervous little feet clattering on the glass rock. Let me close that!
“Bad blood… must drizzle out,” she hissed through her clenched teeth, breaking pieces of the keratinous skin away to open the wound.
Oh-oh… crimson spills!
Cave gives me chills!
“You’re a spider,” Ena murmured spreading the salve in the cut. Her repairing lung still hurting and only half-working. “Spent centuries in one.”
Kinfolk!
Same the Kinfolk are, but not alike!
“Crazy soul, what did you use?” she asked the anxious Wraith Arachne. Illusions in the flesh, the Traveler had called them. Bloodmagic, Bonemagic… but better. Put a name on it, doesn’t matter. Magic has no father, or mother.
Like gold.
The First Sibyl who knew him the longest thought this was the reason another should lead.
> A scholar like Falael -new things to discover, since Elwuin is like yester’s ale.
>
> A gardener like Olonelis to make these new things grow.
>
> A fighter like Anfalon to win battles and to defeat's ruine not our future bestow.
>
> Perhaps a builder like Quiceran, or better yet his brilliant pupil Ninthalor,
>
> form an empire hopefully too big to fall from envy’s fault, or lack of valor.
Aye, the eloquent Sintoriela used to say always adding…
Not a sorcerer.
A sorceress herself, she got her wish.
Old stories! Qerrali screeched anxiously. Seal the wound!
“Edlenn couldn’t have done it without you,” Ena told her and pushed herself up to examine the large cave under what once was a mighty granite mountain, but now was just a flat plateau bordering Hunter’s Watch. The stone had been quarried away, massive amounts of it and transported to Goras in order to build Ninthalor his bridge between Black Peak and White Peak, from Chimera’s Leg to Goras Peninsula. There was no need for it, but building is what builders do.
The Black Peak was still there the Ranger had told her, but the White Peak was long gone now, grumbled underwater and such was the fate of the King’s bridge and the King’s empire. “If a creator is judged by his creations, then you surviving and still being useful, points us to a clear winner in this argument,” she finished with a grimace of pain.
Same, Qerrali reminded her stubbornly. But not alike!
“This brew tasted funny,” Ena griped not wanting to go over it with her again and wobbled towards the hollowed out underground quarry. The Cave, essentially just an even bigger portion of the mountain missing, extracted with magic and machines.
My secretions make it last longer! Qerrali screamed rushing after her. Good for webbing, better to preserve and to secure!
“Is there another exit a human could use?” She asked looking about for the traces of routes carved on the walls of the cave. Some still there leading to dark openings.
No path leading here! Too high, no bipedal is that spry! The Arachne leaped forward and upon landing immediately span in a circle, rigid hairy legs clattering for purchase spraying webs from her spinneret. She covered a cracked rocky protrusion with those thick ropes of silk netting making it comfortable. Ena sat on the crude chair created in minutes with a groan of pain.
“Your hard fake skin deflected that arrow enough to save me sister,” she told the skittish large arachnoid. Qerrali was the size of a dog, with thin black lines running her grey-white legs. Her body of similar, but darker color. “That ranger has a steady hand.”
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
How? Qerrali wondered thinking of Hardir.
“A Wyvern’s bone to thin the magic,” Ena murmured rethinking the encounter. “Made into an amulet of sorts. Something he looted. A familiar’s help to ‘quickstep’ out of danger without casting. If the gods have a hand in this.”
He did cast, but it didn’t last! Qerrali protested with a screech.
Hmm.
“An untrained pupil can’t do it,” Ena hissed. “What did he use?”
Himself? The Arachne guessed.
“No human can withstand the shock. The first couple of times would knock him out and scare him shitless,” Ena explained listening to the sounds of the empty and dark large cave. “Never to attempt it again.”
Who could teach him the unknown, Qerrali shrieked in frustration, how to stop afore turning to stone?
Ena made to answer, but the sound of rocks collapsing reverberated on the hundreds of meters high walls and ceiling of the underground cavern like a thunder, before she had the chance.
“See what that was,” she told Qerrali and the Arachne reacted instantly her pointy feet clacking on the hard surface.
Ena got up and walked slowly away from the custom seat, her eyes piercing the colorless blackness further than any human’s would, but this was a massive cave. She listened for sounds, but silence had returned again and even Qerrali knew to mask her movement when it was absolutely necessary.
Fallen rocks, but nothing walks!
Qerrali informed her.
Ena planted her staff down and closed her eyes. The cave breathed, the realm a living thing. It mixed with the soft breeze coming through the many cracks. Others created by water gathering after a heavy rain and sipping into the rock. Some whistling, a few whispering. Hidden wild flowers responding, moths flying away intrigued. The vapors creating droplets that tapped the sleek granite, where red iron-rich moss flourished.
What walks this dark place hidden? The witch asked the whispers.
A Wyvern, they eagerly replied and an alarmed Ena chanted for illumination.
A ball of light popped out of the top of her staff and catapulted for the ceiling expanding with each second.
One and the walls came to view.
Two and the shadows skirted away.
Three and the cave’s ceiling became a solid black gleaming sky with its own moon, but for the lighter spots playing the role of clouds.
Oh-oh! Came Qerrali’s startled gasp and a large ball of fire came down from the ceiling.
Big as a wagon’s wheel.
Ena transferred her weight to the Arachne’s crude seat, the rock heard cracking and she leaped out of the fireball’s way. A strange sucking sound leading before it, the light turning a warm yellow and the heat increasing with each passing second.
The sorceress’ feet touched ground just as the ball of fire struck the spot she had just been standing on. A wave of scalding gasses, debris and pulverized rock blasting outwards while Ena stumbled hurriedly out of the way.
The light flickered and died the next moment, the cave walls crackling in the pandemonium and she put her back on a sharp standing boulder welcoming the darkness. Some smaller rocks still tumbling down and the ground glowing a fierce red twenty meters away, right where the fireball had landed, Qerrali’s rocky ‘seat’ turned to a three meter wide pool of lava.
Not at the entrance! The Arachne warned, but Ena knew where the Wyvern had come from.
Sneaky young creature, who taught you this?
She reached with a spirit thread and sucked all that rich flourishing moss dry. Kept the water in the roots and charged it into small lighting rods with some of her blood. Nororis favorite spell.
Ena got out from behind the boulder and hurled them all upwards in an arc, two meters apart to cover more ground. The shards spread and catapulted for the ceiling, glowing electric bolts creating a strikingly beautiful light show in the blackness of the cave.
The small explosions rattling the rock and cracking it, debris falling down and smashing on the hard ground.
BOOM.
BOOM.
BOOM.
Twelve of them covering the spot from where the fireball had originated. The cave shaking with the sound of multiple thunders coming in sharply quickening intervals. Her ears ringing as she relocated fast. Up the worn path near the east side of the cave wall, old heart beating fast, adrenalin flooding her innards, back in the war again. Her staff touching the lip at the edge of the carved out of the rock road and her free hand following the rough wall for guidance.
Ena reached the first cave thirty meters higher, gold threads spreading out inside the cave, under and above her position looking for the Wyvern. The threads snapping where it had moved through, the route it had taken arcing in turn towards the walls and away from the ceiling.
Hmm.
She moved again, another narrower path cut out of the wall leading higher, the wyvern moving as well back the other way, a hand digging in her satchel for the resin incense cubes the ranger had brought her. Not as potent as she would have preferred, but Ena burned through them fast and reached for the fallen pieces of granite littering the floor of the cave now more than fifty meters below her. The Wyvern’s pool of lava, a small red circle right at its center.
“Move,” Ena chanted in Witch Tongue stepping back towards the entrance of the second tunnel to protect herself. “And to your places, return!”
The sea of debris leaping up with the speed of catapult shots and bombarding the ceiling and the walls of the cave in a hundred meter radius. The cave shaking and roaring, much more material coming down than what it had gone up, clouds of mixed pulverized dust, dirt and granite turned to gravel forming and blasting everything.
Ena ducked inside the dark tunnel’s entrance, already preparing a ‘poison the elements’ paralyzing spell. It wouldn’t stop the wyvern but it will slow it down enough, she thought. To give me time to get out of the cave and seal it behind me.
Her ears ringing, the discordance of many small rock slides and sharp cracks opening up on the ceiling echoing all about the cave and walls of the tunnel. Ena started chanting again, but stopped with a blink, her sky-blue glowing eyes turning to the white briefly as an instinctive vision kicked in.
Her body crashed at the bottom of the cave.
Thou can’t be a proper witch little Ena, much less a Sibyl, Sintoriela scolded turning Galadriel’s piece of dough into foul mud in her mouth, a young Nororis chuckling unable to control herself. Ena’s name meaning ‘once more’ in the old tongue. The old sorceress sighed in frustration afore adding with a warning glare and a hiss.
If thou can’t foresee your own death.
“Leave! Find her,” Ena warned the approaching Qerrali and the Arachne screeched in preternatural agony in her head, as she’d just shared part of the Third Sibyl’s vision. The sorceress turned around to face the blackness of the tunnel, the roar of the collapsing cave coming to an end slowly behind her. A tensed but serene Ena felt a hot breeze blowing her ravaged hair back, smelling of naphtha and brimstone, just as she restarted the spell.
Out of the thick darkness a scaly large head materialized, rubicund dragon eyes glowing like torches, sharp twin protruding horns gleaming like black glass and that beastly mouth forming a smug as much as hideous gnarly smile.
“GEAH!” Ena cried out and jerked back her body not as fast as in her youth, or before the war, the scorpion like stinger part of the Wyvern’s tail catching her right arm and ripping it away clean, right at the shoulder joint. Her staff clanging on the wall. She faltered out of the tunnel’s entrance, realized part of the keratinous skin had been torn away exposing her blackened shoulder bones along the area where the arm was missing. Blood spraying out in an arc, but her mind numb to pain from the severe traumatic shock.
Then the tail returned, opened her up from left hip to under the chin, sending her gouged out entrails and the lower part of her jaw flying in an explosion of gore. Ena saw most of that falling back and over the narrow stone-cut path.
NAAHHH! A delirious Qerrali screamed in her head, the ceiling’s blackness turning into a mirror for a brief moment showing her gutted, horrifically mutilated body dropping towards the ravaged rocky terrain underneath her. It was the black Wyvern flying silently outside the tunnel, time slowing down, the cunning beast turning its scaly head to witness her downfall.
What Onyx Wyvern fights like a cowardly rascal, lurking by the side of a road? The plummeting to the nadirs sorceress wondered in amazement, her last conscious thought an order to the screeching distraught loyal Arachne.
Tell Galadriel what happened.
And then Ena was no more.
----------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
read it at Royalroad : https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/46739/touch-o-luck-the-old-realms
& https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/47919/lure-o-war-the-old-realms
Scribblehub https://www.scribblehub.com/series/542002/touch-o-luck-the-old-realms/
& https://www.scribblehub.com/series/547709/the-old-realms/