I stand now in a fallow field, still dying, but clinging more to life than the earlier fields. Around me, the world seems to be breathing. Not breathing with life and fertility. But be breathing with ragged, dying breaths. On the horizon, a dark dense forest stretches out, as far as the eye can see in either direction. A mist hangs low within the trees, and the wildlife is void of sound except for the occasional screech of a dying bird deep within the undergrowth. As I watch, breath caught in my throat, the drooping branches seem to writhe and twist like tentacles. I know it is an illusion but it is unsettling all the same.
Dusk has begun to fall around me and I decide to make camp on the forest’s border for tonight. I use a small Y-shaped tree to make a small tent and then build a small fire to cook some of my leftover rations.
As I rest, with my back against a large tree with drooping branches, the fear begins to set in. Not a fear that I would show outwardly, nor a fear that I would admit if confronted. But deep within my subconscious, I am scared to fall asleep. The dream, the encounter with Azhorra-Tha, scared me, to my very core.
I may have acted brazen, and even foolhardy when talking to the godlike being, but that facade was just that… a facade. Nothing more. I know falling asleep will only open my mind up for more nightmares, possibly even more intense encounters with Azhorra.
Unable to sleep, I get up and pace around my makeshift camp. The forest behind me rustles with malevolent energy. I half expect something to jump at me from the dark treeline, but nothing does. Around two hours after I settle down, a heavy howling wind picks up and the trees around me whistle with its power. A light rain begins to fall around me, coating everything around me in a thick layer of moisture and forcing me to retire to my tent for the night.
I lie awake restlessly, tense and on edge, knowing that something might happen in the instance of mere seconds. Far off, the howl of an animal catches my attention but it isn’t close enough to worry me yet.
The time I spend in the state between consciousness and sleep isn’t definable by any standards that I know. It may be mere seconds, it may be hours, all I know is that I experience the perpetual liminal hell that exists on the border of the awakened and the subconscious. However, eventually, I slip into an uneasy sleep.
The night, by all measures, is unremarkable. I sleep peacefully and without interruption until the sun begins to peak over the eastern horizon, its rays waking me quietly from my slumber. I roll over, praying to awaken to Val’s body in my arms, as well as the realization that this has all just been some horrific dream.
My euphoric hopes are shattered as my arm crunches on wet branches and damp leaves. I open my eyes and am greeted by the same hopelessly depressing landscape as before. Pushing my sore body from the ground, I let out a long exasperated sigh, letting my head droop as I solemnly pack up my camp.
After all is packed, I turn my attention again towards The Illusionary Forest. The mist from the night before only seems to have gotten thicker and darker since I last looked upon it, taking on a solid black hue. The long twisted branches interlock in shapes that seem to form impenetrable walls of foliage. The wind whispers in my ear, the sounds of voices speaking in ancient tongues. The feeling of unfiltered dread emanates forebodingly from every part of this evil forest.
The forest, however, is the only thing between myself and my only hope of seeing Val again.
I take a singular hesitant step into the forest, expecting an immediate reaction from the corrupt energy permeating the very air around me. To both my surprise and relief, nothing happens, and as I take another step, deeper into the woods, again, nothing happens.
I let out a long, unintentionally held breath, as each step into the trees becomes easier and easier. Before the end of five minutes, the weak island sunlight has all but disappeared and I am swallowed completely by the forest, trapped within its trees.
As soon as I have been swallowed, with natural light becoming nothing but a fading memory, the forest awakens. At first, it’s small things, the whispering of the wind reaching a sudden fever pitch before abruptly resuming its quiet monotonous drone. Or the occasional growl of an animal seeming to come from behind me, only for nothing to exist when I spin around. Nonetheless, I am on edge, waiting for something to happen.
After about an hour of these odd occurrences, I call out into the trees ahead of me.
“Come and face me! Instead of using your magic and trickery on me, cowards!”
A quiet, childish giggle responds, deep from the woods ahead of me, causing me to fly forward toward the source of the sound, pushing even deeper into the woods. By the time I reach the point of the sound’s origin, there is nothing but the endless trees to greet me. Again the giggles echo through the forest, this time far to my left.
Hoping that these are at least a partial source of the forest’s dark magic, I again chase after it, only to again find a vast expanse of trees knotted together in impenetrable walls of branches and thorns.
This sequence of events is repeated four or five times, my mind taken over by an insatiable desire to find the source of the noise. When eventually I stop, I come to the sinking realization that I am now hopelessly lost in this inescapable maze of fog and forest.
Damnit! I shout to myself, I can’t let the forest’s magic get to me like this again. I sit down, my body winded from chasing the sounds through the trees. As I wipe the sweat from my brow, I see a figure on the edge of my peripheral, tall, dark, and ominous. My head whips around, eyes focused intently on the spot where I saw it. But, as I expected, the figure is gone.
The whispers of the wind swell, the ancient language of the island filling the air around me, echoing up into the canopy. The words pelt me like heavy stones from an angry mob, slicing into my skin, becoming my only focus.
“Ret. ‘aylah. Runras. Fhasad.” These harsh words, with their grinding consonants and spitting vowels repeat, those words amongst many more, screaming directly into my head.
I slam my hands against my ears, trying in vain to block out the voices but nothing seems to work. I cry out in agony, the sheer cacophony of noises deafeningly loud in my mind. I spend a few horrible seconds screaming before I notice more dark shadowy figures darting in and out of my vision. They dance in and out of focus around my writhing body, offering helping hands just out of reach. I grasp wildly at the shifting reality around me, hoping to latch onto some fiber of normalcy. When all attempts fail, I sink back onto the foggy forest floor, utterly defeated.
The depths of any hell would hold no candle to the torture of the voices within my head. Their unending screams form a purgatory between life and death, I find no shreds of solace in their never-ceasing chants, the words grating against my very being.
At some point during this encounter, I feel my body get up, and involuntarily move away from my place of rest, deeper into the forest.
When at long last the screaming stops, I stand in a small clearing, the midday sun shining in weakly from above. In the middle of the open circle of trees, I see a crude monumental spire, shaped like a T and built with a myriad of human bones and disconnected body parts such as arms and legs. The top of the monument is adorned with a skull. Two blue candles burning with white flame protrude from the hollow eye sockets, casting an eerie shadow over everything around me.
I step forward, slowly and quietly making my way across the clearing to the crude effigy. The ground under my feet turns from soft dirt to hardened black stone as I approach. The moment I enter the ring of flickering white light, I can feel the dark energy of the forest slam into me like a wave, attempting again to besiege my mind.
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I fight it off and make my way, against the current of evil, towards the macabre monument. As I reach my hand out, the candle continues to grow brighter, blinding me with its fiery light. Before I can control myself, I grasp the skull in my hand, wrapping my fingers around the cold bone. No more than half a second passes before I am thrust yet again into the void of visions.
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But this time, it’s different. The usual voices I experience upon entering the cosmos are not present. As I float through time and space, there’s a different feeling about them too. The darkness flows around me like the water at the bottom of the oceans themselves. No light reaches these depths, and I float amongst the water, darker than midnight, waiting for something to happen.
When nothing does, I decide to yell out, hoping to attract some attention or shatter the illusion altogether. My voice is gurgled by the void around me, caught in the deep ocean. Yet, there is a reaction.
Something moves in the dark water around me, shifting and spinning around my body. I get the sense that like Azhorra, this monster, god, or whatever it may be, is gargantuan. As the water continues to swirl around me, I reach a hand out into the darkness and it brushes against a massive amount of hardened scales, moving past my body at an extremely fast speed.
The best estimate I can make places this creature, assumedly a serpent of some sort, at miles long. As this realization begins to set in, so does the panic. I am surrounded, stuck in an inescapable void at the mercy of a serpent the size of a small kingdom.
After a while, the water calms around me, the serpent slowing its frenzied spiraling. I feel something coming towards me, possibly the head of the creature, come to swallow me whole. I struggle against the current, trying and failing to swim away from what I believe to be my inevitable fate.
For a minute, all movement stops completely, and I wait, expecting my life to end at any second, eaten by this massive sovereign of the sea. Then, at long last, I feel a shift in the waters around me.
A massive eyelid slowly opens, revealing a singular bulbous yellow eye. The eye glows with magical energy, illuminating the darkness around me. Revealing my assumptions to be true. I am encircled by a massive serpent, the size of which again makes me feel infinitely small. Apart from the glowing eye, I can only see green scales which fill my vision on all sides, making up the entirety of the world around me.
The eye stares into me, penetrating my body and staring directly into my soul.
“What… Are... You?” A deep resonant voice says, directly into my head, “What… is… your… purpose?” The dialect may be slow and broken, but the words have purpose and intention behind them. This creature really wants to satiate its thirst for knowledge. I think about my reply, whether or not it would be wise to speak to the serpent. I come to the conclusion that its thirst for knowledge is something I can use to my advantage, and thus, I take the risk.
Even though my words are broken by the water around me, I speak back to the serpent, intending to confuse it with my wordplay, tricking it into revealing its name.
“I am both nobody and everybody. I am right here and nowhere. I am all of existence as well as the lack thereof. My name does not exist.”
“You… anger… Qu’athlas.” Hisses back the voice. “That… is… unwise.”
“Qu’athlas is naught but a name to me.”
“A name… you… should… fear.”
“I fear no name, why should I fear yours?”
“I am… the.. Serpent… Sovereign… you… are mortal.”
“I am mortal. But scared, I am not.” I lie, hoping to press the serpent for more information.
“You… lie. All… are afraid… of Qu’athlas.” The voice is angry, hissing more and more.
The black water shifts around me as the eye closes, plunging me back into a world stripped of light. The angry swirling of the Qu’athlas’ body resumes around me and I fade out of the void and back into the reality of The Corrupted Isles
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For the second time, I have come face to face with an ancient power, whether they are gods or simply extremely powerful beings, I still know not. But I do believe one thing to be certain, if there are two, they are bound to be more. And the others are probably scattered around the Isles. All the more reason to leave as soon as I rescue Val.
A sudden wetness draws my attention down to the skull which now lies detached from the effigy and clutched in my trembling fingers. Black blood drips from the base of the head, coating my hand and arm in the warm liquid. The candles burn low and extinguish themselves as I kneel on the ground, allowing the shock to subside. By the time I am able to rise from my knees, the sun is low on the western horizon and The Illusionary Forest has grown even darker around me.
I find a heavy branch at the edge of the clearing and wrap it in some oil-drenched cloth. Lighting it creates a small torch, allowing me to push on through the darkness setting in around me.
As I plunge back into the dark thicket, guided only by the setting sun, The light of my torch casts an eerie glow around me. The whispering of the wind resumes, the malevolent energy returns, and shadowy figures dance in and out of my peripherals.
Pushing ever onward, I draw Shadow from the scabbard and use its dark blade to cut a path through the overgrown underbrush.
After the sun disappears completely, a new string of voices begins. The shadowy figures call out my name, attempting to mislead me through the darkness and the fog with their malicious, hissing words.
“Draven.”
“Follow my voice, lost traveler.”
“I will guide you to safety”
I know their voices guide me towards death so I try to move opposite to their directions, but as the voices continue, more and more join in until they seem to be coming from all sides, their fake directions and false guidance overlapping to form a confusing cacophony.
I try my best to keep moving, blocking out as many of the voices as possible. However, no matter how hard I try, they keep through my mental barriers, getting louder and louder.
“Draven!”
“I know a safe place!”
“You are lost, follow our voices!”
“We know how to find Valena!”
I stop dead in my tracks, the voices stopping with me.
“Valena?” I ask, my voice flowing like the mist into the trees, “Where is she?! Take me to her!”
“Then follow my voice, lost one. Let me show you the way to the woman you love.”
I can’t control myself, the voice’s promise of my lost love is too overpowering. I veer off toward the sound of the voice, following it deeper into the woods.
When at last I reach a second large clearing, the feeling of magical influence fades and I stand there, my mental stability shattered into a thousand tiny pieces.
From the edges of the clearing, fifty or more figures, cloaked in shimmering robes of blue and white, emerge. At their head, a tall woman clad in snowy white armor, wearing a cloak woven of the night sky itself. Atop her head is a golden crown of woven thorns. In her long arms, she wields two swords, just as I do, one made of a dancing, hellish red fire, and one made of crystal clear, wickedly sharp ice. Worst of all is her face, uncovered by the white steel helm, her face is ever-shifting, changing with every step she takes toward me.
At first, the faces are nameless women, none of whom I know nor will ever know. But as she gets closer, the faces become more and more familiar. The features begin to meld together, forming the only face that has driven me to go so far, and push so hard whilst the entire world pushes back against me so hard. The face becomes Val's. And even though I know this beast isn’t her, the sinking realization that I will have to kill Val to continue on my journey is a realization that nearly breaks me.