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The Shattered Oracle
Chapter 1 - In the Refuge of the Azhemyra
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She stood silently, half hidden among the ancient shadows, her other half lit only by the dim and reddish light given off by rivers of molten rock. The oracle-turned-crusader Maenthrai Haullpent, remained motion-less like a statued sentinel lost in deep concentration. Her sight was cast over a subterranean realm made from hewn stone as well as expertly cast metals that comprised the myriad walls, rooves and buttresses of a city that was built back when the world-goddess had yet to forsake all of humanity. Winding roads, pitched windows, and exquisitely fine chiselled reliefs played out a feverish dance using the extreme contrasts of wane light fighting against oppressive shadow. All of which, pulled an onlooker away from the mundanity of the terrestrial world and cast them deeper, through to a weirdly supernal realm beyond. It was in this supernal realm of unrestrained thought and energy, existing parallel to the chained world of flesh and blood, that she reached out using the powers she had perfected over three decades of her life.
Maenthrai was ardently focused while she began to pull the ephemeral substance of her soul from the corporeal anchor of her physical self. Silvery tendrils of quintessential energies trailed between her higher self and her lower one, eventually snapping or crackling with the sound of miniature bolts of lightning under the strain of her will. The senses of her body were becoming like a distant vibration as her consciousness lifted itself upward.
The crumbling balcony that her mortal coil stood upon was fading below her as she lifted herself higher, now being free of gravity or any of the other entropic constraints of the physical world. The city below her changed her perspective from one who was trapped within the labrinthine streets, to one who soared above them like a bird on wing. She could see the patterns of the streets, buildings, and molten rivers below. With her sight no longer limited by the perception that her eyes granted her, she could see dancing flickers of energy moving throughout the city. Some of those flickers danced like the soft, twinkling glow of fireflies during a warm evening. Other sources of energy streamed through the city like glowing wyrms on a predatory hunt. Even more, seemed like stuttering echoes of dimming energy that played out moments from the city's ancient past, trapped within the very vibrations of the dense and eldritch stones.
She turned the focus of her sight upwards, seeing the vast and vaunted roof of rock that served as a shadowed firmament to the realm below, moving towards her with ever increasing speed. There was no impact as her soul flew into the stone, metals, and earthy minerals of that barrier. She continued to float upwards, faster and faster, as each moment multiplied her rate of ascent. It was only in the breadth of time that it would take for a living person to take a gasp of air that she saw herself pull free of the earth and rise into the atmosphere beyond.
Her ascent soon swung from upwards momentum to a forward thrust. Jagged peaks strewn with snow and ice began to sweep past her ghostly feet. Vast lakes, fjords, and lochs of steaming glacial waters streamed by as her speed continued to incease further. In this existence there was no exertion of body or force of strength, simply the limitations of thought and force of will.
A few wisps of morning cloud passed away underneath Maenthrai as she continued to soar. Warm air moving eastward from the Heartsblood Sea was beginning to mix with the frigid airs flowing down from the Kethyran Reaches in the North, creating blankets of thin clouds. Eventually, the clouds would settle, lowering down to be raked at by the jagged peaks of the Loch of Flame below. Their mists would soon become a heavy snowfall by the evening hours. It reminded Maenthrai that her body was still trapped within the warm confines of the earth, hundreds of miles away. She continued to push forward through more dense clouds, a few able to block more than half of the Burning God's celestial light.
A few flashes of grey and white, then she felt herself growing near to her destination. The sensation was like a deep tugging at her higher self. The weight of nostalgia and memory pressing through to drag at her feet, pulling her down. She began to descend through the billowing clouds towards the world-plane below. The clouds were far thicker in the place she now arrived. The world below was cast in a depressing grey-blue light. In the distance the echoing booms of thunder began to shatter the sky. She had arrived in a dead land. A land that was once her home.
She continued to lower herself, wanting to press forward towards the earth, yet she hesitated and remained aloft. Every few feet lower towards the world reminded her of a game that she would play with her younger brother and the twins she grew up with. In their house, the ruins of which existed far below her now, they had a doorway to the catacombs beneath the city they lived in. It was a dark and forbidding place, providing access for living members of the family to consult with their ancestors. Maenthrai started the game one day as she stood in the doorway looking out in the darkness of the catacombs beyond.
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Her mind would swim with horrors from her imagination. Arisen skeletons clawing at her with bony fingers. Wraiths of the ancient deal revealing their faces through the darkness to utter curses and cryptic warnings. Or the very real threat of the thaekkuz revenants that occasionally haunted her people when those that died returned to a shambling semblance of life due to some cowardice they could not let go.
It had started as her attempt to build up courage when she was younger after reading many passages concerning the art of necromancy that her mother collected as idle fancy in her studies as an oracle for her people. She had read harrowing tales of those that consulted with the dead, or those that had to put them down should they come back to the world of the living. Those tales had given her nightmares all thoughout her childhood. So there she would stand, staring into the darkness where the dead dwelled, pushing herself forward, step by step. She did this every night for a few hours. That is, until her younger brother Serranos woke up one evening and caught her.
Maenthrai and he made a game of it, pressing each other further and further into the darkness. Each testing their mettle more and more, making creepy sounds, recalling the morbid tales that she had learned in her younger years. When the twins were old enough to walk and talk, Maenthrai and Serranos tried to get them to participate in the game as well. The twins weren't as fun, nothing seemed to phase them. They could stand in the dark for hours, staring with their creepy and wide eyes out into the realms of the dead. The game lost it's interest then, with both Maenthrai and Serranos coming to see the twins as otherworldly.
She loved her siblings dearly, and despite the strangeness of the youngest two, Maenthrai was panged by the loss of them. She pressed forwards a few more feet, still remaining thousands of feet more from the land that was once her home. Unlike the imaginary threats she faced down while she was a child, the threat she faced now as a very real and present one. An all-consuming threat that had not only taken the lives of her sibling-twins, but of her father, and all the lives of the people that dwelled in the land she once called home. The land that was torn asunder in gouts of flame and vortexes of chaotic energy below her now.
This was the land that was once called Oerstav Caelii, a once beautiful volcanic island that was seen as the jewel of the Hoelath Empire. The capital city of this land, the once thriving city of Nesharr, was her home. It was the place that her mother's family had lived in for centuries. Each of them had served as an oracle of the Sharr-vhult, those who guided the city and advised the leaders of their people. Maenthrai had followed after her mother and become an oracle as well, although not of the same order. She wanted to travel to the lands of the south, to the heart of the Hoelath Empire, Morrthal City. She was driven to a cosmopolitan life, rather than a life of hermit-like mystics living in a temple for most of their days.
Her mother said it was her father's blood in her that made her seek out the novelty and bustle of a city life. Her father had moved northward to be with her mother. He was a member of the Filidath, or the law-giver caste. He managed the day-to-day existence of people in the city and ensured those managments were enacted as law. It was her father that raised her and her siblings more than her mother did. He was always present at home, while her mother was always away at the Ullthosian Sanctum for elaborate rituals, deep contemplation, and the ardous refinement of her divinatory abilities.
A bolt of reddish energy shot by, blinding her with its searing heat, knocking Maenthrai out of her memory-filled reverie. The bolt carried through the atmosphere alighting currents of air like blood roaring through the arteries of a human body. Each arc of current set off a boom of thunder as the final segments of energy bled themselves out before reaching the ground below. The energy itself would have killed a mortal person, but all it would have done is discorporated the energies in Maenthrai as she was. Most likely sending her back to her body in a flash, and stunning her for several hours. Thankfully, despite the close-call, it didn't bring any harm to her.
She wanted to reach out and enter into the lands below her but the threat down there remained waiting for her to pass the threshold. There was a real thaekkuz revenant down there that truly would harm her if she stepped too far into that darkness. That threat knew her well and possessed the same uncanny abilities she had. She began to worry if being even this far away, in her ephemeral state, might be enough for that threat to reach out and see her. She would have to disperse her energies when she returned to her body, taking a long route through the busy energies of the South and far to the empty expanses of the Hoelath Valisilas grasslands to the East. She mustn't have that dark being following her back to the Refuge of the Azhemyra. It had taken her a little more than a decade to find that ruined city beneath the world's surface to act as a safe haven.
The once immense volcanic island nation below her was now torn asunder. In the time since her childhood, the land had torn itself apart into smaller isles. Many of the high peaks that encircled the central city, resting upon an island in the heart of an ancient caldera, had tumbled in on themselves. The great volcano had not erupted, itself having become extinct many millenia earlier, yet the energies tearing through the land below seemed to stir it almost to life once again. The northern waters of the Heartsblood Sea fell into steaming gashes in the earth's surface to meet with the magma pools of Gehemol, the land beneath the world-plane, far below. The once lush forests in the valleys and ravines of the island were aflame, caused by the thrown up boulders and embers of molten rock. The forests that she had spent many nights and days in with her siblings on camping trips were all either alight or reduced to ashes.
The great city of Nesharr had been torn apart in previous years. Some of the city may have survived and sunken to the bottom of the great caldera lake at the center of the island, but most of the city had either fallen into the great burning chasms or been reduced to rubble in the earthquakes that still shook the island to this day. The once glittering lights of the city had faded away to nothing more than a distant memory. Only the distant lights of the port cities in Fyrrantha, and the coastal townships of the Hoelatha Empire shone any human-made light. The island of Oerstav Caelii, now referred to as the Shattered Oracle Islands, were dead of any human life at all.
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