Waking is...difficult.
Aaravos struggles to pry open his eyelids, failing miserably. He coughs; his lungs feel as if they are filled with cobwebs.
He feels so...weak…
He's felt worse, for certain, but there's an odd sense of...lightness that he feels now, as if some great weight has been lifted away from him.
With a herculean effort, he manages to open his eyes, blinking dazedly into bright sunlight. He promptly closes his eyes again against the glare.
He was still on the balcony…Sihr!
Aaravos reaches out blindly, head reeling from the sudden movement. Where was his son?!
"Stars-!" he rasps, "my son, is he safe?!"
There is a warmth in his chest, a soft reassurance that floods him and he collapses with relief. His son is safe.
Aaravos lies there, trying to muster up the strength to move.
He at last manages it, opening his eyes to a balcony flooded in moonlight. He squints.
Hadn't it just been morning?
The light is somewhat easier on his eyes, and he struggles into a sitting position. His lungs ache, head still reeling but he makes it to his bed after what seems like hours of slow, semi-calculated movement. Then he sleeps.
For how long he isn't sure, his ability to judge time, the innate ability that all Startouch have has been thrown off balance.
When next he wakes, he feels more rested than he has in a long time. He can't tell how long he's been asleep though, and it concerns him. He looks about the room, and finds there is a thin layer of dust.
Aaravos pauses, frowning.
The ambient magics of his prison keep everything more or less clean. That they have been so disrupted is worrisome to say the least. If the ambient magics were unstable, that meant the pocket dimension that was his prison was becoming unstable.
And he was still trapped by the wards that remained. Aaravos reaches out for his magic and is startled to find that it responds almost sluggishly.
But the corruption had been purified…
Aaravos stalks across the room, throwing the doors open to the balcony.
It's night, the moon gleaming above, a waning semi-circle. Not a good night for scrying but Aaravos needs to know. Something has changed-
He stops.
There is water pooling out from under the door of the study.
Aaravos feels a tingle of unease curl down his spine.
He opens the door.
The study is dim, the only light coming from the high windows and the doorway behind him. He steps further in, summoning an orb of starlight to his hand as he looks about.
Water drips somewhere in the room, and it pools under his bare feet, cold and icy.
Aaravos pushes more power into his spell, so that it illuminates the entire room.
The water is coming from the mirror.
Aaravos walks closer, and his spell flickers, sluggish and dimming once more.
He stands before the mirror; the water is trickling from beneath the edge, almost as if it's coming from within the mirror…
Aaravos reaches out, towards the glass-
Black tendrils fan out across, almost like hair, soaked through and a hand presses against the glass, from the other side.
Dull white-glazed eyes watch him, distorted features twisted into a grimace.
"-Hello, Aaravos-" a gurgling, horribly familiar voice says.
He twists away, a strangled cry of horror escaping him— and wakes to sunlight, his scream shattering the stillness.
He is alone, his shuddering gasps the only other noise in the room.
Had that been a nightmare? A premonition?
He closes his eyes against the memory of the sight of dead eyes staring at him, a malicious, terrifying smile on a face he knows so well.
Inaction will do no good here, he knows, so he opens his eyes, standing up, almost stumbling out of bed.
He very nearly falls over, catching himself just in time to avoid a nasty collision with the nearby dresser.
He feels so weak.
Aaravos reaches out to the connection that binds him to his child and finds it, whole. Somewhere in Xadia, Callum is practically humming with enthusiasm and energy.
The knowledge eases some of Aaravos's anxiety.
His son is safe and evidently excited over something.
Aaravos sits down on the edge of his bed, closing his eyes again.
What does he do now? Would Callum be able to break all the wards and free him from this tower between the worlds? He still has a thread of a connection to Viren, though he has been neglecting that of late.
And Viren was damn near useless to him right now, Aaravos thinks. The man had to be getting desperate, after so long an imprisonment. Desperate men do desperate things, he muses.
Perhaps he should withdraw the star-worm…but he is so weak now, lacking the strength to even pull the worm back to himself, separated as they are by the worlds between them.
He sighs, feeling the bone-deep weariness that has settled upon him; he is so tired.
Sleep overtakes him, and he does not dream.
Callum studies the cube carefully, turning it over and over in his hands, memorizing each detail. He knows them all by heart now, has dozens of drawings in his sketchbook.
The light of the fire flickers, logs shifting in its blazing heart, and Callum catches sight of the reflection in a nearby pool of water.
There are many such small puddles around the campsite, left over from the rainstorm. Callum can see himself reflected in one that is closer.
It's strange to see himself, now that he's seen what he would have once looked like.
Look at you, Aaravos had said, as you should be. The unbroken truth of your soul.
There had been such sorrow in his father's voice.
Callum looks at the reflection again, and wonders if there is a way for him to try to mimic the look he'd had in the star-tower.
Maybe...an illusion, Callum thinks. He knows that many elves would not take well to a human in Xadia, even one accompanying the long lost Dragon Prince.
It would be good practice, at any rate, he thinks, reaching for the Moon Arcanum and calling up the image of the person he would have been, before it had been snatched away from him.
Star-speckled skin, dark horns, star-marks blazing beneath his eyes.
The reflection shifts, the change washing over him, a sensation that feels almost like being dunked in a warm bath-and he is staring at an elf once more.
He tilts his head; it's really weird to see horns and not feel them.
It's an illusion, he knows, and he'd really only had the horns for a little while, but he still misses the weight of them, the promise of a future that he'd been denied.
The spell flickers as Callum abruptly loses his grip on the image and then he's staring at himself again.
He could tie it to something, he muses, absently tracing the edges of his mother's pendant.
He's already layered one spell onto the pendant though, and isn't sure of how many spells a mage could place on top of one another.
Mom's pendant is all that he has left of her; he doesn't want to risk losing it.
Could he try to place the enchantment on his scarf?
Callum unwraps the scarf from his neck. He's had time to clean it in the past week, when they'd passed by a small brook that tumbled past the path, and it smells loads better than it had in a while.
Actually bathing had been an entirely awkward procedure for both he and Rayla, involving one of them standing with their backs to the other while they quickly washed.
Just awkward in general, honestly. Zym had been the only one that seemed to be perfectly at ease, bouncing around on the bank, following the path of a few glowing butterflies.
Callum refocuses on his scarf, tracing his fingers along a few of the fraying threads, over the symbol that his mother had sewn so long ago.
He concentrates on the spell again, inlaying it upon the scarf. Magic seems to flow easier now, and he can sense when the spell is finished, the task no longer a guessing game that he must struggle at.
When he takes his hands away from the scarf, another symbol glows beneath; a seven pointed star.
The seven-pointed star is another symbol for the Morning Star, Callum knows. An old symbol, but still a known one.
He watches the star glow for a moment more and then vanish.
He pokes the scarf warily, and the star reappears, glittering under his fingertips. Callum moves his hand away; the star vanishes.
He repeats the experiment a few more times, both out of curiosity and honest delight at seeing magic at work.
Callum grins, pleased, and wraps the scarf back around his neck, watching his reflection in the nearby puddle. The image shifts and he is once again staring at his elven self.
"Yess!" Callum whispers gleefully. "I am a genius!"
Behind him, Zym makes a snoring whine, and Callum glances over, finding the dragon on his back, legs wriggling in the air.
He looks ridiculous, Callum thinks, although very cute.
Callum picks up his sketchbook again, turning to a clean page, idly tapping his pencil against its edge.
He doesn't really know what to draw, though his pencil drifts to the page nonetheless, almost of its own accord, lines and figures taking shape against the white paper.
It's a portrait that eventually forms, perhaps once possible, in another world, another life. Impossible now, Callum knows. There is no magic that exists that can turn back the hands of time itself.
There is a portrait that is staring back at him, himself as he would have been, his mother and father on either side. Mom wears her armor, his father wears the robes that Callum has always seen him in. The horned pendant rests around Mom's neck, a torc about his father's.
Callum frowns.
He's never seen Aaravos wear a torc before, other than in the star-tower of his mind.
He sets the thought aside for the moment and turns the page, continuing to sketch. Some of the drawings seem random, little doodles of butterflies, of particularly interesting rocks, and the foul-smelling fart flowers that Rayla had pointed out the week before.
Callum wrinkles his nose at the memory, and resumes sketching.
He pauses, realizing that he's drawn a mirror, tall and elegant. It's familiar. He dimly remembers Aaravos having one in the study.
But this mirror looks...off.
Callum can't quite place why, until he realizes he's sketched water trickling down the sides of the mirror, as if the mirror held back a lake or sea.
Callum drops the pencil, suddenly unnerved. He usually doesn't space out to the point that he doesn't remember what he's drawing.
He reaches for his pendant, finding it solid and slightly warm beneath his fingers. It is comforting.
He shivers and scoots so he's sitting closer to Rayla and Zym. He replaces his sketchbook and pencil back in his satchel.
He's pretty sure he's done with drawing for the night.
Callum suppresses a sudden yawn.
He's a lot more tired now, which is strange given that he'd apparently been asleep for two days.
Callum yawns again, and despite his promise to sit watch, falls asleep beside his friends.
Callum dreams, first in fractured, broken pieces, then in more complete scenes.
He dreams of a mirror, dripping water, dark shapes flickering in its depths, he dreams of a mountain, tall and crested with white, he dreams of a collar, silver and heavy, held in trembling pale hands.
And he dreams of an elf, a woman with star-speckled skin, white hair braided and coiled back from her face, her dark horns fading to white at the tips. She stands tall and proud, dressed in darkest red, a torc of silver around her throat. Her eyes are the brightest gold Callum has ever seen, her star-marks different from his, many pointed stars instead of diamonds.
Her hands trace the edge of an opal scrying bowl as she sings, her voice warm and deep, eyes gleaming with power as she works, the image in the waters crystallizing before Callum is somewhere new, a massive cavern whose floor is carpeted with grass and flowers.
Before him, a blue dragon sleeps, curled around a slight indentation in the grass. Where, Callum realizes as he circles around, an egg might have lain once. Overhead, he can hear the distant sound of wingbeats, almost matching each breath of the blue dragon.
Then he is standing in a room that could be a mirror to Aaravos's study, but the walls are smooth white stone rather than grey, and instead of a tall mirror in the corner by the chair there is a small tree whose pale branches are crowned with glittering white berries, the golden leaves rustling softly.
Sunlit panels of glass cast glowing shapes across the room, the air humming quietly with magic.
A woman is singing, and Callum turns to see the Startouch woman of before dancing barefoot across the room, her eyes half-closed as she sings, shimmering magic following her.
Something binds them, Callum can feel it.
Blood calls to Blood, and Blood answers, a voice that sounds like Aaravos whispers in Callum's ear, though when he looks around he cannot see him.
The woman turns to Callum, and her eyes are wide, meeting Callum's squarely, surprise on her face as she pauses in her song.
She reaches out, and Callum mirrors her, their fingertips almost meeting.
"What manner of creature art thou?" she asks, her voice almost a whisper. "How hast thou come here? To mine own dream space? Pray thee, name thyself. Who art thou?"
A/N: Happy Holidays to you, dear wonderful readers! I want to thank you all for tagging along for the ride with me, and I hope that you will stick around for whatever lies around the bend for Callum and co. in the future!
As ever, many, many thanks to Moondancer5813; without her this story would not have gotten as far as it has.