Chapter 3: And where's Source, there's Void
A hell it was indeed. First, that strange woman casually taking off her Source collar, then a blast, fire, smoke, blood, and last, but certainly not least - Voidwoken that followed the magic trail the witch purposefully set
The witch's spell also, amazingly, managed to turn all present Magisters into piles of gore. Chaos ensued moments after, as Elane crawled out of the lavish chamber where she was supposed to get registered in the ship's log covered in blood and gore that was not hers.
As one positive in this absurd situation, the noble somehow accepted the bad turn of events as a given. After all,it was not not the first time she felt particularly targeted by all woe present in the world. Her first thought was to curl in a corner and wait for the rising water level to get the job done, perhaps, once and for all. It was a tempting desire that burst first into guilt and then resolve when her sight laid upon the unconscious face of the red-haired woman her companion was speaking with before. He himself was littering the ground nearby, just as unresponsive. No one in the entire hold woke up, no matter the amount or intensity of calling and nudging.
Panicked, she tried to make a mental note of all the faces she spotted when she was crossing the common area. There was this human she woke up with, the redhead, the snake-eyed elf, a gruff man that kept mumbling something under his breath. Two dwarves. One lizard, as the other didn't make it - her head exploded assumingly from the same spell that killed the Magisters. Why she was singled out remained a mystery to the elf. Three children, all safe.
Someone was missing…
She wedged herself back into Fane's nook and saw neither blood nor the sleeping elf. He had to be somewhere, she thought, making quick rounds around the chambers on the deck they were kept in, kicking doors open as if there was no tomorrow.
Well, perhaps there was not.
Elane backtracked to the Magisterial quarters again, then up a staircase that was loathed here. To her relief, the door upstairs wasn't locked, but she emerged face-to-face with a Source Hound. Thankfully the animal was too terrified to even think about lunging at her, opting to bury itself under the nearest bunk with a tail between its legs.
She felt sorry for the animal, she really did.
All the chambers she bolted through were empty - of living people, that is - since corpses littered the wooden floors heavily, blood mixing with seawater that surged into the ship as it bobbed on the waves and creaked. There was one upside to this - no one could bat an eye at her stealing a sword off the weapon rack.
The noble doubted her chances of ever getting away with each of those sounds.
Finally - she came across someone. Not the elf she was searching for, and clearly no one mentally sound either. A person shrouded in scraps of clothing most likely torn out of killed crew garments was sitting in a storage nook, feet well underwater and yet, at the same time, calmly flicking one damp page of the book he was holding after the other.
The book was one she saw before - Cranley Huwbert.
"F-Fane?" She dared to risk the assumptions, lodging herself between the door frame that led to his hiding spot as the vessel continued to violently shake.
The…character, for a lack of a better word, shifted his attention from the book at the uttered name, and under the fabrics of his makeshift cowl, Elane realised she was standing before an undead. Just to make sure she was not going quite mad she yanked the scraps off his head only to unravel the skull. But not just any skull - his was intricately carved, adorned with a gem encased in gold located in the middle of his forehead. She blinked twice, then dropped the wet rags to the floor.
"Oh, it's you. Shouldn't you be… running and screaming and some such?" The voice that answered her undeniably belonged to Fane.
She grew confused, forgetting about the incapacitated Sourcerers and even the sinking ship for a moment.
"Your voice…What have you done to him?" She demanded, reaching for her scavenged sword she kept in a stolen scabbard.
"Him" The skeleton asked, cocking his head to the side and putting down his lecture.
"The elf!" Elane hissed, feeling both like an idiot and a madwoman in given circumstances.
"Please, I was no more an elf than you are those rags you're wearing," he grumbled." I had a mask, rather ingeniously designed, which allowed me to take that primitive form. A mask that was stolen by that damn witch after her little scene. Still, she'll drown with the rest of these fools. And I will simply pluck my mask from her cold, dead hands."
The woman kept clutching onto the wood, staring in disbelief as the undead shrugged with a click of bones and casually returned to reading.
"What in the world are you…?" she mumbled, questioning reality.
"I am someone not concerned with breathing or having soft tissue pierced with debris. While one of your race's weaknesses is having your lungs filled with water until you can no longer breathe. So... try to avoid that, perhaps?"
A screech of wood louder and more violent than before rang somewhere overhead.
"I have been through worse, if you can imagine that," Elane added in a tone of casual conversation.
She, quite frankly, lost it.
"Really? Then perhaps you don't need to hear about the life boats upstairs. But please, do find another spot to await your demise in, I am rather content with my own company…"
"There are life boats?" Elane interrupted, her mind snapping back to her original purpose - saving people.
"Quite a few last I saw…"
The woman jolted in search of another staircase, splashing water around as she ran.
"I would say good day but it seems quite likely that you're about to die a rather terrible death, so…" the skeleton called after her, then returned to complaining about the durability of mortal books.
Indeed, a few smaller vessels remained intact. The outside has been crawling with strange Void pests she had to cut through, while an enormous tail, one she could clearly see now, was constricting around the ship's hull. That, not the furious waves roaring around was the sound of the morbid creaking.
When the bugs were slayed, she noticed movement in one of the hatches nearby. The children in the company of one of the dwarves made it out alive. But no one followed them.
"Where is the rest?!" the woman stopped the dwarf and screamed through the tumult of unravelling hell.
"Voidwoken in the hold!" He yelled back. "We need to go…!"
He was asking her to abandon them- which wasn't something she could do anymore. Her hand ran to her hairpins, ensuring they sat tight and snug in her damp hairdo. Then she shoved the dwarf aside and dove for the hatch.
Almost sliding down the ladder, she reached its bottom, hearing the sounds of a fight just outside where she ended up.
When she made it into the hold proper, it was just as swarmed as the upper deck, the room almost darkening by the sheer amount of black chitin exoskeletons torn apart by primitive weapons and the simplest spells.
"The lifeboats are up the ladder! Go! I will keep them off your tail!" She ordered the battling crowd.
Surprisingly, it wasn't all that hard for others to retreat - the Voidwoken focusing all of their aggression on the elf the moment she entered the fray.
She was swarmed, with the creatures biting on her flesh and tearing it apart. For once she doubted her chances of survival quite seriously. Getting eaten alive would be a first in her decades-long career of endangering herself.
Then the wooden walls finally imploded under the pressure, and water came rushing in, scattering the monsters and the elf alike. Her lungs filled with water. Her last conscious thought was to hold her weapon tight and a bitter feeling of déjà vu that came soon after.
She was falling into the dark, furious sea.
Just like the last time.
And so she woke up laying on shore again, looking at the sky above, unharmed.
The sea was murmuring all around her, washing her body with gentle waves. The sun was pouring down through clouds in god rays. A bird was singing in the distance.
She was alive.
Just like the last time, this state of being came with guilt. She sat up in the water and looked around without hope to see someone equally lucky as her. Her hand raised to check her updo - miraculously all her comb and hairpins were still in place. There was at least this much.
She stood up after a while, her black eyes locking onto the horizon, trying to distinguish something other than seafoam. Nothing.
Her gaze dropped to the shallow water over her feet, as her memory for the blurry recollection of what happened. They had to make it out, there was more than enough time to-
It took her a while to pinpoint and recognize that a darkened shape that floated right past her, and which she was mindlessly trailing was a body. She gasped and hurriedly dragged it to the shore. It was Vermil.
He began coughing and spitting seawater as soon as he felt the air on his face. After a while, his breath steadied and his pale face regained color.
"Good to see you alive," the elf said while wringing her tunic.
"And vice versa. Where are we?" He asked, looking around. "Joy?"
"That would be my guess, Braccus Rex's statue looms in the distance," she noticed, tilting her head in the direction of the aforementioned statue, looming over atop a hill with all of its sharp spikes reflecting the sunlight with their metallic surface.
"You'd think the Divine Order would get rid of any of the traces of the Source King with all the 'Source is the root of all evil' agenda they adapted" he mocked sarcastically.
Elane just shrugged in answer. There were many things the Divine Order could do better. She swept the sand around with one hopeless look and noticed that the sword she found on the Merryweather actually made it to the prison island with her, now safely buried in the sand. The scabbard was gone, but the weapon was mostly intact if you ignore the half of its blade that had gone missing since she last wielded it.
"Did others manage to escape as well?" she pried after giving the man a moment to recollect himself.
"Escape we did, but the squall upturned the boat. I lost sight of everyone soon after..."
"Come, we shall search the coast" she prompted with a gesture, instinctively taking the role of a leader.
Lending a hand to help him up, they took off in a dazed, slow gait into the lush seaside verdure.
The island itself was quite charming. The azure sea grazed the shore gently. The blanket of soft sand covering the earth was still warm and not scorching. The greenery that overgrew the tall mounds high overhead hid walls and towers of granite. They followed a strip of a sandy path, meandering between bounders sticking out of the ground like giant gnomons of sundials. In other places, however, it was rotting wood that took most of the shoreline. Some planks seemed ancient, bleached by the sun and saltwater alike - others looked fairly recent.
As the two emerged from behind a large rock and into a sandy headland they noticed that the sea hadn't killed the monsters that infested their ship, and a few overgrown cockroaches found their way to the shore - currently too concerned about freeing a Magister corpse of its flesh to notice to Sourcerers.
"Let's..." Vermil tried to propose.
He tried, but the elf leaped into action without as much as a second thought. Sword already in hand, she sprung over the beasts and pushed the halved blade, hilt deep, into the monster's trunk making it trash around in spasms. The other lurched back from the corpse, and then she heard an incantation, all too familiar, behind. Suddenly the other Voidwoken was enveloped in a swarm of bloodthirsty mosquitoes. The third tried to skitter into the sea, showing an uncharacteristic display of reason. Elane's sword dove into the retreating creature's tail, splitting it open. It cricked and screeched as it bleed out, stilling completely after a moment.
"I thought these bloody collars were supposed to keep these things at bay!" She exclaimed in frustration tugging on the heap of metal that was still biting into the skin of her neck.
"Easy there," the man hushed. "You'll bruise that pretty neck of yours and what then?"
The flirty joke flew right over the elf.
She approached the half-eaten corpse to examine it instead, noting that it had been the man standing guard by the Magister's quarters, the one who called her to get registered. Searching the shipwreck debris and bloodied sand, she could not find a hint of another corpse.
"They did not get eaten...did they?" she asked very much wishing the idea hadn't popped up in her head.
"Well," Vermil huffed, similarly distraught." I'd say we better stick together for a while, watch each other's backs, and so on."
"Seems sensible," the elf nodded, gave one more look at the corpse's surroundings, and turned around, heading back on the trail they strayed from.
They left the shore behind and wandered further into duny center of the island. The path took them under ruined arches of a great highway, hinting that they were nearing the keep. Soon enough, the ancient sandstone walls of Fort Joy finally came into view. A few magisters were pacing on top, and several others stood in the very gates, engaging in a very heated discussion. Elane spotted that one of them was dressed in white, and the other if her sight was not fooling themselves, was the Holy Bishop himself.
Vermil tugged her into the roadside shrubbery before they were spotted by the welcoming committee. His dark eyes scoured the obstacle at hand with quite the fervor, while Elane hoped she could just take another route whatsoever.
"There..." he pointed at a scaffolding that kept the more time-nicked part of the wall together. "There's a ladder, if we keep to the bushes we should be able to make it unnoticed."
Elane tightened her lips into a thin line. She did not like the feeling of the place.
"You seem more capable to sneak around. Go." she ordered "I will look around for a bit more."
"You really don't like crowdss, huh?" he inquired.
"And ancient evil keeps. Yeah," she agreed with a hint of humor.
"Fine," he said, rolling his shoulders up. "Just don't get yourself into trouble."
Elane offered a nod instead of verbal assurance and crept well out of the sight of the guards. She kept to the rocks and ruins for a moment, and when the looming mass of stone disappeared behind a bend of the mountains, she trotted freely.
Her head was turned to the far-away horizon where the sea and sky seemed to blend into one and she started thinking 'what now?'. Dying here was an option, of course, she could curl up somewhere and wait till time and malnutrition took their toll. Before, she thought she'd very much like that - but as it was now? There was nothing but doubt. Freedom does taste best when one is locked in a cage of sand surrounded by a monstrous sea, it seems. Feelings swirled and changed around her. There was this feeling of adventure, the disdain of all that led her here, the growing feeling of rebellion, and lastly-
A shadow of a small creature ran past her feet in such a way that she almost stepped on it. Her eyes followed the hurrying shape until it disappeared behind a curtain made from colorful vines hanging over a stone wall. They swayed back and forth faintly, disturbed, indicating a vacant space there. Intrigued, she approached the vines and parted them with both hands, unveiling an opening in the rock; a small arch bathed in an eerie blue light emanating from fluorescent plants that found their shady home here. A few steps through this natural tunnel led the elf to a clearance; a charming glade currently occupied by a silhouette she felt she saw before.
Hunched over a corpse was a figure covered in cloth from head to toe. She crept closer, wary and careful as to not make a sound, keenly listening to the undead tirades he muttered under his nose...or whatever bone in his face passed for such role.
He, on the other hand, was so occupied with pulling at the corpse's face that he would not notice the elf approaching even if she had war drums on her.
"Bugger," Fane breathed after another failed attempt of tearing the face free. "I wonder, does the beard act as some form of anchor..."
She leaned over him, her head inches above his new cowl, this one at least had a real hood.
"Your wondrous mask is still gone?"
"Gah! No! Stay back! Don't-"
The ungodly scholar jolted away with his hands raised protectively, falling onto his back in the process. Elane only tilted her head in response.
"Oh," he said as he began to gather his composure and what was left of his pride. "I must admit, I'm surprised. Perhaps you're more buoyant than I suspected."
"Oh, I am full of surprises," the elf smirked, extending a hand to help the skeleton up.
Hesitantly, he accepted it.
"Undoubtedly..." he mumbled awkwardly, peering at her as if he was double-checking her existence.
"What brought you to this damned island anyway? Could you not walk somewhere else?"
The skeleton sighed heavily.
"I could indeed, but that endeavor would be rather short-lived, or so you say. It seems the human that stole my mask was rather more resourceful than I gave her credit for. I followed her here, but she rather seems to have 'given me the slip'."
He returned back to the body, prodding at its face.
"-and the idea of being chased across Rivellon by every idiot with a torch does not appeal."
"Why, it sounds like you need a body...um, a boneguard? You know, someone to keep those simpletons at bay," her own remark left the woman quite surprised, it's been a long time since she had the strength to joke out loud.
If Fane had eyes, he would have glared at her with the utmost contempt, but after a few minutes of thought, he nodded, finding some logic in the proposition.
"Indeed, it might be...advantageous. I cannot simply sit about waiting for the rest of you to die so I may continue my business in peace. No, I might be an Eternal, but my patience has its limits."
Elane crouched nearby, her ears twitching at the sound of the word 'Eternal'.
"In fact, I may be the only Eternal. My people seem rather...absent. At least from this realm."
"An 'Eternal'?" Her gaze was fixated on his strange, angular skull.
He turned to face her, empty sockets weighing the risks of oversharing information with the strange woman. Still, he felt it would be quite difficult to deny her curiosity.
"We were a race that existed before the idea of 'race' was needed. I could ask you to imagine an Eternal as a creature of incredible intelligence and skill, but I fear the limits of your imagination would not do us justice. We studied the mysteries of the universe. We created works of great art. We-"
His tone broke mid-sentence only to return with a pain that stirred a certain kind of understanding in Elane's heart.
"...we disappeared."
There was another, longer pause, but when he spoke again the sound of a stern resolve rang clear in his voice.
"But I will find them. Wherever they are, I will find them."
"How come you are still here if your people have vanished?"
The skeleton waved his bandage-wrapped hand impatiently.
"Well that hardly seems relevant but if you must know, I was...inconvenienced for a time. Several centuries, in fact. Or perhaps millennia...one tends to lose track. I was sealed in a tomb-"
The elf crooked her head, daring to interrupt. "A tomb? So you died?"
The Eternal fell silent for only a moment, 'eyeing' her intensely.
"Do you really consider me one of your own?" He scoffed. "Your people are prone to death, mine are not."
"But you are rather…" She began, unsure how to bring up the issue of his lack of everything.
"Oh, don't start. How would you look after aeons in some ghastly crypt?"
"This is a surprisingly good question..." she murmured, then hastily added. "It is settled then, you can count on me from now on."
"Splendid, you seem more...at ease in this world than I. A guide would certainly be useful. Before we depart, do you happen to have a name, or referring to you as a 'mortal' is enough?"
One brow raised, she got up slowly. "It is Elane."
Fane clasped his hands together.
"Very well. That settles it. Let's be off!"