By Sami Adalwulf
A thousand eyes
-Gavin Dunne, “A Thousand Eyes”
Open inside
To grant me sight to see the end
A thousand eyes
The curse of the wise
Into the madness I descend
CW: Body Horror, warped perception, terror, blood.
“Come on. Stay. You already said you don’t want to go back to that dumb school.”
“I’m about to graduate. Just a year more.”
The boat floating in the clear bay around the Kestview Markets bobbed in the waves, lanterns drifting overhead. The sounds of a festival of some kind were drifting over the water, as merchants and citizens of Clayonne danced around the statue of an armored red dragon that stood proudly in Emancipation Park.
Other gondolas drifted by, the pair keeping their heads down and out of sight. The lonely boat in the bay contained two figures: a horned woman with pinkish skin and stark white hair, still partially dressed in a blue uniform, and a more muscular woman, dressed in leather armor, piercing wolflike eyes glowing blue in the dimming evening light as she looked at the other woman, lifting an eyebrow.
“What are you even learning now, Zelith? You’re already insufferably smart. Or at least talk like one of them, now,” the armored woman said. “You said it yourself, just now. You want to go on an adventure, leave the city. Come with me.”
“Words flow freely when a beautiful woman is whispering in my ear,” Zelith said, frowning a bit, seeming guilty. “I know it’s a lot to ask. Just one year more. Maybe even less, if I can impress the professors. They’re working on something, I overheard. Something to do with time. I could get on the project! They’d have to be mad to not accept that for graduation, Grey.”
“Hmm,” Grey said, her eyes flickering to the tall towers of Lahrii, the university of Arcana, sitting on its secluded island off the coast. “Fine. Don’t complain to me when it goes wrong.”
Lahrii University. The preeminent place on Valos to learn the arcane arts, especially after their only rival, the Cirocian Academy, was destroyed at the start of the Harbinger Crisis twenty-two years ago. Split into four wards: Annihilation, Deflection, Corporeal, and Reality, each devoted to two schools of magic.
Zelith Vachon was originally from Ciroc, and would have likely been admitted to the Academy had it not been obliterated when she was a toddler. Instead, her family had fled the Harbinger’s demonic hordes and moved west, first to Greenfields, then to Marble Landing, and eventually, down to Clayonne, the City of Scales, the trade capitol of the north.
While her family had struggled to make due in the slums of Clayonne’s West Quarter, Zelith’s nascent talent for arcana had been noticed by her father. Years of struggle and study, all for the sake of her family, had finally put a teenage Zelith into the halls of Lahrii.
All of that had been fine. Until, visiting her family’s new modest home, bought with the money she’d made on the side with her growing skill in magic, she had met her.
Grey. A traveling hunter touched by the power of the wolf, who whispered stories of a road that stretched across the continent, the corpses of long-dead gods, and a storm that dominated the southern ocean.
Months bled together, projects and lectures passing with agonizing slowness. Zelith Vachon was a brilliant student, but her focus was like a beast she had to force into submission, often with dangerous amounts of coffee.
The project had begun, although all of her applications had so far been rejected. Whatever it was, the head of the department was being incredibly cagey about what exactly he was working with, to a frustrating degree.
But whatever it was, it was working. Zelith could feel it at the edge of her awareness, like her internal clock was just off from reality. She found herself sitting most nights in her room in the student living dorms, eyes glued to the clockface above the Grand Library.
Faint blue stones glittering on the clock face, the hands turned, just…ever so slower then they should, as Zelith could feel her own heart rate seemed fast in comparison. Pages and pages of notes, more than she would have been able to write in that time, covered her desks. It was like the entire school was full of energy, brimming with possibility as they found themselves with more time to work with.
Zelith could feel her attention sliding off her notes even as she kept writing, her hands a strange blur as her multiple clay jugs sat emptied nearby. This application was going to be the one. The one that would get her out of here, finally, out into the real world.
Suddenly, a sharp, ringing pain shot through her entire left arm, like a nail had been driven into her palm as she let out a curse in infernal. Hand throbbing, she gripped it tightly as her vision swam. A few other students looked over, looking concerned as she pried her shaking hand open.
Disorientation hit her like a hammer as she saw her own face at the same time she saw the hand, her whole vision swimming as the strange contradictory inputs threatened to make her sick. There was an eye, in the center of her palm. Strange, blue and black like hers, but the pupil was misshapen, like an hourglass. Bits of her feather quill were stuck in it where she’d been holding it just moments before.
Just as she was about to scream, one of the other students had taken her hand, applying a salve as he looked concerned.
“Lily, you need to slow down. Hand cramp, I think.”
As he pulled his hand away to pull out a bandage, she stared at the hand. No eye, just a bruise. Her vision was back to normal.
She let out a nervous laugh as Orville, the other student, starting to wrap it.
“Of course. Too much coffee. Thank you, Orville. I’ll be going to bed soon.”
Orville nodded, shaking his head.
“I’ll be sure to have somebody remind you in twenty minutes, Vachon.”
As he moved back to his bunk, Zelith sighed, rubbing her bandaged hand as she walked back to her desk. Too much coffee. That was it.
As he eyes flickered over her notes, that edge of panic rose again. The ink was jagged, deep, almost cut through the parchment. She reached a hand out and traced the edge, straining her eyes to translate what was written….what she had written.
The horizon watches, waiting. Again and again, the hands turn. The sky bleeds as the hands of the clock twist the knife.
They are coming.
As a chill spread down her spine, she looked out the window, towards that clock, the ticking of the gears echoing across the courtyard like a doorknob shaking, lock giving away.
“Ms. Vachon. While I appreciate your work, I must ask that you calm down.”
Zelith paced back and forth, her footsteps echoing through the marble floors and expansive, cathedral-like space of Professor Verin’s office. The professor of Divination sat perched like a dove, dressed in all white as his eyes followed her back and forth through his steepled hands, occasionally glancing down at the large crystal ball floating on his desk. Zelith, compared to his calm, elegant composure, seemed worn down and exhausted, her uniform uneven and the bags under her eyes dark.
“Calm down? Something is wrong, professor!” Zelith said, gesturing to sprawled out notes that covered the table. “I’ve been doing the calculations, looking it over…whatever this effect is, it’s getting worse. Steadily escalating! You’ve certainly heard about what’s happening with the students. Random eyes manifesting, hallucinations…they’re getting more extreme. Lasting longer. Whatever they’re doing with that time project, they need to correct it before-“
Verin raised a hand, letting out a sigh that froze Zelith mid-sentence.
“I understand you have been stressed out, and upset because you were not accepted to the project,” the professor said, passively. “You were not even meant to overhear that it was occurring, and I think you got your hopes up about that. The visions are just a result of you overworking yourself. With so much time to study, it will take time to adjust.”
The tiefling woman glared back at the professor, frowning. She could feel her hand throbbing, the strange spot on her palm that had never quite healed right. For a moment, she swore could see see her own enclosed fingers.
“…Thank you for your time, professor,” she practically snarled, picking up her notes and storming out of the room.
As the door shut behind her, Verin’s gaze drifted back to the crystal ball on his desk. Staring at it, he began to lean forward, before his forehead touched the smooth crystal.
It began to part, almost like liquid, before the professor jerked his head, snapping backwards. As he fell into his chair, a chunk of his forehead was missing, blood beginning to trail down his face as he let out a shuddering breath.
“Too soon. Too soon.”
The wind was rushing past Zelith, a cloak wrapped around her shoulders to protect against the encroaching autumn chill. She was standing on the top of the astronomy tower with a number of other students, most of whom were dressed in the same uniform cloaks, shivering against the cold.
“The least they can do after ignoring us for months is to come to the meeting on time,” said Caspar, frowning. Caspar was one of the Conjuration professor’s student teachers, a local who’d grown up around the school. “Verin said at sunset, yes?”
Zelith nodded, having returned to pacing as her eyes drifted over to the door at the top of the staircase. There were about fifteen students here, all of them people who had expressed concerns and had been invited by Professor Verin to the astronomy tower to discuss the situation. Most were glad to be listened to, but Zelith was less certain.
“I’ll go get him,” one of the other women said, an evocation caster in the same year as Zelith. As she quickly descended the steps, there was a loud rattle and a pause before she looked up.
“…The door’s locked.”
As a mutter started to build among the crowd, Zelith began to frantically scope the rest of the school rooftops. As she looked, eventually peering out towards the shores of Clayonne, growing dread began to hit her. Strange flashes, bright and then dark, were flaring across the city. Distortion hung in the air, and as she focused she could see a street flicker in the city, for a moment shifting to a skeletal framework, construction equipment manifesting where it hadn’t been before. She turned, frantic now, to see the clock hands of the Grand Clock were beginning to spin erratically, more flashes gathering around it as she turned to the rest.
“Something’s going on!” she yelled. “The distortion is getting worse!”
There was more panic from the crowd, as one of the boys, a younger student who had been killing time by looking through the telescopes, paled and backed away.
“They aren’t stars,” he said weakly.
None of the others seemed to hear him, but Zelith quickly moved over, gripping his shoulder and wincing as she realized she’d closed her bad palm around it.
“What are you-”
“The sky was wrong. I was trying to…figure out what was going on. They aren’t stars.”
There wasn’t enough time to respond. As Zelith began to turn up towards the domed roof of the tower, something slammed into it, hard, a large dent forming in the side. As silence fell over the students, another loud thud followed, then another, as a large, luminescent pincer the size of the telescope began to snake almost like a serpent through the gap around the scopes.
They are coming.
The top of the tower erupted in chaos, a flurry of movement above and below. The telescope was snapped in half, shards of glass raining down, as more and more dents formed in the roof. Students rushed towards the locked door while others moved towards the windows. Dead eyes, dark orbs as large of the students, stared through the gaps in the roof. Like the eyes of a shark.
Then the blood. The boy who had noticed the false stars was suddenly nothing but a pair of bloody stumps on the floor, as one of the spindly serpent limps moved impossibly quickly through the air. Another, one of the divination students, began to float in the air, like she was gripped by an invisible hand, before screaming as she was slammed through the glass window, rapidly accelerating and vanishing out of sight.
Scream cut short.
Zelith began to move towards the locked door, as the evocation student was frantically tracing her hands through the air, looking at the chaos that was erupting, before snarling out a word in draconic and slamming her hands into the wood.
An explosion erupted out from the spot, the door erupting into flames and splintering. As the fire rushed out, it was expertly shifted out of the way with more hand movements, dancing around the other students. In moments, the stairs down were open, ash and cinders drifting through the air.
Zelith rushed past, almost stumbling down the stairs. Her hand was screaming at her, and as she looked down the eye was back, pulsing with light as she could feel that sickening unease still filling the air.
It was a blind panic from then. Flashes of chaos erupting through the school, vanishing around blind corners as Zelith just kept running, her breath ragged. Flashes of things prowling the corridors, hunched things with skin like oil and glowing mouths. Tendrils drifting through the air as paintings writhed, screaming faces pressing against the canvas. Professor Verin, floating through the corridors, his entire head nothing but a skull enveloped by his own crystal ball.
Sea air. As she burst through the door, she found herself by the docks, her feet having decided to run there independent of any rational thought on her part. The sea churned around the island.
A boat was drifting nearby. And as Zelith stared, a familiar face peered out over the edge, her blue eyes intense and concerned.
“Lily!” Grey called out. “What’s going on? They said the school’s been locked up!”
“Wh…who…” Zelith said, shaking her head. “There’s something going on! Whatever that damn experiment is, it’s…everything is breaking!”
Grey just nodded, gripping the edge of the boat and holding a hand out as she pulled as close to the docks as she could.
“Come on, you’re getting out of here,” she growled.
Zelith reached her arm out, but froze. The eye in her palm was flaring, and as she heard screams from behind her, she pulled it back.
“I…I need to fix it. I can fix it,” Zelith said, shaking her head.
Grey just glared at her, frowning and reaching out to get closer.
“Foolish girl, don’t-”
Grey never finished the sentence. Another inverted flash erupted along the coast, consuming her and her boat. For a moment, Zelith could see stars, endless swirling clouds of gas, before the rift snapped shut.
Grey’s outstretched arm fell to the ground, severed. Zelith screamed.
The skies bled. Lahrii, once the beacon of Clayonne, was sealed shut, whether by the orders of Verin and his cultists or one of the other professors, Zelith had never learned.
Time lost meaning. The halls were ruled by monsters, things from beyond understanding that had been drawn to the scar Lahrii was creating. The fabric between realms grew thin, taut, like fabric stretched too far.
It wouldn’t be long before it snapped.
As the pink-skinned tiefling walked through the hall, cloaked wrapped tight, her glowing blue irises darted across the upper halls. The faint noise of rushing wind came from downstairs.
Good. The hole in reality that had once been Professor Jantris was on the first floor.
Darting across the gap, Zelith held her hand up. The eye in the palm had only festered, her left hand now a mess of clawed, exposed bone and muscles and a new set of eyes trailing along her hand. Nothing around the corner.
Keeping her wand raised, Zelith strode into one of the old classrooms. It was torn apart by the force of Jantris’s crawling form trying to swallow everything around it, but some of the desks were still somewhat intact.
Especially-
Donavan.
With a desperate push, Zelith’s arms shook as she knocked rubble off of the wood desktop, reaching in and pulling out sheets of paper. Donavan’s notes for his thesis, charts of abjuration and calculated forces from various different planes.
As her eyes drank in the formula, something shifted in the rafters above her, a horrible gurgling coming from something that might have once been a throat. Zelith was unfazed, although her scanning picked up pace, rapidly moving her eyes back and forth.
Slobber hit her shoulder. She winced, but just kept reading.
With a horrible snap, a long jaw, like an angle fish, snapped shut. The last thing Zelith saw was the inside of the thing’s mouth.
…
…
Zelith let out a sharp intake of breath, eyes adjusting back to the darkness beneath the docks. Salt clung to the air around her, and she coughed, before leaning over, quickly grabbing her spellbook, transcribing Donavan’s notes before they faded from her memory.
Once she was done, she turned to the wall behind her, dragging a clawed finger through the salt. A tally. She was at 247 now.
Climbing out, she looked up at the clock face, and the school. Damage and status was the same as every other time she’d returned to this, the hour after Grey had vanished. Another loop. Another step.
She had learned, over time, that the forces that held the school in their grip had trapped many of her fellow students in strange prisons, of flesh or time or space. This loop was hers.
Glancing back under the dock, Zelith looked at Grey’s arm, sitting near her scrawl of notes. A token of guilt, set on a rock. She steeled herself and looking back at Lahrii.
Time to go again.
Every wall was covered in tally marks. Notes covered most available surfaces, as Zelith stared at the book in front of her, muttering calculations to herself. Her arm was a skeletal mess of muscles and eyes, the infection starting to spread onto her neck and chin, but she had long since stopped caring.
This was the longest she’d been in one loop. Every note she could gather was found. All that was left was to calculate. This had to be perfect.
There was an explosion not that long ago. The Reality Ward lay smoldering, smote down by some kind of conflagration from the skies. The Grand Library was ripped into the sky, pulled from its moorings, ink raining down in waterfalls.
The hour was getting late. The end was fast approaching, and Zelith knew she could only make this work as long as the experiment was still occurring.
As the final number came to her, Zelith began to cast. Her voice was hoarse from salt, but she pressed forward, beginning to trace her hands through the air. Small tentacles split from her infected arm, joining in the tracing as gathered materials laid out in the circle around her began to smolder.
Her focus began to narrow in as the spell continued. Her arm moved through the air, and she saw it move back and move again, over and over, as she tried to drag it forward. A light outside flickered, on and off, faster and faster, as pressure and pain began to pulse through her body rhythmically. The loops were closing in, tightening a noose around her. The terror and panic of her entire time in Lahrii: wanting to be the perfect student for her parents, this hell that had been unleashed, crystalized and focused to a keen edge.
She closed her eyes, forcing her mouth to continue the spell. She would just have to remember it. Only focus on the arcana. She could do this.
As she continued, her body casting the spell almost on autopilot, the darkness behind her eyes became illuminated. She was standing in darkness, a shattered echo of one of Lahrii’s hallways unfurling around her, lit only by a faint glow. Standing before her was a robed figure, a cloak of stars in the shape of a professor’s uniform covering their form, as a white mask, owl-shaped, looked at her. The creature’s eyes were dark, but faint golden light was covering their form. As the creature spotted her, it held out a hand, clawed like an owl’s talons.
“Do not worry. There are people here who are helping. They will stop what is happening, and I can lead you to safety. Take my hand.”
Zelith stared at the hand, letting out a long breath.
“No.”
The image around her cracked as she was jolted back to the docks for a moment. The ground was shaking, and she could feel blood pouring out of a wound in her good arm. She continue chanting the spell, squeezing her eyes shut as the owl creature looked at her, concerned.
“This place isn’t safe. Professor Sora has created a sanctuary, I can lead you there until my friends deal with the device. Please.”
“I don’t want to be safe,” Zelith said weakly. “I want her. Grey. She’s lost. But I can find her.”
Another crack. She didn’t open her eyes this time, but she could feel as another shard of salt rock pierced her shoulder as the spell escalated.
“My grandmother. She was from Seul. Proper devil worshiping tiefling,” Zelith said, grinning through the dulled pain. “When I was a kid, she was always saying this thing. Asmodeus scripture, I think.”
The space echo around her began to fill with the glowing sigils of her spell.
“Walk forward. Focus your entire being on the world you wish to achieve. Cut away the past. Find your doubts, your fears, and smother them. You are the vessel of your future, and your will must be absolute.”
The sigils were nearing completion now, the owl creature looking at her with an unreadable expression as the circle was almost completely manifested.
“Become the sword that strikes the horizon.”
With a rush of energy, the spell completed. Zelith felt herself being torn into thousands of pieces, scattered strands of consciousness sent hurtling outwards by the force of her spell. Countless worlds flashed in front of her eyes, countless possible outcomes, as the endless spiderweb of possibilities spread out further and further. The rush of perception was overwhelming, and Zelith gritted her teeth. Countless worlds of safety, of shining awe. Golden spires reaching into radiant skies, valleys of small rabbits dressed like people. Countless places to rest. Lahrii was there, as well. Visions of it in the past, and the future. Rebuilt. Her home, the only place that had been stable, even as it had taken everything from her.
As she floundered for a moment, unwinding in the face of indecision, the voice of the owl creature came to her again.
“…My friend would have liked you, I think. I can do what I can to guide you. I hope you find your Grey, no matter how many horizons she hides behind.”
There was a weight, like a cloak covering her, as focus came to her once again. With a roar with no voice or vocal cords, the fragmented web of Zelith Vachon began to draw inwards, rushing forward, towards a distant glowing star. Walls of crystal, flows of Arcana, the dead cities of the distant astral seas, all parted before her.
With a crack like thunder, Zelith materialized, first as a skeleton before muscle and skin followed. With a rush, she found herself falling, then hitting something hard. With a splash, she felt herself sinking.
A long moment of weakness. Her body was injured, torn apart by her own spell. Escaping the pull of Lahrii, rocketing outwards, had taken everything she had.
Then, something grabbed her hand. She felt herself pulled upwards, breaching the water’s surface. Zelith gasped for breath, scrambling to find something solid, before gripping the edge of a boat.
With a thud, something hit her, before she was pulled into an embrace, one arm wrapping around her shoulders.
“There you are. I knew you’d come.”
Tears came fast then. The two of them sat once again in the boat. Grey was the same as the night she’d vanished, likely having only arrived moments before, her dark hair tied back as she looked Zelith up and down. Zelith was still in her uniform, the cloak managing to at least partially hide her mutation, but the eyes were obvious, as was the haggard and gaunt state she was in.
“…I’m sorry I didn’t leave sooner,” Zelith said, locking eyes with Grey. “I was a coward. But I’m trying not to be.”
Grey looked at her, eventually grunting.
“Very well. Now, what are we doing, little flower?”
Zelith crawled over, leaning into Grey’s shoulder as she looked out towards the horizon. The sky was an odd lavender hue, the sea stretching out eventually meeting a distant shore.
“An adventure. Sail to the horizon., and keep going.”
Grey leaned closer, chuckling.
“An adventure it is.”
UNWOUND is based on the events of the author’s Dungeons and Dragons campaign, Mirror Sea, following original events and characters set during one of the game’s storylines. A major thanks to the players. Your actions and deeds during the Lahrii Disaster were a major reason I was inspired to write UNWOUND, and to my co-DM, without whom Lahrii and The Mirror Sea wouldn’t exist.
Also, Happy Pride Month. Love wins, even if it needs to punch a hole through reality to do it.
-SamiAdalwulf
Strike The Horizon 