Beware, beware, the Bright Ones, child
The Masked Ones lie and lead
Their angel crawling, waiting, watching
THE LIGHT BEGINS TO FEED.
-The notes of the mad prophet Leinkreh the Blinded
“Land ahead!”
A cheer came up from the crowded deck of the stolen elven ships, the pale, white wood gleaming in the dying light of the evening. A fleet of nearly fifteen vessels drifted across the choppy waters north of the Mouth of Kest, having traveled for several weeks.
Standing at the front of the ship at the front, which the refugees had taken to calling The Unchained Fate, there stood the defacto leader. The Gleaming Ones, the elves, had put Jeremiah Baius to work at the docks maintaining the very ships they now used to escape, and as such he was the one most knowledgeable on keeping the fleet moving forward.
“One of the Titan’s corpses,” Baius muttered to himself, looking out over the swampland before them, frowning, his old weary eyes flickering over the coastline, eventually resting on an island, the edge of the decapitated Titan’s eyes resting just above the coast. “…Land here. We’ll see if we decide to stay or not.”
The man to his left nodded, motioning to the gathered humans on the deck.
“Dock the ships! We’re settling for the night.”
As the music of liberation drifted over the camps, Baius’s first mate, Xander, chuckled as he looked at the rising smoke over the swampland. The place was a nice reprieve from the golden halls of the Bright Ones, sterile and austere on their islands, but this place was infested with bugs. But it had its charms.
As he looked out over the camps, he could see his child among the crowd, glowing faintly. It was a common trait among some here, the mark of the Bright Ones on the children they fathered, passed down.
As Xander smiled, his attention was suddenly dragged to his right as a flash of white, like an explosion, burst next to him.
A flash of white, a flash of black. And as he stared, through the rift in front of his eyes, he could see it. A cathedral, a set of towers rising like a crown on the brow of the Titan. A building that put all of the Bright One’s buildings to shame.
He could feel his eyes watering, movement in his peripheral vision, but his eyes refused to be pulled away from what he was seeing.
Just as quickly as it began, it was over, Xander breathing heavily as he turned to bolt into the camp.
“CAPTAIN BAIUS!”
There are so many lives here. So many.
These towers were born from a dream, a dream that was planted by its own completion, echoed back through the ages.
The sapphire is forged by paradox. The light, breaking through the threads of time, tightening around Lahrii like the web of a spider. Streets appear and vanish. Ghosts of past and future flicker like a projector across the mirror skin of time.
They saw. The demoness and her puppet. They saw the cracks forming, and sought to harness it. They saw her, standing at the heart of the storm, the Witchblood Zelith. The architect, led forward by her own handiwork towards a future that only exists because she saw it.
We helped. We always help.
We watch, with our thousand eyes, and we pull and we twist. We yearn so keenly for touch, for our home is cold, and empty. Nothing grows out here. Nothing lives. No flesh or bone or heart beats in this emptiness, and yet, we are here, screaming. We have been here since first the paradox was born, the recursion rippling back into infinity.
The time is arriving, when the net is complete, in that rattling gasp before the light consumes all, when we shall exist. When flesh will flow forth and sensation is ours. The walls are already thinning. So close.
We can almost touch her hand, now, that gleaming metal extension, wrapped around the knitted fabric. She calls, but not to us.
But no. The wolf can smell us, although she does not yet know what she smells. We must be careful. Just wait, and watch, and learn.
The spell is cast. A momentary weakness in her eyes. A perfectionist, to her end, even now.
Another crack, another flash across the ages.
He has arrived. The pieces are already in place, as they always have been.
It’s too late for it to end in any other way.
But you already knew that. That’s why you’re here.
Another set of eyes.
Strike The Horizon 