“Words, images, sounds. So many vectors, so many possible ways to try to connect, to meet in the middle with another. Imperfect, truth obscured in shadow. Even the blinding light, claiming to illuminate, only reduces and blinds, grinds all truth into nothing but stagnant void.
To live and love is to resign yourself to this limitation. Words scrawled on the page, words spoken, all share the same weakness. The person that lives in words is false, to some degree, no matter how hard they work to make those words ring true.
But there is a language older then words. A language of a time when men saw the stars as the stories they were. The language of touch, and taste, and sensation. A hand outstretched, lovers entwined. Body heat and smell. And, in that language, a single truth that can bridge the divide:
I am here. We are alive. You are not alone.
What more needs to be said?”
-Zelith Witchblood, Traveling Wizard
The fire was wrong. Strange, blue, smokeless. The carpet and gathered arcane tomes of the university had served adequate kindling, but the hard to track nightmare time of the inside of the hell that was Lahrii was never dependable and never normal.
Grey stared at the fire, the blue flames matching her own faintly glowing eyes. She couldn’t tell how long she’d been walking that day. She and Conall had gone down corridor after corridor, almost never spotting any other still-living people. Just twisting hallways, blood, and that growing sense of unease.
Memories were scattered, slowly disintegrating. She and Conall had been working to keep what they had intact fresh, trying to catch it as it slipped away, but it was getting worse.
White death.
There was nothing outside the school, not anymore. They knew enough to know there should be, but not enough to recall what it was.
“Lily. Her name is Lily,” Grey muttered to herself. But even as she said it, it seemed wrong. Was it…a nickname? Was that it? There was nothing solid to grasp onto, just swimming, phantom images of white words drifting past.
“…Yes,” Conall said, voice hoarse as he looked over to Grey. “Yes. It is.”
There was silence, yawning, infinite. The end of the line. The end of everything. Grey began to close her eyes-
That smell on her breath again, mixed with the strange honey-alcohol. Those scars along her face, glowing the same color as her eyes, like there was something inside that emanated out of her. Even as she opened her mouth, tongue moving along sharp canines, Zelith could swear she could see the faintest blue light coming out from inside.
Neither would have been able to say for sure who started it, but in a moment Grey’s tongue was in Zelith’s mouth, honey and heat, as Zelith could feel herself being lifted in the air, heart racing like she was in the middle of another theft. But she hadn’t had to steal anything for this, just say the word. No thoughts threatened to overwhelm her now, just a chorus of something in her mind asking for MORE, the same part that flared to life when she saw an unattended coin.
Grey’s eyes shot open, her heart starting to beat like a drum in her chest as the memories rushed back. She could almost hear Zelith’s voice in her head, like a message drifting across the stagnant air.
“You’re wrong. Of course you’re wrong,” Zelith said, stalking forwards as the whispering white claws and eyes shifted around her. The clock ticked behind her, the cogs shifting around her like a choir in match with her footsteps. As the thing shifted away, letting out a hiss like steam escaping from a kettle, the witchblood couldn’t help but smile.
“If she’s real or not, a dream or not, she’s what I have,” Zelith said, reaching a hand down towards her belt, tail thrashing in the air. “I don’t fucking care if this is fake. Maybe we’re all just a lie. Maybe there’s a real Grey out there, somewhere I can’t get to. But this Grey, my Grey, is here now. And she needs my help, because of you.”
WHY AM I NOT ENOUGH FOR YOU? WHY DO YOU WANT PAIN OVER ME?
Zelith’s hand paused, drifting in the air as the scars on her arm tingled, chilled by a breeze. The memory drifted over her, of that first night with Grey. Sea salt, honey-alcohol, drunken kisses along the alleyways of Stinjul.
“Stop the thinking. Feel.”
Zelith’s arm shot up, a wand of onyx metal gleaming in the light as she broke into a wide, determined smile, an almost crazed expression. Defiant.
“Because I’d rather try and fail a hundred times than ever, ever, give up on her. I’m going to find her. And if she’s fake? Then I’ll find the real one. And I will NEVER STOP.”
A slash of the wand. Red fire and stars. A flash of blood, shadow. Reality reforged. A Titan struck down, in this place where all reality had been consumed and eroded.
“UNTIL I-”
Another. Sea and blood and life spilling out as reality began to reassert itself.
“-AM BY HER SIDE.”
Grey shot up to her feet, staring around her as the hallways shifted and groaned, the windows flooding with day and night again as water rushed by. She could see the docks, so close, like they’d barely walked twenty feet. As the flame flared, turning a normal red as smoke drifted into the air, a grim smile came to Grey’s face as Conall looked around.
“It’s…it’s coming back!”
Grey laughed, looking out the window at the rapidly reappearing sky. The streets of Stinjul, the Spaphire, gleamed in the night as the ship of the Sunvaar reappeared. Mindol’s corpse sat where it had, the core of the city. And, as Grey looked, her eyes fell on the clocktower.
Above, a white and black scar, still crackling with energy. The epicenter of the distortion, now the only part remaining.
“…Lily’s up there,” Conall said, voice grim.
“Yes. We are going to save her,” Grey said, her voice determined as she flexed her claws.
“Seems dangerous,” Conall said, already raising his hands to prepare to cast.
“Yes. But she needs us,” Grey replied, before a gauntleted hand fell onto her shoulder. As she turned, the weary, battle-worn face of Kevyn, no longer vanished into the void, looked back at her.
“And you aren’t alone,” Kevyn said, chuckling and looking behind himself as a massive, armored bear, one eye mismatched, strode with purpose into the hallway of Lahrii, letting out a monstrous roar that shook the glass around it, letting all who heard know that Zarucan, The Old Bear, joined the hunt alongside his daughter.
Grey’s smile grew sharp, wolf fur beginning to grow along her arms as she turned to the window.
“We’ve got a witch to save.”
Strike The Horizon 