ACT I, CHAPTER I
The End
Footsteps echoed in the dim half-light of a long-forgotten temple, its ruinous edifices long worn away by seawater that ran down its walls through cracked and pitted stone. Luminescent moss shrouded in curtains of overgrown seaflora lit the darkened halls in the slightest greens and blues, interrupted only by a single point of harsh, burning red. Stale air undisturbed but for the occasional inquiring ophidian - eyes bulging and skin clammy with the heretical nature of its existence - stirred and roiled amidst the submerged and flooded tunnels that ran maze-like through its gutted core.
Like drowning, all at once… and then still. And cold. And lifeless.
All but for one.
Sunken eyes, gaunt with sleeplessness and a weariness beyond the years of their mortal frame, peered out listlessly through the red-orange haze of a lit brand. A scorching sword, a flame tongue that popped and hissed with every movement. Held aloft like a torch for light, for warmth, for sanity. The walls here were familiar, well-traveled, and the legs knew the steps well. The damp, matted hair as deep as the ocean blue framed a face worn apathetic through enduring torment. The vibrant turquoise of the eyes had dulled at some point, now resembling brackish seawater.
She was so tired. She was so alone. She was so foolish.
What dreams had drawn her here, to this awful place? What voice had called to her, drawn her siren-like into the waves, to where her alleged calling awaited her? Other questions had worn away with time… however ironic the statement had become. For though she knew quite well that years must have passed, she cursed time’s timidity about her in this place.
Annora Caestrum had not aged a day since setting foot in the Temple of Oblivital Waters, and she hated it for that.
How many times had this accursed place set back the winding sands and bid her begin anew? How many ways had she fought to escape, to beg and plead and threaten and curse? A shudder wracked her form, unable even to properly feel hunger until several days had passed each cycle. She was trapped, posed a challenge to which she held no answer, no recourse.
The glimmering strangers of dusk and shadow and half-dreams seemed so far away now, as she trudged through the halls mechanically. Her feet found their way to the same chamber they always did, and Annora felt keenly the weight of the vambrace on her arm, the leather strap on her palm digging painfully as she clenched her fist to ground herself. If nothing else, it helped her to stay present.
“You really should have expected this,” Keydis spoke from where she leaned against the slick stone walls of the wide central chamber. “Weren’t we going to avoid going it alone after last time?”
“I know,” she replied, sullenly. From his perch on a section of stone rubble where he crouched bird-like, Eloquii grimaced. Her father offered her a sad smile from where he stood next to the stone bier at the center’s head.
The echo of footsteps that were not real rang harsh in Annora’s mind, but she made no attempt to banish her only company, however deeply the words that had not truly been uttered hurt. She found herself standing at the bier as usual, the same words half-visible on the worn stone.
I T E N D S A T T H E B E G I N N I N G
Biting back the urge to snarl at the mocking phrase, Annora sank against a shattered brickwork brazier that flanked the makeshift altar, and mulled over the words as she always did. The leather of the vambrace smelt fresh, the only comfort she’d had since coming to this place, and she took refuge in holding it against her face as she crossed her arms around the knees she’d brought up to her chin. She had long assumed that this room was the only place she could end the cycles, the only place she could finally triumph amidst her long-mounting losses.
“The only question is how, right?” Eloquii ventured helpfully, navigating the rubble with relative grace, his youthful features aged by Annora’s imagining mind to something more mature and solemn.
Keydis huffed, and her own comment was terse, but belied an undercurrent of tense concern. “If it were that easy, she’d have already figured it out.”
“I’m only trying to help!”
“You can both help by shutting up,” Annora muttered out, and she was alone once more. The only sound that accompanied her now was the echoing drip of water on stone, and the occasional sniffle as she fought back tears she’d wished she’d run dry of by now. She buried her eyes in her arm and pressed them harshly against the back of the vambrace, cursing and thanking it in another whispering sob.
There had to be a way out, she just had to find it, she had to find a way back to them..!
Minutes passed, and Annora eventually shifted to tracing the words on the bier with her vambrace-clad hand, mouth set in a mulish frown and brow furrowed. There had to be a double meaning she wasn’t catching, but the rest of the inscriptions in the room had long since eroded away! Precious context robbed from her supposed task from on high, how could she become an augur if the only resource she had was broken and ruined?
Grinding her teeth, Annora beat her off hand against her head even as she punched the bier, the stone unflinching against the weak-willed blow.
“Think!” She admonished herself aloud, letting her words echo back at her. “Think, Annora! You’ve had years to think, what are you missing? You’ve explored every damnable hall and chamber in this place, think!”
Snarling, she shot to her feet and drew her longsword, unheeding of the furious snap-hiss as the flametongue of Vallum was unleashed. Pacing back to the foot of the raised altar, she began scratching what she knew into the stone floor, a line of blackened and charred stone flash-evaporating any moisture nearby.
This place… this terrible place… the Temple of Oblivital Waters was once dedicated to preserving knowledge concerning time, and magic which could somehow manipulate it beyond the ken of anything Annora had ever heard of. She could think of nothing else binding her to the temple, and only the dispelling of this magic would free her. An answer she would have to provide in order to be, perhaps, recognized by her artefact as a true augur.
Annora scratched magical equations, numerology theories, esoteric reagent properties, anything she could think of into the stone underfoot. The chamber had begun to gradually heat, her hair drying into a frizzy mess she ignored. Eventually, she found the heat distracting enough to cast off her now bone-dry cloak, and relished in the pops and cracks that issued as she loosened her form. However temporary, the feeling of control was enough to get her thinking clearly again.
When the voices returned, they spoke with voices not quite their own.
“Perhaps there is some kind of overlapping qualities between the principles of Aquilan and Serpensis arcana?” Keydis ventured, scratching her head as she bent over the underfoot writing at the corner of Annora’s vision.
She blinked, and Eloquii was nodding thoughtfully as he glanced back and forth between two points. “If that were the case, it explains you getting brought back to the same spot each time. But there’s clearly something missing there.”
Normally, Annora would be doing her best to shut her delusions out to try and think clearly again, but in her exhaustion, she could do naught but listen as they made an… unusual amount of sense.
“If the magic is so powerful, applying the helix rule may be unwarranted,” her father added, “especially given the clear presence of Bellatorian and Occultusian properties.”
“Then why,” Annora snarled back, Vallum still flashing against the stone below, “Does it keep restoring me? Why does it keep bringing me back, hale and hearty and alive?”
The voices went silent, leaving her alone once more, chest heaving with exertion as water dripped against stone in the vast chamber. Swallowing dryly, Annora screwed her eyes shut and called out, not for the first time, “Where are you all?”
Her words bounced off the stone and back at her, a droning parody of her voice. Her words flowed fast and harsh, trying to seize the line of thought her own delusions had provided, the chamber growing loud and harsh as she ranted and raved.
“It’s Bellatorian because it kills me if I leave the temple! It’s Serpensis because it binds me to this point in time! It’s Occultusian because its source cannot be traced! It’s Aquilan because it resists dispelling!”
Her voice hoarse with dehydration, Annora couldn’t help the furious tears that wore warm tracks down her cheeks as she screamed. “So why? Why does it restore me? Why doesn’t it leave behind my corpse already? Why make me live it again and again? Tell me!”
The stone remained silent to her impassioned plea, even as she repeated it, half-delirious, “Tell me!”
Slumping in place and curling in on herself, Annora wept. Not for the first time, not even close to the first time, but she wept nonetheless. She wept for the childhood that was stolen from her by providence she never asked for. She wept for a love that never saw her as a person. She wept for a father she could barely recall the voice of anymore. She wept for the faces of friends that had long outgrown them while she’d been left behind.
And ultimately, she wept for how weak and stupid she felt.
The headache that followed felt spiteful, a punishment for her outburst like a parent scolding a child for tantruming. Still hiccuping, shoulders heaving as she drew herself to one edge of the altar, she looked back at the scrawled notes she’d burnt into the floor and let her thoughts spiral.
Hateful imaginings mixed with wistful dreams of reuniting, and she was left simply tired of it all. Her eyes remained dull and listless, the fire of her momentary passion had gone out. Sat there, curled in on herself, Annora remained unmoving. Her mind fixated in rictus delirium upon that singular question, unanswered all these years.
Whether minutes or hours had passed, she could not tell. It had been a long time since she bothered attempting to tell the time in this place. When she eventually looked up, eyes still red and puffy from crying, she saw the half-blurry forms of her delusions, gathered around a single point in the center of her mad scrawlings. Blinking her vision clean, she tamped down the urge to tantrum once more, to scream and cry and hurl abuse at the images of her only friends and family.
Instead, she did something else. Something completely irrational, as her friends might have done.
In a fit of acknowledgement of her own onset psychosis, Annora regarded the section of drawings that the hallucinations were staring at, where she’d scratched a harsh approximation of the Five Point Theory into the stone. It was a simple thing, taught to any amateur practitioner or budding student: the five properties of magic that followed one another, much like the water cycle. And on the faint image of Castus, adorning the head of that pentagram.
Unthinkingly, Annora rose from her spot and joined her imagined allies in their circle around the diagram. This was stupid, it was impossible.
“The properties of Castus are binding and absolute in magic,” she argued aloud.
Keydis shook her head. “If that were true, then it wouldn’t feed into Bellator, right?”
“The light of Castus creates energy, fuel for Bellator’s fires…” Annora mumbled, before replying with a shake of her own head. “... all attempts to bind Castusene magic to other properties have failed. The Immaculate cannot be tainted without losing itself, just as you cannot add dye to white without losing the blank canvas Castus requires.”
A child’s mnemonic for studying magic, easily regurgitated from childhood tutoring. So why did it feel so hesitant leaving her lips?
Eloquii gestured with an outstretched pointer finger along the lines of the pentagram, his voice excited. “If that were the case, then wouldn’t adding white dilute other colors as well? What was the phrase? Aquila’s winds uplift the light of Castus, like great Caesar is pulled across the sky!”
“Castus is almighty,” her half-remembered lessons in scripture, imposed and wielded against her like a cudgel, spewed forth. “No one of the Vis could stand astride them, for it was their light that first gave birth to the Vis themselves.”
Her father’s voice cut through the swirling, frenzied memories. “Then what about all four?”
Annora blinked, and was alone once more. Her eyes trailed to the back of the vambrace on her hand, where five unassuming lines of cord were tied about the length of its arm. It had always given the relic the appearance of an antique, but any attempt to cut or snap the cords had ended in failure.
“All… four. Or… all five,” She mumbled to herself, and turned back to face the bier. Clenching her hand tightly through the leather that bit across her palm, she marched back up the altar, a strange weight in her steps.
She gazed at the empty space above the altar, and furrowed her brow once more, words leaving her lips unbidden, “All five at once. Every aspect used, all things flowing as one.”
Annora had not called upon her magic in what felt like ages, pointless as it had seemed in the temple. Yet it roused like an old friend when called upon, a reunion that some part of her could celebrate. Drawing her fist back, Annora thought of her friends, and smiled, and thanked them. Power swirled around her, invisible currents of magic drawing into the physical reality as she concentrated.
The destructive force of Bellator, to raze that which bars you. The binding strings of Serpens, to reach that which would escape you. The veiling guise of Occultus, to go unseen by that which would elude you. The warding power of Aquila, to stand firm against that which would attack you. The brilliant light of Castus, to ease the suffering which ails you.
All five, incomplete without one another. For though Castus had not held love in Annora’s heart in years, in that blissfully quiet moment… she almost felt pity for them. To be so untouchable and unreachable that all you would stand astride should need to stand against you as your balance… what a sad existence it must be.
Power coalesced in vibrant hues against the vambrace, and the cords which bound it burnt with otherworldly fire, snapping like dry tinder as Annora turned clear eyes to the space above the bier.
“Everyone… I’m coming home. I promise you.”
And she thrust her hand forwards, the light blinding and brilliant and encompassing, until the stone and damp and suffering of the Temple of Oblivital Waters was far behind her.
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