Exigency

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The Whispering Sea, late summer, during the hunt for the Bone Dust Dune.

A plaintive staccato cry from overhead makes Ioeth lift their gaze from the horizon. Two marsh terns soar across the mottled marshland landscape, and for a moment, they are thrown back in time. The birds’ long-winged shapes stir childhood memories of early mornings among the reedbeds, watching small fish in the shallow waters, being oh-so-quiet to avoid them scattering in all directions.

The rhythmic flight of the terns far outpaces the storm, and the pair soon disappear against the morning sun.

Ioeth wipes the sweat off their brow, and once again, their attention is drawn to the monster before them. There doesn’t seem to be a conscious mind controlling the howling gale, but perhaps that is worse—wanton destruction without rhyme or reason, a great mindless vortex leaving only dust and death behind.

Burning desperation has transformed into steel-edged determination, whipping them into performing feats of magic they would have been hard-pressed to do otherwise—but even solid shadows can only do so much against the powers of wind and choking dust. Raising the darkness again and again, they begin to feel as if the shadows follow their every thought, becoming a part of them, no longer needing conscious direction.

It isn’t enough. The storm still rages onwards, oblivious of any attempts at stopping it.

When the dust storm shifts—leaving another destroyed village in its wake—and wind and flying debris start to threaten their companions, Ioeth makes a decision. They recall the countless mages coming to help defeat the Ravenous Beast, and the Decahedron in Faline; here, in the heartland of the Whispering Sea, few have come. How many other villages and homesteads will be destroyed before the monster falls?

They take a deep breath, quell the sudden fear in their chest, and reach into depths of their magic they haven’t touched since that fateful day in their youth. Despite the years, it is—as always—at their beck and call; the great Abyss, the dark void at the very heart of their magic... and Ioeth lets it loose.

It starts small: a black pinprick in the sky, like someone poked a hole in it, high above the clouds of dust.

It grows. 

Soon it rivals the sun—and for a moment, two celestial bodies reflect each other across the heavens: the brightly burning one, its light making the air across the Whispering Sea shimmer; and its temporary counterpart and shadow, a black sun rising.

It’s a crack in the world, a rip in the weave; behind it is the Void, the dark and empty chasm between worlds and universes—and the Void hungers. Slivers of clouds form, touched by shadows, moving towards the center of that rift in the sky: a vortex to mirror the raging dust storm below.

To mirror, and to swallow. The darkness plunges from above, still spreading, engulfing, reaching for its prey. At first, a smattering of debris swirls towards that black hole, skimmed off the top of the storm; then larger shreds, tattered ribbons of wind and bone dust, ripped from the monster’s unstable form.

The shadow begins to descend over the dune. A gaping maw, devouring; the monster seems to writhe and thrash within its black shroud, as if trying to rid itself of the darkness that is smothering it. 

Ioeth grits their teeth as the edge of exhaustion creeps closer. Their own heartbeat is almost as loud as the storm, in their ears, and their bones are so heavy; they can feel blood—like tar, swallowing the light—trickle from their nose and eyes. They force themselves to keep going.

A shard of bone whips past, leaving a stinging cut above their eye; others follow. They are far too close to the storm now, the smell of death too near, but their legs betray them, uncooperative and heavy as lead. 

They stagger, their breath shallow and rattling, and fall to their knees among the dust.

The monster doesn’t die so much as it simply stops—the air rings with the sudden absence of sound; the raging winds have died down, and debris and bone shards are falling like a rain of ash. The skulls that crowned the storm lay quiet and still amidst piles of dust.

Silence falls upon the marshes, but the darkness remains, seeping from the rift in the sky like ink in water. The area where the monster fell seems to dim and darken; the shadow rolls in like a fog bank. A sickly twilight falls over the indistinct, blurred edge between the sunlit world and the shadow-scarred land.

At first, in the dark, there is nothing. No sound, no sensation, no pain. Utter stillness, unmarred, tranquil; there is peace in the darkness. It is all too easy to lose oneself in it, and simply rest, numb and mindless.

But the Void will not cast aside its vessel so easily, and something stirs within the dark…