130th of Gnielm, 336 EA
Citadel of the Athalial League, Athal
Shattered glass and thick black blood poured down through the room like rain on a burst of wind, and with it came the nothic.
Flying through the air, the creature’s eye shot back open. It was callous and sleepless, white and green and shot through with thick red capillaries.
Svaljna felt the air fall out of her lungs as that one raking eye peered into her. She scrabbled back in instinctual panic, falling off the couch to the hard stone floor but not feeling the impact.
The nothic landed on all fours, sharpened elbows and knees all splayed out. Whatever alien bones it had in it’s neck cracked as its head snapped up, and it skittered towards her.
“Back!” She yelled at it, kicking a foot out. She caught the creature at the shoulder, shoving it back and over. The spines growing out of it’s back scraped and broke across the floor, more brittle than they seemed. The creature howled violently, writhing as it righted itself.
“What do you want from me!” She forced herself to turn and look at the thing, to stare it down.
“Who are you!” The nothic ground its teeth with an awful gnash.
It backed itself away into a cranny of the room, and as it did thoughts filtered into Svaljna’s head unbidden. “Abnormal… freak… recluse… your clan meant nothing to you, honor means nothing to you, all you care for are the things which push you away from the world!”
Intense dread and isolation and fear washed out from it, almost physical in how powerfully it kept her back. Visions pierced through it’s projections though, visions that Svaljna had conjured in the aether. Visions of a life of rejection, visions of mistakes made in fatal proportions.
For a moment, huddled in opposite corners, locked into states of scattered mania, Svaljna and it seemed very much the same.
Mepka burst into the room with the crack a door slammed so hard that it rebounded back on itself.
“Ahtr’ul P’kossero”, the call of her word reverberated out like a spike, a bombardment of aetheric force assaulting the monster huddled in her corner.
The creature turned in instinctual defense, breaking its gaze from Svaljna for the first time since its unwelcome arrival. Its loathing lost clarity as it focused on her, diffusing back into hate.
It’s green-ringed eye narrowed towards Mepka, and suddenly her flesh was awash in the same erasing energy that she had put onto it. It rotted the tissue from her bones, that eye, leaving patches of her arms and face suddenly raw and bleeding red as the skin simply ceased to contain her anymore.
“Fuck!” Mepka cried in pain, swiping out in a futile crack as the nothic dodged. “It’s in my head again! We can’t let it get to us! It’s fucking lying. It’s a fucking liar. I’m safe here, and so are you. I got out, the swamp isn’t coming for me, it’s a muddy fucking liar.”
She cracked it across the skull with her second strike, sending it reeling. She kept to it, jabbing at it with her quarterstaff.
Svaljna scrabbled up to her feet, the danger-fueled adrenaline finally pushing out the despair she felt. She could see it now, in the midst of that fray. The first the nothic looked afraid, in that moment of desperation and pain, was the most it had ever seemed human to her.
That verity lasted only the barest scrape, and then it was back on Mepka. It knocked her to the ground, clawing viscously at her exposed stomach. She opened her mouth to cast a spell, and it ripped at the inside of her cheek sending the magic words splattering out incomprehensibly.
Svaljna watched her new friend be attacked, and panic welled into her. She was too weak to fight it, too cowardly, too hrin. Her mind raced wildly over all that had lead up to this moment, all that she had done to lead to this pain, all that she was and all that she had been. In those thoughts, she circled herself and she circled the nothic and finally she found the aether between them.
“Donatos!” Svaljna yelled, the name that she had come to know by the half-dead stupor of prophesy clicking back into her mind. “You are Donatos Hechejo.”
The nothic flinched as though struck, giving Mepka just enough time to shove it back to the center of the room.
“Enveim Psalre Cer’i Ibel-ratiij”
The sveida arced out from Svaljna like the thrum of a rising hum, like an archer’s bow played as an instrument, like the stories of twelve hundred skjalds. It was a spell of truth, a spell of restoration, a spell to put back upon this creature some jagged fragment of humanity.
The warbling light of the spell pierced through the nothic’s eye as mist through a mirror, stunning it to a rigid sort of limpness. The nothic, Donatos by name, blinked. It saw itself, it saw Mepka to one side breathing heavy and Svaljna to the other all blown up in floating glory.
Being seen, as it had seen, realization flooded across it’s face drawing from madness to regret to anguish. “NAH! NO! LOOK AWAY! I AM NOT THIS!”
It screamed, and screamed, and screamed. It flailed itself wildly, rending at it’s own flesh. It stumbled, and wobbled, and finally it leapt from the fourth-story window.
The Etra Anthology 