130th of Gnielm, 336 EA
Citadel of the Athalial League, Athal
The moon was always full at the citadel, always made to be full, and this night was no exception. Under it’s pale light, Svaljna walked with her companions. They were not out of place, how could they be? Walking the streets of the citadel, no two groups of people were alike in kind nor purpose, and yet to Svaljna it was a near certainty that each pedestrian they all passed would eye them for the trespassers that they were.
She must have been showing her nerves. She felt Xochit reach for her hand, felt her squeeze it and felt the intense comfort that small signal of confidence brought on, and she pulled her palm back from it.
“This way!” Broneimir hushed as the their destination came into view.
The Rhovos Archall was a blocky and balconied building of brown brick accented in smooth white stone. It was lined in darkened windows all the way up, save for the last few floors which instead supported in their slabs a giant green hemispheric crystal like some singular considerable eye. A tower sat tangent to its right side, and from the left sprouted a long trailing wing of the building which arced against the curve of the aether into which it plunged. The aether itself was a roiling sort of fog, swallowing the building in opaque blur such that it was impossible to know just how deep the structure extended into it.
Svaljna paused instinctively at the sight of it, this looming colossus which dared reach into the aether. The others managed more than a few paces before noticing that she was not keeping stride up to the pod-like door that formed a choked entryway into the building.
“Come on!” Xochit whispered back excitedly, breaking Svaljna from her momentary inertia quickly enough for her to jog to catch up.
Snekde’de whispered to her from below as they shuffled quickly up to the doors. “You okay?”
Svaljna gave a taut nod in response, motioning with her chin for him to focus ahead.
The small kobold settled up, hand waving over the door to reveal binding runes meant to lock them out.
“Can you open it?” Broneimir asked with a pragmatic worry, looking over his shoulder to the empty street.
“No problem!” Snekde’de fiddled with his runic bracer, and spoke again with words of power, “Coamzer Mact Hehd”.
At his call, the runes bent out of their shape and with the sound of a hard fist knocking the door swung open.
They all began to shuffle through, and Svaljna was the last to pass with them into darkness. Thin trailing lights pulsed along edges where the walls met the floors and the ceiling. This outlining left wide tracts of disorientating darkness, and so she steadied herself by following the natural red embers off of Xochit’s body like a trail. Even still, she ran herself into something painful at knee height, and sent herself into an unquiet tumble.
“Oh, shit.” She heard Xochit’s voice from above her, followed by a hand helping her up.
“Here,” the voice was Broneimir’s next, and after a beat came a resonating set of words, “Circipt Syn’zyzhm”.
The space suddenly illuminated for Svaljna, the perfect golden sunlight of vision shared magically. She blinked back the sudden shift, adjusting, and when she clarified she could see her allies looking around nervously.
“You’ve got to remind us that you don’t have darkvision like the rest of us.” Broneimir’s tone was slightly chiding.
“Yeah, just ask and we’ll help.” Xochit leaned a knee on the bench that Svaljna had hit “Can’t be stumbling around blind, what use would that be?”
“Right.” Svaljna apologized, feeling the weight of her mistake and doubly so for having needed help in the first place. “I can see now. Where are we going?”
“Deeper in.” Broneimir said simply.
“How much deeper is there to go?” Xochit fiddled with her belt “The aetherline can’t be more than a few hundred feet that way.”
“The runes on the walls,” Snekde’de traced a finger under the symbols in question. “They’re written to push against the aether. I think this building used to go past the aetherline, like into it into it.”
“Used to?” Svaljna asked incredulously.
Snekde’de took a long look, taking in the whole of the surroundings. “Well, the runes, they’re not fully active. They’ve got some wear, like they had been totally functional at one point, but it seems like something broke the sigilic connection.”
“That’s great.” Broneimir started towards a set of double doors, leading up a staircase. “The contract called this place the Archall reconstruction site. Re-construction, that must be what they mean.”
Climbing the stairs in spiral pattern, few others shared Broneimir’s enthusiasm. They emerged into a landing, the door ahead closed.
“Ah!” Snekde’de squealed, wheeling around frantically.
“What, what is it?” Xochit jumped back from him, forced into alertness.
“You didn’t-” Snekde’de held the back of his head, “You didn’t hear that?”
“Hear what?” Svalnja searched the corners of the landing, up to the ceiling where foul things are want to hide, and found them empty.
“That voice, I heard someone.” Snekde’de began to shiver.
“Hey, hey, it’s alright. It’s just us.” Xochit closed the distance back towards her companion, draping an arm around him comfortingly. “What did it say?”
“It- Nothing, I-” Snekde’de fumbled for his words. He had passed through fear, into an inexplicable embarrassment. Svalnja had never seen him try to lie before. “It was just a low sort of moaning, and it said my name. How did it know my name?”
“Could be a spirit.” Svalnja moved against the tone of comfort, “Some haunting of this place.”
“Let me see,” Broneimir furrowed his brow, his golden eye taking on it’s radiant hue. “Circipt Yld’eag”.
A faint shell of glittering luminance pulsed out from him, through the room and through the walls and then back into his socket. “No undead, that I can feel.”
“Are you certain?” Svalnja’s question came out more dismissive than she intended.
Broneimir squared his shoulders back ever so slightly. “My patron would not deign the presence of such foul creatures. If they were near us, I would know.”
“Okay, no undead. That’s probably a good thing, right?” Snekde’de managed a faint smile, hand gripped across his body to his enchanted bracer. “But what now.”
Broneimir was quick to respond. “If we’re starting to hear voices, we must be getting closer. We should track ahead, send someone out to scout.”
“I’ll take it.” Svaljna spoke begrudgingly. She knew that her honor in these people’s eyes would depend on her utility.
“Are you sure?” Snekde’de asked, a note of concern on his tongue.
As much as she wished to stay with the group she gave only a curt nod, drew her sword, and pushed through the door before she changed her mind.
She opened up into a cubic room, doors leading to washrooms on either side of her, passed across by hallway leading deeper in either direction. Ahead, through pane glass, the makings of a wizard’s laboratory were left abandoned. She could see tables lined with alembics, wands scattered, vials of material components for spells smashed. She had a fleeting, intrusive wonder of what life must be like to openly wield the academic arcane such as the people who must have populated this place before it fell. She had never had much skill in noble runecraft though, and had learned to avert her eyes from its pursuit, and so instead she settled on the hallways.
To her left, a short stint to another closed door. To her right a long stretch out, arced in such a way that the hall cut off her vision of what was ahead by any more than twenty or so feet.
She gritted her teeth, trying to ignore the churning in her stomach, and started down the long hall. Doors and doors and doors passed her on either side, leading into small offices and working rooms, but she knew somehow that what she sought was further in down the hallway.
“They can all see right through you. They know you’re a fraud.” A rasping voice, like the sound of wind on a cold bluff, trickled into the back of Svaljna’s mind. She wheeled around, searching for the source, but there was no purchase to it. All she found was the arc ahead and the arc behind, the place she had come from now out of sight. She continued, sword raised a little higher.
“There are changes coming, whether you like it or not, and nothing will be the same. You’re going to have to change too, and you’re not ready, are you?” That voice assailed her, flooded over any indignation she felt towards it, until there was only the cycle between panic and despair.
“You’re wrong.” She tried, weakly, but the words fell flat because she knew in her heart of hearts that it was right. Nothing as good as her escape to this place could last. The trouble lurking around the corner would find her. She did not hear, so much as feel the voice laughing at her.
She curled through the hallway for a long while after that, not hearing another call from the voice. The spacial dynamics felt impossible, to have followed this sharp of a curve for so long and not formed a circle. Just as she thought that she must have entered an infinite spiral, the hell of some trickster god, something began to form into view ahead.
She stopped in her tracks, as she realized that she had been coming to the aether. It cut across the hall in a jagged line, volatile oblivion incarnate. Where it began, the world simply ceased to be. At it’s edge, a lattice of electric green magic roiled out from the walls like a net to hold it back.
Svaljna felt the same pit in her stomach every time she was close to the aether. It was the feeling of wanting something that you knew was disgusting, of knowing that by your very thoughts you were debasing yourself. She could not help but step closer, and closer still, watching the enchanting horrid beautiful fog move behind this gate that the good people of athal had erected with such hubris as to hold back a force more incomprehensibly vast than any other in the cosmos.
She drew face to face with it, her visage illuminated in green and gold. Sveida pulsed at her fingertips, trails of the fog reaching out to her through the thin breaks in the cage. She stared in, and staring back was a reflection of herself in that mirrormist. It spoke with the voice she had heard before, her own voice grown cold, and it told her something that she could take in no other way than as the truth.
“You’ve ruined yourself and your life. You can never be happy—you’re not even capable of it anymore.”
And then the gate flickered and failed, the aether lunged for her, and she was instantaneously engulfed.
The Etra Anthology 