When Phocion realized Hilana was very serious about Myshala’s warning and intended to see it through, she had gotten a room at the Citadel to sleep in. She didn’t, at least, have to move her snakes and cats, which meant her apartment remained a veritable den of spicy danger noodles and Hilana would just go back and forth and use it as a launching pad when she returned to a more regular schedule in a few days. But seeing Finn and as a welcome and pleasant surprise, and she was grateful that he came. She was no Vigila that would receive information back from them unless it was strictly need-to-know… but where there was a will there was a way. Finn was a northerner, Sentinel, and one of her best friends. She trusted him… he wouldn’t steer her wrong.
With Lia and Lykos still sleeping, Hilana came along with him. She’d changed her clothes from the debacle that had been the Crystal Tree the day before, back in her long tiered skirts, a swirling, colourful blend of greens and blues, and one of her short, sleeveless shirts that only just covered her chest. She had barely slept, having had a brief nap, but it would do. She was, oddly enough, without her snakes today, and her right arm was resting in a sling that matched her skirts. Finn could see the discolouration there at elbow, shoulder, and wrist. But he could also smell the salves and ointments she had applied to it to help reduce the pain and swelling. He’d gotten them from her too before, but wherever she’d been and whatever she’d come into contact with had gotten her arm good. All the same, all she could do was just push through it.
“Something, and you should know him, but you don’t,” Hilana repeated. “I’m starting to think I’m right about what the Stitchmother took from him. I gave him that name, Lykos, because he doesn’t have one. It’s from the Sands, Nomad dialects,” she smiled up at him at that as they walked. “It means wolf and light… it seemed to fit. How is your arm doing? How are you doing?” She’d noted the contraption, and that was certainly smart. Her own injury didn’t require that, thank the Gods. Just some patience and not overdoing it. It was going to be some time before she tried that whip again, that was for sure. She did laugh, though, when he spoke of making it an epic song. All the same, she’d indulge her disciple.
“From the beginning?” She let out a chuckle, as if to say he knew what he was asking for. “Æros and I set out from Tertium after the derby. He wanted to see the great darkness of the Eclipse for himself, and so we took a boat and went north in the Crystal Sea. We found the darkness once we went beyond the borders of the realm, and once we got there… there was a Crystal Tree, shimmering and jewelled, dead ahead due North, on an island. The island was about the size of the oasis we camped at when we were investigating the village in Ash, if you remember, and the tree was considerable in size… like the one Atraxian Oak I’ve taken you to see that was to the northeast of the capital. It was resplendent, hues of blues and silvers and purples, shimmering crystal, every branch, bough, twig, and leaf… So of course… rather than turn back and go home… we decided to go and look. Once we landed, our boat cracked and splintered as shards of ice and frost froze everything around us. The cold was such that my eyes almost sealed shut, but I used a bit of Elementalism to take the edge off so that I could at least see. A voice said. ‘Welcome back, Winter’… That was when we noticed an opening in the trunk of the tree, and we went inside. I am certain that Lykos was there when we got to the island, because I swear there was a third person aside from Æros and I… but I can’t remember for sure… that being said, I believe he was.”
She took a breath as they walked, looking on at the endless sands and the crystal clear skies of her homeland. “Inside was like a cave. Perhaps the size of my living room, mostly dark with little light. Above us was something… I wonder if it was some sort of aether... It shone like fire on water… gaseous but frozen, every colour you could imagine… I’ve never seen anything like that. In the middle was a large obsidian monolith, maybe 10 meters high… and on it… words began to write themselves… writing in surely hundreds of languages. I saw those I recognized - Vallenor, Vastian, and Common - but there were so many.” She paused again, her eyes far away. Finn had seen that look before: she was recalling something and organizing it in her head.
When she spoke again, her barely-accented Common was slow, but steady as she brought forth her memory of the verses.
“Upon my stone, a hand be placed
To the Void, intent given free
A realm of the lost and erased,
A gate opened for three.
But Void is for forgotten and lost
Discarded, hidden and scrapped
Entry comes with a severe cost
Beware, ahead lies an eternity trapped.
To enter, give as the gods have given,
Pay not in blood, not in tears, or empty hope,
Turn back now, so as not to be riven,
Give that which without one cannot cope.
For as those that came before,
Gave everything they had
And so much terribly more
With a heart ironclad.
Or turn back now, no blood spilled
Go home to your those you love
A destiny left unfulfilled
Or transcend the mortal and stand above.”
Hilana finished. The recitation was a bit slow, but she was calm and ready to continue now that she had recalled that to the best of her ability. Memory was necessary in the sands, and he knew some of her early childhood lessons had been about sharpening that skill to a razor’s edge and making sure it stayed sharp. “And so I… foolish, foolish Hilana… put my hand on it and committed. I should have let Æros Semble it, because Founders know I didn’t get anything out of it when I looked at it, but he’s the one who trains in the Arcane arts so quickly… but since it said ‘a gate opened for three’… I thought all of us would be taken to the same place. But we weren’t. We all put our hands on it, and then the next thing I know… my Rune of Elementalism was ripped right out of me… out of my soul,” she looked at her right palm, turning it up where it rested in the sling, that was there now. It shone, shimmering and soft and looking like it had never vanished. Ornate molten gold that formed a floral sun. “I saw a vision of myself in the monolith, and it felt like it had hooked my Rune from me and subsequently ripped it from me. My hand was scarred the next time I looked at it, but the Void-shade of myself… swallowed my Rune. Everything went black, and when I woke up… I felt like I had overstepped. I was exhausted. I had a migraine. I felt hollow.”
She clenched her hand slowly, closing her fingers. “I was in an area that was very much like the Sands. But it was dark and desolate, destroyed towns and villages, but there was a city of spires and buildings. Everything felt unbalanced and there was nothing at all. No life. No people, no animals, not even wind. That was when my Void-shade appeared in a Traversion portal atop the highway spire… and thunder and lightning flashed and all of a sudden, everything started to change. People appeared from buildings as they burnt and crumbled, and it was no longer sands but destroyed grasslands. Charred skeletons, animals and people alike, and many more burning, falling, begging for my help…” her voice was tightening with the memory.
“I couldn’t help them. There were so many of them, my supplies were limited, and I couldn’t do anything with what I had. None of it would be enough, and if I stopped to help, she could just keep going,” Hilana sounded a little bitter, which was not a normal tone for her. Perhaps it was exhaustion, perhaps it was regret, perhaps it was guilt. The pendant she wore from Cithaera kept her Aura and Symphony muted, but he was a Master, and he knew his paedagoga well. “Except, stupid me, my biggest weapon was my Elementalism and I had it ripped out. I didn’t have a plan; I just figured I’d come up with something when I caught up to her or she got sick of toying with me… and as I made my way towards the spire she was sitting on, I found someone else. A version of my sister, Athalia.” The third Chenzira daughter; the one with whom Hilana had the most contentious relationship. Athalia had had the sharpest temper and the least patience for her sister, and while the family presented as united for appearances, that was the furthest from the truth… and those from within knew it.
“As I best understand it… she’s the version of Athalia that might have existed here in this world had we got along. But after we had that screaming fight over mother’s veil over twelve years ago… she found herself in the Void,” Hilana knew that this probably made very little sense, because there was an Athalia in Tertium, who was happily married and a mother of multitudes. “‘But Void is for forgotten and lost, Discarded, hidden and scrapped’,” she quoted the monolith. “She came to my aid, and she could commune with the spirits. I couldn’t anymore, not without my Rune… and it turned out my Void-shade was unbalanced. The fire was afraid of her, and she enslaved it to force it to obey. That never ends well. It can’t. The spirits will rebel eventually, when you cannot hold it together anymore.”
“I don’t know what she... the Void-shade... did. I assume it was some way of toying with me, to have me watch things die again, because those that had died and been burnt and injured no longer had those wounds and came back to life. They came running to us to ask for help… and all I could do was tell them to run and scatter. A portal opened again, not far from us… and out stepped some sort of demon. It was thickly built like an Orcanus, maybe two heads taller than I, with fiery and glowing cracks over its body and many thorn-like spikes and protrusions. It carried a chain whip and it used it to blast fire from it, so I thought if I could get that whip… maybe we could use it against the Void-shade,” Hilana continued her tale, fashioning a smaller version of the monster that they had faced out of sand off to the side so that Finn could have some idea of what such a spiked creature looked like. “One of the things that she had taunted me with was a version of the Great Tortoise of Gel’Grandal… so Athalia and I used her Elementalism to, well, tip it downhill and guide it along a course to build momentum… and crushed the demon with it.” As she had shaped the demon, so she did the tortoise shell, working with the elements to form a miniature tableau of sorts, depicting the hellish landscape and the overturned tortoise shell’s progression downhill until it smashed into the demon and carried off on its way before it all dissolved. “I did get the whip, but when I tried to test it… I managed to dislocate my elbow and shoulder.” She rolled the right arm that rested in the sling.
