Blood of Azura

Part XXIV

His visions had been dormant and mainly quiet since returning to Leoth, no more than brief flickers at the outermost edges of his mind. No more than whispers in the shadows. So he was almost knocked to his knees by the force of it as it had struck him.

He'd been inside the circular room high up on the mountain, watching, as though a part of the walls themselves. The two men had spoken in archaic tongues, a language he knew he did not know, could not possibly know, and yet had understood perfectly.  Angry words between brothers.  Sons of Ethis?  Calate and Leoth.  It could be no one else.   What did it mean that he'd been shown it?   

He had lingered there only a short time before being dragged from the room and deposited into another space. This room was a richly decorated solar, the walls made almost completely of brightly coloured glass. A man stood alone at the opposite end of the room, surveying whatever lay below. There was a regal set to his proud frame, an arrogance emanating from him, an inbred privilege.  He wore a thin golden crown upon his head and the unmistakable mantle of a royal. Black and gold; the colours of Calate. Tall but with a slight arch to his upper back which brought him up a fraction shorter.

Theodan felt a chill sweep over him as he drew closer to the cloaked figure. Pure darkness emanated from him. His quiet rage almost violent in its malignancy. It seemed to pervade the very air around him. Theodan reached for his sword but found himself absent of it, and realised that he was completely unarmed. Baring his teeth, he forced his claws to extend as he picked up his pace, rushing towards him. There was no basis for it, no sense in it, it was instinct alone.  Theodan knew this man was destruction, was ruthlessness, and that he alone could stop him.

The figure turned when Theodan was almost upon him, clearly sensing a presence, but just before he caught glimpse of his face the ground fell away, the glass walls of the room splitting apart into a million glittering segments as Theodan fell. The solid stone beneath his feet turned to nothingness as his body was pulled down into the darkness. It felt as though he fell for eons, through space and time, until the force which pulled and hauled at his body changed it's mass and weight so that it was no longer clear to Theodan the direction in which he fell. 

A moment later he stopped moving completely, and hung there, suspended in impenetrable darkness. Able to turn himself around, he searched an end, land, something solid to grab hold of but the emptiness was absolute - a void of darkness, of nothingness. Suddenly, the air around him grew thicker and thicker still until its mass changed and began to seep into his mouth, his nose, his lungs. Water. Dark depths of water. He pushed out his arms to swim, panic flooding through him as he struggled to see an escape from it.

There was no concept of direction; up or down, left or right, no clue of where the surface might be until suddenly he heard a woman's scream pierce through the darkness.  The sound was half-muffled by the burden of water but his blood told him it was hers. Fara's.  He knew then that he would know her cry anywhere, that it would call to him anywhere.  The sound of it forced his claws to over-extend and his teeth to push down once more from the roof of his mouth.