Music filled the wide, empty cavern. One artificial light shone specifically on my work, casting shadows on all the components, while a set of pillars each sat with their own brand of fungi that shone in the darkness, blues and violets and oranges glowing pinpoints in the dark.
I sat still, humming and exhaling in tune from my core. A set of singing bowls had been set to one side, the echo dying but still giving me enough tune to match my song. My hands rose ever so slightly, power thrumming from chest to arms as I began to work the spell laid out in front of me.
Twisting and spinning my arms in the right pattern, I began to sing. One of the fungi lit up at my tune, magic resonating outward. I switched my pattern, adding a small waver to my notes until the second one lit up. Lacing in further undulation resonated with the third. I continued until all eight of the pillars were lit up, the words in front of me now glowing where I had carved them in the stone of the platform.
Their light was caught and absorbed by a green gemstone, hanging suspended over the center of the platform. The lights began to swirl inside it, becoming an intricate pattern of colors and lights before my eyes. I was running out of time, however, and couldn’t stop to watch. The echoes of music were already dying into bleak, quiet space, and I had to finish before that happened.
Stretching my hand out, I focused all my energy and song on the gemstone. The lights responded, reaching out to my fingertips, and I began to slowly guide them downwards to the center of the platform. An elongated bit of crystal glimmered helplessly in the light, as if it were afraid but willing to stay put while the light fell towards it like thick smoke.
It covered the crystal, submerging the translucent surface behind a veil of smoke and light. The resonance around me grew louder, the pillars and the gemstone overriding my own song as they began to channel their own magic into the situation, the words scrawled on the floor now coming alive and speaking through ancient unseen tongues. The colors and smoke began to swirl, clouding the circle, the pillars, the crystal and the lights.
I kept going, my focus only on the crystal as everything reached a crescendo of music and light and sound. I poured everything I had into the crystal, the spear of light now vibrating on its own frequency as it absorbed all the surrounding energy with a feverish intensity. Everything mounted into a peak, swelling and shifting and obscuring until--
Like blowing out a candle, everything stopped.
A short rush of air from the center. The light had blown. The words were empty shadowed scratches. The pillars were dark. Everything was still. Silent.
I waited a moment, weak and drained. I had given everything. Had it worked? Had I done it?
Dragging myself forward, I crossed the lines and reached out for the crystal shard. It was cool and smooth in my hands, nearly unchanged. Except...Except…
I pressed a finger to the top of it and found it was solid. I hummed, trying to channel magic through it and found no reaction. I set it down and watched as something began to crawl across the surface, mapping itself onto the crystal in a way I had only seen a few times before, and I knew. I knew what it meant.
I smiled, too tired to do much else. It meant I could save my world.
Thanks for the ask!
Ooooh two at once eh? I'll do my best.
Sting
He's a half-elf that runs a bar in a pocket dimension that's attached to our reality via a run-down hardware store somewhere in Colorado. Of course, that's just one of the doors that lead into his bar (Called My Fair Lady). Want to get to a different dimension or realm? He's probably got a door somewhere that'll lead there. But the knowledge of which goes where will cost ya.
He thrives on information and secrets, and does a wildly successful trade in gossip among his patrons. If you need to know something, he's your guy. Of course, he'll also take payment in whatever currency you've got, as he serves a bunch of different creatures and some of them are bound to use the same stuff. Value is value, ya know? He's also made sure that all his drinks have markers on them so that different species can ask to know what's in them, and he's always open to learning a new recipe...although it'll take him a few times to get it right.
Of course, he's also got an insane computer setup in the back of his bar that's only accessible through a series of complex magical locks, and it's alien tech that's a combination of our technology, magic from his home world, and a sort of bio-mech magic/tech from the same system as his home but a different planet. Secrets, man, this guy has secrets.
Becks
Because she's kiiiinda my current oc brainrot, lol
So Becks is one of those characters that sorta grew and took off on her own once she had the right story. She's part earth sprite and part human, and the girl CANNOT stay out of trouble. Sometimes she finds it, but mostly it finds her. She was born in the 1500s in north america but when one of her parents was killed and the other disappeared, she started out on a quest to find others like her, taking off around the 1600s and heading overseas. She found plenty of sprites, plenty of humans, plenty of mages, (and of course, plenty of trouble) but never any hybrids like her. Eventually she returned to the americas and lived as a forest witch, a desert outlaw, the mom of an adopted kinda-hybrid child, lived under vampiric control, and eventually broke free and took up life as PI in the 1950s before running into a case with a pirate hunting down a chest of haunted coins that nearly killed her and put her under a sort of self-imposed stasis for seventy years before she woke up, solved the case, and started figuring out how to live in modern times.
She admittedly is one of my favorites right now. She's been a lot of fun to write for, as are several of the characters that have shown up around her story. She often surprises me with the stuff that she does in her story, in both good and "WHY ARE YOU DOING THAT BECKS STOP IT" kind of ways, lol
