I spent literally 20-30 minutes of the hour just staring at this and wondering how it escalated, but I think its decent? Hope you like it.
Used the dialogue prompt and picture sorta.
*****
Lila strides out of the bar, blade pressed against her side, bell dinging over her head like a toll for death. She walks around the side, to the cold, bricked, dark alley. Spray paint tags the wall, a swirl of colors that is abstract to any human who doesn’t know better, but more to those who do. It’s a doorstop for the portal she’d opened to get there.
It leads to the woods. Long grass curling around her ankles, curled fingers from below, trying to pull her in with the old magic imbued within it. Spindly, tall trees reach for the sun, jagged branches thirsting for magic that no longer lives under its thin cover. Magic migrates, like flocking birds, to where it is easy to live, to where those who practice it reside. When the nest is left behind, empty, the twigs and dirt and sky thirst for what is now gone.These grounds were sacred, once. Lila was going to make sure that they were again, if just for a single moment.
The buildings were long gone, overtaken by nature as the centuries dragged on, but the magic they had been built with, tempered with, housed with, remains. It will take more than time and moss to remove that.
It thrums under her feet, desperate, pleading. Lila unsheathes the Soul Dagger she’d tricked Xia into relenting. It should corrupt her, leak poison into her blood that explodes her mind, taunting her with all of her thoughts of death.Lila isn’t a Soul Keeper. She doesn’t have a drop of it in her blood, in her past, in her ancestry. But the blade will cooperate, with what she’s going to use it for.
It takes souls. Cuts the bond between body and soul, an astral blade, forged by the Fates, eons and eons and eons ago.
There are few weapons older, more pure, than a Soul Blade. This one, Lila knows, happens to have belonged to the Cutter of String. The final Fate, the lesser Fate, the one who held the shears.
She walks through the trees, pulling against the magic in the ground, in the dirt, in the trees. It obeys, with that blade in her possession. So few know of Fate’s connection with Soul Keepers. Lila knows.
She knows of its history while also knowing of the corpse that lays in the ground here. An old body, an old soul, old magic that powers the plants to this day. Secret knowledge, deadly knowledge.
Kneeling, she digs her fingers into the soft earth, malleable with power. She stakes the blade into the ground, to the hilt. Light spills from the edges, and she drinks it greedily before beginning her chant.
The tongue she speaks in is old. Ancient. Powerful. Monarchs had crumbled under the taste of a single syllable, a fraction of a word, of a sentence, of a declaration. Now, it burrows, and grabs and tugs.
Bones rise from the dark dirt, shambling into a skeleton’s form. With words alone, she assembles one of the oldest skeletons, restoring it to its original form, to smooth white instead of craggled yellow-brown. When assembled, she stops. Slowly, reverently, she glides her finger along the clavicle, a sharp jutting point.
“Ward,” she breathes, running her gaze along the forgotten fragment of life. The skull tilts, in response, empty eye sockets turning towards her. “I’m sorry.”
Taking the dagger from the earth and plunging it into the skull, it shatters into a luminescent powder. Stinging, she blinks, gathering a small amount into her hand and blowing it into the air, where it sparkles and hangs, still like a puppet at the end of a string.
“What are you doing?” A voice sounds from behind her, a familiar one that is too late.
She doesn’t turn, instead manipulates the powder, infusing it into her breath, her being, her soul. In return, she trades three inches of her hair and a secret of the earth. Her skin changes, rippling into a darker shade, adapting to a thicker epidermis, the skin of a man who had changed MagicCraft for every being, who had almost become a god.
Finally, she turns to her visitor.
“You know what I’m doing,” she says, dual-voiced like a double edged blade, hers and something deeper.
Colin looks at her, pity hanging in his eyes like a corpse from a noose. “You can’t do this.”
Her hair recedes into her skull, shorter, thicker, lighter. “You’re too late to stop me.”
“Stop trying to be him,” Colin says, a plea instead of an order because she wouldn’t listen to that. “You’ll never be him.”
She stands, bones shifting under her skin, breaking, painful but welcome. “I’m not doing this for fun.” The feminine lilt is receding, a background echo to his deep tenor. “I’m adopting him so he won’t be lost. You can sense it. Traders are hungering for a piece of him, his bones, his flesh, his hair. It’s too dangerous, for him to lie dormant in this ground.”
Colin steps forward, hesitant, arms raised. “He will consume you. The old tongue will only keep him bound for so long.”
“It’s not for forever,” she says. “But the company cannot get their hands on him. They’ll destroy the Nons if they do.”
Tears light his eyes. “The Garden is sealed. You won’t make it.”
The old soul bubbles within her own, a temporary extension, a temporary half. “Together we can do it.”
Standing, she towers over him, body thin and boney. Once, he had fostered all life, had turned the tides of extinction into tides of change. Magic would be dead if he hadn’t sacrificed all he did. If he hadn’t created all he did. Unspoken, his name is just a series of letters to most. To Lila, to her ancestors, he is more. He belongs in the garden, in the cage of ethereal vines that holds souls too powerful to remain.
The forest would change. The Garden would change. Her and her magic would change. Stepping forwards, her footprints sink, below the mantle and to the core, to molten heat and chunks of forbidden, ancient magic.
His aura, even in death, is strong. Pungent. Trees bow underneath it, grass abating, life waning. Ebbing, she takes a step forward in the forest and finishes her next at the Gate of the Garden. The cemetery of power.
Immediately, the forest she left withers. Gone ebbs the fiendish pull of the call for blood, for death, for skin. Centuries among humans had turned his kind healing into vicious corruption.
Haunted woods haunted no more, Lila brandishes his power and skin like a fleet of trained men. Tearing at rust, at vegetation, at gates made of celestial, intangible steel, she demolishes the veil of protection and lies his soul to rest among all the dead, among world domineering strength, among vile healing and kind destruction.
She takes an old soul and heals the world.
*****
@caffeinewitchcraft Here it is!! I have no perspective on if this is actually good, but hope you like it.
