Side blog for Thinariel Farmight of Hollowlight Ventures, a character on Moon Guard in World of Warcraft. Art, stories, and inspiration go here. Main blog at Pyrosophist.
This work, penned in England by an unknown author, is a distinctive collection of selected passages from works on magic and various occult arts that describe everything from speaking with spirits, to cheating at dice, to curing a toothache. The book also includes a section of Latin prayers, litanies, and other magical charms that seem to stick more closely to mainstream religious practices.
She cannot breathe past the deluge of anger, and confusion, and heartbreak, and she rides. Away from the Elrendar, away from her, and she’s gone deaf to the pounding hoofbeats below her or the hellish tones of Kherevax’s labored breath. She commands the black steed to go as fast as possible, and the focus needed to stay astride is the only clarity she has.
The landscape passes her by in dizzying blur, and she does not have the wherewithal to place the creeks and hills they ride over. She is overwhelmed. Her eyes sting and a vice winds around her chest so fiercely that by the time she drops to the ground at her campsite, she feels fragile. She is fragile.
No. No no no no no no no no. No.
The crunch of snow beneath her boots or the distant scent of camp smoke feel numbed. Nothing to her, just a bleak sense and immediacy before her vision blurs and it all sinks in. Sanarissa is gone. It was all gone all gone, she was selfish she was foolish she was a fool to think
it could be
okay.
She feels cold for the first time in this winter. It lances through her, visceral and jagged, a hand to her mouth to stifle a wracking sob, and she nearly crumples beneath.. beneath what? The burden? It does not settle heavy on her shoulders, it robs her of her will, saps the strength from her limbs, until part of her is fragile and then cracked and then crumbling. She does not let herself falter, fall to the ground, until she staggers into the safety of her tent.
I loved you. How could you?
Love? Is that what you thought it was? A fairy tale?
She finds the letter stacked upon a box, under some piece of nothing. She fumbles, breath baited, and the words on the page would mean something more to her if they were not seen in a haze. In her state it is nothing and nothing.
She turns and rips her claws through the air in sudden rage, and the inferno that burns the front half of her tent sparks into being half a second before she has willed it. She is so raw and confused, the ground shattered beneath her and she is falling, falling. But she can’t. She can’t be weak. She can’t be weak. She can’t be weak. She can’t be like
Fire is an excellent tool to remedy infection, she finds.
The halls of Uldir crowd with rot and viscera, the air heavy with pale specks of mold. Every troll or corrupted watcher or animated globule that meets their host as they plunge into the depths burns, horribly - the remains often left in calcified, ashen stains strewn about this work of the Makers.
It is the same flame in her blood, the inferno she lives and breathes. The magic of the blood trolls, of their Blood God, finds no purchase in her. It is a thing she finds first in the outlying swamps, the fetid bogs of Nazmir, where so many times she must defend herself to piece together the greater mystery of this place. It is a security that breeds recklessness, almost; too many times after battling these monsters they face she must breathe, sequester herself, measure herself so that she does not burn out.
That would be the ironic fate, wouldn’t it? Arrive in strength, only to be undermined and exposed to the rot thereafter. An irony the trolls’ god would appreciate, she’s sure. Her greatest task is to defy it. Part of her relishes each cremation, past the force of will which drives her. Satisfaction in a complete burn.
Part of her laments the condition of this place, still.
So many great workings of machinery, of magic, all eroded by time. She takes samples of the transmorphic creatures, marking vials away with wards into her satchel. She lingers on the great monoliths, the pillars that hold oceans of golden light to her Sight. The Titans waste no expense in their countermeasures, their wards, their efforts to imprison a god.
It is.. unsettling, just so, when she sees time and time again how thoroughly it has all been corrupted. The revelations at the Seat of the Pantheon so many months prior ring in a haunting tone, when all she sees of the Titans’ works is erosion and decay. She sees the shattered ghost of what once was austerity, what once was a great work, far greater than she can understand - that any of them can understand.
It is the mortal flaw of these places, she supposes, to fall to ruin when they are but relics of a bygone era, their creators lost to death or madness or obscurity. Ah, well. She was never a researcher of Titan lore, anyways.
She banters with Aurelian, so outspoken about which warlock in particular he employs. She trades a glance with Avada - oh, she cannot imagine how out of her element she is, here. A kinship in fire, yes, but there is no hope of renewal nor restoration, for this place.
The gathered Oathsworn of the Falcon Company rise from their rest, make ready to press on and leave behind their brief reprieve.
The air is heavy with anxiety, when the mechanic systems of the prison beneath them grind and open way into a chasm. An open maw, a gaping void; too dark to see, if the murmurs of her comrades are to be believed. Not her, though; she can See into the dark, and it is as though an eclipse has fallen over the sun, by the cold wind that it breathes. The colossal shape of a monster nearly beyond fathoming, its presence scorching - not gnawing, nor tearing, but burning - the edge of the real.
The memory of a calamity, the breaking of a beacon seen from far away. Mythrax.
They teeter at the edge of a tangible oblivion.
A challenge, almost. Her ring burns, heat pouring into her blood perhaps just a few moments early. A challenge. Animosity burns sudden and foreign at the back of her skull, the Mark on her chest pounding in time with the beat of her heart. She almost chokes on the smoke that billows in her breath unbidden, and she must close her eyes and turn her focus away from this oblivion to face it.
It does not scorch her to the bone, like before. No longer must she stare into the sun by the boon she has forged into the ring on her hand. A thing too great and terrible to know looms behind the bars of its cage, watching, heat and power booming out from between the cracks in its prison.
It’s not her that’s provoked its attention, this time. Like recognizing like, in chaos and destruction.
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