Lost in the White
A blade to the gut could kill a man in moments, minutes, hours, or never, depending on where it struck and how deep. A gouge to the chest, at least as fast, all depending of course on whether or not the victim received timely healing and the degree of that.
Ice in the brain, Ataya has found, kills within a fraction of a second.
The baowi before him — massive, coated with thick black fur, and very much alive moments ago — collapsed with a muted
thwpp and
crrrrchhh to the snow at his feet. Ataya flicked his fingers, humming and stepping around the great beast’s body, his winter boots
crunching in the ice as he moved up beside it. To his left, Rannah whickered softly, shaking her head with a derisive snort as though to ask why they were stopped
here of all places, particularly with a storm brewing. But, as he tended to do to most others, Ataya ignored her. Aside from speed, efficiency, and precision, there was another reason why targeting specifically — and only — the brain yielded the results he in particular wanted.
Ataya reached for his belt. Slipping loose the black-bladed dagger therein — a gift from his father, no great surprise — he brought it to the fallen creature’s throat, dug, and sliced. A messy incision, but then, it didn’t need to be precise. When the brain alone was stopped, the heart continued to beat for some time, a pacemaker independent of the mind and running by design, which made the next step, siphoning out the blood, easier: facilitated by the beating heart.
While alive, a creature’s natural energy — whether man or beast — warred with magic that attempted to manipulate its internal systems. Particularly, in this case, blood magic. Without that barrier of protection, however…
Ataya twitched the tip of his blade as he withdrew it, sending three dark blots of red to stain the snow before he spoke. Twisted, foreign words. Rooted in Old Soudulian and oft referred to as a testament to the dark goddess herself and the tongue with which she brought the oblivionite people into being.
At sixteen, his use of the language was crude at best, rudimentary and ill-informed without a single live source of reference or learning. He had unearthed several tomes however, from which he had pieced together a skeleton sketch of basic spellwork bound in the language, and with it, the blood funneled, slowly at first and then more cooperatively, out of the beast and into a thread-like line at his command. He guided it around. Like a hypnotized snake, it trailed to his bidding, looping eventually into a full circle around the beast and then trickling inwards in smaller lines that webbed together until he had a spell rune of blood suspended above the snow. He let it drop, the remaining heat of the liquid sinking to melt a small groove in the snow for every shape of the pattern he’d formed.
Ataya, now standing outside of the circle, lifted Eurielle and tapped. With the impact, he bid his magic out through her channel, sending it skittering across the snow, black-purple, and into the ring of blood. He felt the pull at him as the magic mingled into the rune, so stark it almost seemed physical, the degree to which the drawn lines demanded a requisite amount of spell energy and
took it from him. His innate energy reserves, eager to meet its demands, rippled forward at its call like fragments drawn in by a tailored magnet, siphoning out and spiralling in, in, in to fuel the blood rune as it began to glow.
Ataya felt his breath cool, a tingling under his skin travelling from his throat down his body and into the ground. His knees quavered, threatening to buckle and he clutched tighter to Eurielle for support as his stance weakened. Seconds later, the demand surged and his knees failed him, body crumpling forward, one hand to his staff and the other burying itself palm-flat to the snow as he shuddered, mentally swearing. He needed another source of energy. Something.
Anything but himself and himself alone.
Like an answer from fate, a twitter of birdsong drew his attention to his immediate left, and Ataya reached out, splaying his fingers with the barest thread of magic — like casting a fishing line — and then crushing his grip inwards. He pulled at the life energy, locking onto its bubble of warmth, confining, gripping, and constricting with his own magic before siphoning it into the greedy pull of the spell rune. Soon, as the bird quieted, depleted to nothing but a husk, he moved to the tree it had been perched on. Not much, it being winter, but something. Life still beat in its trunk and roots, raw, living energy, and Ataya dug into that as with a needle, gouging in and then straining.
The blood rune around his target flared, building to a steady glow before finally — finally — it all sank inwards, funnelling in along the lines of the circle towards its center focus, Ataya’s target: the baowi corpse. Ataya’s limbs shook, but as the pull on his magic cut off, the process all internal now within the binds of the circle itself, he pushed himself upwards, leaning heavily against Eurielle’s support. As the spell finished itself, the baowi’s fur radiated a brief, ethereal shroud — black-purple and red, but coiling like smoke — which caught the wind and dissipated a moment later. Ataya waited with bated breath, silent in the moment of absolute stillness that followed.
Then, like the first drop of rain on a still pond sending out a ripple which stretched to the water’s edge, a faint web of energy, intimately intertwined with his — like the strings on a puppet, binding him as the puppeteer — twitched with life. And the baowi’s eyes opened. Ataya felt the laugh in his throat, bubbling up there well before it reached his lips, and when it did reach his lips, it started quite, breathless, and giddy. Almost a giggle, but not quite tenor enough to qualify. But it built from there, rising in volume as his mouth stretched into a crooked grin, and the sound of a laugh sounded oddly sharp and dissonant with the otherwise quiet mountainside, accompanied only by the winter wind, but Ataya did not care.
He had
done it.
One quirk of his fingers, a mental pluck at the ‘strings’ of magic which bound him to the beast, and a self-satisfied murmur of, “Up…” and the baowi moved. The hulk of its shape shuddered and pushed from the snow, answering the call of his spell and lurching to a stiff but functional stand. It ‘breathed’ thin smoke in the form of his energy, a faintly coiling ripple of darkness that — if nothing else did — made it impossible to mistake for something naturally alive. Ataya hummed, eyes glinting with accomplishment, and he stepped forward.
Dead.
And standing. Breathing his magic.
Waiting at his command.
Ataya’s pulse thrummed in his chest and throat. Rapid. Entranced.
Thrilled. As he made it up to stand before his puppet, he reached out, fingers hovering before the once-ferocious carnivore’s unmoving snout. After only a moment’s hesitation, he brought his touch down, tracing up the bridge of its nose, over its bristling dark fur to the top of its head.
‘
Mine,’ he thought. ‘
Now…you are all mine.’
White teeth showing from beneath stretched lips, he bunched his fingers, catching in the fur with a sharp grip and with it came the next pervasive thought: he could
ride this if he so chose. Unfortunately, before that thought could fully settle, the ground shook. Ataya tensed.
Gaili magic.
He recognized its signature as it quaked the earth, having spent well enough time around his uncle Casseth to know the feel. But this was not Casseth. He narrowed his eyes, on alert and sweeping the surrounding area for any sign of the dragon sure to have caused the disturbance. The greatest problem with gailis, of course, was that so long as a person stood on solid ground, they were at the mercy of their element.
“Come, then…” he murmured beneath his breath. “Show yourself.”
As if on command, the earth broke. Massive, deep-brown wings stretched like a shadow, stark against the white sky, and Ataya stepped back, carefully avoiding the marks of the binding blood rune as he gathered his magic. Frost dusted his fingertips, as though in anticipation of the encounter to come, and his breath coiled outwards.
The dragon dove.
Ataya sank into the shadows, melding and rippling across the snow before shifting out again moments later, well out of the way from where talons and teeth crashed into the earth, snarling. He flicked his wrist out, rooting his stance and gripping before shoving with the innate aiskala magic that ran in his blood, bidding it upwards in sharp, unforgiving spires of ice that caged — and then skewered — his target. As the dragon clawed at the snow, roaring, he forced the ice spires in, and deeper, expanding their size until finally, with a broken wail, the massive beast stilled, and dissipated into nothing but its soul.
It was not, apparently, alone.
Ataya fought those that came similarly, dancing between shadow and ice and, despite his already depleted magic reserves, managing reasonably well, all things considered. It occurred to him to attempt to employ his newly-fostered ‘pet’, but — being unfamiliar still with the concept of controlling something quite that large, this being the first time he had successfully done so — he left that experimentation for a later date and worked with what he knew. All went more or less according to plan.
At least, until the combat drew too close to his spellwork.
In the moments that it all occurred, Ataya could not be precisely certain what exactly happened when. In retrospect, he would deduce that his rune making had been sloppy at best, his spellwork volatile, and the magic poured into it brittle and wavering, looking for any excuse to snap. In the present, however, he knew only that a particularly sharp
CRACK of earth sounded, Rannah whinnied in upset, the snow around where he had been casting about the baowi jolted upwards in one half portion, messy like a broken plate, his ‘puppet’ swayed heavily as the magic binding it faltered, and he
felt the fray in the lines of thread connecting them.
Then, all of the magic fractured at once. The rune magic seared, rippled and fizzled, an explosive crash of energy barrelling into him like the reverb from a bungee drawn too tight for too long snapping back into his face. The magic
burned as it coursed through his body, too much to handle all at once, not merely knocking him flat to all fours in the snow but feeling as though it was eating through his veins from the inside. He screamed, though it was more instinct than intentional and to his ears it sounded hollow, brittle and distant, his entire mind wrapped immovably around the concept of
pain like nothing he had ever experienced before.
When it ebbed, the first sound to crawl from his throat was a hoarse whimper, his palms pressed to his burning eyes and muscles feeling as though they had been cooked thin. Every limb shook, but one rumble of sound and pulse of magic was enough to tell him that there was at least one dragon still about, and he shuddered, scrambling atop the snow and attempting to right himself. Except that…
His brow furrowed.
White.
White.
White.
He shook his head, squeezing his eyes shut as he attempted to push to a stand and rubbing his face before opening them again.
White.
White.
White.
The first knot of panic in his throat started small, and he attempted to swallow it back before it sank into his gut. Just a shock. The light had been very bright. It was a lot of magic at once. Just
give them a moment and your eyes will come around. He shut them again, breathing out and trying to quell the building
additional shake to his fingers completely unrelated to weakness and overexertion.
‘
One, two, three…’
A pulse of chilled air was the only warning he got before what felt like the weight of a mountain collided with him, pinning him to the snow like a caged insect. He shoved out with his magic blindly, panic clouding every rational thought he might possibly have. Then, something — teeth? a talon? the spine on a tail? — raked into him, clawing down his side, and temporarily the white of his vision blacked. He managed, though, to shove
something out which must have hit, or found a nerve, because, finally, the great weight above him stilled, and disappeared.
Ataya lay in the snow. Shaking. Teeth grit. Depleted of magic. In
pain, and…
His brow furrowed, fingers touching to the warm wetness at his side and lips tightening in a wince. Bleeding. Yes, he was definitely bleeding. And…
No matter how many times he tried — open, shut, open, shut, open —
begging the white to clear and coalesce into the actual shapes, sights, and colors he was used to, his eyes gave him nothing. Whiteness. Light, and dark. Black when he shut them. White when he opened them. A colder, deep panic pooled low then in his gut, a thousand fears chasing one another in his mind and building with every passing breath.
It was temporary, he told himself.
It
had to be temporary.
Akara would help him.
And, if she couldn’t, then
surely his uncle uncle, Lithian, could. They would be able to do
something…
Surely…
Another rumble in the earth sent Ataya staggering upwards. “Rannah…
Rannah!” He couldn’t fight another. Not now. He
couldn’t. Not like this. He ‘saw’ the shadow of the beast — a flicker from white to grey as it passed over him — or so he
assumed was the cause, though it seemed a strange way to attempt to assess the world. So
little to go on—
Then, he felt Rannah’s familiar hide under his outstretched fingertips and, ignoring the continuing build of lurching terror, he forced himself up and onto her — fortunately familiar enough with the process that he could manage it blind, if messily. And not a moment too soon. He heard the dragon’s roar. Felt its magic. Dug his knees in, urging his mount on in whatever direction
any direction she chose, and they were off. He with his head and body tucked close, newly useless eyes squeezed shut as he clung to her, and Rannah pounding over the mountainside and down, down, away from whatever might be chasing them. Ataya slung a messy, aimless semi-circle of spires backwards in an attempt to discourage anything from giving chase, but he felt adrift.
Useless.
Helpless.
And drowning in the bleary gauze that was now his worldview.
He realized — well after it became apparent that whatever might have been following them had given up — that he had no sense of where they were. No direction. No guide. He was somewhere on Eowyn, in the mountains of the Terra Expanse, in winter, lost in the snow, wounded…
And blind.
Reaching up, Ataya clutched with bloodied fingers at the pendant which still hung about his neck. It seemed a decade ago —
was nearly a decade ago — since he had first designed and enchanted it, laying the spellwork for an ‘alarm’ system by way of which either he or his sister could alert the other that they they were in trouble. He had not made use of it until this moment, but now, he did. As he gave a muted pulse of magic to it, activating its age-old scrawled markings, he prayed that his seven-year-old self was more competent with rune-carving than he was, apparently, today.
“Please, sister…” Ataya let his forehead drop to Rannah’s mane and neck, his body beginning to feel dizzy with blood loss. “I…need your help…”
Word Count: 2,770
