Chapter 8: The Wanderer and the Abyss

Koolah walked beneath the cawing leaves of the frozen gnarled trees. The ice and darkness tried to soak into her being, even as she felt the pull of the loop desiring to steal away her awareness of being apart from it. The charm she kept next to her breast kept ice, loop and darkness back, if only barely.

She felt the gaze of the frozen crows of the leaves. It was not a malevolent gaze, but it was disturbing. Worse still it made it very hard to sense her surroundings, even with her hat. Now and again she would catch a glimpse of shadows stalking other shadows, the remains of scouts from the city and the army of the dead.

Locked in a deadly game of hide and seek that would start again whoever won.

Nothing followed her except the gaze of the frozen crows.

Sometimes Koolah felt that the whole forest had become a single spirit, and the crows its eyes. She and her sisters had resisted studying them. The reason they swallowed their curiosity was the fact that the crows were asleep… yet still they watched. The sisters had an inexplicable feeling towards the thought of the forest waking.

Her sisters had received a classical mage’s training and a large amount of that consisted of having a mass of stories and records of the ill fate of mages crammed into their skulls. In general unless you knew exactly what something was, waking it was a terrible terrible idea… and often if you did know what it was, your desire to wake it would vanish.

Koolah and Jadah had split up to cover more ground, they planned to investigate the surroundings, and to talk to the few other interlopers that were in this fallen place. Koolah was not looking forward to talking to the first person she was seeking out.

Soon however, she edged ever closer to where that person wandered.

The cover and oppressive gaze of the crows broke, above was swirling frozen abyss, thick with spirits devouring each other and growing. Koolah however was wisely not looking what passed for the fallen realm’s sky with magesight, so she just saw an abyss, and not any of the spirits mindlessly growing and dying. It was still enough to send a chill down her spine.

Even uncorrupted abysses were dangerous to look into too long. Koolah tried not the think about how she was at the bottom of the abyss.

Before her there were no trees, instead there was a tower that looked as if the hand of some furious titan had torn it from the earth and smashed it against the ground, changing what was once a tower into something that looked like the shattered skeleton of some mighty serpent.

Amidst the scattered bricks there was soldiers of the dead army. They noiselessly fought against a brace of rime covered knights. The knights had been from the city, their lower halves were serpent tails, clad in plate and mail. They had four arms, each set grasping a halberd.

Their helms were curved sweeping back along and a coif of mail spilling from where they met the neck. The visor of the helm had three slits and the middle one extended far up the sides of the visor. White eyes shone through the slits.

One of these knights was far larger than the others and was locked in bitter combat with a skeleton wreathed in armour of shadows, and above its helmet, a halo of flame. The champion bore a shining blade of flame in one hand and skulls swirled around its other hand.

Each strike of the knight-captain would destroy one of these skulls, but a fresh skull would take the next blow, and then its broken fellow would slowly piece together.

There was a glimmer of awareness in the eyes of the Knight-captain and the skeleton champion that their comrades did not have, but they were still locked in battle.

No noise came from these fighters, even as the earth was churned up by their conflict.

Beyond them, sitting on the bent spire of the tower’s head was a figure in a tattered grey leather robe. Boots that had once been green kicked out from the spire, swinging back and forth below the robe, there was still a strange shine from their rusted buckles.

Hands covered in black-stained cloth strips rested on its lap. Its hooded head was raised to the sky looking straight into the sky of spirits of ice and darkness. Looking up from the abyss.

Koolah had found the first who was like her sisters. An interloper to the fallen realm.

She did not know its name.

She was not sure it knew its name anymore.

It was a wanderer who lost its face.