II
An Astral Sojourn
- Page Nine -
Maenthrai felt her mind shift from overwhelming emotion to that of a quickly focused state. She began to pull the ephemeral substance of her soul from the corporeal anchor of her physical self. Silvery tendrils of quintessential and aethyric energies trailed between her higher self and her lower one, eventually snapping or cracking with the sound of miniature bolts of lightning under the strain of her will. The senses of her body were becoming like a distant vibration as her consciousness lifted itself upwards, now free of the entropic gravity that belonged to the physical world.
The crumbling balcony that her mortal coil still stood upon was fading below her as she lifted herself higher. The city below her changed within her perspective, from one who was trapped within the labyrinthine streets gazing upon the world with the limitations of eyes, to one who soared above them like a bird on the wing, seeing beyond the limitations of light. She could perceive the patterns of the streets, buildings, and molten rivers below. With her sight no longer limited by her body, she could also see the dancing flickers of energy moving throughout the city. Some of those flickers moved along like the soft, twinkling glow of fireflies during a warm evening in the woods nearby Neshran City. Other sources of energy streamed through the city like glowing wyrms on a predatory hunt. Even more sources of energy seemed like stuttering echoes of dimming blues and purples that played out moments from the city's ancient past; these echoes trapped within the very vibrations of the dense and eldritch stones that comprised the city, itself.
She turned the focus of her ephemeral perceptions upwards, seeing the vast and vaunted roof of icy rock that served as a shadowed firmament to the realm below. This darkened wall moved towards her with ever increasing speed. There was no impact as her soul flew into the stone, metals, and earthy minerals of the barrier. She continued to float upwards, faster with each moment, multiplying her rate of ascent. It was only in the breadth of time that it would take for a living person to take a gasp of air that she saw herself pull free of the earth and rise into the atmosphere beyond.
Her continued ascent soon swung from upwards momentum to a forward thrust. Jagged peaks covered with snow and ice began to sweep past her ghostly feet. Vast lakes, fjords, and lochs of steaming glacial waters streamed beneath her as her speed continued to increase. In this existence, there was no exertion of body or force of strength, simply the limitations of thought and the force of will.
A few wisps of morning cloud passed away underneath Maenthrai as she continued to soar. Warm air moving eastward from the Heartsblood Sea was beginning to mix with the frigid ais flowing down from Issautha and the Kethyran Reaches in the North, creating blankets of thin clouds. Eventually, the clouds would settle, lowering down to be raked at by the jagged peaks of the Loch of Flame below. Their mists would soon become a heavy snowfall by the evening hours. It reminded Maenthrai that her body was still trapped within the warm confines of the earth, now almost a hundred miles away. She continued to push forward through more dense clouds, a few able to block more than half of the Burning God's celestial light.
- Chapter Page Navigation -
Previous Chapter
Table of Contents
Next Chapter
No comments:
Post a Comment