II
An Astral Sojourn
- Page Eight -
She took the rusted metal trim and marble-topped railing in her hands. The shifting and churning lights from the rivers of molten rock, the magickal braziers illuminating the city, and the glimmering reflected light from the ice encircling the city lit up her form. It took a few moments for her pupils to get used to all of the stimulation bombarding them at once. The shifting light, the deepest shadows, and all of the complex details that comprised the sprawling city around her.
Her eyes surveyed the subterranean realm as she stood like a silent sentinel on the balcony. For a brief moment, a chill wind blew through the buildings near where she stood. That whispering breeze, seeming to carry the voices of the dead, began to tug at the gray robes that covered her. She let her eyes fall to the shadowed streets below. Some of them were littered with debris and others remained almost frozen in time, looking as if they had just been cleaned by diligent city workers the night before. The streets were like twisted rivers of shadow, cutting swaths through a labyrinth adorned with expertly hewn stone buildings. The diverse kinds of walls, roofs, and buttresses of the city wound around, trailing off to the walls of deep ice, or over highroads that gave way to rivers of molten rock slowly flowing below.
Pitched windows and exquisitely fine chiseled reliefs seemed to play out a feverish sort of dance using the extreme contrasts of wane light and oppressive shadow. The details of rusted or decaying metals — once great works of art — throughout the forms of the buildings served as yet another reminder of the immense ages the city had remained abandoned. The silent and darkened windows peered into the interiors of the neglected and empty buildings. The only sounds echoing through the city was that of the occasional rush of wind, the creaking of some metal doors or windows, and the very rare crash of ice falling from one of the encircling walls to hiss as soon as it becomes engulfed in the extreme heat of the magma below.
The entire vista was an oddly otherworldly one, where each detail felt like a spiral into the supernal realms beyond the mundane physical. The haunting scape of a ruined city called out to be the domain where the shades of the dead would dwell. The dazzling lights and the deepening shadows seemed to pull at the consciousness of the onlooker and send them rushing into an empyrean land beyond the physical senses. Errant thoughts began to string together like a macabre symphony inside of Maenthrai's mind. Each thought pulling into that distant, ephemeral realm — to a place of unrestrained thought and energy — existing parallel to the chained world of flesh and blood. All of the sensations seemed to activate the powers within her — seductively calling to her and goading her to reach out beyond her body — to use the strange powers she had been given through her blood.
It was only a few moments before she gave into that whispered longing, completely. She felt alone in this place, haunted by the shadows not just of the city's past, but her own past as well. The shades of the restless dead seemed to whisper into her ears, inviting her to join them in the vault-like halls beneath the earth, or in the echoed realms beyond the ken of the living. She felt homesick, not just for the members of her family that she had lost, but for the land that was taken from her so long ago. She wanted to return there, even if only for a moment.
She would do so, using the powers she had focused during her studies an oracle. She would reach beyond the physical realm and perceive the lands beyond. She would use her spiritual self to travel that distance — back to her home — to see what now remained of it. She might be able to gather for herself some sense of closure at long last, now that her travails were close to completion. She would remain distant, however, as even in the relative safety of the spiritual realms, the monster that hunted her had the powers to find her. She would ride to that place, but she would diffuse the trail of her essence before returning. It was a risky act, but she couldn't hold back any longer. She closed her eyes and subsumed herself into the emotions and energies building up inside of her.
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