The Shattered Oracle - II - An Astral Sojourn - Page 13

---

II

An Astral Sojourn

---

- Page Thirteen -

---

She began to worry that maybe something down there yearned for her essence and aethyric energies. Perhaps it was her deep connection to the area, or some aspect of the violent energies ripping the place apart. Worse yet — her mind began to scrabble and claw at the dark possibilities — it might be the very same monster she feared below that drew her in now. The monster of her mother, given a renewed and unholy set of powers in her undead state. Her mother was always a powerful and talented oracle, some even said she might be the most powerful oracle in the world. Who knew what kind of powers she might have been imbued with that day at the Ullthosian Temple. What powers she might have perfected over the last two decades she spent hunting Maenthrai, Serranos, and the last surviving oracles down.

The panic turned into a sense of full vertigo. Maenthrai had a hard time keeping track of which direction was which. Space around her seemed to flux and twist. She didn't know if she was spinning or curling in upon herself. If the dark tug she kept struggling against was beneath or above her. She had truly made a horrible mistake giving into her emotions, her nostalgia, and her darker impulses. She should never have given into her longing and curiosity. This dreadful place was always meant to be forbidden to her since she left it so long ago.

No matter which direction was towards the hellish islands, she soon felt the last of her strength give way as she began to fall towards it. She threw her ephemeral arms out — more of an instinctual reaction than anything logical — grasping and clawing at the aether of the astral plane around her. There was nothing there for her desperate flails to seize upon. The only solid forms in this echo of the physical world were the forms of will-made-manifest. Her will was stripped of her; upward, downward, sideways, inward, outward, she began to fall.

There was a flash of bright and brilliant light as she fell through the gathering clouds below her. Their misty substance seemed to coalesce out of the very air like a dark hand reaching up to capture her within its grasp. Another flash went off just a fraction of a second later. Three more stole her senses from her in a staccato burst. As she passed through the fingers of the hand-shaped cloud, continuing her fall to the world below, she could see tracks of land whipping by at an incredible pace. Whole provinces, cities, and landmarks were cascading by faster than she could fall. She was moving backward to her origin point. She was being violently summoned right back to her body. The last bursts of ground she could see were the jagged and snow-capped peaks near the Loch of Flames.

She braced herself, putting her half-transparent arms up around her head — another instinctual reaction of no use to an astral form — as she fell to the hard rock below. Flashes of blackness engulfed her sight and then one last, brilliant burst went off. It was a flash of light in a mixture of reds, blues, and rich purples before everything went dark. 

---

- Chapter Page Navigation -

---

Previous Chapter Table of Contents Next Chapter

In the Refuge of the Azhemyra The Shattered Oracle As Oracles are Wont to Do

---

The Shattered Oracle - Companion

---

The Shattered Oracle - II - An Astral Sojourn - Page 12

---

II

An Astral Sojourn

---

- Page Twelve -

---

The once immense volcanic island nation below her was completely devastated and shattered into several smaller islands. Many of the high peaks that encircled the central city of Neshran — itself resting on an island in the heart of an ancient caldera — had tumbled in on themselves. The great volcano, now exposed below, had not erupted. Thankfully it remained extinct as it had been many millennia earlier, but the energies tearing through the land below seemed to stir it almost to life once more. The northern waters of the Heartsblood Sea fell into steaming gashes in the earth's surface to meet with the magma pools of Gehemol — the forsaken and darkened land beneath the world-plane — far below. The once lush forests in the valleys and ravines of the island were aflame or already burned to cinders. The fires were caused by the thrown up boulders and embers of molten rock that still soared into the sky from the great gashes below. The forests were the same ones she had spent so many nights and relaxing days in with her siblings and her father on camping trips. Now nothing remained of them save for ashes.

The great city of Neshran had been completely torn apart and the damages seemed to be very old. Perhaps some of the city may have survived and sunken to the bottom of the great caldera lake at the center of the island, but most of the city had either fallen into the great burning chasms or been reduced to nothing more than rubble in the earthquakes that still shook the land to this day. The once glittering lights of the city had long ago faded away to nothing more than a distant memory. Only the distant lights of the port cities in Fyrrantha in the west and the coastal townships of the Hoelath Empire in the east shone any human-made light, below. Twinking lights, held at bay beneath the dark canopy of clouds that dwarfed out the day-time light. The island of Oerstav Caelii, now referred to many in the Hoelath Empire as the Shattered Oracle Islands, after the abomination that dwelled there, were dead of any human life at all.

Maenthrai felt herself beginning to panic, the mortal sensations of hyperventilating and blood draining from her extremities called to her separated consciousness. These mortal feelings echoed through the distances she had traveled from her mortal body back in Kalshuyr Azkholl, to her astral self here at her old home. The land below seemed almost entirely alien to her now, yet there were shards and pieces of painful familiarity in the devastation. Those shards pulled at her heart, filling her with a sickening unease, and weighing down her essence. The feelings of nostalgia mixed inside of her with feelings of sanity-shredding, mortal horror. Her thoughts tried to pull herself away from the disjointed memories and severe emotions of her past. One thought echoed in her mind more than all the rest; this entire astral sojourn had been a grave mistake.

A weight pulled at her ephemeral feet, tugging at her and distorting the astral echo of her mortal body. It had been a slow and persistent tug since she first arrived, but now that several moments — or what she thought might be moments; perhaps hours — had gone by, the pull was increasing. It felt like the depths of a great ocean pulling her down from the surface of the water. Using her will she kicked and floundered, trying to pull herself up, but the effort to keep aloft seemed to grow with each heartbeat that echoed through time and space from her mortal body. She couldn't feel a presence in the pulling, this partly because of the severe concentration she had to maintain to keep her astral essence from being discorporated or forcefully snapping back to her body. Her telepathic powers were useless in this state. 

---

- Chapter Page Navigation -

---

Previous Chapter Table of Contents Next Chapter

In the Refuge of the Azhemyra The Shattered Oracle As Oracles are Wont to Do

---

The Shattered Oracle - Companion

---

The Shattered Oracle - II - An Astral Sojourn - Page 11

---

II

An Astral Sojourn

---

- Page Eleven -

---

She loved her siblings dearly, and despite the strangeness of the youngest two, Maenthrai was wounded — deeply — by the loss of them. She pressed forward a few more feet, still remaining thousands of feet more from the land that was once her home. Unlike the imaginary threats she faced down while she was a child, the threat she faced at this very moment was a very real and present one. An all-consuming threat that had not only taken the lives of her sibling-twins, but of her father, and all the lives of the people that once dwelled in the land she called home. The barren and shattered land beneath her ghostly versions of feet. That land was now torn asunder in gouts of flame and vortexes of chaotic energy at this very moment.

This was the land that was once called Oerstav Caelii — meaning in High Hoelatha, the Isle of Oracles — a once beautiful volcanic island that was seen as the jewel of the Hoelath Empire. The capital city of this land, the once thriving city of Neshran, was her home. It was the place that her mother's family had lived in for centuries. Each of them had served as an oracle of the Sharr-vhult — those oracles who guided the city and advised the leaders of their people — a long tradition stretching back to the fall of the Morthavi people in antiquity. Maenthrai had followed — at least in some respects — after her mother and become an oracle as well. She was not a member of the same order. She wanted to travel to the lands of the south, to the heart of the Hoelath Empire; the bustling capital of Morrthault City. She was driven to a cosmopolitan life, rather than a life of hermit-like mystics living in a temple for most of their days.

Her mother said it was her father's blood in her that made her seek out the novelty and bustle of the city life. Her father had moved northward to be with her mother when they were young. He was a member of the Filidath — the law-giver — caste. He managed the day-to-day existence of the people in the city of Neshran and ensured those managements were enacted as law. It was her father that raised her and her siblings more than her mother ever did. He was always present at home, while her mother always was away at the Ullthosian Sanctum for elaborate rituals, deep contemplation, and the arduous refinement of her divinatory abilities. Even at this moment, Maenthrai could feel the resentment she had for her mother bubbling up inside of her.

A bolt of reddish energy shot by her, knocking her out of her emotional reveries and blinding her astral senses with its searing heat. The bolt carried through the atmosphere, alighting currents of charged air like blood roaring through the arteries of a human body. Each arc of current set off a boom of thunder as the final segments of energy bled themselves out before reaching the ground below. The energy would likely have killed a mortal person, but in Maenthrai's astral state, it would only have discorporated her astral body and sent her flying back to her body in an instant. She would most likely be stunned for several hours, if not stuck in a coma for several days. Thankfully, despite the very close-call, it didn't bring any harm to her.

She wanted to reach out and enter into the lands below her but the threat down there remained ever vigilant in its wait for her to pass the threshold. Down there was a real thaekkuz revenant who truly would harm her if she stepped to far into that darkness. The threat knew her like only a mother could, and possessed the same uncanny abilities she had, if not moreso. She began to worry if being even this far away, in her astral state, might be enough for that threat to reach out and see her energy. She remembered immediately that she would have to disperse her energies when she finally returned to her body, taking a long route through the high intensity and busy lands of the south and far into the empty expanses of the Hoelath Valisilas grasslands to the east. She mustn't have that dark being that was once her mother following her back to the refuge of the Azhemyra. It had taken her a little more than a decade to find the ruined city of Kalshuyr Azkholl beneath the world's surface, so as to be a safe haven from her mother's depredations. 

---

- Chapter Page Navigation -

---

Previous Chapter Table of Contents Next Chapter

In the Refuge of the Azhemyra The Shattered Oracle As Oracles are Wont to Do

---

The Shattered Oracle - Companion

---

The Shattered Oracle - II - An Astral Sojourn - Page 10

---

II

An Astral Sojourn

---

- Page Ten -

---

A few flashes of gray and white, then she felt herself growing near to her destination. The sensation was like a deep tugging at her higher self along with a ghostly pain of her past. The weight of nostalgia and memory pressing through the astral realm began to drag at her feet, pulling her down. She began her descent through the billowing clouds toward the world-plane below. The clouds were far thicker in this place. The world below was cast in a depressing gray-blue light. In the distance, the echoing booms of thunder began to shatter the sky. She soon broke through a thick ceiling of cloud to gaze at the land below. She had arrived at the threshold of a dead land. The land that was once her home.

She continued to lower herself, wanting to press onward toward the earth, yet she hesitated. She remained aloft, but every few feet she allowed herself to slowly descend began to remind her of a game that she would play with Serranos when they were younger. In their house, the ruins of which existed far below her now — if it still existed at all, given the devastation she could barely see — they had a doorway to the catacombs beneath the city they lived in. It was a dark and forbidding place, providing access to the living members of the family so that they may consult with their ancestors. Maenthrai started the game one day, in her youth, as she stood in the doorway looking out into the darkness of the catacombs beyond.

Her mind would swim with horrors from her imagination in those times. Arisen skeletons clawing at her with bony fingers; Wraiths of the ancient dead revealing their deathmask-like faces through the darkness to utter curses and cryptic warnings; and the very real threat of the thaekkuz revenants that occasionally haunted and stalked her people when those that died returned to a shambling semblance of life due to some severe cowardice or regret they could not let go of upon death.

It had all started as her attempt to build up courage when she was younger after reading a great many passages concerning the art of necromancy that her mother collected as idle fancy in her studies as an oracle. She had read harrowing tales of those that consulted with the dead, or those that had to put them down should they come back to the world of the living. Those tales had given her nightmares all throughout her childhood, but she couldn't pull herself away from the darkly morbid books. So, there she would stand, staring into the darkness where the dead dwelled, pushing herself forward; step by shivering step. She did this every night for a few hours. That is until her younger brother Serranos woke up one evening and caught her.

After he had shown some interest in her tests of courage, Maenthrai and Serranos made a game of it together. Each of them pressed each other further and further into the darkness. Both, besting their mettle more and more, making creepy sounds to rattle each other; recalling the morbid tales that Maenthrai had learned in her younger years; Each playing off of each other's fears so as to push each other to get over them.

When the twins were old enough to walk and talk, Maenthrai and Serranos tried to get them to participate in the game as well. The twins weren't as fun, nothing seemed to phase them. They could stand in the dark for hours, staring with their creepy and wide eyes out into the realms of the dead. Both of them, with their stark white hair, pale features, and strange energies seemed to be well at home amongst the shades. The game lost its interest then, with both Maenthrai and Serranos coming to see the twins as truly otherworldly. 

---

- Chapter Page Navigation -

---

Previous Chapter Table of Contents Next Chapter

In the Refuge of the Azhemyra The Shattered Oracle As Oracles are Wont to Do

---

The Shattered Oracle - Companion

---