by JD Franx
Yrlissa sat cross-legged on the ledge of the roof two stories up and across the street from where Rath was collecting protection money for old man Talo. Tonight's route through the market districts would be uneventful; things only got tense when Rath visited businesses that had young, pretty women or children working or living there. On those nights, he took a lot more than just protection money. Two nights past, Yrlissa purposely entered the shop of a small jeweler minutes after Rath had, hoping to prevent just such a nightmare from happening. The old jeweler and his young granddaughter lived on the shop's second floor. With a customer as a witness, Rath had no other choice but to collect the Talo's payment and leave. Yrlissa paid for a beautiful pendant and left, quickly resuming her surveillance of Rath—across the street from the brothel beside Cora's Tavern in GutterTown. Noticing a young man with no legs sleeping in the alley behind her, she quietly approached. Latching the pendant around his neck, she retreated unseen to continue her watch, shifting her attention to the matter at hand.
It was on another night like this when Rath killed a crippled woman named Corla, after he raped her, and then nearly killed her husband, Davin. Yrlissa frowned at the memory of the grisly scene because there was no customer at Davin's shop that night to chase Rath off. Corla's broken, abused body had been tossed to the floor like discarded garbage and Davin had been left to slowly bleed out—even Yrlissa's advanced magical knowledge wouldn't have saved him. The royal physician for the court of King Joran Bale owed Yrlissa a favor from years past, for helping her during the Third Wildlands War. The skilled surgeon saved Davin's life by locating the bleeding artery so she could sew it closed, preventing a slow, agonizing death.
Shaking her head to clear the images of the past, Yrlissa frowned, determined to make damned sure Rath couldn't do it again, to anyone. Corla had been a member of the Broken Blades, a true sister, and a friend; she had retired with honors after being crippled during the difficult completion of an unsanctioned contract for the Blades' ruling council.
Staring down at Rath for hours was extremely boring, and yet Yrlissa usually never wavered—except for tonight. She hadn't felt well for two days. Something was drastically wrong with the magical energy flowing through Talohna. One of the last wizards in existence to be tied so deeply to the earth's power, she felt every wave and every painful twist of magic that corrupted this power. Someone, somewhere, was manipulating the darkest magical corruption she'd felt since... the magical war of the previous era, some ten thousand years ago.
Out of nowhere, with no warning, her face flushed with heat from a rapidly increasing fever. Lowering her hood, she stared at shaky hands that didn't seem to be hers. Her eyes blurred, burning. She took a deep breath and shook her head to clear her fuzzy mind. Finally regaining control of her own body, the symptoms lessened. Sighing, she took a deep breath when the right side of her face exploded with searing pain. She grabbed her cheek with both hands and fell over backwards onto the roof, biting her bottom lip. Blood ran down her chin as she tried to suppress the scream of agony threatening to escape her mouth.
The pain renewed tenfold as Yrlissa felt the flower tattoo on her face come to life, tearing its way over her jawbone and into her neck, all the way down to her shoulder and chest. No longer able to withstand the pain, she screamed with absolute, soul-rending anguish. Drawing a huge breath so she could scream a second time, the pain suddenly vanished. Sweat dripped from the end of her nose as she gingerly touched the side of her face and neck with twitching, trembling fingers.
Noticing a puddle of water on the roof to her left, she scrambled over. Still on her hands and knees, she summoned a globe of light and checked her reflection in the water puddle. The small tattoo she had received many thousands of years ago that resembled a simple black flower covered in thorns running from her temple to her cheekbone on the right side of her face had grown like a living plant. Vines covered in barbed black thorns now circled and twisted down the right side of her face and neck, from her forehead all the way to the top of her shoulder and chest.
“Assani's bloody blades, no! What have they done?” she whispered. It finally made sense. The twisted feeling with the earth's energy—the emptiness in the pit of her stomach that came from the loss of innocent life taken through blood-sacrifice. Even the death of her family eleven years ago and the blood taken from her at the time—a prelude to soul magic. And now the death-flower's return to magical life. Her stomach turned to ice as fear slowly invaded her body.
It meant only one thing: with no Black Sun in the last two decades, the child who'd been born during the Black Sun twenty years ago and then exiled to another dimension had been brought back to Talohna. A being the Wizard's Council and other Talohna officials called a Kai'Sar: a wizard who walks with death. A true born, and by now, matured DeathWizard walked Talohna once more. And it meant more than anything that she needed to find him. The prophecy so many feared had finally begun in earnest.
“The Blood's blackest will dawn the light's last... A return to times past,” she whispered. The words from so long ago echoed inside her head. She knew what those words really meant, but no one alive would believe her. If she could find this DeathWizard soon enough, it wouldn't matter what anyone else thought or believed. She could do things differently this time, she had to: it had all ended in disaster last time. A tear ran from her cheek at the recollection of how her closest friend, Ella Navasha, had betrayed her even after Yrlissa had saved the witch's life. It had caused the deaths of so many and even after so many thousands of years, the loss still hurt.
She would kill Rath tomorrow night, for Corla. Then she would go after this DeathWizard. His name was Kael and he'd been raised in a dimension without magic. She recalled the night twenty years ago when he was banished as if it were only yesterday. Hidden high in the rafters of the ArchWizard's soaring mansion, she had cursed at her inability to get to the newborn child. Wizards and Elvehn elementalists opened the dimensional doorway to a world unlike anything she had ever seen. Lights flashed by at incredible speeds, and towering buildings of metal and glass could be seen in the distance.
She had overheard the ArchWizard repeatedly state that the world was devoid of all magic and that technology dominated there—like some twisted Dwarven paradise. It would have been so easy to stop the chain of events that were now irreversible if only she could have gotten to that child born of the Black Sun, but sacrificing herself would have done nothing. Now it would all happen again, only this time there would be no way to stop it. There was no magical tower, the Black Arc was destroyed along with much of Talohna, upon Jasala Vyshaan's death. No ritual to drain a DeathWizard's life force—magic was no longer strong enough. And there were no Guardians left alive to help her.
The prophecy was clear to those who knew what it meant, and a mainline prophecy always came to pass.
She had to find Kael, being alone wouldn't stop her. It was the only chance Talohna had left now.
He'd been raised in a world with technology and had no experience with magic. How hard could it possibly be to find him?
The End
