Reborn
Mini Conto sobre os Iosanos
The Fane of Scyrah in Shyrr, 4575
Awakening was jarring. Sleep for her was not like it was for her people; neither were her dreams like theirs. The slumber that was her existence was not unconsciousness — it was instead a profound connection with the lands they had set aside for her adopted children. Her mind had been cast outward like a gossamer net across the land.
She had been watching from afar as they gathered like agitated ants and swarmed at multiple conflict points, trying to repulse the skorne. She had touched each as they battled, lending strength and inspiration and witnessing their final moments. Each was a sacrifice made in her name. She felt each extinguished light as a sliver of an infinite grief — the ending of not just a life but a bloodline. Each light was so easily lost, gone in a single thrust or shot. She tenderly gathered the glimmers as they faded, enfolding each with what protection she could spare, lending a moment of calm peace before each passed to the Veld, where darkness stalked.
Waking forced a greater portion of her consciousness to return to her living, divine flesh. What had been fragmented into a thousand tasks began to reassemble. She had to reorient. Sonorous words chanted and echoed off the hallowed walls as powerful wills harnessed energy that did not belong to them.
Wrongness and foulness surrounded her. Unnatural things intruded into her chamber, and it required a moment to unite with her bodily self to comprehend the scene. Her Fane Knight guardians lay slain, one near her stone bier, his gleaming armor stained red. A fragment of her mind already knew this, had collected his soul, had soothed his regret. Not far from her bier rested her brother’s vault, which had been cracked and unsealed, his protective ice partially thawed. She had already risen to a seated position and spoken a challenge to the intruders. Angry words had been exchanged. It was several heartbeats before her greater consciousness knew what had been said.
An assemblage of eldritch confronted them, one who was known to her brother. This leader bore Voass in his hands, Nyssor’s sword, stolen from him not now but years earlier. She struggled to distinguish then from now. The flow of time mired her awoken self in a way she found distasteful.
Each intruder was known to her in an instant, their pasts laid bare. It was not to their leader that she looked first. Her eyes fell instead on the one that had led the ritual — an ancient creature that had been dead far longer than it had been alive. Tyrios was its name, in life an auricant. Like the others, it had chosen blasphemy over death. Only a wisp of its former essence remained, an echo of the gifts passed down in the first act of creation by Lacyr, whom Tyrios had once served as priest. Thinking that name made her remember with fresh grief the last moments of her mother-sister, the first to fail at the threshold, to fall, and to wither. Her noble legacy had been reduced to this.
Time froze. She stared at the ancient abomination. Tyrios was suffused with vileness, overwhelmed by the stench of narcissistic self-absorption, trapped within a skull that should have turned to dust. Long had it gathered stolen power, mastered occult arts. Runes surrounded its form, remnants of its ritual. The cold glow in its shriveled eyes dimmed with uncertainty as she stared at it with cold fury. It realized it was not invincible and felt terror for the first time in a thousand years. It faced the wrath of an angry goddess.
She made a sharp gesture, as though swatting aside an insect. All its summoned magic was swept away in a cold wind. The threads of will that held its essence together slipped loose and were undone. For you, Lyliss, she thought, a prayer to her missing sister. The ancient eldritch crumbled to a fine grey powder, and white fire engulfed his screaming green soul, which fled through the roof of the fane. She watched it go with grim satisfaction.
Then she felt tired. Every action had a cost. She turned to the others and considered giving them the same release. It would cost her too much. She felt Nyssor’s frozen regard as he slowly roused his own mind from his frozen state. By his own waning strength, all but one of the intruders vanished. Their forms were intact, unlike Tyrios, but banished to their well of power in Eversael, where her brother Nyrro had once lived, a brother now beyond blasphemies.
Yet one eldritch remained. Why? Scyrah puzzled at this, but knew Nyssor’s mind was too fragile to endure mental communion with her. She turned to the eldritch instead. Goreshade, he was called. No. Ghyrrshyld, that was his name. A wretched thing. The arrogant leader who had torn Ios apart in recent memory. He was suffused with corruption and madness as his eyes stared back, defiant. She remembered his birth, the joy in his mother’s heart. She watched him throw down a soulless child on the steps of the Consulate Court. A child who might have died decades later, to prevent the death of a House Eyvreyn noble that would have found a secret the Seekers had long sought. She saw Ghyrrshyld flee to Eversael, bleeding from a mortal wound. She saw his heart blacken when he chose to escape death, accepting the blasphemous sacrament of Tyrios.
On his brow was a mark — a sigil forged by Nyssor. In a moment, she saw all the answers to her questions amid its elegant complexity. It was a curse, a warning, and more. In its gleaming and sinuous shape was the skill and craft possessed only by the Frozen Sage, the Grand Crafter, and the Architect of the Palace of Lyoss in the Veld. More of the pieces of her mind came together at the sight, drawn from afar, a gathered awareness of all she was and had been.
Goreshade spoke defiant words, and a part of her answered. Most of her attention remained focused on the mark. Nyssor had seen something in this being, had left this sigil against the likelihood of his own destruction. It demanded she delve into its being. Past veils of darkness and perfidy, past stains left by the murder of countless innocents. There she discovered the seat of his will — a tiny but gleaming diamond.
Around them, beyond these walls, her people fought and died. She had not the strength to save them. Nor did Nyssor. Goreshade hoped, in slaying his gods, to liberate their divinity and achieve that salvation. He would curse them all, to become as he was, to endure an existence that was an atrocity sealed into cold bones and dry sinew. His mind was broken by death. Nyssor had found in this polluted being something unique, a speck both beautiful and terrible. He could do what the gods could not. Only life could change him. He must be reborn in flesh. Not as what he had been but something that preserved his darkness as well as the light. All of this was within the mark of Nyssor. She weighed what she must sacrifice, how it would hasten her extinction. She felt her brother offer his strength, what little he had. She bowed her head.
“I forgive you,” she said to the eldritch and let her power blossom within the withered husk of his being. She prayed to Lacyr’s children, who had been entrusted to her, asking them to forgive her as well.
Fonte: No Quarter 71
