11.15.18.

NOTE: this is from my original second draft of ophidian. it's old as shit and takes place a few years prior to the current draft now. it was originally written back in 2015ish, but publically posted in 2018. so welcome.

There’s a mysticism that surrounds Oracles. Questions have floated for centuries of what they are and how they are chosen, but it’s left silent. Are they connected? Are they afflicted by the same curse that wore their gods down to their final battle? Makes you think, doesn’t it? They are so different from the commonwealth, but also the same. A few are wealthy nobles, while others live a much more… quiet life among the people. And why? Is it to make them feel human again? They are questions that bounce back and forth in Callen’s head as he trails behind Mohan. Every little answer is answered, but larger ones seem to be ignored. The information of it all must be so tantalizing for researchers and historians.

“How powerful do you think you are?” Callen pauses in his steps with a hold of his breath, “Not counting the fact that you may or may not be able to die, that is.”

Mohan pivots in his step and turns to face the researcher, catching the focused gaze of gentle green, “If I train more, I should be able to raise more than just an army of the dead… if that gives a little of how much I know of my power.”

“Is this your way of telling me that you’re strong enough to flatten cities?”

He’s quiet for a moment, his attention breaking to stare down at the blackening soil at his feet. Callen soon follows his gaze to greet the decaying path that led up to them. Lines, thick and black, curl from the ground like fetid smoke, choking out the life around him in slow motion as the grass dims from green to almost a sticky black. Nothing about it feels… right. It’s as if the world seems to decay from his presence, but at the same time, flourish.

But he finally speaks, “I’ve almost done it. Here and down in Eastburn… Sybel saw it both times… Neither were my control, but… there are still marks of my ill-disciplined magic all-over Glasswick.” Another pause and he shrugs, “It was used with a mindset to protect and I suppose I just went overboard. Shit happens.”

Varmillious couldn’t pull away from the sight that trailed to them. That dark ichor pooling around them like swamp mud mashed beneath their feet, and yet slowly, the line dissipates into nothing, as if it had never been there, the grass springing back to life, richer and greener than it had been before. He had seen the power of druids, their bark-like fingers blessing life and color back into the lands, but nothing on a scale that matched this. “Sh-show me these scars you’ve created?”

“Of course.” Soft is his voice and he speaks no longer. Mohan turns away from Callen with a billow of the train of his coat and a hand combing through locks of his dark brown hair. Had this been a man like Sybel with a lust for knowledge, Mohan would have been fine, however his heart is beating a mile a minute with a man listed as a traitor behind him. Nothing he could do would send terror into this man’s heart… right? He’s prepared for the worst; ready to die and take tens of hundreds with him for it… that’s how those stories go… right? But now is not the time to let that feeling chew away at his mind. Callen asked to witness something a village buried away.

The walk was silent as they disappeared into the woods. Nothing too out of the ordinary aside from a few children scaling trees like silent assassins and disappearing into the dark brush above. At one moment Varmillious could count the children, all of them various ages from what he could see, staring down at him as if he didn’t deserve to be there, but in his heart, he could feel their distaste for him on their land… but there was more to this… wasn’t it? Even as the few he saw disappeared into new faces, even as they climbed down to greet their Oracle with bright, happy eyes, their mistrust of him burned at the back of his skull.

“Are… Are children normally crawling around in the trees here?”

Silence broken, Mohan jumps before he looks back then up at the trees, “Oh. Yes. They have homes up there. We had a few dryads come through and help me with the… mess I created. A few stayed and settle up in the forestry. It’s almost like its own little town. Quite beautiful change than what we have normally.”

“The mess? We must be close, yes?”

Mohan stops and steps to the side, a hand guiding passage to continue forward, to which Callen accepts with a dip of his head and a step forward. There are doubts clouding him. Scars? Really? The Oracle’s words are flowery, but scars? All he’s seen is trees and dirt aside of the plains that wrap the village. So are were these so called… scars…?

Varmillious Callen had seen a lot of things, so to say, in his life. He had spent weeks in Versailé during the Raven War. He had seen innocents split in two, men and women burned alive by angry wyverns, but nothing on a scale like this. What was this? It was black… for miles. Scorched earth and maimed trees that looked beyond saving. Life felt desolate here, even with the afternoon sun high above them, there was nothing but death here. Thick was it, the pungent smell of burned soil, those black plumes lifting into the air from the murky dark clouds that crawled over the land.

“The first blood sky in almost… sixty years? It brought the Val’Kulth with an insatiable hunger that ripped apart the hamlet of Quilshire and almost its counterpart in Eastburn.” Callen watched as Mohan cautiously pushed forward into the murky land, the plumes surround him in an ominous cloud around his ankles. Slowly he turns, brows knitted, “They came for us. Picking my people off one by one. Soldiers. Scholars. Farmers. They left my lands salted and burned… but here? I did this… to save not only my people, but also my beloved.”

I did this… It repeated in Callen’s head a few more times as he focused on the decay around them. There sat no head on that holy figure far out in the distance, but he knew it well. The chiseled look of it all, the heroic pose it stood in and yet, here she stood… so to say. Mother Kularis sat marred with dead vines and black scorch that within chipped and broken pieces of her figure, head basically in pebbles at her base. Her signature weapon that sat high above her, a blade as bright as the cosmos, gone, along with the arm that held it, and her armor virtually non-existent. She no longer stood at her former glory, however instead, only bore the scars of her saint’s uncapped power.

Chunks of stone and marble lie embedded into the trees around them in large pieces within the wood of the trees behind her as well as the obsidian of what once was the faux blade of the cosmos impaled within the thick trunk of a dead oak across the field. She was in ruins, left and forgotten by time, as a reminder of a mistake they held no control over.

“This was, what— six years ago? Has the earth no will to restore itself?”

“Not here, no. But I do hope it answered your question.”

Callen nodded, uncomfortable with the outcome, but unable to form any other coherent thought. Every other question seemed to interrupt itself, contradict and fall apart in his head before he regathered himself to notice Mohan silently walking past him.

“Shall we go? I’d like to catch a little bit of the festivities. All the good food always goes by quickly before sundown.”