The Shattered Oracle

Chapter 2 - A Vista of Worries

The sky above the city of Nesharr was aflame with the dying light of the Burning God as his last sputtering flames rippled over the great world-plane. Glowing mixtures of oranges, deep crimsons, and effervescent purples reached like giant, corruscating waves across the firmament above. In the east, the first stars were beginning to peek through the dimming halo of light that just moments ago had lit up the great celestial sea during the daylight hours.

Merithault remained motionless, gazing out and drinking in the details of the world around her. She was currently seated on the edge of an immense and aged stone slab. These ancient stones made up the trailing mountain steps that wound their way from the western edges of Nesharr below, up to the dizzying heights where the Ullthosian Sanctum was perched. She sat on the chill stone, that grew colder by the moment as the heat of Dhaum's light was steadily being drained away by the frosty night winds of the North. Her place of rest and contemplation was only a scant fifty stone steps away from the foundation of the Sanctum above. It was a short distance compared to the thousands upon thousands of weathered and cracked steps that separated her from the glittering lights of the city, several thousand feet below.

The city of Nesharr was once limited to the island of Sharrva that preoccupied a deep, mountain-fed lake at the center of the much larger isle of Oerstav Caelii. The glittering city had overgrown its limitations in recent centuries since being fed with great bridges and had begun to ramble off into the sides of the steep mountains as well as the dense forests that encircled it. Merithault remembered from her childhood, being taught by several pre-eminent sages of the Nesharite Collegium, that the isle of Sharrva and the lake that surrounded it were made from the caldera of an ancient, dormant volcano, which once stretched across all of Oerstav Caelii. There were no records of the volcano's eruption by the sages, given that it must have spent itself out long before humanity had fled to this world from the one they had forsaken so long ago.

As her eyes began to trail downward over the sheer cliff-faces of the mountains on her left and in front of her, she let her eyes fall to the shimmering lights of the city to her right. She hoped that the sages were correct, that the volcano had long since blew itself out many millenia before humanity came to this world. Should another eruption come forth from the bowels of Gehemol, the dark and heated lands below the world-plane, she would lose all that she held dear. Her blood was from the very soil that made up the island of Nesharr and the city that now stood upon it. She was raised here, and although she had reason to travel over her four decades of life, she would always grow sick, longing to return. Not only was this the land of her birth, this was the land she had founded a family upon with her husband. Three of her four children's blood was of this same soil. Should this volcano, almost forty miles in diameter, decide to one day erupt again, it would destroy her world and all she held dear within it.

Merithault continued to look out over the city below, the glittering lights seemed to grow with intensity as the fading light of the sky turned into bruised purples and deep black. The stars were revealing themselves in their entirety with even the pink and blue Hejran clouds out in the celestial sea casting their hues on the world. The distant, double-slitted eye of ever-watchful Vorthyl was slowly coming into focus over the lower hills and smaller mountains of the east. An eye made of two encircling discs of dense stars that stretched out across the celestial void and backwards into the depths of time, or so she had learned in the Collegium.

She began to wonder if her husband, Jornath, had arrived home from his work in the Nesharite Bureaus and if he or her eldest daughter Maenthrai had made dinner for the evening. Perhaps her daughter wasn't home, as the last time she had recieved a missive from her husband, he had stated she and her eldest son Serranos had been accepted into the Morranthal Collegium to the South. It was a grand place of learning, which only accepted the best and the brightest students. Maenthrai wanted to follow in her mother's footsteps and become an oracle, although not of the Order of Sharr-Vhult that came from Nesharr, but rather a new order that was beginning to form in the southern lands. Serranos, however, wanted to take up the role of Morrthaen Vhulkovatti, the wizard-knights of the capital. Both were prestigous positions and would demand much of her children. She hoped that she would still have time to finish her divinatory rituals and get back to her family before they left. It would be an empty household if when she returned, all that was left were her youngest twins. Both were always so sullen and quiet.

She continued to stare off despite noticing a minor commotion and flurry of footsteps behind her. She could hear the padding of sandaled feet on the ancient stone. A few muffled grunts as the figure dropped off a particularly high or narrow set of stairs, and a light flutter of fabric as the chilled wind blew through their robes. The figure stopped two rows of steps above where she sat. She didn't turn to look at the figure that approached her, she knew fully who it was.

"Being moody again?" The voice was female and had a sharp, high-pitched cadence. The figure sat down on the steps beside and a bit behind that of Merithault. "Primarch Ollianes told me to get you. The rituals are almost prepared." The voice trailed off and took on a slight echo as the other woman creened her neck to aim her head and voice back up to the sanctum above. "You did take a sacred bath, right?"

"Yes, Bruhjiet. I did." Merithault kept her head forward, turning slightly to the right, as if to further ignore the presence of the woman talking to her. She raised her eyes back up to the stars. The slightest crimson glow of the Bloody Goddess, Celanna, was beginning to peek over the forested hills of the north-east. "All nine agonizing hours of purification. Bathing. Washing. Incense blown in my face. More bathing..."

"Good. It's necessary." Bruhjiet turned her head back to Merithault, and her voice became louder and more directed as she did so. The voice hurt Merithault's ears. It wasn't an unpleasant sort of voice. It was young, naive, distracted, and filled with a slight tinge of entitlement. She simply preferred silence to the shrill vibrations of other people's vocal cords.

Merithault didn't turn or acknowledge the other woman's words in any form. She continued to stare out into the stars above. These could very well be her last moments alive, if anything were to go wrong with the rituals and with her act of divination. In several more hours she would endure even more rituals, a bit more purification, and then be guided in great pomp and ceremony past the monastery that many called the Ullthosian Sanctum. She would travel up along another disused staircase even higher into the mountains to the west. There she would follow a winding path, alone, through a cave complex and down into the Ullthosian Temple. The stories she had heard of the place during her studies when she was younger, as well as the speechs she endured from Primarch Ollianes over the last few weeks made her blood run cold. Few returned from the depths of the place where the Secret Master behind the fabric of reality, the hidden god, Ullthos pierced into this world. Some of those who had entered the true temple to learn from the Secret Master died outright upon the threshold. Others had wished for death throughout their lives as their sanity had been shattered into pieces. A rare few others had come back irrevocably and inhumanly twisted. The rarest of all came back as the true seers of all things. Merithault hoped for the later option, yet still feared the other possibilities.

Every moment that Merithault could spend procrastinating her eventual fate was a moment she felt was well-spent. She wanted to drink in all she could of the world around her before she would be thrust through into the supernal realms of pure essence. Thrown beyond the realms of time, space, or human notions of sanity. She wanted to be left alone, her only companions being her thoughts, her emotions, and her memories of her loved ones. Instead she was being pestered by a young woman half her age, who probably didn't even understand the full ramifications of this rare and fated event. Who couldn't grasp through common empathy just how severe this situation might be for another person. Merithault didn't need to draw upon her powers of telepathy to know that for young Bruhjiet, this was an event of purely academic curosity.

"I can see the old coot up in the doorway." Bruhjiet had turned her head back to the sanctum. A stiff breeze almost seemed to carry the last words she spoke away on the wind. "Yeah, he's frowning now. He's got his hands curled up in those knots he aways does when he's being impatient. We best get back." The young woman reached out to put a thin and delecate hand on Merithault's robe-covered shoulder.

Merithault gave a long sigh, pulling herself up to her feet, and ending the exersion with a slight groan. She let Bruhjiet's hand fall away and she was glad for the physical contact being broken. She gave a few long breaths and tried to burn the beautiful evening vista into her mind's eye. She hoped, once again, that her husband remembered to make dinner for the twins. They were still growing and if he was exhausted from his work as a law-keeper for the Bureau, he could become scatter-brained.

"Come on, Meri!" Bruhjiet gave a whine from a few steps up. "This is a very auspicious night. It's not every night that someone gets to go into the Ullthosian Temple." She continued to drone on as Merithault turned away from the vista, closing her eyes for a moment and making her way slowly up the remaining stairs behind the young woman. "You've been chosen, even though you're only a Haethrex Secundi. You're the first one to step into that place in over one-hundred and eight years." Merithault raised a hand to pinch the bridge of her nose. She continued the rest of the stairs in a strained silence. "Just imagine what you'll see in there. I wish I could be with you. You know?" Bruhjiet turned to stare right into Merithault's face as she approached the doorway of the sanctum. "It's a great honor."