The Shattered Oracle

2 - An Astral Sojourn (Revised)

"Thraya. Thraya. I can't sleep."

It took a moment for her to open her eyes. She lifted a hand to rub the sand out of her right eye. The voice came from her left; a small shadow perched over her bed and with its arms outstretched, vigorously shaking her at her shoulders.

"Thraya. Wake up."

With her left hand, she swiped the arms from her and sat up in her bed. It took a moment for her consciousness to fully enter her body. The small shadow began to poke at her exposed ribs to get her attention. She quickly lowered her bed-shirt which had bunched up around her chest while sleeping.

"What in Gehemol do you want?"

Her voice was curt, whispered, and groggy. It must have been the middle of the night. No light shone through her open window at the other end of the room. The room was cast in shadow save for a tiny and guttering candle that the shadow child had brought into her room and placed on her wooden desk by the door.

"I had a bad dream. I-"

"Serranos, it was just a dream. Go back to sleep."

She turned away from her brother in the bed and began to fluff up her pillow. She could feel herself give a groan of exhaustion before she pivoted to lay back down. The poking at her ribs had ceased and now was replaced by two clammy hands firmly on her exposed thigh, trying to rock her back and forth.

"It was a thaekkuz. I think one got into the house."

Thraya could feel her eyes rolling beneath her heavy and dry lids. She knew her brother was just bothered by the stories she had been telling him earlier, and the games they used to play. She knew the very second she let him in on her nightly game of courage, that he would work himself up until he would become a nuisance.

"There's no thaekkuz revenant in the house, Serranos. If there were, I'm sure father would have dealt with it by now. Or we'd all be dead. Go back to bed."

"You don't understand, Thraya. It isn't a normal one." He paused for a moment, trying to gather his thoughts. "Not some shambling undead thing from the catacombs below the house. No. It was more like a shade; a ghulg."

"We live in Neshran, Serranos. You know, home of the Sharr-vhult oracles. Since mom is one." She got back up into a sitting position and turned to make eye contact with the boy. "Oracles are pretty good at getting rid of ghulgs. If there was even a single restless shade in the city, the Sharr-vhult and the Order of Lanterns would have dealt with it. What in the world-plane do you think you or I can do about it?"

The boy bit his lip. His eyes were wide with fear and he kept glancing around the room at the shadows given life by the guttering candle-light. He stood with his legs taut and kept padding on the floor with his right foot. He always did that when he was legitimately worried about something.

"It's more than that."

"It's always 'more than that' with you, Serranos." Thraya propped her head up in her hands while her elbows dug into her thighs. She was so tired that she wanted to scream. "Fine."

She pushed him away from her bed and swung her legs over the side. She moved forward and lifted herself up onto her tired and shifting legs while tugging the ends of her bed-shirt below her rump, to cover her thighs.

Her brother moved toward her desk to pick up the light he had inside of a candle-holder. He stopped right before her bedroom door to stare at her. His free hand went up to his mouth so he could bite a single fingernail.

"Well!"

The word escaped from her lips louder than she would have liked. She didn't want to wake up her father or the twins. Both her and Serranos would get in trouble due to the ruckus. She prodded him with her long and bony index finger poking at his forehead.

"Take me to where you saw this half-shade, half-thaekkuz nightmare of yours."

Both of them made their way out of her room. Serranos opened her door up fully, taking a moment to stare back at Thraya and make sure she hadn't gone back to bed. His eyes were still wide and wild. He slid into the hallway outside.

Serranos' footsteps were quiet as feathers falling on the wooden floor of the hallway. He moved cautiously and deliberately, making sure that every single footfall never hit any of the creaky spots of the floor. Thraya, however, was tired and clumsy. Each footfall was a loud slap of flesh against wood and every other step seemed to set off an alarm of creaks and moans from within the bowels of the old house.

Serranos stopped for a moment, halfway down the hallway, and one of his perpetual cow-licks of auburn hair on his head managed to unfurl and stand up at attention. His head shifted from one direction to the next and he held his breath for a moment.

Thraya gave him a light slap across the back of his shoulder blades and took a few steps to get beside him. She didn't feel or sense anything in the hallway. She looked where her brother had looked and only saw the darkness of the hall ahead, turning towards a foyer were the stairs down to the main level were. On either side of them were the doorways for the twin's room which was currently shut tight, and the doorway for Serranos' room which was partially ajar.

"There's nothing here. What's wrong."

"This is where I saw it. I had my door open. Slightly. As I always do. I opened my eyes and saw a shadow glide down the hallway."

Serranos stopped. He gave a long shiver at recalling the details in his mind. Thraya, although not fully adept in her studies of Haeth to pierce his thoughts, could feel the empathetic vibrations of fear come off of her brother. She now knew what he had seen was either real or was a convincing enough illusion in his mind to convince him it was.

"It went from far down." He stopped and pointed a finger behind them towards Thraya's room. "I think by mom and dad's room. Or maybe the side stairs up to the third floor. I don't know."

Serranos paused for a moment. His eyes began to well up with tears which glittered in the moonlight filtering in from a window down by their parent's door. He held out a single hand, his index finger pointing right at the doorway.

"It followed the hallway. It didn't make a sound. Not that I heard, anyway. It stopped by my door for a second. Blotted out all the light. Then turned and went into the twin's room."

"Did you check on the twins before you woke me up?"

"No." Serranos paused and could see the concern and anger welling up in his sister. "I was afraid."

Thraya took two steps towards the twin's door. The door itself was shut tight and hadn't seemed to be disturbed at all. Surely if a thaekkuz was in the house, it wasn't smart enough to close a door behind itself. Shades, however, had no use for such physical barriers and would have passed right through it.

She placed her ear on the warm wood of the door so as to hear inside. The room beyond was silent. There was no sound of any disruption at all. She let her hand take hold of the brass knob and begin to slowly turn it.

"Watch for father. If he catches us sneaking into Jhulessi and Nesbinet's room, he'll tan our hides."

Serranos' eyes went wide. The earlier tears were sucked back into his sockets. He turned and stared at the end of the hallway as a sentry. He lifted his other hand to cover the candlelight.

Thraya turned back to the door and having felt a click of the knob, began to softly lift and push the door on its hinges. One of the doorjambs gave out a quiet groan under the strain.

Once the door was open sufficiently and no disruption seemed to come from either her father's room or inside of the twin's room, Thraya released the door and took a single step inside. The haunting white light of Ishep filtered in through the bare window at the end of the room. On either side of the room were small wooden beds, each containing a gently snoring occupant.

Thraya pressed her luck and took two more steps into the room. She was now between both beds filled with their slumbering occupants. She leaned into Nesbinet's bed and cautiously felt the bed covers over his chest. She could feel his breathing in quiet little bursts. She pivoted on her hips and lightly touched Jhulessi's forehead with the palm of her hand. The young girl's temperature felt normal.

She turned on her feet, lightly creeping back to the doorway. She could see Serranos glancing from her to her father's doorway nervously. She gave a grin and the thought that they might actually get in trouble for sneaking into their sibling's room.

She took another slow and wide step to avoid any kind of creaks or groans from the floor. Her hand grasped the carved ball of wood on the end of Nesbinet's bed. Obviously whatever Serranos had seen was enough to scare him, but the twins were safe, the house was secure, and the evening's imaginary phantoms would soon pass once everyone got back to sleep.

Once her foot struck the rug-covered floor without a sound she looked back up to see Serranos staring directly at her. His eyes were wide with fear and his pupils had dilated to pure blackness. She felt her eyebrow perk up at this, wondering if her father had somehow gotten the drop on them.

Thraya could feel a chill coming from behind her, maybe a draft from the window. As she thought about the window, she soon noticed that the room she was inside of had suddenly gone completely dark. The only light she could continue to walk by was the flickering candle Serranos held in his hand. Surely a cloud hadn't passed in front of the Night's Lantern so quickly.

She noticed her brother in the hallway shaking now. Clear wax began to jostle out of the metal candleholder and fall in droplets upon his bare feet. He didn't notice the heat or the pain. He continued to stand and shake. She looked at his face and saw him mouth out the words "Right. Behind. You."

Thraya immediately turned on the balls of her feet, heedless now of what noise she might make. Something was indeed behind her. Whatever it was was large enough to block out all of the window's light. Whatever presence was there was beginning to leech the warmth from the room, possibly to coalesce with more of a form.

She turned to see the face of her mother as a shade. Her mother's auburn hair was the color of blood. The hair itself seemed like gushes and rivulets of half-coagulated blood flowing from her head and over her shoulders.

Her mother's face was white like alabaster and transparent enough that the bones of her skull were able to be seen beneath blackened veins. Her eyes were black as pitch, seeming to draw any light or warmth into them to be devoured.

The clothing that covered her mother's form was a mess of tattered, gray robes. She looked as if her oracle robes of station had been shredded by wild beasts or by decades of neglect. Her feet never touched the ground and her form seemed to hover as if suspended from the very fabric of darkness itself.

Her mother's arms reached out for her, each of her hands were soaked up to the forearm with blood. The blood was mixtures of old stains and brilliant freshness. Her bony fingers, more like a skeleton's than the hands she remembered pushing her bangs out of her face so often growing up, reached out towards her as if ready to seize around her neck. Long and silvery claws, like the stuff of mercury, danced and curled as her hands reached forth.

At once the jaws of her mother's shade opened wide — wider than any human skull could allow — and a great piercing cry erupted into the room. The cry itself was beyond description; being a mixture of incredible agony and rage all at once.

Thraya noticed that as her mother began to wail, so to did the twins who had now sat up straight in their beds. Each set of the twin's eyes had gone white as if turned fully in their sockets. Their mouths gaped open at a painful angle. The darkness flowing over her mother's form seemed to reach out and embrace each of the twin's upon their bed; ready at any moment to lift them up.

"What in Gehemol!"

The voice from behind Thraya was that of her father. She turned her head sideways from the fearful shade in front of her just enough to see him enter the room from her periphery. He soon went quiet with fear.

She could hear Serranos' quiet sobs from outside of the door. She let her head turn back to the looming shade before her. She could feel the energy inside of her crackling to life. She wasn't trained yet in how to offensively attack with her will, but the energy was there and her intent to protect her family felt like enough.

She faced the shade completely now. Her hands were curled into tight fists. She could feel her nails piercing the skin of her palms. The energy inside of her welled up to a level she had never felt before.

The shades' wailing face, filled with fangs and blackness was a mere inch from her eyes. She looked up to take in the hollow blackness of her mother's gaze. The energy inside of the room felt as if lightning would go off at any moment.

"Fuck off! You undead bitch!"

Tendrils of energy snapped out from Thraya's body and went into a whirlwind of lashes about the room. The twin's beds lifted from the ground and began to assault the floor and walls with repeated thumps. Several of the twins toys that were on the floor flew into the air and began to throw themselves at the shade-form before her.

Serranos' candlelight outside the room began to burn with the intensity of a rogue firework. A plume of flame welled up and sent the young boy scurrying to the other side of the hall.

The glass of the window shattered and the wooden frame gave in under the telekinetic force that Thraya assaulted it with. Shards began to whip around in a frenzied whirlwind, shredding at the shadow substance of the demon before her. The wail of the shade and the twins turned from one of rage to one of pain.

With an immense force that seemed to rip the paint from the walls and rupture the very wooden beams of the house, Thraya created a telekinetic shockwave before her that cast the shade out of the window. The force was enough to send everyone in the room deaf for a few moments. The air in the room seemed to be quelled along with the shade who was blasted out the window. The walls on either window seemed to rupture forth under the continued strain.

The shade was gone into the night outside. Eventually, the sound of the room returned and the wail ceased. Thraya could still feel the tendrils of energy whipping throughout the room, ready to go after the threat should it reappear. Every bit of her attention was focused on the energy rippling out of her. She felt like a god.

"Thraya!"

"Thraya!" The voice repeated a second time.

"For the love of the gods old and new. Thraya! It's gone! You can stop! While the house is still standing!"

The voice was the frantic cries of her father behind her. As soon as his words got through to her mind, she could feel the power in her ebb and wane. The tendrils faded away within a moment and she felt herself slump to her knees on the floor of the room.

Her father's frantic voice was accompanied by the soft and scared cries of the twins. She turned to look at them, with barely enough energy to turn her head.

Her father knelt down with the twins. Jhulessi was sobbing and grabbing at his chest. Nesbinet had his hands around his father's side and neck and was wailing with fear. Serranos stood behind his father staring at Thraya with wild and wide eyes. Her brother held her eyes for a long moment of silence. She couldn't understand if the look on his face was one of fear or amazement.

"Why is momma trying to kill us?"

The voice was from Nesbinet. His words were innocent and filled to the brim with fear.

"Why did momma get inside of us?"

Jhulessi's voice wondered as she clutched at her father's shirt and let the tears flow.

"I don't know. I don't think that was Merithault, children. There is no way. Your mother would never harm any of you."

The room went quiet for a moment after Thraya's father said those words. It seemed like everyone in the family had to take a moment to realize just what had happened. Surely their mother hadn't of died and become a ghulg. So, if she was alive, then what in the world-plane had just visited them?

"Remember what your mom said before she left for the Sanctum. She loves you. There is no way that thing was her."

Thraya turned away from her father and slowly got up to her feet. She took a few steps forward, her feet getting cut by the broken glass and shards of jagged wood. She didn't care about the pain. She didn't care about the blood. She continued forth until she could press her hand on the ruptured wall of her sibling's room.

She stared out into the darkness of the night. The haunting white light of Ishep lit up the rest of Neshran in shades of blues and purples. She lifted her eyes up, following the distant lights of the Thousand Stairs of Sorrow that made their way from the farthest edge of the city, up into the mountains that encircled its limits. She held her eyes on the twinkling, far-off torches of the Ullthosian Sanctum far into the peaks of the Auhl-athum Mountains. There, supposedly, is where her mother was undertaking her rituals and trials as an oracle.

"Thraya don't get too close to the edge. Oh, for Tolesh's sake, you've cut up your feet. Come back, Thraya."

Her father beckoned her but his hands were filled with the others. Thraya stood at the edge defiantly and continued to gaze out into the night.

"Serranos. Jhulessi. Nesbinet."

Thraya's voice was like a whisper. As she spoke, each of the children went quiet and stared out at their sister.

"No matter what. If that was mom, or not. Remember this..."

The room went silent. Her father's jaw went slack at how easily the children seemed to take heed of their sister over him.

"If that was mother. I will kill her. If that wasn't her, I'll find out what this thing was and I will end it."

Thraya's father took a step back towards the doorway. Fear and a strange sort of pride began to well up inside of him. He didn't understand what kind of strange connection the children had beyond the peculiarities of their mother's blood, but they were united by Thraya's words.

In unison, the children gave a single silent nod.

***

Maenthrai stood alone with her thoughts, her back turned to the door her dear friend had just left through. He kept her eyes transfixed on the city beyond the balcony doors. The pain that welled up inside of her was becoming too much for her to handle. The candle on her writing desk had blown out in a gust of telekinetic power she must have let loose in the last few moments.

Having Jephrin leave her side was the same kind of separation she endured when she had left Kaisos and her children in Morrthault City a few years ago. She felt her shoulders slump, giving into a long and belabored sigh.

She truly was alone now and although she trusted the remaining Azhemyra and her student-oracles with her very life, none of them knew the internal guilt and sorrow she held within her. She dared not confide in any of them, although she knew well that several of her more adept students could pierce her thoughts during her weaker moments. She didn't confide in them not because they wouldn't listen, but because they shouldn't have to endure the burden that was hers to carry, alone. The last remaining heartstring she had in this ruined and forgotten place was her brother, Serranos.

He was never the same after they had both heard the news of their family's slaughter at the hands of their mother. The news had come to them almost two decades ago.

Serranos was always a very introverted and emotionally sensitive person, even as a child. After the news, however, he turned cold and distant. Maenthrai felt like she constantly had to walk on egg shells around him — wearing a mask of false joviality — being frozen forever as the teenage sister who tried to keep him safe. She couldn't be serious around him. There always had to be some sort of playful sibling rivalry between them. She kept it up so he could stay sane; so that he could keep one last thing from his childhood, to remind him that not all of this world had become doom and gloom.

She would have to see him sometime in the evening. She could fee the energies building and bustling throughout the city. She knew it would be a matter of time before she heard a knock at her door. There would be some of Thaellon's students, ready to tell her the news that she could feel through the aethyric energies around her. That the artifacts she had commissioned and researched would finally be finished.

She began to feel a little bit giddy at the realization that within just a few hours she would have to prepare herself through arduous rituals of cleansing before she took the same ritualistic journey through time and space that her mother had done at the Ullthosian Temple so long ago. She would endure her own visions, just as her mother had, but these would not be granted by some alien intelligence from before the days of humanity's arrival into the world; the visions would instead be focused on what her mother endured during that time in her own visions. She would finally find out why her mother had turned into such a monster then, and what motivated her to slaughter not just her own family, but all of those people — innocent or not — who lived on the island that Maenthrai once called home.

With a push on the rusted balcony doors, creaking loudly as she did so, Maenthrai allowed herself to step out onto the crumbling balcony beyond her room. The ancient precipice gave a groan beneath her feet, but she felt that it could still hold her weight. Most of the balcony was still intact, with its finely chiseled railings being able to be used as a support. The far right corner of the balcony had given way some time ago — perhaps years, or more likely centuries — in the past. Stress fractures were spilling out from that spot like spider's webs, yet the ancient hands who had constructed this place, using their intricate magics and artisan skill, ensured it could last a few centuries longer.

She took the rusted metal trim and marble-topped railing in her hands. The shifting and churning lights from the rivers of molten rock, the magickal braziers illuminating the city, and the glimmering reflected light from the ice encircling the city lit up her form. It took a few moments for her pupils to get used to all of the stimulation bombarding them at once. The shifting light, the deepest shadows, and all of the complex details that comprised the sprawling city around her.

Her eyes surveyed the subterranean realm as she stood like a silent sentinel on the balcony. For a brief moment, a chill wind blew through the buildings near where she stood. That whispering breeze, seeming to carry the voices of the dead, began to tug at the gray robes that covered her. She let her eyes fall to the shadowed streets below. Some of them were littered with debris and others remained almost frozen in time, looking as if they had just been cleaned by diligent city workers the night before. The streets were like twisted rivers of shadow, cutting swaths through a labyrinth adorned with expertly hewn stone buildings. The diverse kinds of walls, roofs, and buttresses of the city wound around, trailing off to the walls of deep ice, or over highroads that gave way to rivers of molten rock slowly flowing below.

Pitched windows and exquisitely fine chiseled reliefs seemed to play out a feverish sort of dance using the extreme contrasts of wane light and oppressive shadow. The details of rusted or decaying metals — once great works of art — throughout the forms of the buildings served as yet another reminder of the immense ages the city had remained abandoned. The silent and darkened windows peered into the interiors of the neglected and empty buildings. The only sounds echoing through the city was that of the occasional rush of wind, the creaking of some metal doors or windows, and the very rare crash of ice falling from one of the encircling walls to hiss as soon as it becomes engulfed in the extreme heat of the magma below.

The entire vista was an oddly otherworldly one, where each detail felt like a spiral into the supernal realms beyond the mundane physical. The haunting scape of a ruined city called out to be the domain where the shades of the dead would dwell. The dazzling lights and the deepening shadows seemed to pull at the consciousness of the onlooker and send them rushing into an empyrean land beyond the physical senses. Errant thoughts began to string together like a macabre symphony inside of Maenthrai's mind. Each thought pulling into that distant, ephemeral realm — to a place of unrestrained thought and energy — existing parallel to the chained world of flesh and blood. All of the sensations seemed to activate the powers within her — seductively calling to her and goading her to reach out beyond her body — to use the strange powers she had been given through her blood.

It was only a few moments before she gave into that whispered longing, completely. She felt alone in this place, haunted by the shadows not just of the city's past, but her own past as well. The shades of the restless dead seemed to whisper into her ears, inviting her to join them in the vault-like halls beneath the earth, or in the echoed realms beyond the ken of the living. She felt homesick, not just for the members of her family that she had lost, but for the land that was taken from her so long ago. She wanted to return there, even if only for a moment.

She would do so, using the powers she had focused during her studies an oracle. She would reach beyond the physical realm and perceive the lands beyond. She would use her spiritual self to travel that distance — back to her home — to see what now remained of it. She might be able to gather for herself some sense of closure at long last, now that her travails were close to completion. She would remain distant, however, as even in the relative safety of the spiritual realms, the monster that hunted her had the powers to find her. She would ride to that place, but she would diffuse the trail of her essence before returning. It was a risky act, but she couldn't hold back any longer. She closed her eyes and subsumed herself into the emotions and energies building up inside of her.

Maenthrai felt her mind shift from overwhelming emotion to that of a quickly focused state. She began to pull the ephemeral substance of her soul from the corporeal anchor of her physical self. Silvery tendrils of quintessential and aethyric energies trailed between her higher self and her lower one, eventually snapping or cracking with the sound of miniature bolts of lightning under the strain of her will. The senses of her body were becoming like a distant vibration as her consciousness lifted itself upwards, now free of the entropic gravity that belonged to the physical world.

The crumbling balcony that her mortal coil still stood upon was fading below her as she lifted herself higher. The city below her changed within her perspective, from one who was trapped within the labyrinthine streets gazing upon the world with the limitations of eyes, to one who soared above them like a bird on the wing, seeing beyond the limitations of light. She could perceive the patterns of the streets, buildings, and molten rivers below. With her sight no longer limited by her body, she could also see the dancing flickers of energy moving throughout the city. Some of those flickers moved along like the soft, twinkling glow of fireflies during a warm evening in the woods nearby Neshran City. Other sources of energy streamed through the city like glowing wyrms on a predatory hunt. Even more sources of energy seemed like stuttering echoes of dimming blues and purples that played out moments from the city's ancient past; these echoes trapped within the very vibrations of the dense and eldritch stones that comprised the city, itself.

She turned the focus of her ephemeral perceptions upwards, seeing the vast and vaunted roof of icy rock that served as a shadowed firmament to the realm below. This darkened wall moved towards her with ever increasing speed. There was no impact as her soul flew into the stone, metals, and earthy minerals of the barrier. She continued to float upwards, faster with each moment, multiplying her rate of ascent. It was only in the breadth of time that it would take for a living person to take a gasp of air that she saw herself pull free of the earth and rise into the atmosphere beyond.

Her continued ascent soon swung from upwards momentum to a forward thrust. Jagged peaks covered with snow and ice began to sweep past her ghostly feet. Vast lakes, fjords, and lochs of steaming glacial waters streamed beneath her as her speed continued to increase. In this existence, there was no exertion of body or force of strength, simply the limitations of thought and the force of will.

A few wisps of morning cloud passed away underneath Maenthrai as she continued to soar. Warm air moving eastward from the Heartsblood Sea was beginning to mix with the frigid ais flowing down from Issautha and the Kethyran Reaches in the North, creating blankets of thin clouds. Eventually, the clouds would settle, lowering down to be raked at by the jagged peaks of the Loch of Flame below. Their mists would soon become a heavy snowfall by the evening hours. It reminded Maenthrai that her body was still trapped within the warm confines of the earth, now almost a hundred miles away. She continued to push forward through more dense clouds, a few able to block more than half of the Burning God's celestial light.

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.

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.

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.

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.