She couldn’t quite tell how long it was, in the end, but the more complete the body paint became, the more bearable it was. The curious feeling could now be compared to her upper half being submerged in warm water that happened to also contain swarms of infinitesimally tiny creatures.

“Alright, turn back around and hold your arms out so I can put the pelt on you. Now the difficult part…” said the norseman, standing and grasping the pelt by its edges.

When his fingers wrapped around its bloodied, matted edges and he uttered a single, commanding word, it was almost as if the pelt came alive. Indeed, its milky-white eyes cleared, pupils dilating and contracting, aimlessly searching about as its fur stood on-end. With audible exertion in his voice, he heaved the shuddering carpet of dead meat up and placed it squarely on Zel’s back.

The stinking inner layer of skin stuck to her in a manner not unlike fog-infused fabric would, the beast’s hollowed-out skull sitting atop her head such that she felt its foremost fangs upon her forehead. Wherever the hide touched her, the scuttling sensation intensified to the point of approaching the feeling of a deadened limb regaining sensation, thousands of tiny needles poking and prodding.

As she looked herself over, noticing that the bear’s hollow paws now sat over the backs of her hands - its claws somehow still clinging on to the meat - she also realized that a subtle, greyish glow began to spread through the network of glyphs that covered her, starting exactly where the bear’s pelt had been placed, and with it, the thrumming.

It seemed that Jorfr had noticed, as well, considering the mixture of relief and urgency in his eyes and demeanor, despite the stone-solid, expressionless cliff face that was the rest of his face. He sprung into action and grabbed the other brush, using it to fill in the gaps in his own body paint and repeating incantations that she’d heard before. He hastily grabbed one of the other bottles from the side of the altar, pouring its syrupy, sharp smelling contents over the great slab.

“Now, I’ve only done this twice before, and it’s been different every time, so I can’t exactly say how it’ll go…” he said, taking great care to preserve about a quarter of the bottle’s contents, half of which he drank himself before he held the bottle out for Zelsys. She kicked the bottle back, ignoring the bitter, bracing taste and smell, followed by a powerful burning as it went down her throat.

Jorfr swallowed his mouthful only after she did, picking up a much smaller bottle, whose contents he also downed with a pained grimace, before taking up a curved, roughly-hammered knife whose shape and sing-song tones both belied its origins as a starmetal hrivn.

He gently dragged the tip of the blade along specific lines of his body paint, cutting simplistic skin-deep runes into the outsides of his forearms and his shoulders, at first murmuring in the norse tongue. A faint light began to spread through his body paint, ghostly mirages of what looked to be swarms of tiny lights coming into vision above the altar. Then, when he finished cutting himself, he placed the blade upon the altar, handle facing towards Zelsys. His blood spread out through the puddle of herbal concoction unnaturally quickly, forming strange patterns .

“The symbols don’t matter,” he said, blood dripping down his arms and into the grass. ”The intent of sacrificing something to the land does.”

This knowledge in mind, Zel made shallow cuts on the same spots tracing out the first symbols that came to mind, rooting around in the recesses of her memory in doing so. Whether she remembered them or just made them up on the spot, she wasn’t sure, but it seemed that genuinely holding the intention in mind had been sufficient, for she saw the self-same glowing swarms coming into vision around herself, spreading out in flowing currents through the air.

She returned the bloodied blade to the altar, and her blood, too, spread out through the puddle.

At last, Jorfr placed his hands together, intertwining his fingers and placing the tips of his thumbs together and exhaled a gust of hot breath, breathing in deeply as his facial features suddenly hardened and the blood upon his arms froze.

“Spirits of the land, ye who drive the world upon its axis and churn the earth underfoot!” he proclaimed, and lights now swarmed all throughout the air, a gust of wind from seemingly nowhere blowing these swarms towards them. Yet, though it felt like wind, neither the grass on the ground nor the fur on the bear’s pelt moved.

“Ye who serve as lifeblood within the veins of the earth!” he proclaimed again, and the grass around him was enveloped in hoarfrost, swarms of what Zel presumed to be earthly spirits rising from underfoot and approaching through the air alike, the spiritual flow intensifying yet more.

“Come forth, for this child of Man seeketh to draw upon the land, as is our usurped right!”

“Come forth and grant us eyes, that we might witness the blessed waters from which we seek to draw!’ he finally commanded, yet more spirits swarming about them until suddenly, they were no longer in that meadow.

The lights surrounding them became overwhelming to the senses, the thrumming sensation all-consuming, until there was a non-physical sensation that would best be described like being sucked through the eye of a needle, all at once, without any friction or resistance. A thunderclap of the soul, by Zel’s closest reference point, though that could perhaps be attributed to the constant roar that echoed from everywhere and nowhere at once, simultaneously infinitely loud and quiet enough to comfortably speak over.

She blinked a few times and saw that they now resided within an empyrean abyss not unlike the vision she had witnessed within the Dungeon Core, an inconceivable river containing every colour both conceivable and inconceivable raging just below, within arm’s reach.