Snippet #1444693

Road into Laeral

Hollow footsteps traced the ash seared ground. Body cold yet skin unfeeling to the gasping breaths of a dying breeze. Everything was dead. She stood naked in the failing sunlight, everything a shade of gray. Golden eyes peirced in the mottled landscape, alone in their own briliant color yet weary with exhaustion. Steady breathing slipped in and out yet she could not feel the own rise and fall of her chest or the air slipping through her nostrils. Hands clenched on a bleached white skull, ornate tusks curling from the upper jaw as a single flaw stretched across it. Another dead and gone. It fell from her fingers even when she was unaware of its touch, breaking on the ground at her feet. A glance down revealed her sole were on broken and scattered bnes. Clouds obscured the day. Silence ruled everything and muted the sounds of her own life. Before her lay Gia, broken and defeated. Lost.

Movement swept around behind. Figures, shadows they all seemed the same here. Her eyes turned to follow them, searching for life in the path of death. Blank faces met her sight and she turned. Rows of children, faces erased to blank slates and stretching out like fields of wheat. They faced her yet no eyes matched hers. Something was in her hands again, head dipping she looked at smoke gray hands covered in a black fluid that stained her skin. Nestled between her hands was an infant. Even with its limbs missing it seemed to writhe and cry, no sound to be given. Bloody tears slipped past snow white cheeks, even the blood seemed black. The clanking of chains muttered in the distance and her head turned towards it, hands dropping the baby gone and forgotten.

The chains clanked a second time, closer but always just out of sight. She turned and her golden eyes found a shadow. Humanoid in form though dark, head and body twisted to the shape of some kind of dragonoid. The dark black slithering away to show dirty crimson, the color of dried blood. Its lowered head rose, red eyes glaring from within its skull, hands lifted before it as a long coiled chain swung without the touch of wind. Her eyes dropped lower to see talons on its feet, and beneath those rested the mutliated body of Talik. Following it down the one body changed to that of a child and then a family, the farther down she looked the more bodies piled beneath it. The chain clanked a third time and she felt it.

The cold kiss of an edge gliding around her neck the edge gently itching her flesh, yearning for it to twitch or move across it. She heard only the intake of her breath as the hook jerked through her neck...

---

Illeyssa let her eyelids slip open as she exhaled. The cold air greeting her as her body shivered. Eyes looking dully at the casting stones before her. She had delved deeply this time, her body slow to wake from her walk on the other side. She slowly became aware of a presence to her right and turned, eyes lifting up to the smooth and concerned face of Silvyar. She read the face of her apprentice for a moment, noting the shiver in the girl's skin from the lack ow warmth, hands wrapped across her chest, fingers curled tightly with worry.

"I was walking for that long, huh?" She spoke without need of an answer and glanced up to the backs of her guard.

Gormun and Brack, two brothers who were skilled and strong. They had been under her watch since they were boys, still learning of her abilities when Gia wasn't just a bad dream. Both had grown strong in their time, their tusks sprouting from their mouths were wide and strong, Brack's left missing its curved tip from a fight. Their forms were in treated skins, a thick leather strap pulled diagonally across their shoulder. Gormun, the eldest and slightly taller of the two, had a wide sheath attached to it, the handle of his make-shift claymore waiting for his green skinned hand. Brack's had no sheath only a strap, wrapped around and supporting the a war hammer and battle axe, both smaller than normal but ready to be wielded one in either hand. Both stood watching ahead, and would have for as long as she was in her Premonition State, for it was punishable to glance upon her body when she was not fully in this world.

Illeyssa exhaled calmly and stretched out her left hand to sweep up the stones, moving them into their familiar cloth bag and placing the string back around her neck. Silvyar rose just before she did, slender arms helping her up though she did not need it. The girl meant well, though she was nervous, her face and actions clear enough about that. She was the youngest apprentice yet only she was asked to follow her in this travel. Still a year or two under her second decade, she was the only apprentice to even show a spark in the skill of premonitions.

"Silvyar. Do you know where we are?"

"We are in the Jurial Planes, near a place known as Laeral, Shawoman." The girl's voice was direct, almost like a soldier answering an officer, though it didn't take a sharp mind like Illeyssa's to read the respect in it.

"So we are..." Illeyssa didn't smile though she stretched a bit, feeling the physical attachment of her body to her mind once more, and the cold feel in the air drifting on her skin. Motioning for the other to her side she walked up to her two guards, soft fingers resting on the tall shoulder of Gormun, "It is time to move on to the town Gormun... Where is Durmond?"

"I do not know Shawoman. He moved off as you walked the planes of foresight." The tall orc looked at her then, eyes looking just below her own gaze, not wanting to show challenge to her authority.

"I see."

She nodded her head and moved past, Silvyar barely a step behind her as the brothers moved into their places, the younger at the front the older in the back, both drawing their weapons as eyes searched for unknown danger.