Archon of Strife: Segment Ten

There was a stray flicker of sunlight moving up and down Kael’s face as the branch keeping him from basking in radiance shifted in the wind. It was the kind of atmosphere that one only dreams about; the heat of the day had progressed past its zenith into the softer warmth of the evening with just enough left from the bronze, fading sun to make the occasional breeze welcome. The trees swayed and rustled their leaves in a smooth rhythm, raining down their soothing music upon him in waves augmented by the smell of lilacs drifting off the bushes surrounding each tree trunk. Kael lay amidst it all, taking it in and feeling at the same time that he had nothing to owe or repay; just being there to appreciate it was the greatest return he could give. While he sat on a stone table at the center of the tranquility he pondered why everything was so different now. He knew it was her doing - that everything had been changed by her influence and even this retreat from the world was of her making, but looking back upon how he used to be made him wonder why he ever let it happen. He was irreversibly different now, a better being than he had been, but how had she managed to get past what he had been before to change him to what he was now? She truly was incredible.

Then Kael looked down at one of his hands and furrowed his brow at what he saw: where his fingernails should’ve been there were instead long, claw-like versions, some over an inch long. "These aren’t my hands - what is this?" Suddenly Kael began to question what he had been thinking about and where he was instead of just accepting it. "Who is the person I’ve been thinking about, what happened after the cavern, where is Sarina?" Kael began to panic as he asked himself these questions and the sky darkened in what seemed like a response to his change in mood. The breeze that had been rustling the leaves grew into sudden and violent gusts moving in unpredictable patterns and the jagged forms of lightning strikes flared at random intervals on the horizon. Everything continued getting worse by exponentially more severe degrees for another minute as Kael tore about the grove in search of anyone or anything that could help him figure out what was going on until he finally saw her.

A woman’s face looked up from smelling one of the lilac bushes near the table he had started on, acting as if she had been standing there all along. Kael ran the twenty feet back to the table from where he had been ravaging some of the bushes around a tree trunk without even knowing what he was looking for, slowing down as he neared the table once again until the table and several strides was all that separated them. When he looked at her the weather immediately calmed and a slow melody played out in his mind, something with a slow piper and a sitar moving in a relaxed and calm rhythm.

Every now and then a languid horn would issue from the depths of his mind, as well as various other unexpected sounds that somehow merged into something beautiful and consoling. There had been a bolt of lightning about to strike near the clearing that instead lost all of its force as it neared the ground when the devastating changes had abruptly ceased. It froze in the split second when Kael laid eyes upon this woman and now it flowed into the grove and split off into many smaller arcs to flow in a lavish manner around them both and through the branches, turning a sapphire color as it did so.

The woman merely stared into Kael’s eyes and began to slowly pace forward, giving a small smile without parting her lips as she moved that melted away all of his apprehension and confusion. When he looked at her he couldn’t think about all that was wrong with the world; his responsibilities and fears just seemed to take a seat behind the here and now and whether or not he even made it through the day no longer mattered. When she neared and they were face to face with the stone table between them he leaned forward with one hand on the table and reached out to her with the other.

A sudden, intense feeling of longing shot through his body and he wanted nothing more at that moment than for her to take his hand and touch him back. But when his clawed fingers almost touched her she faded from in front of him. Kael was completely overwhelmed with shock for a moment before swiping at where she had been and climbing over the table only to find her completely gone. She had just merged into the air, incomprehensibly into nothingness before his eyes. He screamed in frustration and once again the mood of his surroundings darkened along with his own. It felt horrible to be so close to her and then be without her again.

It was when she was gone again that Kael resumed questioning everything around him. It felt like something was touching his face and running across his skin like water but he couldn’t see any rain falling from the sky. When he began wondering again just where he was and why he had all of these strange feelings a pang of anger ran through his body. This new sensation felt like something wanted him to have nothing but disdain and hatred for everything and to see it all in suffering. Along with it came a feeling of pure terror, some of it from all the uncertainty he had ever faced and all of it yet to come, and the rest was of himself and the anger he was inexplicably feeling now, as well as what he might do because of it.

When the world around him had finished transforming back to the malicious version that echoed Kael’s feelings the woman finally reappeared. Kael had been narrowing his eyes at the blackened clouds and deepening the frown that had crept across his lips while clenching and unclenching his hands when he felt her near him. For some odd reason he just knew she was there again and he turned to her. This time he couldn’t let her go, he had to get to her. Kael sprinted toward the woman much more quickly than he should have been capable of - his body felt amazingly powerful now. When he thought he would reach her, however, she began to fade as she had the first time.

As he reached where she had been he felt her again not far away and ran to her with the same results. Kael continued to miss the woman every time as the environment around him grew increasingly hostile along with the anger and fear inside him. The only thing she could offer him was that reassuring smile and intense feeling of longing. When he finally felt that he couldn’t take any more he fell to his knees and looked up to the obsidian sky, seeing two giant, black eyes looking back down upon him. He focused his anger upon them and welled everything up inside of him into a roar of pure hatred and fury far more inhuman than anything he had ever heard in his lifetime.

Kael opened his eyes to a very disconcerting view of his surroundings. One eye was below the stream he lay in while the other was just above it, yielding a split view that the dim light of the cavern only made more difficult in providing Kael with any recognition of where he was. After a second of confusion he pushed himself up and crawled to drier ground while coughing out water from his lungs and mouth.

Kael remembered a little more as he looked around the cavern he had left only in his dreams. He had weaved his way through the crystals on the floor to find a small stream of water running along the far wall. For some reason when he got a drink an overly large sense of fatigue came over him and, judging by his surreal experience, he hadn’t been very successful in staving it off. He gave a small shudder as he recollected bits of the dream and the conflict of feelings that had characterized it. The woman had seemed so important but for some reason he couldn’t even remember what she looked like. Now he shivered a little from chill rather than discomforting thoughts as he hugged himself and wished he was a lot drier. Peering at the stream, only about six feet from the dirt and sandy loam that made up the stream bank until it reached the wall, Kael realized that the water actually flowed into and under the wall of the cavern, most likely deepening as well.

"Huh, the first underground river I’ve seen." Kael murmured to himself. "And to think it’d look so serene by the light of bloody crystals, humph."

He didn’t have much time to admire it, however, as he once again heard the ominous hissing of charstrizes coming from the chute in the ceiling across the cavern and knew he needed to do something. But even with as good a reason to panic now as any, Kael felt oddly calm as he stared at the steadily flowing water glistening in the crystal light. After another minute of letting his mind grasp reality he turned to the sounds of scratching and hissing from across the cavern to see a charstrize scrabbling at the wall with all four appendages, a rope tied around its waist. From the manner it was groping at the cavern wall and the rope it didn’t seem very eager to follow its dead companions and the irately gurgled hisses that issued from above it were likely the only reason it was continuing.

Watching its slow descent into the cavern, Kael snapped out of his stoicism and realized he needed to hide, thankful at the same time that the charstrize was too occupied with its own safety to chance a quick survey of the rest of the cavern until it was on the ground. Kael got up and quickly looked around for anywhere that offered some concealment, a sinking feeling arising in his chest as all he saw were more crystals reflecting and refracting the light from the few lit ones and walls of dirt and rock that rose steeply toward the blackness above. He turned back toward the river, desperation causing him to consider whether he could swim down it and reach the surface, but the possibility was so low due to him being underground and the thought of drowning so terrifying that he immediately dismissed this thought, looking back to see what progress the menacing reptile had made.

Alarmingly, it had already climbed most of the way down with its large claws and balancing tail, only another ten or twenty seconds from scaling the rest of the way to the ground. Kael had to make a decision fast and there wasn’t anywhere here that he could hide without being found. A brief mental image went through his mind of Sarina fighting the characterize, of how strong they felt when they had attacked him, of how horrifying trying to fight back had been. Then he could consider it no longer and waded into the river as quietly as he could manage. The coldness bit through his skin and into his bones, forcing his lungs to spasm and his muscles twitch, screaming at him to get back on land. He took a few moments to steady his breathing, knowing he had no other choice, and with a final immense inhalation he ducked his head under the water and swam away from the riverbank.

He moved downward and outward as far as he could until his hands felt soil and gravel, hoping to stay out of visibility. His right hand felt a root and he seized it with both hands to stay on the bottom of the river. There he floated motionless except for the wavering motions the slow current imposed upon him, trying to keep his mind blank and his heart from racing in fear. He wondered how long the charstrizes would search for him above or if they would come to the conclusion that he was in the river. A small hope abided within him that they would come to some other deduction, surmising instead that he had evaded them and climbed back out or that perhaps the lizards would just leave and not concern themselves further.

A darker voice silenced these thoughts as useless, however, reminding Kael how futile these hopes were. At the same time Kael choked and struggled to keep his breath in, knowing that if he released it he would give himself away and also be forced to the surface. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold out in the freezing void, deprived of all senses save the frantic tremors his body sent him of its need for warmth and air. It wasn’t long after that when spastic convulsions finally set in, forcing him to attempt to trick his body by filling his cheeks with recycled air from his lungs and breathing it back in, imitating breathing fresh air but at the same time moving the oxygen around in his lungs to pull every last ounce of usability out of it. When he could finally take it no longer he let go of the root and floated upward, unable to let himself drown even if it meant dying just a few seconds later to the monsters that awaited him.