Doorways
Doorways
She knocked three times, just like man in the bazaar had told her to. Nothing happened. "I hope this is the right house" she thought, and looked around for any characteristics. She found nothing, it looked just like the hundreds of other apartment buildings in Kodash. She knocked again, three times. She heard the sound of a large bolt being pulled away on the other side. A glyph of some sort, appeared on top of the door in golden and purple light, revealing the star pattern on the front of the heavy wooden door in more detail. She noticed that a few of the stars seemed to light up, but before she could examine it in detail the door was opened and an old hunchbacked man draped in a purple cloak came out and closed the door behind him.
"What do you want?" he asked, and for a moment his voice surprised her, it was much deeper than she had expected. "My name is Lapis, I have travelled all the way from..." she stuttered. "I asked you a question, what do you want young lady" He interrupted, his voice sending chills down her spine. "I am here to speak with The Arcane One." she said. "I have searched for many moons and my search has led me here, could you fetch him for me?". The man took a few steps towards her. "Give me your hand" he said, extending his right hand towards her. It was old and gnarled and smelled fowl. Scratches and open sores, most of which were oozing puss, covered most of his hand and wrist. She hesitated for a moment, repulsed by the sight and the smell. He sensed her hesitation and started to turn around. Sensing that this was her last chance she desperately grabbed his hand with both of hers. "Please, sir, I am desperate, people are dying and I need help, please, I need to speak to your master."
She didn't notice it at first, but his hand felt smooth as silk. As he turned around, his hunched back straightened and his entire appearance changed. Purple and silver runes spread across his cloak as it changed into an exquisite tunic, and his wrinkled face melted into one of a young man not much older than herself. She stared at him for almost a minute after his transformation. "A simple shape-shifting spell" he said. "I believe you had something you wanted to talk to me about?", his deep voice seemed to fit his new appearance much better. "There is something very wrong" she said. "Something is very wrong with magic."
"It started about three moons ago, and it seems to be spreading. Most of Tyria is affected by now. The Asuran homelands have been nicknamed "The Tarnished Coast" because they are affected most severely. Gravity is out of control and the landscape is being torn apart. The Norn are migrating south because thunderstorms and blizzards, that seem to never end, have made their homelands uninhabitable. The Vanguard reports that the Charr have been fleeing south as well, because their homelands are being consumed by firestorms. Reports from Cantha says that the effects of Shiro the Betrayer's death cry is wearing off. The jade sea is turning back into water, and the wardens of the Echowald have awoken from their slumber as the forest is coming back to life". She blurted it all out, almost forgetting to breathe. "And what do you expect me to do about this? Do you think I can just snap my fingers and make everything go back to the way it was?" he said, with a hint of indignation in his voice. "If the legends are true, you are the most accomplished mage in Vabbi, Tyria, maybe even the world. Please, I beg you, teach me! Help me understand what has gone wrong with magic and search for a way to fix it. I was part of a team sent by the Asuran Council to investigate the anomalies, by my team mates have all suffered horrible deaths to these anomalies. It is my fault, I was supposed to protect them, but I couldn't. My prayers don't work close to the anomalies. Please help me, I beg you..." she said with desperation in her voice. He grabbed her hands with his, and she felt a soft blue tentacle of light protruding from under his hood and gently touching her forehead. "Your intentions are pure" he said after few moments of silence.
He turned around and tapped the stars of the door in a particular pattern. A bright light emanated from the cracks on the sides of the doorway as the glyph on top of the door sprung back to life again. He turned around. "So, are you coming or what?" He asked. She hesitantly took a few steps towards him. "I must warn you, I don't have guests very often, so this might seem a bit strange at first" he said as he opened the door. When she stepped through the door she saw that the source of the light came from a couple of large windows, the room seemed much larger than the size of the small house. Then she noticed it. "Wait, it is night time, how can the sun be shining outside?" she stuttered, and went over to one of the windows. "Well, it isn't night in Kessex Peak" he said with a smile. "Welcome to Castle Kessex, can I offer you something for breakfast?". The door shut behind her seemingly of its own accord, and the metal bolt slid back in place. Somehow she had been instantly transported from Kodash to Kessex, over three and a half thousand miles in an instant, without any Asuran portal technology. "This is going to be an interesting apprenticeship..." she thought.
Indigo
The beast let out a roar that joined with the thunder and rolled over the landscape. If anyone had been within a few miles they would have heard it, but the Homestead was abandoned, the Norn has moved south because of the storm. The roar stopped abruptly as his spell started to take effect. He saw the fear in the dragons eyes. It ran. He watched as it climbed the nearest pillar, slowing down as it began to reach the top. "You think yourself safe up there?" He thought. A smirk spread across his face as he saw it's shimmering scales turn matte. "I don't know how you managed to absorb so much free magic my friend, but you spared me a lot of effort. Now that the free magic is safely sealed away inside your new body, I suspect that this storm should not last much longer", he said. He had developed a habit of talking to himself, but after centuries of living alone in the tower, one is bound to adopt certain idiosyncrasies.
The storm had stopped, and only a few giant snowflakes now lazily fluttered down from a cloudless indigo sky. He trotted through the snow on his way back to the abandoned Homestead. He heard a howl, and it was not that far away. "That's just what I needed" he thought as he turned around and saw a band of Kveldulfs slowly approaching him from the treeline. The storm had prevented them from hunting much this past month, and he could see the ribs of several of them. Never the less, he was too exhausted from the petrification spell to fight them all off with magic, and there was still a chance that the leftover free magic could have adverse effects on a teleportation spell. He quietly mumbled a few words of power, summoning two green runes in front of him. He grabbed both runes and they writhed and grew in his hands. A few moments later they had formed a shield and a sword, and their glow quickly dissipated. "Come on guys! Can't we talk about this? No?" he yelled at them. The leader of the pack approached him. "So this is the way it has to go down..." he said, "Well so be it!".
Apprentice
Lapis yawned. It was too early in the morning for studying magic in her opinion, but The Arcane One had demanded breakfast at sunrise because he said he had to go on a mission. She had tried to get him to share his name with her, but despite her best efforts he had refused. So she had started to simply call him Tao. He had been kind enough to show her around the Kessex Library and for weeks he had mentored her, but then he had left her to study magic on her own while he went on "missions". She didn't mind though, she loved the nooks and crannies of the floating castle, home to millions of dusty old books and crisp parchment scrolls stacked in mahogany bookshelves from floor to roof.
Tao had been studying the effects of The Event long before Lapis had come to seek his aid, but so far he had not gotten very far. It had been three months now, and Lapis was growing pale from sitting in the study day and night, reading tome after tome about magic. Two weeks ago she and Tao had a breakthrough. She had been reading a tome titled "Free Magic and The Eternal Alchemy: By Oola Notekk" and found that many of the effects of The Event seemed to match what the author described as "Free Magic". At first the concept had seemed odd to her. When she had first learned healing magic as a novice, she had been told that all magic was granted by the five Gods. She was told that each type of magic had its patron deities, so the idea of magic not granted by the Gods had seemed like heresy! But the more she read the more it seemed to make sense.
The author hypothesized that before the Gods descended to Tyria, magic had existed in a free untamed form, wild and unpredictable. The five Gods had then tamed it by channelling it into the Bloodstones. The author even claimed to have made free magic in one of her experiments, and described some of its characteristics. It was these descriptions that had convinced them that free magic was the cause of The Event. The author wrote that in it's raw form free magic manifested as energy in the form of pink or blue energy, but that it would spontaneously change form when coming into contact with different items or creatures. The author speculated that, in order to maintain balance in the Eternal Alchemy, free magic could spontaneously change into different forms that resembled the four elements known from the "Tamed Magic" of the Gods. The different descriptions in the book all matched one or more of the strange effects of The Event, the resemblance to the tomes descriptions was uncanny.
Lapis yawned again, and splashed cold water in her face. Tao had left about an hour ago, so she decided to go to the study and continue reading the tome. It took a while to translate from ancient Asuran, especially since the author, seemed to spontaneously scribble down equations and half-finished sketches of what looked like prototype Golems in the middle of her writings about free magic. Lapis turned another page and was suddenly wide awake. The next few pages seemed different than the previous chapters. The handwriting was different, as if written by someone else. It described a spell to create free magic, although in small quantities. It described how crystals were essential to storing and controlling Free Magic. It also contained schematics for what looked like a machine to create and store Free Magic and use it as an energy source of "Epic proportions the likes of which Tyria has not seen in aeons" according to the author. More importantly however, it had a schematic of a small setup for creating Free Magic with the title "Proof of Concept". Lapis eagerly read the next pages.
"Okay, this is it..." she thought. It had taken her most of the afternoon to set up the crystals, and the inscriptions on the table were exactly like the tome described. The inscriptions twirled in intricate patterns across the round table in the study. The only thing missing was the central crystal and what the tome described as a "Word of Power" to "kick-start the reaction". "If I can create a little bit of Free Magic, maybe Tao and I can figure out how to destroy it!" she thought. She put the last crystal in the middle of the table and took a step back. She took a deep breath and spoke the word loud and clear in accordance with the instructions in the tome "Nulfastu!". Nothing happened. Maybe she had not pronounced the word correctly? Or maybe one of the crystals was not properly aligned? She took another deep breath, about to repeat the word. But then she saw it. A pink spark of lightning crackled briefly as it ran across the patterns she had drawn on the table. Then another one. She felt a metallic smell in the air and watched as the sparks grew in intensity as they jumped from crystal to crystal, faster and faster. Suddenly the central crystal shattered with a loud crack and the Free Magic started jumping from crystal to crystal around the edge of the table faster than her eye could follow. "This is bad... This is very very bad..." she thought.
The crystals popped like popcorn, one after the other, leaving only a small cloud of pink dust that was sucked up by the blinding ball of Free Magic that had manifested in the centre of the room. It had swallowed the table and a few of the books underneath it. Lapis grabbed the Asuran tome and ran down the stairs as fast as she could. As she did, she realized that she could see through the stairs, and the walls, down to the jagged cliffs hundreds of feet below the floating castle. "This is definitely bad!" she screamed and ran even faster. She ran towards the doorway, and flung it open. No time to touch the pattern of symbols that controlled which house the doorway was currently linked to. The floor was almost gone when she flung herself through the opening.
She landed on smooth stone tiles and looked back at the doorway. It had slammed shut behind her. She got up and reached for the handle, but in this building it was a sliding door. She tried to slide the door to the side but to her surprise, her hand went through the door. She watched in horror as the entire building in front of her faded from existence. A pink spark of lightning jumped from the inside of the house to her outstretched hand. As it made contact with her fingertips it jumped from finger to finger for a moment and then dissipated, leaving only a faint sense of numbness. Then it was over. The building in front of her was gone, and with it, her only way home. She looked around, it seemed to still be morning where ever here was. A few kids that were playing in the small courtyard had seen what had just transpired and ran off through narrow alleyways. She tried to call them, but to no avail. She didn't recognize the building style, but decided that it would be a good idea not to stick around in the same place where a building had just vanished, and started to walk through the narrow streets.
The Escape
The clanking of metal boots against stone tiles grew louder and the two of them dodged into the shadows and crouched. Lapis could see the fury in Efras eyes, and knew that it was taking a lot of restraint for her to not burn the guards to ash. They had known each other for less than a week, but Efras help had been invaluable, despite her fiery temper and impulse to burn the entire city to ashes. The Imperial Guard had been on the lookout for Lapis ever since she arrived. The disappearance of an entire building in the middle of Raisu City had not gone unnoticed and now she was a fugitive, just like Efra. Lapis' clothes and accent didn't exactly fit in with the locals, but Efra didn't seem to mind. They had first met when they tried to break into the same pantry. There had been plenty of food and as Efra had put it: "Four arms carry more than two, and four eyes spot more enemies than two". Since then they had worked together on a plan to get out of the city. Lapis had told Efra about how she arrived in Cantha and they had agreed that their best course of action was to steal a junk and head north towards Lion's Arch.
The guards didn't seem to pay much attention. The sun had risen only a few minutes ago and several of the guards looked drowsy still. The dim light of dawn made the smoke and steam from the hundreds of chimneys in the city look like a thick blanket covering the rooftops and mixing with the fog coming in from the bay. After the guards passed by, Efra and Lapis emerged from the shadows. Lapis saw the fury flare in Efras eyes again and watched as a fireball engulfed her right hand. "Psst! Hey, not today Efra! Low profile, remember!" She whispered angrily, and gestured for Efra to follow her. Efra clenched her teeth and the fireball dissipated in a tiny puff of smoke. Slowly they made it towards the docks, hiding in the long shadows to avoid attention.
As the breeze caught the sails and carried the junk out to sea Efra looked back at the city she had grown up in. The city where she and Yamina had grown up together. The city that had killed Yamina. She felt the sorrow and rage well up inside her. She felt Lapis' hand on her shoulder. "Thank you Efra, I don't know what I would have done without your help..." she said. Efra couldn't hold back the tears any longer, and screamed in frustration as she felt the warm tears pour down her cheeks and mix with the salty waves. Lapis didn't believe her eyes at first. Efras tears were catching on fire on her face, and when they hit the water it caught fire too. Soon a river of fire slithered across the bay like a snake looking for prey, until it caught the first of the imperial junks docked in the harbour. She heard the city bells echoing across the bay. The sea, the docks, the imperial fleet... Raisu was burning. "Serves them right..." said Efra. Lapis could have sworn she saw a hint of a smile on Efras lips before she turned around and grabbed the rudder.
The Tournament
Gladiator
The crowd roared. Lapis watched as the Corsair horde cheered on while the crushed remains of what had until a few minutes ago been a former Canthan naval guard was dragged out of the arena. "There must be a better way for us to make enough money to get to Kessex" She said, but Efra didn't seem to listen. Maybe the cheers of the crowd were too loud, but Lapis sensed that it was something else. The victorious Corsair had been almost a full head taller than the guard and was now drying off his hammer in the blue cape the guard had been given to wear. The announcers voice boomed over the arena once more: "Our next challenger is an interesting one!" he exclaimed, as the cheers died down a bit. "He claims to be Captain of the Silver Eagles, the notorious death squad from Raisu City! I guess we will see how well he fares against our champion today!". The cheers of the crowd rose again like a wave. "They followed us..." said Efra, her eyes fixated on the Captain. "Why couldn't they just have left us alone..." Lapis felt Efras hand turn warmer and warmer until she eventually had to let go. "Sorry... I can't always control it." she said as she felt Lapis pull away. Lapis couldn't tell if she was blushing or if it was her fire that made her look flushed.
She looked Efra in the eyes for a moment, and saw the grief and the anger burning deep inside. Then their attentions were once more directed towards the arena where the fight had begun. The Silver Eagle Captain had chosen an axe and a shield from the weapons rack and approached the Corsair warrior. The fight was intense, but the brute force attacks of the towering Corsair didn't seem to connect. Rather than blocking the attacks directly, the Captain positioned the shield so that the hammer slid off at an angle, instead of crushing the wooden frame. After a few minutes of dancing around the heavy swinging Corsair the cheers of the crowd had turned into an excited murmur. Neither of the two gladiators had so far landed a single hit. Suddenly, the wooden frame of the shield seemed to have had enough and after blocking a particularly devastating blow it splintered. The Corsair seemed shocked for a moment but smiled and pulled his hammer back once more. His next swing was not going to be blocked. The Captain pulled his splintered shield back and swung quickly. The crowd gasped as the hammer fell to the ground, both arms still clutching the haft even after being separated from the torso. The agonizing screams ended abruptly as the Captain decapitated his opponent a few moment later. "It seems like we have a new Champion!" the announcers voice thundered over the speechless crowd. Moments later the roars filled the arena once more.
Duel
Lapis eyes were fixated on the Canthan Captain. Each time he disposed on a foe he gave them a swift death. It had made him unpopular with the crowd who apparently were used to watching the looser suffer a slow and agonizing death, and contrary to most other fighters he did not drag out the duels to entice the crowd. As such, despite the former Silver Eagle Captain winning every single battle, he was not a crowd favourite. No that title befell a short blonde warrior, possibly Tyrian, who always made a spectacle of her victories, and often played with her opponent before finishing them off. This duel was longer than most of the Captains matches. His opponent was a young girl, an assassin judging by her extravagant silver outfit covered in daggers. Lapis knew she had been cuffed, as all the duellists were, to block her ability to use magic, and therefore she was unable to use any of her shadow arts or deadly arts skills to weaken her opponent or shadow step.
Efra had told her about the cuffs when she came back a few nights ago and said that she had volunteered for the tournament. Lapis had pleaded and begged her to reconsider, but Efra had been impossible to reason with after she had seen the Captain in his first battle. She knew him, she said that he was responsible for her sisters death and that they would not leave Southsun Cove before her thirst for vengeance had been sated. Since then, Lapis had made it her mission to watch every battle that the Captain fought, hoping to find some weakness. The fight in front of her looked more like a game of cat and mouse than a fight, the young assassin was dashing back and forth dodging and avoiding the fierce attacks of the Captain, but it was only a matter of time. She watched as the girl got more and more tired, while the Captain seemed to gain more and more adrenaline fuelling his attacks. Finally the girl attacked, she lunged at the warrior in a desperate strike, hoping to finish him before she was too exhausted to continue. But the Captain bashed her with his shield, and knocked her on the ground, before she could get on her feet he sent a final thrust of his sword through her heart and spine, making her death as brief and painless as possible. He bowed down and closed her eyes as her blood dyed the sand underneath her broken body and Lapis though she saw him whisper something in her ear but only for a moment. Then he lifted up her body and carried it with him out of the arena. Lapis had seen him do this with every fight of his except for the first one, people in the crowd had started to whisper that he was eating his enemies to obtain their strength.
As he carried the girls body out of the arena, a tear ran silently down his cheek and quickly dried in the sun. The collar around his neck made it impossible for him to disobey his captors, the stone summit enslavement stones made sure of that. But the orders he had been given when the bracelet was enchanted was to fight and kill, without specification of how. He had taken pride in killing the corsair who had killed his crew, as well as in depriving his captors of their joy by killing his opponents as quickly and painlessly as possible. But this... this was wrong...
Fury
"You...You're not supposed to be able to use magic! The cuffs, they block anyone from using magic!" he stuttered, trying his best not to choke on the smoke. "Oh this? This isn't magic, this is retribution!" She sneered. His pupils dilated in terror as the flaming woman towered over him. "This is for my sister!" she said, too low for anyone sitting on the benches around them to hear. Her sister? He wondered why he had done it, she had been sleeping, helpless. But he followed his orders. Refugees from the Empire always met a swift and cruel fate. So he had slit her throat, as instructed. "I was just following orders..." He stammered, as he felt the sand underneath him get hotter and hotter. "You, you are the one that tried to burn my city to the ground...". The images of his city ablaze was still fresh in his memory. "Your city? YOUR CITY? We grew up in Raisu City, we had a life there before the Emperor decided that all foreigners were a threat and closed it off!" she said, with tears of rage in her eyes. The tears caught on fire almost as quickly as they emerged, but her whole body was on fire now, so it was hard to notice. "You say you were just following orders? Well, I don't care! You won't be killing anyone ever again!".
The flames around her roared and started to take the shape of a giant tiger. He remembered seeing a tiger as a kid once, when his parents had taken him to see the Lunar festival in Shing Jea, but this one was nothing like it. It's eyes burned with rage, it's mouth spewed liquid flames and it's roar filled the air around them with smoke. "Any last request?" she asked. "Don't do it! Don't kill me!" He begged, forgetting all the pride he had felt the last few days when winning fight after fight in the arena. "Oh I'm not going to kill you.." she said, a sly smile spreading across her face, "I'm going to DESTROY YOU!".
The crowd had stopped cheering. Lapis watched in horror as Efra had effortlessly brought the former Silver Eagle Captain down. The blazing inferno that ensued was so hot her eyes were watering from the heat and she had to look away. When the fire died down the arena had been transformed, the sandy dunes that made up the floor of the arena had turned into black glass. All the vegetation was gone. As the smoke cleared she saw Efra standing silently in the centre of the arena, holding the only thing that seemed to be left of her opponent in her hands, an obsidian helmet. In front of her was a small pool of molten metal that still glowed red. Her voice boomed across the stunned crowd: "Is this not what you want? Mindless violence, carnage and rage? Well you're going to have to find that somewhere else!" she said, and took a step towards the crowd. "My friend and I will be leaving now, and if ANY of you as much as think about getting in my way... Do the smart thing, and let someone else go first!".
Alliance
"I guess someone didn't get the message, and here I thought I had made myself pretty clear when I melted your stupid arena..." sneered Efra at the corsair warrior in front of her. She was getting tired of these corsairs, tired of this lousy excuse of a city. She grabbed Yaminas swords from the scabbards on her back. A tear ran down her cheek at the thought of her sister, but her burning rage evaporated it almost instantaneously. "Don't you get it? WE'RE LEAVING" she screamed and threw a fireball at the warrior. She blocked it with her shield, and it didn't even get scourged. She threw another fireball, same result. "Dragon's hide, I made it myself, after my first kill" She replied with a smug smile on her face. "You aren't the first hot headed foe I've faced you know".
Efra felt the flames licking her neck and back. She was used to it now, it was different from normal fire and didn't hurt her, nor did it burn her clothes, it only seemed to hurt those that she wanted to hurt. Even Yamina had been able to touch her when she was like this. It hurt, every time she thought of her it hurt deep inside. Avenging her death by burning that Silver Eagle guy had felt good, but only for a moment. Now she just felt empty, so empty.
"You're lucky you know? I'm going to let you live. I don't want to fight you, because I need your help" said the warrior, bending her knees and bracing for yet another fireball. She had taken her sword out from her scabbard now. It looked strange, like ice. "This here, I call it Slayer. It can cut through a dragons scales like a hot knife through butter!" she said, referring to her sword. "I just need you to hear me out, give me five minutes of your time and you can go to your girlfriend. She is safe and sound. I had to tie her up in one of those boats that you guys were planning on stealing, but she'll be fine.". Efra stopped the barrage of fireballs at the mentioning of Lapis. "The corsairs won't take long to muster the courage to come after us... You have three minutes!" she said.
Merowyn tried her best to not let her fear show. This person, she was different from the foes she had faced before. She was like an explosion wrapped up into a person. Merowyn knew that if she wanted to, the girl standing in front of her could turn her into ash just as easily as the warrior back in the arena. So she played it cool, tried to make it seem like she was in control. When the girl stopped hurling fireballs at her it was a relief. Merowyns shield didn't burn, but the handle was so hot now, it was blistering her hands. She explained quickly to the girl what she had seen in Maguuma and how the Sylvari had killed her former teammates. She explained how she had fled to Southsun Cove to escape the coming plague of parasitic sentient plants. And finally, she pleaded with the girl. She asked them to take her with them. She explained that maybe, with their combined strength they would stand a chance. Maybe it was time to stop running away. Maybe this was the reason that they had met in this god forsaken corner of the world. Maybe the Gods had put them here to give the world a chance to stand up to the Sylvari before it was too late.
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