Healing Spells — Echoes & Orisons Part Four

The dell was quiet, eerily so, with town far behind him and nothing but wooded hills rolling in the moonlight for miles around. Ollis stood there alone, afraid, and unsure.

In his hand was the yegstone, if that’s indeed what it was, the small and deadly thing that had brought him here with its quiet pull in the night. Before him was a boulder, taller than a man, roughly round, nearly as wide as a small pavilion and so clearly out of place. Even if he hadn’t suspected what awful capacity it might hold, it would have terrified him, sitting hidden as it did like some ancient sentinel, some earthen altar to a god he could not name.

The more Ollis looked upon it, the more he was certain it was kin to the stone in his hand. Even in the dim moonlight, the boulder’s massive surface revealed the same fractures and craters, the same strange grey sheen. Spangled light, cool and warm, marked small pockets of quartz and amber-like material embedded in the boulder’s surface, the reflections of the glimmering stars above. Here and there, thin veins trailed off from these pockets, lines of translucent mineral that beckoned him to their precious nature. 

He had to inform the others. First, he considered trekking back to the alchemist’s shack immediately. But then again, to leave this thing unattended without at least examining it felt foolish. He could try communicating with Cynthea across the innerweave, but wasn’t sure he’d succeed, having to establish a connection and wake her up in the same go. And if he could, what would he say? Good evening, Magis, I wandered off and found a scary rock, please come get me. 

Discovering something like this should have made him proud, but suddenly the thought of revealing it to her with so much left unknown, with so much still frightening him, was embarrassing. Before he did anything, perhaps he could confirm these two stones were the same?

He brought the yegstone up to eye level to compare its surface with the boulders beyond it. They looked similar enough. His eyes pulled back and forth in focus a few more times, confirming the coloration and textures of the near and distant objects, before he realized that his fingers looked wrong. A many-textured skin of numb callouses had sprouted across each digit, blooming where his skin made contact with the rock. Stomach lurching with a silent gasp, he tried to drop the thing, but his fingers would not let him, fused as they were to the stone.

Panic flared. He raised his arm and tried to throw it, pulling his shoulder violently. He thrashed his hand back and forth, flinging the awkward club of his arm like a lunatic. Still, his hand held firm, and Ollis understood quite quickly that he had made a terrible mistake and would soon join Threehill’s brickmaker and sexton in their awful, stone-fleshed fates. Already, he could feel the effect spreading, knuckles swelling with firm, coarse grey. Perhaps he should remove the stone by greater force, pry his fingers free with something hard, or scrape them, or lop off the hand completely.

Shallow breaths formed a suction in his chest as he realized his own insanity. Of course he could not lop off anything. There must be some solution. Oh Vindac, oh Vindac, what was it? What could be done, so alone in the dark crook of the hills, too far for a scream to be heard, separated from the companions who would know what spell might—

A spell! All that training and he hadn’t even thought of his own magical arsenal, now, when he needed it most—but which?

The petrifying stiffness kept its inevitable, unstoppable crawl around each finger, his hand drawing mortar through its veins. He closed his eyes, tried to breathe. He forced himself to flip through a mental catalog of effect reversals, material softeners, medical augmentations, each unusable for one damned reason or another. 

Wait. 

There was a spell he’d learned a year and a half ago. A transmutation designed to warm the blood, to increase circulation, to heal the limbs of frostbite—to make stiff flesh well again. Yes, yes, perhaps this. He remembered the exercise, the effect, but could not conjure the words. Syllables and declensions whipped through his mind. “Ullara…crinillis…rurr—” He stuttered breathily, his entire body rigid with urgency. “Rurruminenta…rurruminenric….” 

No, that was wrong. His fingers stiffened still. Now his whole wrist felt immobile, the effect accelerating. Water welled in his eyes from fear.

“Ullaris…rurruminelle…urrullinenda—” He added suffixes, tested endings, none correct and he knew it—and to cast the improper thing, to conjure the wrong effect, especially when targeting his circulation in this manner, disaster inevitable—what were the words? The words?!

“Ullaroren…”

His eyes widened in the quiet dark. Moving his free hand to his left bicep, he gripped tightly, and the words burst out in a frightened croak: “Ullaloren rurruminest!”

Energy surged from him, and suddenly he felt his blood warming itself, flowing vigorously from his chest and shoulder down through his aching right limb. Pain needled his arm as his muscles became more fluid and pliable, heating and swelling even as they relaxed. Something had happened. Had it worked? He was holding the stone still, but only just. Had it really—

Then, a touching, a bursting, a warm stab of magical energy upon his back. 

Ollis turned, startled. As he did, the yegstone fell from his hand, his fingers loose for the first time in what felt like hours. His cantrip had worked. Yet it brought no relief, not as he gazed into the face of the man before him, angular and savage in the dark.

“Casting spells at an unknown artifact are we?” Admar’s voice was sharp and heavy in the night. “What in ash was that I heard? ‘Ullaloren?’ An amplification?” 

‘Ullaloren’ indeed. It had been declined to amplify the effects of a system or object, such as a circulatory system. Or, if Ollis had been an idiot, such as the massive magical boulder beside them. 

My blood, Ollis tried to explain, not the stone— 

Yet no sound came out. His throat would not vibrate. There was no voice in him.  

“No no.” Admar’s hand still glowed with the pale magical essence that had just entered Ollis’s back. “No talking. No more cantrips. No more sneaking. No more spells.” With that, Admar leaned down toward the yegstone as if to examine it, perhaps, even to touch it. 

Ollis opened his mouth to warn him against it, but no sound came out, and still the elf leaned down. Madly, he grappled the elf’s shoulder, trying to keep him from the yegstone but nearly pushing him onto it in the process.

“Yrig,” the elf swore, “are you trying to get us both killed?” Uttering breathy syllables, Admar grabbed Ollis’s shoulder in turn, a flicker of white magical light sparking from the elf’s outstretched hand as another powerful force surged. Suddenly, Ollis felt as if he’d spent days or weeks in travel, his limbs pulling him down to the earth with insurmountable fatigue.

Soon, the effect of Admar’s second spell was complete, and Ollis was on the ground, paralyzed.

“You sit tight,” the elf said, “until I know what to do with you.”

With his head locked in its painful position upon the coarse grass, Ollis saw little more than the strange boulder through the green blades. He hadn’t even had time to be relieved that the yegstone—whatever it was—hadn’t petrified his hand for good, and now his whole body was immobile. He felt terrified of the rock, of course, but also of Admar, whose presence should have been a comfort. Unable to ask how he had come here, or to cry out, or even to weep, Ollis could only watch as the elf circled it, a dark shape against the night’s ferrous blue.

After several minutes of examination, Admar brought a finger up to his own temple, and even in the dark, Ollis thought he saw the elf’s pupils vanish in white. He’d sent a message along the innerweave, and soon, the others would come. That done, Admar turned his attention back to his captive, the darks of his eyes catching specks of moonlight with an eerie glint.

“So, were you casting something upon this stone?” he asked, eyeing the boulder. “Or that one?” Admar nodded toward where the yegstone lay on the grass. “I’d like to think you weren’t doing anything sinister, just getting yourself neck-deep into a field of shit before you even knew how the stuff tasted. Much less how to get it off your virgin tongue.” 

Now, the elf stood over Ollis, his angled ears and smooth-topped head visible in outline against the navy sky beyond. Amid the dark shape of the elf’s frame, white seemed to poke like pinpricks through his dark eyes, light all the way from the celestial canopy. 

“Do you know just how much trouble you could be in? Do you know what happens if you are found to have stolen an unknown and very powerful, very dangerous artifact from under the noses of your Exploratory Party members, to have waltzed off into the night and made contact with an even more powerful artifact, which you very well may have been trying to investigate—or agitate—unsupervised?”

Ollis could not reply.

“Rittenhour,” the elf said with a heavy breath. “His story is not for show. You seem to have misunderstood that. Casting a spell, any spell, in the presence of an artifact, especially an artifact of which we know nothing,” Admar pointed a dark hand toward the large boulder, “could easily have been your grave, if not the grave of every person in a five-mile radius.” 

The silhouette bent downward, Admar bringing his face—his glistening eyes—as close as he could to Ollis’s unguarded ear. “Let me be clear. Perhaps you think you risked only yourself, that, if it came to the worst, your measly life would be no great loss for the Waithens. You’d be right. But had you killed the rest of us? Had you harmed the town? Could you even imagine the turmoil you would have created for the Courts? The blasphemy it would have wrought upon Vindac’s name? How you would have soiled the dignity of our faith? You infant?!”

Admar straightened himself, sighed, and looked out over the hills. 

“When the others arrive, you will have your faculties returned to you, because I am unwise and believe you have done nothing with nefarious intent. But,” the lights in Admar’s head twinkled with an even, cool gleaming, “to avoid any unnecessary trouble on your part, and because I am not unkind, we will tell them it was you who followed me out here in the night.”

Had Ollis been able to, he would have looked confused, or shocked, or concerned. As still as he was, he supposed he just looked dead. 

“Of course,” Admar went on, “feel free to reveal your version of events at any time you like, but you must be willing to face the consequences of an apprentice’s transgressions. Which are well-earned. Yes,” he nodded, “even Cynthea would have to have you censured for this little midnight tryst, and face censure herself. Although I will still come under questioning for coming out here on my own, you can probably understand that the leniency granted to my station is greater than yours. The better route, to be sure. Do you understand?” 

Ollis tried to lift a finger in response, accomplishing nothing. 

“This is what it means to be a Waithen, you know. It is authority. And punishment. And nonsense spouted by the face of power. Mine, in this case,” he mumbled, speaking more to himself than to Ollis. “It is a state where fools become mage-kings and the righteous are cast aside. It is the Bridge of Echoes. And the Courts. And censure. And, often, the regret of paths untaken. Or of those taken too hastily.” Then he rose and droned in the Old Tongue: “But it is by these troubled waters, dark and decadent as the tears that made the world, that the blessing of you, oh Vindac, may come upon us, rich in power and mercy…”

In his mind, Ollis could not help but join him in the Orison of Troubled Waters: …and divine above all things broken. Oh shatterer and breaker-king, may your dominion of these waters be our blessing, that even in the depths of your great sea we shall witness the terrific beauty of your justice and your hand.

After that, Admar sat some ways away, looking at the large stone. Ollis watched as the silent night sky continued its slow revolution above the hills. He considered Admar’s proposal. The elf was right, of course. Ollis had been foolish. Childish. Hadn’t Harkital told him, time and time again, not to ask questions? Hadn’t Admar given him, before he was even ready for it, the story of Rittenhour? Was there nothing he would learn, nothing he would do rightly?

Sorrow crept into Ollis’s heart as they waited for the rest of the party to arrive. Sorrow, but gratitude as well, for the elf’s strange protection. For his willingness to spare Ollis from his rightful consequence. How could he have been so stupid? How could he have let it happen? He was just… bored, he couldn’t sleep, so he had followed the stone. That was all. Complete and utter idiocy.

Ollis wanted to think on this, to dwell on it, to savor the shame he’d earned for himself. In fact, as his mental anguish grew louder in the dark, he thought of going home. Back to Yaelfand. Or even back to the squalor of Folgrin and Cooper’s Landing. Or even back, further back, so that he would have never been born. The party—the Order—deserved better company than him. Far better.

But wallowing proved increasingly difficult, Ollis found. Motionless as he was, something still distracted him.

With the side of his face pressed against the earth, he was picking something up, even through the scratchiness of the grass against his cheek. Some signal. His ear, so attuned to the charms and enchantments of the halls of Waithen learning, tingled with the vibration of magic. It was a resonant energy, a cyclical force, consistent, just like the throbbing of the yegstone. Only now, it dispersed through the whole of the dirt beneath him, slowly pushing away from the larger stone that sat silent in the dell. It was the swirling of the clays.

As the stars continued their quiet revolution, and as Admar meditated a few yards away, Ollis’s fears and sorrows about the Waithens and his worth were wholly drowned out by this sensation. By the suspicion that—no, he was imagining it. He must be. It was so subtle, so small, it couldn’t be real. But he was stuck there, on the ground, with no choice other than to perceive it, to dwell on it, to wonder if he felt what he thought he felt.

That slowly, almost imperceptibly so, the rhythm of this earthen tide was getting faster.

Admar perked up and looked off to the south, toward town.

“Here they come,” he said, approaching his captive. “On your best behavior.”

Ollis felt another glowing touch upon his prostrate shoulder, firm and sure, then a tingle in his fingers, toes, hands, and feet. Sloughing off his artificial fatigue, he stood, wobbling, and stretched, careful not to look Admar in the eye.

Then, from a path between two hills, three figures emerged, two tall and one short. 

“This better be good,” Vorik called, “for you t’have woken us up so—”

There was a flourish among them, and from Cynthea’s hand came light, warm like that of a candle, but bright enough to fill the dell and illuminate what lay within it. The small yegstone glinted in the grass just a few feet away, near Admar. Beyond it was the boulder, grandiose, imposing, solid, its weightiness revealed in its curvature. 

The three newcomers balked.

“Don’t tell me that’s…” Harkital began.

“It be the same stone,” Vorik asserted.

“Indeed,” Cynthea agreed in a small voice. For a long while, they all stood and stared. Then Cynthea turned to Admar. “And what brought you two here?”

With the toe of his boot, the elf kicked the yegstone in the grass before him. “I woke up a few hours ago, unable to sleep. So I took another look at the yegstone, and attempted to see if there were any divine aspects to its power. It began to pull me here. On the journey out, however, I did not realize I was followed…” He cast a damning look at Ollis.

“So you meant to come here alone?” Cynthea accosted the elf.

“Yes,” Admar said, with no small amount of defiance.

“And for what?”

“To take a walk, I suppose. And to investigate any divine links to the object unimpeded by mundane distractions. As I said.”

“Mundane distractions, are we?” Cynthea glowered, then turned to Ollis. “And you just followed him? Didn’t think to wake us?”

Ollis could only manage a nod.

“I could have you both censured. Perhaps I should. For Ollis to have done something so foolish might be understandable,” she said, and confusion and regret quickly overwhelmed him. Would it have been? But it was too late now. “But for you, Admar, this is unprecedented. It’s a shock the stone didn’t just kill you after you’d held onto it for so long. And I’ve never known you not to keep one eye opened for a tail—”

“I was distracted by its energy, Cynthea,” Admar interjected.

“Obviously. But we’ll sort all of this out later,” she said, approaching the 

large stone that yet awaited them. “What in ash have you found?”

“What in ash, indeed,” Harkital said, voice still groggy from sleep, or drink, or some weighty fear. He took another gulp from his flask.

“Well,” Admar pointed to the boulder, “they seem to be composed of similar, if not identical material. I see no places where our yegstone could have been chipped off, but I can only deduce they’re the same…”

“Is this, then, a yegstone?” Cynthea asked. “And the one we’ve been dealing with is its lesser version?”

“Well, by definition, it could be,” Admar said. “Or it couldn’t be.”

“Meaning?” Harkital asked. 

“Either the small stone is a yegstone, and this larger rock is also a yegstone, perhaps the largest one known to history—or I’m not sure that is the best word to describe anything we’re dealing with here.”

“Any other ideas, then?” asked Vorik.

No one answered. Cynthea walked closer to the boulder, examining its striations and veins, but never touching it. “It brims with magical energy. And if it’s anything akin to the one we’ve been handling, fearsome as it is…I cannot fathom what power this rock holds.” 

Circling, she disappeared behind it along with the light she carried. The warm glow illuminated the boulder in silhouette, and in the backlit rock, a few veins and pockets of quartz and amber allowed the light of Cynthea’s magic to, somehow, shine all the way through. Impossibly, the quartzlike, amberlike mineral then seemed to move, to writhe, as if with some inner vapor. With those inner, secret portions all alit, it looked to Ollis as if the rock was hollowed out in places, filled with ethereal gas, its veins so deep and rich that looking into them felt like looking across miles. 

Harkital nudged Vorik. “Ever seen anything like that?”

“Yes and no,” the dwarf replied. “The rock plays tricks on you in dark like this.”

“That was a trick of the light?”

The dwarf did not reply.

When Cynthea came back around the stone, the effect passed, and the rock seemed plain again, only glinting in places where the moon struck it just right. “And you two haven’t found out anything in the time you’ve been here?” Cynthea asked.

In one part of himself, Ollis was desperate to speak up, to tell her about the energy coursing through the earth beneath them, about the discovery of his healing cantrip, about how his arm nearly became petrified. But there was Admar, still eyeing him in the dark, waiting for him to earn the full reward for his shame, to bury himself with his own foolish words. Naturally, this train of thought brought Ollis back to the thought of censure. He envisioned the Bridge, the legendary fall of Rittenhour, fluid stone against tender flesh.

“Knowing that I was against protocol coming here in the first place,” Admar confessed, “I did not think it wise to further endanger myself by engaging with the object. I called you straight away, just before Ollis showed himself.”

“I’m glad you feel so repentant and forthcoming about the matter, Admar,” Cynthea said sarcastically. 

“Indeed.”

“It seems the next step will be to examine this larger rock in full. To see if it has the same properties as our smaller stone. I don’t wish to touch it quite yet, so I’m unsure how we’ll undertake that effort.”

“Why so?” Vorik asked. “It seems touching the yegstone—er, the small one—has had no pronounced effect, at least with short-term contact. Isn’t that right?”

“So it seems,” Cynthea said thoughtfully. “But we aren’t sure. One of you, set up some light for me.”

“Illix kalassier,” Ollis mumbled instinctively with a fragile, quiet incantation, his first words since having been muted. The light emerged from his palm and hovered where he directed it, about three feet closer to the stone and a foot above his head. He still felt somewhat embarrassed, not being able to cast something so simple without oration among these experts—but right now, other shames compelled him.

Cynthea dispelled her own light. Turning to the boulder, she put up both hands and took long, labored breaths. It seemed she used no magic, but something was happening. It reminded Ollis of how she’d hovered her hand above the yegstone—or the shard, or whatever it was—when they’d first encountered it in the magistrate’s offices. 

He must have looked confused, watching Cynthea there. Harkital approached and whispered to him.

“She’s not casting a spell this time. Just feeling it out. She probably thinks it’s too dangerous. Yrig, even a simple identification, on the wrong thing, at the wrong time, can be a bad idea.” He gave Ollis a fraction of a smile. “I figured you had a question.” 

It was the first kind thing another Waithen had said to him all night, and Ollis felt unworthy to respond. 

Harkital backed away awkwardly.

For many minutes, the party sat in silence, watching as Cynthea breathed before the stone, long and slow. At points, her hands shook, as if by force. Eventually, she dropped her hands and panted, recovering from unseen exertion.

“I do not know what to make of it,” she said. “It is powerful, to be sure, but I don’t think I can learn anything more without a formal spell, full contact, and the like. Yet, I still fear…”

“What, petrification?” Vorik asked. “I’m sure we are alright. We’ve touched the yegstone plenty, and these two, I’m sure, touched it before we arrived—”

Ollis shook his head.

“I’m afraid not,” Admar said.

“No?” Vorik cocked his head. “Well let me put your fears at ease, madame.”

“No, wait!” Cynthea shouted.

Vorik stopped midstride, only a few feet away from the stone. “What for?”

“Not yet.”

“Why wait?” Vorik asked innocently.

“Vorik, please.”

Vorik chewed his lip for a moment, then crossed his arms. “Let me ask you this—if I do touch it, with but a finger, will you censure me? Has yer generosity been tapped out by these two rogues?” 

Cynthea seemed to smile a bit, face still shadowy from the angle of Ollis’s hovering light. “No, I don’t believe I would. But Vorik, you mustn’t—”

“And if I start turning to stone like them poor blokes from town, you’ll help me out, won’t ye?”

“Vorik, please—” Cynthea begged.

“I might,” Harkital cajoled, “might not. It depends on how much you’ve left me in your will.”

Vorik bellowed, “Not enough to cover your drinks! That’s for damn sure!” And with an outstretched hand, reached out to touch the boulder.

In the harsh light of Ollis’s orb, what happened next looked like some sort of painting from the Grand Hall at Yaelfand, in which wizards and soldiers posed oddly in historic scenes. In one painting, Vorik reached out to touch the stone. In the next, Vorik was touching it. And everything had changed.

His skin had gone grey in some places, black and brown in others, with a strange sound like crumpling paper. Then there was the popping sound of joints—or maybe the bone itself—cleft by many cracks, all at once. Small rivers of dark liquid, a mixture of blood and earth, dripped from his ears and eyes and from the new, spindly fractures. A finger fell from his hand, silently landing on the grass like a riverbed pebble, saved for skipping. A small groan came from his throat, like that of a person’s at first, before it turned bestial, material, earthen. Then the transition was complete, and before them stood something like a statue. Something like a ruin. Something that was no longer Vorik, for Vorik no longer was.

Harkital shouted the dwarf’s name. He ran up to him and began rubbing and clawing at the stone as if it were a coating. At first the material resisted, but one of Harkital’s violent swipes against Vorik’s arm sent another two fingers into the earth with a light clinking. With a howl, Harkital placed his hands on the shoulder, light glowing from his palms against the earthen limb.

The rest of them, in shock, did nothing. 

“Belis vitalraein!” Harkital shouted. “Belis vitalraein, belis vitalraein—” 

Astounded, the only thing Ollis’s mind could process now was the incantation. It was a rejuvenation spell. Harkital was trying to heal him.

“Cartiger belia, cartiger belia, cartiger—cartiger belia, belia—cartiger belia,” Harkital spat, the light in his palms becoming more scintillated, with a subtly greener hue. And that, Ollis numbly realized, was abjuration: effect reversion, declined to revert a single object, rather than a group, to a previous state, as in the case of an animal put to sleep, or a flower set in stasis for a bouquet.

Harkital went on, moving his hands from Vorik’s shoulder up to his head and crying, almost singing, “Cartiger belia, cartiger belia, cartiger beliaronis—”

Incorrect declension. Used for singular objects which are yet to be transmuted. 

“Cartigeris belia—”

Incorrect conjugation. Used to prepare the spell for later use.

“Gemini hathrikilet, gemini hathrikilet—” The light in Harkital’s hand now lingered soft and wispy, as if emanating from a ghost, his voice rattling. It was a softening spell. As one might use to render a bit of hard chain cuttable with a simple pair of shears. 

None of it was working. The stone remained stone. Impermeable, mineral, and still. 

Cynthea’s hand was over her mouth, her eyes harrowed and raw. Beyond her, Admar stood with a blank look, a slack jaw. Save for Harkital, none of them moved. 

Suddenly, thought returned to Ollis. The words. The words. The words that had worked on his arm, the words that had healed him, not an hour ago. Adrenaline flashed, bright and overwhelming, and he approached the boulder, approached Vorik and Harkital, the latter still screaming incantations into Vorik’s stoney ear, from which blood and earth continued to ooze in a syrupy mixture.

Ollis reached out and touched Vorik’s other shoulder.

“Get away you drunt!” Harkital shouted, the sound an explosive, hoarse plea that, though it reached Ollis’s ears, somehow avoided his mind entirely.

“Ullaloren rurruminest,” Ollis said. From hands wrapped around the stone-cold shoulder of Vorik’s body came the same warmth he had pumped into his own bicep a short time ago. 

At first, nothing happened. Then the robed shoulder Ollis touched regained some of its original, ruddy color, twitching in the dark. For a moment, his heart lightened. Vorik’s flesh was returning. But that flesh was imperfect. The skin along Vorik’s neck and arm, as it regained its hue, was run through with dried cracks. Chunks of his robe, skin, and muscle fell off in the very moment they returned to themselves, uncorking streams of red. Dirt and stony bits lingered here and there, leaving speckled flesh that bled murkily, filled with detritus. Blood came from the statue like wine from a cracked cask.

Harkital saw this, his eyes widening. Then, he rapidly closed his hands around that same shoulder as it bled, and sloughed, and cracked, and he began another spell over the spot that Ollis had just treated. Blood seeped through his hands.

“Harkital,” Cynthea spoke, finally. “Harkital, Ollis, step back.”

Ollis backed away, eyeing the boulder and its silent intensity, its black edge a tragic frame for the image of this Idris and his friend.

“Harkital, back away from Vorik, he’s…”

Harkital continued. Red fell through the feeble dam of his fingers and onto the emerald grass.

“Harkital!” Cynthea cried out, but he did not stop, his eyes wide, nearly glowing with the magical energy that flowed through him. Suddenly, Cynthea’s voice cut the night with otherworldly syllables: “Direxi jaller.”

Appeasement, Ollis knew. She was calming him.

Suddenly Harkital stopped what he was doing, not frozen, but no longer yelling or casting, his mouth and hands stilling even as his wet eyelids fluttered.

“Now,” she said, approaching them, her arm outstretched toward Harkital’s hunched frame, “back away from Vorik. He’s gone.” 

Harkital sidestepped from the stone. Vorik’s shoulder poured with crimson, matter falling to the ground as the malformed body yet decayed.

“Sit,” Cynthea commanded.

Unaware of himself, Harkital sat on the ground next to where Ollis stood. After a moment, Ollis sat down beside him. What had just happened? What had just happened to Vorik? He looked back at the still form, playing the painting backward in his mind, waiting for the dwarf to stop touching the stone and say something. He wouldn’t.

Cynthea lowered herself beside them on the dell’s grassy floor. The only one left standing, then, was Admar, agog. Harkital, to Ollis’s left, continued quiet, restrained heavings.

“Your spell,” Cynthea said to Ollis, after another minute or two, her voice tender, tremulous. “It seemed to do something.”

“Not enough.” 

Cynthea eyed him with a sad, curious look. But she asked no more questions, not then. Instead, she simply put a hand on Ollis’s, right where it sat atop the grass, and held it.

And they felt, together, as something echoed through the earth from the stone in front of them, the force rising and rising, in soft, incremental swells, setting a dull ache in the joints of their fingers. For a moment, she squeezed Ollis’s hand in time with the energy. It was still echoing, moving, the clay within the object yet untapped—it had killed Vorik passively, instantly, and its power only grew.

When he looked at her beside him then, and saw how afraid she was, Ollis knew that none of them were safe, and felt true and utter terror.

They left soon after that.