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“Do you really think you can save them?”
An age ago, it would have been silly to ask the Icyenic Slayer Master such a question; when rather than if was the real concern. Perhaps it was a product as much of blind confidence as it was her growing skills; in ignorance to true danger of any sort, any fool or hero can rush in without concern. Zombies, even unusually intelligent ones, seemed no match for the growing light she could manifest. Even those who dealt with the darkness of the sea were no match; long ago, so long, she thought, the matter had been cast into that wound.
Now, waking up in a cold sweat many aeons and but a few years later, it was hard to see where there wasn’t doubt.
Of course, with daily duties, not much was at stake. Direct a few tasks, meditate atop Priffdinas’s spires, attend to monster outbreaks across the land. Yes, with deliberate blinders, with pushing back, it was livable. If only the realm of dreams, only traversable by those perhaps cursed few, were so kind in hiding things.
Was it the bottom of those seas? Was it the sea of chaos, the empty abyss? Was it Freneskae’s flashing flames and the nightmares of elder minds? Was it the barren or the frozen landscape, the ash of friends tainting her nostrils? Was it the decay of Daemonheim’s depths, where even her stalwart body and soul were not immune to the acid of corruptions? Was it the oft-whispered ultimatum by elder aspects and the most knowledgeable of younger gods? Or the vague yet ultimate demand of the eldest?
Perhaps the desire to seek out knowledge to accomplish the task had done more harm than good, yet still onward she was compelled. Heroes often have a greater bulwark against the universe’s terrors, but the White Guardian’s was not so much breached as crumbling from within. The fires of battle with the TokHaar told some; the eldest of memories meditated told others. Strangers still offered still stranger black tokens and murals of the Dragonkin translated told a carved tale of corruption.
Why were the memories arising now, she wondered? The shadow in the void she’d nearly forgotten, that crept into concern with every passing day? She was no seer (as far as she knew at least), yet it seemed a terrible premonition crept to her from beyond; beyond what, she could and did not want to articulate.
Right, she scowled. That snake wrote of it, and it seemed even now the serpent was still coiled tightly in her soul in a way she could not discern. Somehow, her own name had gotten woven into the mess before Hallowvale stood and fell. If she dared to let silence descend upon her ears, she would hear them; whispers that she could not understand the words of but that filled her with a creeping dread.
While mysteries remained about the five of the Elders, at least compared to what she was now pondering, what she did not wish to speak about, they were relatively straightforward. Not so much with the one tied to the horrors of Ashdale her apprentice Alcana spoke about, ones she found dotting the uncharted isles of Wushanko. The data for this was scarce but did not bode well. Indeed, if it were not so crucial, she would put a torch to the whole matter of the entity known as Xau-Tak so it might not torment more souls. A torment she dare not admit out loud, lest the people who depended on her see the decaying bulwark and fall themselves.
No, not even to the Black Guardian could she admit it.
“Do you really think you can save them,” was the thought that arrested her again that morning.
No one could ever know how close to no her true answer would be.