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Pale hands, veins stand out as cuts would, but blood is contained. His knuckles forcing white skin whiter, grasping the regal stone.
“Yes.. I hear you.” the boy says, his friends already distracted by other glories.
“Rai? You comin’?” Xiv’s voice cuts the silence like glass, forcing his eyes from the gem
“Yeah.. Just thought I saw something.”
His pocket weighs heavily with the stone, his mind weighs heavier. Thoughts that sit in his psyche, he turns over each one through the violence of their quest. Magic flies from his fingertips but there is no real victory. Because they're here. The stone that sits in his pocket has the answers, it just cannot articulate them. Paper. Books. I will show you.
The Goblin camp falls, the archdruid rescued. The refugees whose eyes light up at their heroes converse and talk with glee, and he feels nothing. He lets the thunder rain from Feyrun’s skies, but he is indifferent as to why. Tal and Klip make their jokes, laughing into the campfire, and his stoicism does not shift. Find my book. I will show you. His blood drains from his neck and into the vampire and yet he feels nothing. Each night, he closes his eyes with restraint, because there is nothing stopping it. His dreams are filled with them, their anguished faces burned into his eyes because even in his own conscience he cannot save them. The fire still rages and the storm is not enough to quell the flames that lick up the buildings. Even in his dreams, he feels the heat. Each morning he wakes with tears rolling down his face. They do not notice.
Every step he takes echoes with the stone’s whispers, each moment his eyes close their faces are splayed across his memory.
He eats through every book he stumbles across, and it is only when the moon shines brightly enough for his silhouette to be projected over the sky that Klip notices. Rai’s blue hair tumbled over his forehead, staring at a tome that stares back, crystal slotted firmly in the cover, buzzing with energy.
“Rai, get some sleep, man. No book is good enough to throw your health away over.”
“I can’t, Klip.” he says, reduced to just a boy’s voice.
“Why can’t you?” Kilp pushes, sitting next to Rai on the gravel that digs into his knees.
“Because it won’t show me more if I do.”
“Show you what? And it’s a book, things tend to stay written in ‘em, right?”
“My family, Klip. they’re still out there, I know it.” Rai’s hands quake with the exhaustion, dipping from the pages to his knee, to wipe crimson knowledge across the parchments.
“And this book will tell you that? For what?”
“For life.”
He did not argue, then. Later he would wonder if he should’ve, but each day that rolled over them sank deeper into his bones, seeping blood from his veins, until his friends seemed an inconvenience.
“It’s not enough.
Their lives, their blood.”
There it was, a death sentence scrawled across the front page, the reward of insight plastered on his companions' heads.
-
It’s in moments like these that having the vampire on your side is helpful, a willing supplier, for a price. First, it was only a few drops of blood to a page, but there is an insatiable hunger for what you don’t know the moment you get a taste. Runes and maps that spread over the papers and force themselves into his mind like a drug, the high of finding more enough to cut his friends as they slept. All the while, if the book could have laughed, it would have cackled loud enough for all of faerun to hear, because he was so naive.
In the shade of the underdark, the spongy matter of the ground squashed beneath his feet, the rush is not enough. Harvesting blood from Tal’s battle wounds had satisfied that itch to know, but the book sits stubborn in his hands, blood rolling from the pages.
“You think this is enough? Pathetic.
All of them, Their lives, today.
Or their story ends before it begins.”
His scarred hands wipe tears from his eyes, it’s not worth the risk of getting the pages wet, not when the stakes are so high. In the eternal night of the underdark, only his friend’s shapes are visible in their torchlight, but it is enough. Hairs stand on end as whistling lightning cracks from his hand, blue and lethal. It is enough time for Xiv to turn at the sound, to see the energy, and be hit before he could cry out.
“What the fuck, Rai?!” the tiefling yelled, crumpled in a fried heap. “Watch where you’re pointing that!”
“I’m sorry, Xiv. The book will only show me more if I take your lives.”
“Is that fucking worth it?!” Tal replied, finding his voice, “How do you know it’s true?”
In the end, he’d been right, Rai had no way to know if the information he was so hooked on was true, or just a fantasy laced with nostalgia.
Laces of energy flung from his fingertips, lashing in deadly waves.
“I don’t, Tal! But this is the only chance I have.” Rai said, watching his magic strike Tal in the side, blood rushing from the wound in waves of knowledge. Yet, Tal strikes back anyway, fighting injured. His blade swings low, the glint of steel bright enough for him to leap over and land in dripping blood. Rai’s pale hands stained scarlet as his palm wipes the ground, pulling back crimson, forcing the liquid onto the page.
“There you go, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”
Funny, the very object of his desire lashing out with bloody tongue, to reshape Tal’s blood into the first set of Coordinates.
Rai’s own blood is added to the pile, Tal’s blade embedded in his shoulder, his mouth forming a primal scream of rage.
“Klip, I need you to do something!” he yells, finding that Klip is no longer Klip at all, but a housecat, scratching at Xiv with furious slashes.
“Fuck you, Xiv! Why now?!”
“The fuck if I know! It just does this shit!”
There. An opportunity. Rai forces his boots to move, to pull Tal’s sword from his muscle, wincing at the gash. All the while, it whispers. More, Jump, strike. He lunges at Xiv, his eyes forced wide with electricity, and lands in a devastating shockwave. The lightning stems out in waves, ebbing and flowing like a spiteful tide. While still breathing, Xiv’s pale body lies unconscious under his foot, and the tome’s pages flutter with joy, writing name after name with their blood.
“Rai, you don’t need to do this. Please, listen to me.” Klip mutters, his face splattered with scarlet drops.
“I have listened to your bullshit long enough, Klip. Your time is up.” he replied, teeth gritted.
“Football! Hang tight, okay?” It is quiet enough that Rai does not hear it, or that he can choose to ignore, but enough for Klip to know he will be safe.
Rai’s hand flits pages soaked in blood, and forces ribbons of necrosis from the contents to swing like a whip. Muscles flex under the weight of power, and stop in their tracks. His vision of a weakened Klip replaced with the vengeful spite of Tal, his blade swung into his chest. Blood pours in terrible waves, sputtering down Tal’s arm and saturating his robe. Rai’s breath comes in bursts of effort, until his eyes clear of a purple in the irises that they had not noticed before.
“Thank you, Tal, you saved me. I will spend the rest of my days paying penance for the violence and blood spilt today.”
“Anytime, Rai. Just maybe put that book awa-”
“That's what you wanted to hear, isn’t it?” he muttered, face split from his mouth in a terrible grin.
Darts fling from the boy’s fingertips, striking Klip in the heart with critical accuracy. He cries out as he falls. It’s peaceful, in a way, he knows he will get what he wants.
“You don’t get to do this, Rai!”
“Oh, but I do. This is where your story ends.”
Tal’s eyes widen, because he is not the only one to be armed. Rai’s hand is freed from where Tal had pinned it, power surging through it with the force of a thunderbolt, formed into a blade of energy. From where he can reach, the lethal strike is one through his ribs. Cauterising as it bleeds, and he is dropped to the gravel of their battlefields.
The tome’s excitement is incredible, shaking his hands that hold it with immense power.
There! The last digits, these are the lives to take, to get that final hit.
The underdark? No.. no. This is.. here? But there is no one here but me.
“How pathetic you really are, boy.
There is no family. Not anymore.
The only shot you had at a family
saturates my pages.”
Family..
He is no healer, no cleric. There is nothing to be done, not here, anyway.
Rai Stormheart finds nothing, for there is no blood family to be found, and those who were close enough bleed into the dust.
Tal. Klip. Xiv. He scratches each one into a stone, the book taunts all the while.
What have I done?