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“I don’t like it here.”
A quiet, solemn whisper escaped past Garen’s lips as he stood atop a tower onlooking the metal city below. Above was not the bright blue sky he’d always known, but a dark dome shaped cage of the same solid metal that covered everything and all. Encapsulated in this trap that would never see he or his partner freed for who knows how long?
At the very least, the viking no longer resisted this fate they had found themselves in. Ever thankful that he was not completely alone in all of this, but equally felt just as guilty for dragging his newfound friend along on this dangerous investigation.
It all started with a new vision. One that enraptured his attention on the night following his calamitous prophecy seen to its end. It all should have ended there… but a new prophecy had made him wary. When he came to make some sense of it all, the words formed in a song he had yet to fully understand:
Hark! Slumber no more as the elements stir. Aroused by fire and calamity the earth breaks free of her icy prisons. Dawn of a new age betwixt known and unknowns. Write anew your future and gorge in the realm's joyous splendor! For unbound do the eikons walk. Unshaken pacts upon wayward contracts. Dance to their tune and ye shall know your fate. Travel... Roam... Learn... Ware Beyond new horizons marks the shadows of the yester suns. Pay tribute else flesh stolen asunder.
The gist of it? The calamity he foresaw had passed and they had succeeded in their mission of holding back the dangerous prediction. With peace on the horizon, ice and snow would finally make way for all other elements that were feared never to return after this endless age of frost. They would… they would return to a normal climate and the realm would put behind these cold days before long. That much he could make full sense of.
Yet the second half of this new prophecy came with confusion. ‘For unbound do the eikons walk’ and ‘Pay tribute else flesh stolen asunder’… it caused Garen to tremble with concern as it reminded him of Zura. One who was bound as a vessel to the flame eikon… and had been taken over by the very eikon which possessed him from time to time. It clicked in a way, and yet…
He was not one to dream. Oracles simply couldn’t dream—every scene a probable future. And of late? His mind would wander to images of thawing ice. Of flowing waters breaking out from beneath.
Of a serpent’s head peering out from within the warming depths.
…
So it would be that ‘vision’ would take hold of him once more one night. Garen’s body seized as the sequence continued. It has been ever recurring of late, with only the slightest changes at every happenchance. The ice would thaw just a little more. The running water would rise just a little higher. Tonight, the water threatened to spill over. And then—there it was again. The shape of a serpent’s head lurking within the depths.
Yet the vision did not end there as it always had. No more was Garen a mere observer either to watch it all play out from a comfortable distance. As though a dam had been broken, the ice burst as a sea of blue engulfed his vision. The viking gasped as he struggled to fight the tide himself—trying to wake himself in any fashion possible. An impossible feat, as no seer has ever successfully escaped their burdens before coming true. He would never wake till the dream had come to an end.
“No longer shall dormancy prevail.”
A hiss entered his ears as he looked on to find himself in the sights of a mighty water serpent. One of enormous size that could easily swallow him whole then and there. It coiled around him, entrapping him within its tightening scales and squeezing him short of breath. As its eyes glowed, so too did his tribe’s magick’d tattoo respond in kind. Spiraling outward until Garen’s skin had transformed into a deep dark blue, his hair a lighter shade of it.
“No… You can’t…!” But his vision grew hazy as he could hold on no longer to this sudden surge of power that corrupted his being to its core. It choked back his words until the fight within him vanished, cradled limply in its hold.
In reality beyond the dream? His body had twisted and turned as it would any other night where one might deem him experiencing a ‘nightmare’. But just as it did in the vision, so too did his body reflect in that change as he transformed in shades of blue. A sudden surge of water surrounding his form and thrashing all about.
The serpent had surfaced from its den and claimed the thrall its own.