A soot blackened conch loomed over the horizon. A search of a couple days, and I managed to find one of not twenty landmarks in the region. This new mindset is either a savant tracker.
Or? If it matters, use your Imagination.
Still, To call it intact would be a gross overstatement. The windswept sand continued to grate even as I stepped up to the foundation. If anything, the border was struck with more finesse. The place was about as forgiving as any other in this warring hellscape.
The graveyard of a city, a flat disk of nothingness pinned in place by the heart and even that was a husk. What once would have been a glowing beacon - an adamant catalyst of civilization - had been whittled down to a corroded husk. The lace of burned rings and wind-burnt spines bordered the silhouette, yet my eyes never left it.
Until the moment I had a hand and arm pressed against it, and it had my back. I turned my gaze to the foundation. The metal was cold, and the draft swept away whatever warmth I had. In the shadow of the monument I relived the trek that had brought me here.
I am freezing. Wet, dehydrated, starving, and aching off the edge of mortal limits. My mind was in a sorry state, and I felt sick from the lapse in abuse. Had I become addicted to suffering? No. My body is the material form of exposure. I would drain an arm and a leg for shelter.
What felt like a bucket of water at first became a raging undertow. A celestial cold wrapped around the underside of the vase, and it’s shadow filled every corner of my being. For every chapter of magma, plasma and slag that I powered through, I felt waves of pressure snap through me like bow strings.
As my eyes adjusted to the flow of mana, I could see clouds on the horizon. Beyond the burning haze, I could clearly see a cumulonimbus. It’s blue arcs and blurring shadows. It was farther out than dozens of others, but I could see, feel and know it’s streams sprawling out.
So thoroughly that I suffered a migraine. A delayed onset, and I had to forsake the omens for several moments just to cope.
Rain is coming. With barely understood motions, I groped around my person and retrieved - from a folded sheet around my abdomen - a blue stone.
For the sheer amount of focus it cost me, I would have dropped it then. Every fiber of my brow, every cell that knew of pain carved a path from head to toe and spliced its way down my forearm. Pressure rippled through my wrist and palm, and from the air downwind of me, a wave of water swept out.
So much. Too much. I suspended all belief that I could be responsible for such a thing.
Instead - and because my hand wouldn’t take the memo - I focused inward, and tried to reign in my emotions. I noticed pretty quickly however, that whatever was happening was draining more than just my focus. Sparks flew wherever my strength ran low, and fatigue swept through my body in exodus.
This feeling. I sent out a mental command to commit to it fully. On one hand, my body put a stop to it in an instant. On the other hand, A shell of water erupted so forcefully that my ears popped, and I was driven away from the monument.
I fumbled, migrated to my feet, and immediately tried to place the stream of mana. The storm was still coming. It had to be. The earth around me was coated in tar, as the dust clung desperately to the inch of water that had made its way across the foundation.
I huffed and tilted my head. Fine, if I can’t find the culprit, I’ll find a scapegoat. I raised a rosy brown rock into the air above me and felt a tug from below in every direction. Muddy earth flung toward me en masse, creeping in on shoulder height. In another life, one might have been afraid of getting squashed by five tons of converging soil.
I was used to that by this point. My main hangup was this. With all of the tension in my body gone, my act of defiance picked another target to consume. Paper beats rock, but earth vaporizes textiles, and I borrowed the color from a hundred cherries.
After a week of landslides inferno and acid rain I wasn’t actually losing that much, but it did drive home just how far they'd been stretched. What I gained from that fit though was a ton of clay. Practical workable material.
I didn't have access to fire. I wasn’t the most capable potter back in the village. Chances were the storms would ruin anything I made. By the look of things, I wouldn’t be supplying myself with water again any time soon.
That’s a lot of pessimism, but a starving pessimist will cherish a loaf of bread as much as anyone. I managed to get two pots, a vase and a basin the size of a kiddie pool setup before the storm hit, and used the remainder of my time trying to figure out what it would cost to summon a fire breathing dragon.
The air got slightly warmer before the thunderstorm hit, then it got absolutely freezing. Here’s the thing about storms in Imaginary. It couldn’t be just rain.
A drop hit the ground a few feet away from me, and I noticed a baby blue speck in the distance. Before long, there was this glowing line across the horizon. That’s when the snowball started.
Spikes. Caltrops of ice. One big spike and three branches off of it. I mean bigger, as they started with the mass of single raindrops. But as the storm picked up it got more imposing. Bursts of thirty or so raindrops would hit the ground in stacks of several tens. Vines of ice crawling up toward the sky. Seeing what was happening, I rose to my feet and looked to the sky. If they grew too high or close together, I might be stuck here.
No, anywhere but this point of reference! I need to abandon this place and get to the borderless labyrinth!
So obviously I was less concerned with escaping and more figuring out whether I’d be waking up under a blanket of shrapnel.
Fortunately the ice spires would never get too tall.
Because they explode.
And they cause each other to explode.
I am sitting in the middle of a grenade farm.
You could hear a pin drop, and then the lightning hit.
And the rest of the night was a chorus of shredding crystals.
I would never respond to the crunch of snow the same way again.
