We Solemn Few

Chapter Twenty-One - Deals from Within, Fire on the Wind

Zenrin sat in a void, unaware of the world around him, unaware of even himself. Awareness was nothing in the void, a figment of a non-existent imagination. Imagination didn't exist. Thought didn't exist. He didn't exist. There was only the void. The void he floated within was not even a void. It was the absence of all, even a void. There was nothing. Nothing but the Artifact. An odd sphere of untarnished brass engraved with odd lines and sigils, a shape carved as precisely as a gemstone honed by a professional jeweler. Yet nothing could break it. Nothing could even dent or scratch it as if it were made of soulsteel, the hardest metal ever forged, forged long ago during the ages of the godly. Zenrin, thoughtless as he was, still managed to wonder how he knew of soulsteel; he had certainly never read of it anywhere and nobody had taught him. But he was one with the non-present void and the thought faded quickly.

Thoughtlessly pondering, he wondered without wondering why it felt as though the Artifact was breathing. Why it felt as though when he stared without eyes it seemed to stare back eyelessly all the same. He watched without watching as a flame-like glow flared up within one of those sigils, watched as flames curled through the many crevices of the Artifact and flowed over the brass, and watched as it faded all the same. He vaguely remembered seeing the same before... not long before, but the memory was jaded, foggy. He grasped for pieces of it as they floated away but they all faded before his mind's hands could clutch them. And he faded with them, into the void. Into the nothingness.

Fire consumed him.

His eyes opened slowly but the world around him was not that of his home, nor of anywhere near, but he had seen it before. In those same memories that floated away, he had seen it for but a moment. The ground was tough where he sat, red sandstone - he could only assume it was sandstone from the way a searing wind seemed to brush similarly red sand along - creating a platform of sorts around him, cracks and age weathering its surface. He could see mountains of black stone, perhaps obsidian from the way they seemed to glint, rising into those sickly yellow clouds he had seen before, the twisting forms of which tattered the crimson sky. Now, orange flame-like lightning crackled in those yellow clouds and rumbles shook those distant mountains. He felt eyes upon him from the moment he awoke here, but it was the heat that touched him.

He did not need to clutch a memory to remember this heat; it's touch mended his memory as a mason mended stone. Every scar left behind by the Faceless' whip-like blade - sometimes he wondered how he had survived such a harsh beating, such an unbearable flaming pain - burned as though newly marked, burned even hotter besides. He could feel the scars begging to break, to flare open in face of the heat, could feel the heat scorch every inch of his skin as sweat dripped down his face and back in downpours. All the sweat did was turn to steam against him, burning him further. He could hardly breath, could hardly force himself to gulp down the air that seemed fire, but he did manage to. Part of him told him the fight was futile, that he would die no matter what he did. Part of him believed it.

He took a deep, flaming breath and closed his eyes, and when they opened he was now at the foot of those black spires that were obsidian, the odd glass glinting as if sparkling towers of light in face of the flame lightning that curled through the clouds above. But something about the mountains seemed unnatural, even for whatever this realm was. The angles of them splayed them all outward from the centermost spire, the likes of which was an odd, twisted shape that seemed carved at the top to resemble the hilt and heft of a sword. That seemed madness, though, both for the idea that one would carve a mountain to begin with, and that they'd shape it into the mere hilt of a blade. Madness, he thought, but the realm itself was madness. Perhaps normality here was madness. He would have laughed at the thought if the flaming air did not seem warmer yet, here. He almost laughed anyway. This had to be some cruel joke.