As Great Inferna receded into the sky, I saw the damage to the landscape it had wrought undone. Lava flows receded across the land to be drawn in by great hulking volcanoes, mountain ranges reassembled themselves, and plant life which I had never seen before sprang from the scorched land, then preceded backwards from a wilting state of near death to green vitality. Still, none of this is to say things got much better, at first.
The daytime sky took on an azure hue not quite like the blue skies of today, which are tinged by the reflected light of the celestial bodies that surround Auronis, and a very different world from anything I had yet seen appeared around me. I beheld a landscape of gargantuan trees, far larger than any that exist on our world now. They would put even the mightiest elven steelwoods in Dimmarael to shame, though I think they were ancient relatives of those venerable trees.
It wasn't long before my voyage into the distant past was once again halted by Dexarren's timeline merging with my own. The scene around me abruptly changed, and the rapid fluctuations of a world speeding further into the past ceased momentarily. I felt relief, but only briefly. The scene that came into focus around me was far from pleasant.
I stood in a huge, roughly circular chamber that seemed to be fashioned or carved out from one continuous piece of wood. I have been to Dimmarael and other elven realms, and have visited many a steelwood. With that prior knowledge, I was quickly able to comprehend that I stood in the antechamber of a tree home. Distant crackling sounds and wisps of smoke swirling down from an opening at the top of a nearby stairwell informed me that this mighty tree was on fire somewhere on the floors above.
I stared dumbfounded at my surroundings until my ears caught the sound of a weeping child coming from beyond the top of that stairwell. The voice was filled with an utterly desolate grief I remembered all too well from my own past: "Father!"
The voice was younger and far less steady than the one I had recently heard, but somehow still sounded familiar. There was a child here somewhere, too lost in grief to comprehend his own danger judging by how he sounded. My elven colleagues are no doubt well aware that the inside of a burning tree home is the last place anyone wants to be. The strangeness of my circumstances, especially the most recent encounter, created a suspicion in my heart that would soon be confirmed.
I felt fear once more, but this wasn't the paralyzing panic that had come over me in the presence of the archdemon. I feared the flames, of course, but I was more worried about what they might do to the child above than to myself. The sphere and its nullifying influence had disappeared for the moment, bit I felt the reassuring "hum" in my body that has always accompanied the presence of my power. This time, my own action was required. Instead of taking the stairs, I simply willed myself to the top, confirming that my magical faculties were restored.
The opening led into a hallway which spiralled upwards just inside the outer perimeter of the massive trunk. Openings in the inner wall led into central chambers in a very similar fashion to the typical floor plan of an elven steelwood tree in our own age. The scale here was far greater than any steelwood I have ever seen. Unfortunately, I never got a chance to examine the interior of that magnificent home in any detail.
Every door was to my left as I strode up that counterclockwise spiral passage. The first two chambers I came to were engulfed in flames, and they crackled as they licked at the walls, slowly spreading into the hall. The moisture present in the living wood was preventing the place from going up as quickly as if it were all dry tinder, but that wouldn't make much of a difference. I still had very little time.
The the crying drew nearer, but its source was still obscured up ahead… ahead and above me, beyond a wall of some very strange looking flames. Everything about them seemed unnatural: the strangely dark color, the way they moved, the acrid smell they produced… all of it was wrong somehow. I got a pretty good idea as to why when I saw shadows cavorting in them like nymphs on a midsummer's night. No, this fire wasn't natural at all… and the child was surrounded by it. Ice formed over my hands to match the cold anger spreading through my chest as I strode forward. Despite the grandeur, I recognized this as a family home. These imps were celebrating that family's destruction.
