Trials of Stone

The Dawning

He reappeared between the three stone pillars, and immediately collapsed onto the ground beneath them.

He could just register his body shaking violently with exhaustion, but it was nothing compared to the pain exploding from the left side of his face and through the rest of his body. He tried to scream at the agony, but didn't have enough breath to make the sound, and broke into hacking coughs that forced him to roll over and retch onto the stone, holding himself up on his hands.

A red light flashed into his eyes as he did, and as he looked down he saw a tiny, spherical gem glowing faintly, floating just over the back of his left hand. He blinked his right eye at it, until blood fell from his left and splattered over his hand.

He rolled onto his back again and started undoing his leather vest. He pulled it open, then tore a long strip of fabric from his shirt. He rolled it into a hurried bar, then pressed it to where his left eye had been. He had enough of his breath back now to scream at the touch of it, but he could feel it soaking with blood almost instantly, and he repeated the process two more times, covering the area around his ruined eye. Then he tore a fourth, longer strip from his shirt and wrapped it around his head, holding the rest of them down. He tied it as tightly as he could behind his head, then fell back down to keep gulping down air.

The first trial, and he felt half-dead already. And there were two more to go.

He lay there for subjective hours, and as his breath slowly came back to him, he couldn't shake the growing feeling that something was wrong around him. He glanced up, and saw that the red light from the obsidian pillar had vanished, and a ball of flame had erupted above it, the sickly blue of an old drowned corpse.

But that wasn't it. Something else was wrong. He let his head fall to the side, looking out over the sea, then squinted at it in confusion. He couldn't make out any motion out towards the horizon, not the flash of whitecaps nor the flicker of starlight against the currents, and the blackness of the sea seemed somehow emptier, hollower, without any of its deep, dark majesty.

But he could still hear the muted roar of the sea. He must not be able to see it right through his remaining eye. With a last, heavy breath, he pushed himself upright through the dry air, rested on his arms, and glance back up at the flickering corpse flame.

Flickering, along with the gentle sigh of wind, in the dry, breezeless air.

He looked back to the long desert behind him. The starlight that glinted off the dunes seemed more matte, less colorful, but the dunes were still there, still rolling off into the horizon. He looked up at the stars. They seemed just slightly less bright, but they were still there, drifting ever so slowly across the sky.

He closed his eyes...eye...on the sights around him, and took final few breaths he needed to steady and calm himself. He was beaten, exhausted, his body practically torn to pieces, but he couldn't let himself turn back. The image of his blood on the stone dais brought to his mind the image of blood on the ground before his fallen knees, and with a flash of steel through his body, he opened his eyes and faced the two remaining pillars. His body was done, it could rest, while the rest of him tried.

He debated between them for a moment, then stepped up to the steadily glowing white marble of the Pillar of Soul and pressed his palm against the cruciform human figure carved into it, preventing himself from jerking it away an instant later.

The white light that had pulsed through the pillar slowly suddenly flashed into absolute brilliance, not blinding but illuminating the land around him all the way out to every corner of the earth, and in that flash he suddenly saw the dry, gaping emptiness where the sea had been, and the sharp, rolling waves of matte grey stone, no longer speckled sand, and somehow knew that the light of the stars above him shone on despite the lack of any object from which to emanate, and somehow felt the barren stone where forests, plains, cities had been, with only granite in the form of the land that had been and lost, frightened souls remaining, and in that flash he knew that it was his hand that had done this. And then the white light became blinding and swept over him.