The Lost Voices (OLD VERSION - New Version to Come)

CHAPTER 6... MESSAGES (PART 2)

Journal Entry 59: Marks

8-20-1620 A.R.

Location: Brickshaw, Terrarin  

With everyone in their respective rooms, Xiajem was ready to sleep. Turning around, she unlaced her corset and laid her scarlet, knee-length dress over the oak chair beside her dresser. She slipped off her traveling boots and carefully positioned them beside her bed. 

Finally, the Impatran stretched her arms and breathed, happily walking to the open window in her dusk tights that reached her mid-calf and unfettered maroon gown that she wore beneath her typical wardrobe.

Everything was strangely surreal under the moon's crescent eye. Lands concealed nothing from it and dead leaves pranced across brooks, graying trees bent in the soft gales, slight waterfalls trickled over the shale heaps, animals dreamt beneath the pale sensation, and nature churned with its unknowable systems as fall sank its teeth into the world.

Sharp rays of moonlight traced the floorboards of her room with a ghostly radiance and the knots revealed their hollow form. 

Xiajem observed the few belongings she had accumulated on her journey, or survived the fire, which were carefully planted across the room. A charred, featherless quill sat on the nightstand with her initials, X.R.C., barely visible in the cracked stem. An oxidized lantern rested beside a wood carved cross atop the dresser as dust entrenched the glass. 

Just beneath those items was the fringes of a red cloth sticking out of the top drawer, causing Xiajem's mind to flash back to an old friend, and she opened the drawer just to shut the fabric in with a satisfying clunk.

Turning around with a sharp breath, Xiajem saw her holy text, The Avax, just out of the moonlight's ancient reach. 

It slightly bulged with scraps of smoldered parchment clawing at the fringes and inky smears touched the corners where the parables of artwork soaked her native tongue with shades of interpretation. An opened letter from her former community was folded into the last book of the Avax, but it did nothing to comfort her. It held goodbyes, wishes, prayers, and hopes for her Pilgrimage, which was already stepping into its second year, but no words on who to be, where to go, or what to say when she was on this path.

Xiajem lifted her hands to her hair, only to realize they were fists and she inhaled. Then, as the air swam from her lips, her fingers unhinged and a tear struck her bandaged palm like a massive stone. In that droplet might have been all the barbed heat of her ashen house. Cinders ravaged her bones, seared in her blood, and snapped with every heartbeat. 

Pain roared in her arms, water crossed her vision as the skeletal glow of the night melted inwardly, and a violet well began overflowing in her soul. Magic then sparked at her reddened fingertips as she walked over to the fractured quill. 

A deep refusal torched the walls of her soul.

In that moment, she gripped the quill as a purple vapor began irradiating from her hands and her will impressed itself upon the tool. Soft flashes shook the quill from her grasp and it levitated over her open palms as the lavender surges imbued the item and eddied through its destroyed edges. Then, the echo of splitting wood reverberated inversely as the stem cracked back together, rejoining her initials, and licking ashes coiled backward to reveal the old feathers of her quill in their original flaring style. 

With the respiration of some unseen internal drive, Xiajem's purple magic faded and her writing tool was restored to its original state. As it fell into her hands, the tears stopped. Strange whispers seemed to ride the amendment, but Xiajem heard nothing. 

That night, a silent prayer was answered in her heart.

*

Dreams stirred over Xiajem in rushing torrents. In one, she saw a man she saved not far from the Calvik Wall. His fleeting speech impediment clicked over the dreamy waters, but did nothing to falter his ardent desire to travel toward Terrarin and make a new life. As the rolling waves dashed over Xiajem's mind, she envisioned when they parted ways and wondered where he was now. Then, in a thunderous tide, gleeful masks erupted from behind the floral maze of a jungle. Each pierced reality as a crooked knife scraped over meat and their crescent smiles barely touched those curved, unnerving eyes that bled with greed. A short, red handkerchief danced at the neck of one mask and she heard that familiar nimble tone whisper taunts in her ear from a shadowy cove. Dark geysers of boiling fire steamed her oceanic dreams and Xiajem was drowning in that distorted laugh.