A Fool's Call {Discontinued}

two

Balthazar opened his eyes.

"Where am I?" he murmured to himself.

Everything around him was too bright and glaring. He squinted around the room, then squeezed his eyes shut again. He needed his eyes to adjust to this light before he would be able to see anything. Then another thought made his eyelids fly open again.

"Who am I?"

Balthazar knew his name somehow, but anything more than that... Nothing. Faded wisps of memories tugged at the edge of his consciousness, but he had not the mental strength nor willpower to drag them in for inspection. He pressed his hands to his temples, feeling the beginnings of a headache starting to throb within his mind.

"I shouldn't think about this now, not until I've gotten some rest...or something like that. But more urgently, where is this?"

Balthazar was lying on the ground, a smooth stone floor, by the looks of it. He planted his hands on the stone to push himself to sit up, drawing in a sharp breath of air when he felt something small and sharp sting his hands.

"What is this thing?" Balthazar hissed, recoiling his hands.

Balthazar raised his palms to eye level as he sat up to get a good look at what could have pricked him. He saw stuck in them these little dark crystals, like black granules of sand, that seemed to glitter in the dim light of the room.  Balthazar scanned the area around him. Indeed, there were similar crystals scattered all around him.

Balthazar then looked down at the rest of his body. Thankfully, there didn't seem to be any of those crystals on his body, or below him, for that matter. He seemed to be wearing black robes, with some simple patterns weaved into the cloth that made it seem to shimmer as Balthazar moved.

Then he looked at the rest of the room. It was a simple, empty room hewn of stone, with nothing else but himself within it. On the floor, however, was something of interest. A large circle of white chalk covered the floor from one end of the room to the other, with runes in a strange language written on its circumference. Balthazar was sitting right in the centre of this circle, and a smaller circle was drawn around him, barely touching his feet.

"What is this, I wonder?" Balthazar murmured as he reached his hand out to touch the chalk.

A seal.

"Eh?"

Balthazar retracted his hand. 

"What was that?"

He wasn't sure where that thought just now had come from, but even now it was slipping away from his mind, leaving him with only the memory of what it said. Balthazar tried to probe his mind again, to search for any memories or information he had which would have brought on that thought, but all he got in return was a throbbing headache. Again.

The pain receded before long, and Balthazar decided he had to explore this place...wherever it was. He stood up, dusting his robes to make sure no crystals were sticking on to them. Then he stretched his hand outwards to the edge of the smaller circle he was in. If his intuition was right, and this was a magic seal...he could not predict what would come next. Maybe he would just be repelled from passing, but if he was out of luck, things could go far more awry. 

His finger passed through the air without resistance. He let out a pent-up breath of air and smiled to himself. Then he glanced down at the chalk circle. 

"Oh."

A piece of black crystal seemed to have scratched the white chalk, right at Balthazar's feet. It seemed to be the sole reason he could pass through the seal. He was lucky to have the crystal help him scratch the chalk away.