A Mess of a World: the Etched Stone

6.1) Lorraine

(Twenty minutes earlier) 

Lorraine skirted pass the guards who were avoiding the option of letting anyone into the city and went around back to the entrance that her master usually went to.

Master. Just the thought sent a burst of anger through her, making her staff betray her emotion. It shot off fiery sparks and caused a few of the camped out travelers to look at her.

They stared at her warily and she turned away, walking until she was out of sight.

The doorway, per usual, blended in with the surroundings but at her touch shimmered transparently allowing her into the city.

Walking... waiting... He'd better explain! I'll make him! Lorraine thought bitterly, tuning out some sort of dispersing commotion next door to her house. She clenched and unclenched her fists. He was cruel. How- why would he- just- just- She bit back a scream.

Her feet were sore from the miles and miles of walking and her eyelids threatened to close and fall asleep right there. She pushed on the door, and her skin tingled.

Glancing down at her fingers a sense of wonder and alarm filled her. Magic? On... the door? Her eyes veered down to the slits on her hand caused by the bloody explosion and wondered if they had done something. No. She was certain it had been the door.

Her heart quickened its steady pattern, and she tentatively turned the doorknob. The lock clicked on the other side, and the door cracked open.

Peeking inside, her eyes flew across the entryway. Everything seemed in place, down to the dead plants that had been in their pot since winter of two years ago and the sneering portrait of Master Rembe.

And yet she had a sense of wrongness.

Lorraine listened and her heart quickened even more. It was deadly silent.

Master Rembe? Gone? He never leaves... Hardly leaves.. She wondered, going inside and quietly closing the door behind her. Once again a tingle shot through her fingers.

The sound of shattered glass and multiple somethings thudding to the ground made her jump and press her back against the door, screaming loud and hard. Her grip tightened on her staff and, once her wits returned, she meekly crossed over and up the stairs to her master's laboratory.

The door was cracked open and she gulped, images of possible things awaiting her were disheartening and she wondered if she should sneak back out the way she came and leave it all alone.

'Do not disturb the house.' Master Rembe had always told her. Did this count?

Another crash and she was back down the stairs breathing heavily.

" 'Round and round one walks until they find one who talks'," She recited in low whisper, the verse never leaving her mind. She had walked and walked until she made it out of the woods and found other real people, and had made it back to Ebin against all odds.

Was she really going to let the man who had abandoned her in the Altering Woodlands that she had thought of as an adoptive father continue to scare her?

She took in a deep breath and then exhaled and repeated until she breathed easier. She slowly returned to the outside of his laboratory and with trembling hands pushed open the door. 

Lorraine screamed again when she saw a stray fireball destroying the workplace and singeing anything it came close to. The books that had been carefully preserved and sorted now freely fell from their place on the shelves and flooded the ground with their pages.

Multiple experiments that her master had worked so hard on erupted or fizzled out, their discolored smoke filling the air and choking her.

What do I do? What do I do? What do I do? She thought wildly. Her brain demanded that she use the spell of disenchantment that Master Rembe had taught her, but she just couldn't remember.

"Er, melchia? Mehshia?" Lorraine mumbled, pointing her temporary staff at the rogue spell. It fizzled out and the uncanny silence returned. It suddenly dawned on her how very much alone she was.

She tip-toed through the room over the papers and tried to straighten them the best she could. That fireball- enchantsia zolve 14- was one of the defense wards Master Rembe set up... but it wouldn't have gotten set off unless...

Her eyes had strayed across the room to where his desk was. The desk he had sat at so many times, hunched over his work or scolding her for her mistakes. And there he was.

On the ground.

Beside it.

Dead.