“Perhaps if I-” Darkhorse began.
“No!” This was one that the angered spellcaster wanted for himself. Worn beyond his limits, Dru could no longer check his Vraadish temper. It swept over him, a crimson curse that seized control of his body. Shouting words he would not recall later, Dru raised his left hand and brought it down on the massive metal doors.
With a spark that seemed to course from his fist to the entire doorway, the Vraad opened the way. “Opened” was perhaps misleading. What actually happened, if Dru could still believe his eyes, was that the two doors flung back, going the full turn of their hinges and then tearing free of the walls themselves. While the two watched, Dru in dismay and the shadow steed in growing amusement, the doors, now free of all restriction, teetered for a breath… and then fell with a resounding clatter that shattered forever any remaining feeling of tranquility that the spellcaster might have retained.
“Nicely done,” Darkhorse commented wryly. He had quickly developed a knack of sarcasm equal to any Vraad.
“It wasn’t… I didn’t…” Dru gazed at his fist, then at the battered doors.
“Would it be of interest to mention that the boundaries of this place seem to have suffered from your calm, collected solution?”
Dru turned and eyed the walls of the hallway. An intricate system of fine cracks ran along each wall. The ceiling and floor had suffered from a similar network of these skeletal branches, and Dru could see where bits of ceiling had fallen. “I did this?”
“It seemed a reaction to your power. I noted resistance, but you overwhelmed it.”
His madness had defeated the shrouded realm’s resistance… that is, if this was still the shrouded realm. He wondered how well it would work back in the ruined city. There was also the question of what these side effects had to do with it. They were too akin to what Nimth suffered each time the Vraad utilized their abilities. Was this how his world’s death had begun? Were the Vraad going to destroy their new home as well?
Too many questions. Dru snarled and turned back to the chamber that his fury had finally allowed him entry to.
His eyes widened to saucers and his mouth grew dry. It seemed the realm beyond the veil was not yet depleted of surprises.
Before him, obscured by robes that made them resemble lumpy sacks; knelt more than a hundred figures. They had their backs to the newcomers and all faced a clear crystal in the center of a pentagram that covered the entire floor. The crystal stood on a bronze, pyramid-shaped platform. As with all else, the ages had been unable to touch either the focus, for that was what the sorcerer knew the crystal to be, or the base upon which it stood.
Dru backed up a step. The figures remained motionless despite the noise and damage he had caused. They were, he noted quickly, lined along the points, corners, and sides of the pattern, creating, by themselves, a second pentagram atop the one etched in stone.
“Where did they come from?” he whispered to Darkhorse. The tall Vraad knew that they had not been there when the doors had fallen.
His companion did not reply and a glance at the creature’s equine visage helped little. Darkhorse’s eyes stared vaguely at the chamber, as if he had trouble seeing anything in there at all. A repeat of his question gave Dru an equally silent response.
Admittedly more secure now that he knew he could summon up tremendous power-despite the effect Dru knew it likely had on the land-the sorcerer stepped forward again. He made no attempt to walk silently, knowing that any folk who could ignore the earsplitting sound of two gigantic metal doors collapsing would hardly notice his footfalls.
Dru studied the area with his higher senses, noting how the lines crisscrossed exactly at the point where the focus stood. There were secondary lines as well, weaker links that followed the pattern of the pentagram… and piercing each cowled figure from back to chest.
He blinked, then squinted, returning his vision to the normal plane. There was something wrong with the meditators. Too much of what he saw already reminded him of something else, something back in Nimth.
“What do you do?” Darkhorse asked from behind him. A few hesitant steps informed him that his companion was following the sorcerer inside.
“I don’t know,” he muttered, running one hand through his hair as he pushed himself toward the nearest of the baggy forms. Was he mad to risk himself?
Stretching his left hand forward, calmly this time, Dru touched the figure.
Tried to touch it. His hand went through in much the same manner as it had in the wraithlike forest. Both emboldened and frustrated, he waved the hand back and forth, trying to draw some response.
“They don’t exist,” Dru finally told the shadow steed. “They’re ghosts… no… they’re memories.”
“Memories?”
Nodding, the fascinated mage walked around the one he had tried to touch. Its visage was fairly covered by the hood, but he saw that the being before him had been human and male. The visage was disquieting in some ways, though. It was and it was not the features of a Vraad. Not quite elfin, either. The man’s eyes were open and in them Dru noted an age far greater than the figure’s appearance would appear. So great, in fact, that any Vraad would have been but a toddler in comparison. “You can still feel the vestiges of their power if you stand among them. It was so intense that even after all this time, the shadows of their faces and forms have been imposed upon reality… burned into it, you might say. I think my use of sorcery, even Vraad sorcery, was all they needed to grow substantial enough to see.”
“All I know,” the majestic stallion snorted, “was that they unnerved me. I could make no sense of their existence whatsoever.” It was a deep admission, coming as it did from the amazing creature.
Dru continued to study the wraiths. There were men and women, all handsome in the same disturbing way, as if they were part of one tremendous clan, even more so than the Tezerenee. All stared at the focus and the image of so many sightless gazes chilled even the centuries-old spellcaster.
“These fantastical images that you call pictures… were they not also in the ruined city?”
Darkhorse’s words broke the spell that had tied Dru to the lifelike images. He looked up, annoyed that he had been so engrossed in phantoms of the far past that he had not seen what might prove far more important to his immediate needs.
The ceiling was rounded, which gave it and the walls the appearance of being one. That in itself was nothing, but the pictures that covered the entire chamber stirred the sorcerer’s memories of another place, a place where a dragon lord had gazed with stone eyes down at the avians and their mystified prisoner.
Again, Dru looked over countless little worlds, each with their own representative. The Seeker was there, as was the enemy. The elf, the Vraad-like human, a figure that looked like a walking salamander… there seemed to be more here than in the first building.
Directly above the focus was the only illustration lacking a living figure. It was also the largest, and in the place of a representative race, it had a city… one very familiar, despite the differences time had wrought on the actual one.
The Vraad’s mind worked quickly. With growing suspicions, he looked down at the focus… or rather, the floor beneath it.
Another world was illustrated there, this one greater than the one above. In its center was the very castle they stood in.
“Let us go view something else! I grow bored in here!”
“Not yet.” Dru studied the phantoms-who seemed just a bit translucent now-and then gazed at the worlds above and below him. There was no denying the similarity between what he saw here and what he had devised when researching ka travel. Yet, if the images around him-the races and the worlds they stood within-meant what he had concluded, then the ghostly inhabitants of this place had been to the Vraad as the Vraad were to a lowly insect or, worse yet, a simple grain of sand.