Elfborn

Waystation

The images poured without pause into Naneen's mind, ripping past her mental barriers and rewiring her brain with their power. Images and sensations, thoughts and more. All flowed into her, filling her as if she was an empty vessel. She could feel her body jerk spasmodically as a stream of symbols, images, colors and light raced past her mind's eye.

And then, as suddenly as it had engulfed her, it was gone. With a low moan, Naneen sagged to the ground, barely conscious. For a long moment the world seemed to slowly spin around her. Gritting her teeth against the sick feeling in her belly and the whirling in her head, she closed her eyes. 'Oh my ... what was that??'

With a sigh of relief, Nona sat back, panting as she dabbed at the long cut on her cheek. Beside her, with a cut over her eye oozing blood down the side of her face, Milla sagged back to hug herself with shivering arms, sobbing with pain as her wrist hung at an unnatural angle.

Catching sight of the wrist, Nona reached out to take her apprentice's hand in order to take care of her injury. And noticed that her own hands were shaking. She slowly looked around them at the ruin of the inside of her toka. It looked like it had been hit with a tornado!

Nona blinked carefully and swallowed against the dryness in her mouth and throat. Then she looked back at a now quiet Naneen, who, amidst the disarray of her bed, lay as if nothing had happened. 'What manner of creatures are these Hybernians??' she wondered wildly.

Swallowing again against the bile that threatened to surge into her throat and mouth, the very presence of such in the dream world making no sense to her, Naneen carefully pushed herself onto her hands and knees. It was as she stared at her hands, quivering in reaction to what had happened, that she noticed the spots of dark red on the ground. Blood? Even as she watched, the spots were joined by several others. 'Burn me, they're mine!'

Naneen sat back against the nearest pillar and reached up to where she felt a warm trickling making its way down the front of her face and down the side. Questing fingers found blood oozing from both her nose and ear. She sagged back. 'Whatever happened, it must have hurt me inside my head badly enough that it's being reflected in the dream world!' she thought dully, becoming aware of the grinding pain now throbbing in her head. She remembered seeing a man who had fallen off his barn onto his head, bleed the way she was bleeding, only much worse. He had died some days later. Somehow Naneen didn't think hers were serious enough to kill her.

Then her stomach did a flip-flop and she groaned, closing her eyes against a renewed spinning. 'But then again, my stomach may be. Or, at least I'll want to be dead.'

Carefully she let her eyelids open, expecting to see the world still slowly spinning around her. Instead she found the stones standing straight and undamaged in front of her, the long strings of symbols glowing with eldritch power as they pulsed rhythmically from bottom to top.

"Where ...?" she rasped hoarsely before a lean, hard looking creature darted into view. He was a male, with relatively broad shoulders, a silvery sword clutched tightly in a gauntleted hand, his body protected by a chainmail shirt, a breastplate and armor on his shoulders and neck, all made out of the same silvery material as his sword. His handsome face was streaked with blood and dirt and his thick dark hair was in disarray, as if he had just pulled off a helmet. And he was running right at her.

Sucking in air to scream, Naneen threw her hands up in front of her to ward off the charging male. Only to have him skid to a halt to drop his sword and jerk his gauntlet off. Naneen's vision blurred slightly as he reached up and seemed to put his hand on her face. Yet she felt nothing. And then he was speaking, his voice low and intense.