Wings of Destruction and Duty

27.2 || Aurnia

Aurnia cast a quick glance behind her, then looked up into the grey sky. Swirling grey clouds drifted lazily through the air, forming tight concentric rings. She blinked, hardly believing that a dense bramble wood was all that separated the rotting paradise of Pirnath, with its blue skies and budding fields, from the wasteland that extended before her.

Her eyes scanned the horizon, but no matter how much she squinted, she could not see where the sky ended. A sharp pinch lashed through her heart, and Aurnia sucked in her breath and looked at the compass she'd been gripping in her hand. The blue glyphs pulsed, and the golden arrow danced above the orb's surface.

It seemed she had finally arrived at the correct location. And yet, no tower graced the land before her. Instead, huge boulders, each one easily taller than her, jutted angrily out of the ground. From a distance, she could easily make out the orange glyphs that now spluttered weakly in the sickly sunlight. Frowning, she tilted her head and tried to make out what the one nearest to her said, but as she opened her mouth to utter its spell, her heart pinched once again.

She let out a small cry as pain rippled through her spine. The sensation of scales pushing through her skin crawled across her arms, and she inadvertently took one step forward. Her footprint shuddered, then cracked, and horrified, she quickly scrambled back into the safety of the brambles. But upon seeing the cracks, she travelled no further than the edges of her footprint. She breathed a sigh of relief. Perhaps if she moved quickly, she could avoid whatever horrors awaited below the surface of this place.

Gingerly, Aurnia began to pick her way across the vast wasteland. With each step, the compass arrow blinked wildly, and as its urgency picked up, so did her pace. Her nimble feet easily wove around the scattered cracks that ripped from her footsteps. And when she risked a quick look back, her footprints shuddered, rippled, and then smoothed over. A looming shadow suddenly sprung up before her, and she shuddered to a sudden stop.

The stone before her was striped with old lichen. Their colours had long begun to fade with time, but she didn't have time to contemplate their meaning before the soil beneath her rippled like an ocean. Koa yelped and quickly leapt out of her bag to claw his way up the mottled stone. And, seeing no way to avoid the impending fall, Aurnia clambered up after him.

Once perched safely on the rock, she watched, entranced, as the place where she had been standing was smoothed over to erase all traces of her presence. Koa curled his tail around her ankle before clambering back into her bag.

"Where are we?"

His voice wavered unsteadily through her mind, and Aurnia could only frown and shake her head. Her mother had never told her about this place, nor had her teachings ever broached the subject of soil that behaved like water.

A small tingle, like the sharp bite of an ant, pricked the tip of her thumb, and she looked down with a hiss. A waxy orange substance glinted below her fingernails. Aurnia hesitated, then ventured toward the edge of the boulder and peered at the carvings that lined its sides. It seemed that in her haste to get to safety, she had failed to notice that the orange glyphs were not only the size of her palm, but also strangely soft.

Aurnia was puzzled. The glyphs had been inlaid with a mixture of wax and metal, and the magic imbued with them was too stable to have been wielded by a human. As a matter of fact, Aurnia hadn't seen such skill within the human population, and as her head reeled with the new information, she suddenly stiffened.

She was sitting on a pillar.

Or, to be precise, she was sitting on what was left of one.

Within her mind, she felt Koa push through with another query, but Aurnia chose to ignore it and survey the boulders closest to them. Her eyes traced the glimmering threads of power, and she felt her breath catch. Each stone was a fragment. Their powers were shattered, useless, and scattered into the great beyond. And the building they had once supported was nowhere to be found. She blinked and forced her eyes to look out at the horizon. Her mother had once told her that the gods, in an effort to prevent the inevitable decline of their gilded civilizations, would erect columns lined with spells to ward off destruction and strife. And in an effort to honour their desires, the keepers of their temples had done the same.