Crystals And Curses

1.6 The Ritual

A couple days passed. H acted like nothing had happened. Fortunately my uncle, V or who we call Henry due to him using most of his free time with normal citizens of this island, visited me to make sure his brother, who surprisingly is my father, hadn't done anything to me while visiting me the other day. But like everyday, it was morning again. And once again I was greeted by the same dear friend whom I call Fishy.

"Sorry Lucas, I have to go somewhere but I should be back in the evening", Fishy apologized as the first thing he said to me this morning "Please don't die while I'm elsewhere".

"Where and why so long?" I asked since Fishy basically never leaves the house nor for so long.

"Dawn told me it was a surprise so I'm not sure", He explained

The day went rather slowly as expected with nobody to accompany me. It's not like I had anything to do either. With that, at some point of the day I got the bright idea to go outside since isn't that what I always do when I'm bored and lonely.

It was already getting dark. Things were only gonna get more interesting from here since basically nothing worth wasting your time on happens in the daytime.

The forest was like always. I would notice if something had happened to it. You could say that I know this forest better than my own home. I mean if you can even call it that. For a while I just walked without a destination, until I heard some weird noises coming from a distance. I basically had to go see what was going on over there since no one goes this deep into the forest without some sketchy reasoning.

As I sneaked closer to the sound of attraction. I hid behind some bushes far enough from them that they wouldn't notice me unless they looked for me. Into my sight came three people all of pretty unique kinds. One half dragon and two more human looking people. One of them had long dark horns with ritualic symbols on their skin. It looked more like something caused by a curse rather than some feature that a species would have. The only non-human feature the other one had was completely red eyes. I'm sure that's not the only thing coming from their species.

The strangers were surrounding what I would say was a shrine. It was black with red symbols similar to the ones on the cursed's body. The most humane started spouting some spell that I couldn't understand a word of. I should probably learn spell languages.

Suddenly the altar started spuming dark fumes which were really hard to see through. It was like a smoke bomb. The air got harder to breathe but still manageable. It took a lot from me not to cough my insides out. The thick and dark smoke also made it hard to see. I could feel cold air going through my body. After the smoke had disappeared, I could see a strange bottle of mysterious black liquid, that glowed in purple, on top of the altar.

"It worked!" The cursed squealed.

"Lets drink it only after we have arrived at the gates of Sermnia" the human quided. He had a pretty high voice for such a threatening appearance.

From what I've learned: Sermnia is the land of darkness that had eventually sunk deep underground due to unexplainable reasons. Outsiders won't survive there and even if you could you would need a special night vision power to be able to even see anything there, otherwise you would become the locals breakfast or just food in general since how could you tell the time from there.

They left quickly with the potion which allowed me to go inspect the altar more. To my demise, the altar started spuming even more smoke. This time it felt alive, when it surrounded me it was as if I could hear whispers from within it. After that cleared out the altar had magically disappeared with the smoke. If it was truly alive, what did they just unleash?