The Wandering Isles: Session 106

Days had passed since the Purity Edict forcing the group apart. Somewhere in Palperroth, Hatsu Toshitsugu and Dash Heidmann were still waiting for friends and family who never returned. The Ninth Gate had been attacked, Elara Heidmann had disappeared, fires had broken out across places of significance, and even the vessel intended for their eventual escape had been crippled.

Eldrin Drosk, Boreal Paleclaw and Ekdíkisi Tintreach had suffered an entirely different fate to that of Hatsu or Dash. Captured after the disaster surrounding the square, they were transported by ship to the penitentiary and separated almost immediately upon arrival. The last time any of them saw one another was in the courtyard before guards divided them and led them into different parts of the facility, leaving each prisoner uncertain whether the others had even survived.

Whatever existed beneath the prison was far larger than any of them could have expected. Eldrin was taken several floors below ground, where the conventional cells gave way to an area resembling a sanatorium. His room was small, padded and almost completely sealed, furnished only with a bed, toilet, sink and mirror. It was the mirror that immediately disturbed him. Eldrin's golden eyes, hidden behind goggles for most of his life and eventually accepted as an inseparable part of himself, were gone. Ordinary blue eyes stared back instead. Boreal was taken much deeper, perhaps fifteen or twenty floors down, into an area that looked more like a laboratory than a prison. Rows of exhausted prisoners occupied cells around him, barely lifting their heads when he arrived, while his own reflection revealed that his feathers and familiar avian form had disappeared as well. Eos descended further than either of them. Somewhere beyond the hundredth floor she lost count, and by the time the mechanism finally stopped there was no recognisable prison left at all. Bound at the wrists and arms and fitted with a device that prevented even a whisper from escaping her mouth, she was pushed into an apparently endless empty space containing nothing but an ornate three-foot pillar and a smooth dark orb crossed by pale white lines. The entrance sealed behind her, leaving no obvious door, no indication of time and no clear sense of how large the space truly was.

For Eldrin, the first days became an exercise in silence. No food arrived, no water was provided and nobody answered when he called through the door. He could occasionally hear the movement of prisoners and the deliberate footsteps of guards outside, but the room itself offered almost nothing to work with. More worrying was the complete absence of magic. Eldrin attempted to call upon simple divine guidance and received nothing. He took the time to perform Divination and again felt nothing answer him. Whether Tempestas could hear him or not, Eldrin could no longer reach the power that had defined so much of his life. He tested the door, searched its hidden observation slit, listened for patrol patterns and eventually tried simply lying motionless on the floor in the hope that whoever was monitoring him might believe something had happened. Nobody entered. The longer he remained there, the more oppressive the silence became, until even the ordinary sounds of his own body seemed impossibly loud.

Boreal responded to imprisonment rather differently. Surrounded by exhausted prisoners who refused to answer him and guards who behaved as though he did not exist, he decided that if nobody wanted to speak then he would provide the conversation himself. He called to neighbouring cells, asked questions, sang half-remembered folk songs and deliberately made himself as irritatingly cheerful as possible. The guards eventually responded by electrifying the floor and bars of his cell. Boreal survived the first shock and, rather than reconsidering his approach, continued. A second surge left him barely conscious, but his stubbornness remained intact. Once he recovered enough to move, he turned his attention to the battered mattress in his cell, tore free one of the long metal springs and began straightening and sharpening it into the closest thing he could manage to a weapon. At the same time, he watched the guards and their patrols, hoping to find a routine he could exploit. There were patterns, but there were also simply too many guards moving through too many adjoining corridors for Boreal to identify any obvious window of escape.

Eos had no guards to watch and nobody to annoy. Unable to speak or use her hands freely, she began measuring the impossible room instead. She counted her steps, tried to judge its length and width and used her own body as a reference against the unseen boundaries around her. The effort only made the place stranger. She could walk away from the pillar, turn around and find that it appeared to remain exactly the same distance away. With no reliable way to understand the space, Eos eventually retreated into her memories. She deliberately began recounting everything that had happened to her, working backwards through recent events as a way of preserving some sense of time and identity. Eventually her attention returned to the orb. It was unusually beautiful, perfectly smooth and dark with white lines running across its surface, and when Eos approached it the object began to spin. Its polished surface reflected a human version of her back at herself, another reminder that the purple skin she had known all her life remained absent.

As Eos focused upon the orb, the memories became harder to distinguish from something else entirely. Familiar moments surfaced first: mistakes she had made, terrible consequences she still carried with her and events such as Mishn and the violence in Palperroth. Then came experiences she could not place. They felt connected to her intimately, yet they did not seem to belong to the life she remembered living. There were impressions of someone moving through the strands of time, influencing wars and fate, someone who had not always possessed magic in the way Eos now understood it but had learned to manipulate fragments and possibilities through other means. Alongside those memories came echoes: voices and remnants from alternate paths, worlds or timelines that no longer seemed to exist in the form she knew. It forced Eos to reconsider the visions that had followed her since the events surrounding the Arcanum. Her vision of Mishn, the attack upon her father's ship, Weslyn touching the stone and the other pieces that had gradually come true had always seemed to be glimpses of the future. Now another possibility began to emerge. Perhaps some of what Eos had experienced were not visions of things that had yet to happen, but memories of things that had already happened somewhere else.

Eldrin eventually abandoned patience and began testing the people holding him instead. He tore fabric from his prison clothing and used it to block the sink, then sealed the overflow and allowed the water to slowly spill across the perfectly level floor. After enough time had passed, a hidden opening beneath the door finally appeared and a tray containing food and a cup of liquid was pushed inside. Suspicious of whatever his captors had provided, Eldrin emptied the cup and refilled it from the tap. The decision immediately backfired when he discovered that the water running through the cell was salt water. Already dehydrated and exhausted, Eldrin quickly became nauseous. Not long afterwards, a panel opened in the wall and a short pipe extended into the room. When Eldrin approached to investigate, a cloud of dust erupted directly into his face and knocked him unconscious. When he next awoke, everything had been restored. The floor was dry, the tray had vanished, the sink had been repaired and even the damage Eldrin had caused had been quietly removed. Whatever else was happening, someone was watching him closely.

Eldrin decided that if his captors would not enter for a broken sink, perhaps they would enter for a dying prisoner. He deliberately drank from the salt-water tap until he made himself violently ill, then called weakly through the door for medical help. Nobody came. His condition deteriorated until exhaustion, dehydration and sickness began to blur together, and eventually Eldrin could no longer tell whether he was simply falling asleep or approaching the end of his life. Lying alone in the cell, his thoughts moved away from escape and towards the people he might never see again. He thought of his parents, Anya and Wilheim Drosk, of his friends, of Dash and Dash’s children he might never see grow older. He wondered whether he had been a good man and whether his parents would remain proud of the person he had become. He thought about the things he had never experienced for himself, the family he had never built and the life that might now end anonymously beneath a prison in Palperroth. With little strength remaining, Eldrin quietly asked Tempestas for forgiveness before finally losing consciousness.

What followed was difficult to separate into memory, hallucination and whatever the facility was actually doing to him. Eldrin surfaced briefly to see a masked medical figure leaning above him before slipping away again. When he next became aware of his surroundings, he appeared to be restrained inside a laboratory, surrounded by other exhausted prisoners and masked figures examining him with medical equipment. Someone pulled his eyelids open. There were scalpels, instruments and the thin sound of machinery somewhere nearby. Then the laboratory disappeared and Eldrin saw light. Not the artificial glow of the prison, but the light of childhood. He saw his father much younger than the man he knew now. He remembered trying to kick a ball and falling while his parents laughed with him, remembered the workshop and the sparks of a blowtorch, and remembered a small pair of goggles being placed over his head. Those goggles would eventually become both protection and prison, concealing the golden eyes that frightened Eldrin long before he understood what they meant.

The memories carried him into the streets of Bricksunder, to one of the moments that had helped shape his understanding of the city. A group of hooded acolytes were dragging travellers with pointed ears towards the gates while the people around them refused to intervene. More disturbing still, the Bricksunder Guard deliberately stood aside and allowed it to happen. Eldrin approached one of the guards and demanded to know why they were doing nothing, only to be told that the acolytes were "helping." When he questioned how dragging screaming people through the streets could possibly be considered help, the guard instead became suspicious of Eldrin, asking why he had such an interest in protecting people with magical features. Eldrin gave his name and invoked his father's reputation, enough to prevent the confrontation from escalating, but he left with a clearer understanding of what Bricksunder could become for someone like him. He had spent his entire childhood terrified that discovery of his golden eyes would make his very existence a crime, and the streets around him had given him little reason to believe otherwise.

The memory shifted again, bringing Eldrin to a monastery situated upon one of the mountains overlooking Bricksunder. He had come in search of Sister Vaelith, a woman he had previously contacted through letters but whose answers had raised questions too dangerous to send through a courier. Sitting privately with her, Eldrin struggled to explain the thing he believed was wrong with him. For years he had searched through books and scholarly texts for references to strange eyes, glowing eyes or anything that might explain the golden light he kept hidden behind his goggles. He had convinced himself that it was an illness, something separating him from everyone around him and something that could perhaps be cured if only he found the right knowledge. When Eldrin finally trusted Vaelith enough, he began to remove his goggles, however, she did not recoil. She told him that he had been blessed.

Vaelith led Eldrin outside, where the monastery overlooked Bricksunder as the sun began to set. For perhaps the first time in his life, Eldrin stood in the open air without hiding his eyes and allowed himself to simply look. The sunset was unlike anything he had experienced through the goggles. Light and colour unfolded before him with an intensity that left him almost overwhelmed, and for the first time the possibility entered his mind that perhaps the thing he had spent so long trying to remove was not something broken at all. Vaelith told him about a school where people with unusual gifts could find answers and guidance, assuring him that when he truly needed it, the school would find him. She also gave him a journal, encouraging him to turn his curiosity inward and understand himself rather than endlessly searching for some way to become normal. Most importantly, she encouraged him to question everything. Eldrin asked how best to act in the name of Tempestas, only for Vaelith to tell him that he had misunderstood. He was not supposed to act in Tempestas' name. He was supposed to act in his own name and allow those choices to make his god proud. Faith was not meant to become oppression; it was expression. Even Tempestas himself could be questioned.

Before leaving the monastery, Eldrin cautiously asked Vaelith about something else he had begun to suspect. Stories about a healer and stories about someone within the Bricksunder Guard had begun connecting in his mind, and he wondered whether Vaelith herself had once understood the Guard from the inside. She never gave him a straightforward admission, but her answer reinforced everything she had already been teaching him. If he wanted to understand those he considered enemies, he first needed to understand what created them. Knowing the people he hated was the only way to find peace or meaning in the actions taken against him. That lesson followed Eldrin into his next memory: standing before Anya and Wilheim and telling them that he intended to become a guard himself. His parents were afraid, not because they were ashamed of him, but because they understood what discovery of his secret could mean. Eldrin remained determined. He passed the examinations, entered the Guard and learned its systems from within, including the requirement that magical incidents and people be reported through the appropriate channels. He spent years within the organisation, advancing through its ranks and learning the very institution he had once distrusted from the streets.

Back in the laboratory, Boreal was given a horrifying piece of confirmation that Eldrin was still alive. Somewhere roughly seventy feet from his cell, several masked scientists were gathered around someone undergoing some form of procedure. Boreal recognised him. Eldrin's screams filled the room while Boreal could do nothing but watch. He had no spellbook, none of his equipment, almost no strength and no way of getting through the bars. Desperate to make the scientists stop, Boreal shouted that he would tell them Eldrin's secrets if they left him alone. His words were either ignored or swallowed by the noise. For all Boreal's determination to remain loud, cheerful and defiant, the prison had finally presented him with something he could not simply irritate into submission. His friend was suffering only a short distance away, and Boreal was completely powerless to help him.

Eos remained unaware of any of this. Still alone with the orb, she continued trying to understand whether it reacted to particular memories or emotions. Fear, anger, affection, grief and other fragments of her life flowed together until exhaustion made it almost impossible to separate one experience from another. Yet the deeper she searched, the more certain one idea became. There were moments in Eos' life where she had known the consequences of things before she reasonably could have known them. Her father's ship, the journey towards the school, Weslyn and the stone, the pillars and the other pieces of her visions all carried a strange familiarity that prophecy alone no longer seemed to explain. The knowledge felt lived. If these experiences were memories rather than visions, then somewhere beyond the life Eos remembered, those consequences had already happened. The answers she wanted might therefore not exist somewhere ahead of her at all. They might already be buried within her own mind, hidden amongst memories of paths and possibilities that belonged to another time.

By the end of the session, Eldrin, Boreal and Eos remained prisoners beneath the penitentiary, but their isolation had begun forcing each of them towards something different. Boreal now knew that Eldrin was nearby and alive, but also knew that his own captivity left him helpless to intervene. Eos had begun reconsidering the very nature of the visions that had haunted her for so long, wondering whether she had been looking towards the future when she should instead have been examining memories of events already lived somewhere else. Eldrin had been dragged through the moments that shaped his entire understanding of himself: the frightened child hiding golden eyes behind goggles, the young man who first witnessed Bricksunder's treatment of magical people, the conversation with Sister Vaelith that taught him to question everything and the decision to join the Guard in the hope that understanding it might allow him to become something better within it. Throughout his life, Eldrin had questioned his faith, his allies, his enemies and nearly every institution he encountered. The one thing he had once believed without question was that his golden eyes were something wrong with him. Only after finally learning to accept them had someone succeeded in taking them away.

For most of his life, Eldrin Drosk wanted nothing more than to be rid of his golden eyes. Now, trapped beneath Palperroth and surrounded by the memories of everything that had led him there, the question had completely reversed. He no longer wanted to know how to cure himself. He wanted to know whether he could become himself again. Eos, meanwhile, would have to search through memories that might not belong to this version of her life at all, while Boreal remained trapped in the present with nothing but a crude piece of metal, the guards around him and the knowledge that his friend was suffering nearby. Somewhere else across the Wandering Isles, Hatsu and Dash continued trying to determine what came next, still unaware of exactly what their captured companions were experiencing beneath the city. For Eos, understanding her past may require looking towards a future that has already happened. For Eldrin, understanding his future may require finally returning to the past.