The Wandering Isles: Session 107
Deep beneath the scorched penitentiary, the three prisoners continued to endure very different forms of captivity. Eos remained trapped within the impossible void, restrained before the dark spinning orb that had begun pulling at more than her magic. The longer she remained near it, the more her memories slipped away. Recent faces remained clear, but thoughts of home had begun to blur. Her mother, her father, Duckie, the bookstore in Asazaki and even the physical details of the life she had known became harder to hold onto. Eos tried desperately to retreat into the natural trance of her people, hoping to find sanctuary within her own mind, but every attempt was interrupted by fragments of voices and half-remembered conversations. The orb was not simply suppressing what she could do. It was slowly eroding her sense of who she was.
Several floors above, Boreal Paleclaw had little left beyond stubbornness. His transformed human body was struggling badly after the punishment he had endured, every breath painful and his entire body battered. Eldrin's screams, which had echoed through the facility for hours, had finally stopped, and Boreal had no way of knowing whether that was a good thing. He had tried talking to the prisoners, antagonising the guards and filling the silence with songs, but there was little left to do without risking what remained of his life. Still clutching the sharpened mattress spring he had fashioned into an improvised weapon, Boreal paced his cell like the bird he no longer appeared to be, waiting for any opportunity that might never come.
For Eldrin Drosk, imprisonment had instead become a journey backwards through his own life. His memories returned to his years within the Bricksunder Guard, where the ideals he had sworn to uphold had always carried an ugly qualification. Protect the innocent. Uphold the law. Treat people fairly. Yet beneath those promises was the reality that Bricksunder did not extend the same protection to everyone, particularly those touched by magic. Eldrin had entered the Guard knowing that he himself was one of the people its systems could persecute. He concealed his golden eyes, kept others at a distance and forced himself to watch things that sickened him because he believed understanding the institution from within might one day allow him to help those it harmed.
It was not an easy conviction to maintain. Eldrin remembered patrols where people were taken away while he remained silent, nights when the things he witnessed left him unable to eat or sleep, and conversations with fellow guards whose casual contempt for magical people reminded him exactly why he could never allow them too close. Sister Vaelith had taught him that to understand a monster he sometimes had to walk in its shoes, and Eldrin clung to the belief that the suffering he was forced to witness would someday allow him to prevent greater suffering in the future. His time in the Guard taught him discipline, but it also taught him about healing in a much broader sense. A body could be mended while a mind remained broken. A mind could recover while the heart still suffered. True healing required care for every part of a person, a lesson that would eventually define much of Eldrin's life.
Then came the night that ended his career.
Eldrin began the evening as he had countless others, dressing in his uniform and preparing for patrol, unaware that he would never return to the Guard. Hooded figures surrounded him and tore away the goggles he had spent his life using to conceal himself. His golden eyes illuminated his face, and in that instant there was nothing left to hide. Years of caution, discipline and carefully maintained distance collapsed at once. Eldrin had watched others experience that same terror from the opposite side of the street. Now he understood it completely. His fellow guards watched as he was dragged away and did nothing. The citizens of Bricksunder watched him pass. The same people whose streets he had protected, whose shops he knew and whose lives his family had been part of, and nobody intervened. For perhaps the first time in his life, Eldrin felt completely helpless.
Thrown into the back of a cart and taken through Bricksunder's gates, Eldrin prayed. Not out of academic curiosity or quiet devotion, but because there was nobody else left to call upon. He asked Tempestas for forgiveness, for salvation and for someone… anyone… to protect a frightened person simply because they needed protecting. As the sounds of Bricksunder disappeared behind him, golden light suddenly ignited across the sky. The acolytes transporting him were struck down by a hooded figure carrying a gnarled staff, who approached the cart and unlocked Eldrin's restraints.
The stranger was Remington Maleficum.
Remington apologised for arriving late. A mutual friend, Sister Vaelith, had asked him to find Eldrin and consider him for the Arcanum, but the acolytes had reached him first. Remington returned Eldrin's goggles and offered him sanctuary. Eldrin looked back towards the city that had consumed the labour of both him and his family, only to abandon him the instant his true nature was exposed. With nowhere else left to go, he accepted. Remington opened a passage through space and led Eldrin directly into Maleficum's Arcanum of Magic & Might, a place Eldrin had once only heard described and could barely comprehend upon arrival. There, Remington gave him something almost nobody outside his family ever had: safety without demanding anything in return.
That first arrival at the Arcanum became the foundation for everything that followed. Eldrin had arrived terrified of himself, still describing his golden eyes as a sickness and fearing what his existence might mean for his family. Acceptance did not come immediately, but the school gave him room to begin finding it. His connection to Tempestas strengthened, his clerical abilities emerged, and the powers that once frightened him slowly became something he could use for others. When Dash died, Eldrin performed what he would later understand to be his first true miracle by returning his friend to life. On the Crescent Pearl, his miracles again manifested through care for those around him, including the transformation of the island's trees into sakura blossoms beneath the full moons, a gift tied not merely to Eldrin himself but to Hatsu, Saigo no Toshi and the people his friend carried in his heart.
For all the power Eldrin had accumulated, the memories forced him to recognise that his greatest changes had never truly been about power. They were about acceptance. He had spent most of his life ashamed of the golden eyes hidden beneath his goggles, only to finally reach a point where he could look at himself and see something other than a monster. Moments before that gift was stripped from him beneath Palperroth, Eldrin had at last understood that those eyes were not an illness but part of the man he had become. His life had slowly formed around one central promise: nobody else should ever feel as helpless as the people he once watched being dragged from Bricksunder, as helpless as he had felt inside that cart, or as helpless as his friends now felt beneath the prison.
When Eldrin finally awakened, his eyes were covered and his body was almost completely spent. He did not have the strength to kneel, speak or perform any elaborate act of worship. He simply lay there and prayed. This time, he did not ask Tempestas to save him. If no help was coming for Eldrin, he asked that it be given to his friends instead. If he could no longer protect them, then let someone else give them the strength, safety and aid he wished he could provide himself. Whether anything truly heard him, Eldrin could not know, but for a fleeting moment he felt as though the prayer had reached somewhere beyond the walls surrounding him.
Across the prison, the three remained separated. Eos struggled to remember who she was while Eldrin fought desperately to remember exactly that. Boreal, battered almost beyond movement, remained unmistakably himself despite the body forced upon him. Yet beyond those cells, the world had not stopped moving. A white raven took flight from above the prison, carrying secrets with it through the storm. It crossed the water, passed over allies at sea and above the sakura-covered Crescent Pearl before returning towards Vurduar, carrying word gathered from across the Wandering Isles.
Elsewhere, the Archon's influence continued to tighten around the Isles. Remington Maleficum remained free but was still trying to recover the broken fragments of his own mind, while those scattered by the events in Palperroth remained separated and uncertain of one another's safety. Questions still hung over the missing, over the Crescent Pearl and over the homes and families the group had left behind. Eldrin, Boreal and Eos remained prisoners. Hatsu and Dash remained together but isolated from their captured companions. Dr. Harrow's work continued, while agents serving the Archon remained free to move through the Isles.
Far away from the prison, however, one final event unfolded aboard the metal vessel known as the SS. Omega One. A containment chamber began to drain. Its door opened, and the figure inside collapsed to their knees, drawing breath as though experiencing air for the first time. Simul Decker stood over them as a new set of orders waited to be given.
And there, with the heroes scattered across the Wandering Isles and countless stories still unresolved, this chapter came to an end, and this book came to a close.
This is the final session of this story.
The Wandering Isles will return (in Avengers Doomsday)
