Darkness took me and it felt like I was floating in limbo. Some force was trying to pull me onward, but the sound of several voices were calling me back. They grew in number and volume. Return, remain, never leave.
Each passing moment was stretched and warped, and the void around me began to feel heavy.
With a sound of rushing winds, the tempo of voices increased and I felt myself physically dragged back, and slammed back down into the earth. I had a body again, hands, face, eyes. When I opened mine, my vision was blurred, and my hearing muted. The objects around me soon slipped into focus... the crane, the water wheel, the bind stone, I was standing back in Sandbrook. And there was Piratejim standing before me. Sound returned, he was calling my name...
"Signus! Are you with us again, mate?" He was looking at me with concern, but I could tell that he himself was not feeling too steady. He was swaying, stripped to the waist and covered in blood, though I could see no wounds on him.
"What just happened? Did we get hit by some sort of teleporting spell? Wait, where's all our stuff?" For once Redham had no answers, but someone else was willing to supply one.
"You've both just experienced your first death," a voice said very matter of factly. A tall bearded old man wearing robes stepped forward from his overhang near the bind stone. "For those unfamiliar with how things work on Agon, it can be a bit shocking during the initial experience."
I was not buying the answer. "I'm sorry... but I don't think I heard you correctly. You're saying I just got killed? I don't feel dead." I whispered a joke about senile old folks to Redham.
"Uh, Signus, this is the local Councillor. He's the elder of Sandbrook. I'm surprised you haven't met him already. If he says we died, well then... somehow, we must have." Redham looked over at the Councillor and smiled apologetically.
The old man cleared his throat and continued, "Allow me to explain. Here on Agon, each warrior that swears himself in service here has his soul bound to the land at focus points, like this bind stone. When you are slain in battle, your soul returns here, and you are in a way, reborn." I raised an eyebrow, but the man continued. "It was originally a... ah... technology of sorts, developed by the Mirdain to try to hold back the Alfar. But alas, as war tends to go, it was quickly leaked to everyone else. Now we are fighting in a perpetual purgatory." He shook his head sadly. "People still age, and there are other ways to remove someone from the world for good, but it is not so simple as it once was. But there are limits. Only warriors are allowed to bind themselves here."
I gazed at the stone with suspicion. "That sounds like a very convoluted system. Why hasn't it been improved upon, or spread further?"
Piratejim raised his hand "Ah, I may be able to help with that. I can't speak for other bindstones, but this'n here looks like it was slapped together by the Chaldeans. Many of their secrets were lost when the Alfar broke their Empire. Perhaps no one else knows how to work it?" He looked over at the Councillor who gave an affirming nod.
"Yeah, I'm not buying this, at all. It was a teleport spell, wasn't it?" The old man grumbled and tugged his beard.
"Believe whatever you want, believe a flying hivekin the size of a dragon beamed you here for all I care. But you will keep coming back to this spot, so don't squander the gift." And with that the Councillor began to walk back to his little wooden shed by the road.
Piratejim put his hand on my shoulder and started leading me off to the vault to get some replacement gear. "Come on, let's get back out there. I've got a friend who wants some seasoned fighters to help him reclaim something from a band of centaurs. Perhaps we needed that loss, we were getting pretty full of ourselves..."
I just shrugged and continued on, trying to ignore the fact that my perception of reality had just been entirely shifted. Redham seemed to be accomplishing that with ease. Maybe some centaur hunting is exactly what I needed...
No comments:
Post a Comment