Page 16 of Spirit Storm

Might as well try to make it count.

I let my awareness settle and my senses expand.

He's in a cave.

The details assemble themselves around me the way they always do in here. It’s not quite seeing… more like knowing, the information pressing itself into me. There are stone walls slick with moisture. A low ceiling. And the damp air is filled with the smell of minerals and something older… maybe animals…

It’s like the cave itself has been breathing for centuries and has never once exhaled.

Tharuzel crouches in the center of the space, the long geometry of his limbs folding wrong in all the ways like the stuff of nightmares.

The runic script pulses under the skin of his arms, red and restless, shifting between shapes I can't hold in my mind long enough to read. This is him. The real him.

Behind him, carved deep into the far wall of the cave, is a circle. It’s enormous, floor-to-ceiling, and packed so densely with symbols and interlocking designs that it looks less like stonework and more like a language folded in on itself a hundred times.

But he isn't looking at the circle… his attention is on the floor.

He's drawing on it in careful, deliberate strokes, and it takes me a moment to register what he's drawing with. The lines are dark and wet. They catch the faint bioluminescent pulse of his own runic glow and gleam.

Blood.

He's drawing in blood, and the copper smell hits me. I’m suddenly very glad my dream-self doesn’t have a stomach to turn. Still, I focus on what he’s doing and ignore the grossness of it.

The lines he’s painting spread outward in a precise geometry, symbols connecting into a larger pattern that I've never seen in any text, on any database, or within any of the Order's records.

I try to commit it to memory, studying the shape of each mark and the way they build on each other. But it's like trying to memorize a song being played too fast.

Every time I think I recognize something, another detail changes it and demands my attention.

Then he pauses.

His head tilts slightly, and he stills. Does he sense me? My entire non-corporeal existence holds very, very still. I am not here. I am a draft in the cave. I am nothing worth investigating.

Tharuzel holds for a beat. Then a second.

The chorus of voices that lives inside him whisper and I make myself as small and innocuous as possible.

After another long moment, he turns back to the floor and the work he’s doing.

Is it a ward? An offensive spell? A summoning?

I reach for his intentions but get nothing.

When he finishes the last symbol, he rises to his full height, which, even hunched under the cave ceiling, is massive in scale, and steps into the center of what he's drawn.

He stands there for a moment, his weight settling into the pattern like a key entering a lock, and then he reaches into the folds of whatever serves as his garments and draws out a dagger.

The weapon is ornately jeweled, every inch of it etched with runes. The blade is curved and dark, and the handle is something I don't want to look at for too long.

He turns it in his monstrous, clawed hands and draws it across his own palm without ceremony.

What comes out is not blood.

It’s an ooze of black that moves wrong… too slow, too deliberate. It ebbs out and downward as though it's making decisions about where to go. He presses a finger from his uncut hand into it and turns to the wall.

He draws over the circle of intricate designs carved into the wall of the cave, not tracing the existing symbols, but overwriting them. The black ichor of his blood goes over the ancient stonework in heavy, deliberate strokes.

His symbols. His language. His intentions.