The golden light streaming from Xir’ain’s eyes dimmed and receded. He felt tired; he’d been unaware that he could feel tired. It had taken him much longer than he had anticipated to heal the female human. There had been… something, some force, resisting his changes. But there was too much earth and water and darkness separating the sky and where Xir’ain weaved his powers of creation for the sun’s magic to keep up its resistance long. He had saved her, but for what purpose? Information, he told himself. Surely he could have found another human to get to tell him everything. Curiosity, that was more honest. No, he was Xir’ain, keeper of the abyss, and he did not need to justify his actions. Not even to himself.
The girl awoke suddenly, and she became suddenly aware that she could see everything. She saw the wraith standing next to her, and she saw the strange beings gathered above, and she saw the paths leading in all directions, and she saw the black lake far above. And then the girl’s eyes opened, the iris a dark gray rimmed with gold. “Where am I?” she asked the wraith who stood beside her. She was perplexed how it stood perpendicular to her; she did not feel as if she was lying down. The black creature moved to stand her up, and then she realized what it was. “Water. I’m underwater.” She raised a hand to her mouth and then her throat. “How… how can I be breathing underwater?”
Xir’ain looked at his creation with affection and pride. If he had created it from scratch it would have been his greatest yet, but he had only altered the existing material into something new. “You are in the heart,” he spoke, no sign of motion on his mostly-featureless face. “I made you so you could breathe here.”
As the wraith looked her up and down, the girl became aware of her own nudity. She panicked for a moment as she looked around for something to cover herself with – there was nothing – and then she panicked again as she expected to choke on the black water that was surely rushing into her lungs. The sensation never came. “Why… why am I naked? Where are my clothes!?” the girl was not handling her rebirth well.
“Gone. Too much blood.”
“Blood, what are you talking about!?” But as she spoke her question aloud, her eyes and hand both moved towards her chest, finding the blackened scar over her heart at the same time. “What… happened to me?”
Xir’ain had taken any memory she may have had of being stabbed from her when he had put her back together. She wouldn’t even remember him standing outside her home or that her own father had tried to kill her in a moment of delusion. She wouldn’t remember much of her life before now. “You were dying. I fixed you, but different.” Still, what Xir’ain told her was not a lie. With a twist of his hand, black water wrapped around the girl’s body, pushing her fingers from the black scar, and fell into dark folds of watery silk. “Is there anything else you require?”
“You… saved me?” She seemed confused about something. “Thank you,” as she spoke, the golden light that danced from her eyes seemed to become brighter. “I don’t even know what you are, but thank you. Do you have a name?” At the word name, the girl paused. “Do I have a name?”
Xir’ain didn’t know why he put up with the female’s questions, but he did. “I am Xir’ain. Xir’ain is what and who.” After a moment of thought he added, “And you are Enly’air. Enly’air is what and who you are.”
Enly’air. The girl let it bounce around in her head for a second. It felt right. Yes, that was her name. If not, it would be her name from now on. “Thank you Xir’ain, I don’t know how I can repay you for saving my life.” For some reason, she found it incredibly easy to make her body move the way she wanted it to despite being underwater. She bowed at her savior.
“All I ask is for your loyalty, nothing more or less,” Xir’ain had spoken the words before he knew what he was saying. No, that is not what he wanted from her. “I would also like for you to tell me what you know about the world. I am unfamiliar with it. I am… new.” Odd, he did not speak in such a way to the imps or the eels, not even to the runners though they had the intelligence to make conversation with.
“You have it,” Enly’air said. “And I’ll tell you what I know, though it may not be much. I never travelled far from home.” She began telling Xir’ain of the world.
Xir’ain interrupted her incredibly detailed explanation of every place she’d ever been to or hear about with the question that he had been waiting to ask: “What is Ensis’Lucas?”
“Ensis’Lucas? That’s a place, a big city. Like a hundred fifty miles east of home I think. Ships from all over stop there because it’s got the only sizeable port on the southern side of the continent. It’s home to the most skilled blacksmiths in the whole world. They say that a sword forged by a blacksmith from Ensis’Lucas will never dull or break. I bet they use magic to make that happen though.”
“Magic?” he asked, some part of his mind already lining the word to the force that had tried to stop him from resurrecting the girl. If there was something out there that had the power to oppose him, he had to know what it was, and more importantly, how to destroy it.
Enly’air was confused for a moment how someone could not know about magic. Hadn’t he just made clothes for her using magic? Perhaps it was because he wasn’t human. Not all magical beings could understand the concept of magic because it was simply their natural state. “Magic,” she began trying to explain such a fundamental concept. “I don’t know how to describe it, so I’ll just show you.” Enly the human girl had had very little magical talent, but there were a few small things she could do. Enly’air put her fingers together and concentrated as hard as she could. And then she snapped her fingers, and the entire pitch-black dungeon lit up like the inside of the sun.
Xir’ain screamed in terror, for the first time in his short existence feeling pain. In the chamber above and throughout all the winding tunnels of the dungeon, the imps and eels and runners all felt the same pain. The water, not black at all in that instant, was filled with a singular roar of pain. The light filled every crack and crevice of the sprawling maze-like dungeon, and then it forced itself out through every opening it could. Everywhere a small pool of water marked an entrance to the dungeon, a pillar of light reached into the air. The black lake above the heart disappeared completely in one massive burst of light that connected the ground to the sky.
When the light faded and the dungeon waters returned to blackness, there was perfect silence. Enly’air was finally the first one to break it. “I-I don’t-“ She was having trouble making words come out. Her voice broke the spell.
Xir’ain slammed the girl against the far wall of the heart. The dungeon waters vibrated with his fury. “What did you do!” he roared. The creatures gathered outside the entrance to the heart scattered; they had never felt the master’s anger before. He had never had cause for anger before. Xir’ain might have killed the girl then, despite having just saved her from death, but his body was suddenly incredibly weak. His vision went dark, golden light all but extinguished, and he collapsed, for the first time knowing what blackness looked like as he lost consciousness.
Magic. Was it truly this terrifying?
No creatures being created
Location: The center of the grasslands on the southern end of the continent, S17E02.
Dungeon: An underwater maze of black water, the only visible sign from above being a black lake with a diameter of a half mile. The tunnels spread just below the ground in all directions.
Minions:
100 aquatic imps
60 black eels (and counting)
30 black runners (and counting)
Constructs:
Enly'air - Made to save the live of the dying human girl by the name of Enly. Her body is the same as when she was human, but the skin is more pale, almost white, and the iris of her eyes is grey rimmed with gold. She wears a black dress made from the inky black water of Xir'ain's dungeon. Xir'ain gave her the ability to breathe in the dark waters of his dungeon. When creating her, he unintentionally awoke her latent magical potential and shifted the source of power for her magic from the sun to his own soul.
Infrastructure:
Dungeon Heart (underground spring)
Summoning Chamber
Resources: All the golden grass you could possibly want and an endless source of water from deep below the ground
Compendium
Xir’ain, the dark abyss. A layer of black skin over a bottomless void, Xir’ain is the soul of an old keeper of the void, but he merged with the first thing he came into contact with in this world: water. Now he is of the abyss, the void at the bottom of the blackened sea. Though his body is close to that of a human, any who see him would be put off by some unnamable wrongness in the fluidity of his movements. His black skin pollutes all it touches, and his mouth is the bottomless pit of the night sky. To look into his eyes is to be reminded of your childhood fears of what lurked in the dark, and to lose the false notion that you had somehow conquered those fears.
