In the beginning, there was nothing, and from nothing, there was magic, and from magic, there was the world.
- Tome ofEvermore, Book I, Chapter I
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In the endless expanse of a snowy plain, blanketed with endless white in all directions, the world gleams like diamond in the blazing sunlight. As far as the eye can see, there is no green glimpse of life, no shelter from the biting cold. There is nothing but the dead and the cold, the howling of the frozen wind, and the snow-sprinkled, ravaged corpse of a child, face-down like a broken doll.
A tattered cloak once wrapped his frail body, and the smooth chestnut of his skin is revealed through the nakedness of his arms, stick-like and pale with a maze of jagged scars, protruding at sharp angles from a worn grey tunic, splattered with drying blood. His face is buried in the snow, submerged in a pool of glistening crystals drenched with crimson. More trickles languidly from his neck, chunks of meat shredded from his throat, veins and arteries snaking from his exposed flesh like severed wires. The boy was tall, once upon a time, and his slender limbs are splayed dramatically, arranged like a murder in a painting, carving lines of blood and crushed ice into the snowscape.
Next to the child, a pair of shattered spectacles, thick and clunky, lies abandoned, lenses punctured cruelly. There are no eyes left to look upon the death of the boy, to mourn his destruction. There is only the heatless gaze of the unfeeling sun, the ruthless cold of the deathly winds, and the infinite touch of the endless ice.
The child's blood stains the perfect white of snow, and the world is silent.
And then there is a gasp, coarse and grating, and the boy's breath rattles as he raises a stick-thin arm towards the sky, slender fingers clawed. He stands, lurching and bleeding, without a flinch, dried blood cracking off his savaged neck. The sun reveals ugly claw marks etched into his bare torso, pale bone staring through the gashes, and glistening pink puncture holes through his robed thighs, and the gauntness of his thin face, one hazel eye staring madly into the sky, the other crushed into scarlet jelly, and the skinless patches of his jaw. Perhaps before the terrible incident, he was a child, twelve years of age, joyful and inquisitive and thoughtless in his youth.
But now the wounds that rip through his vessel, and the blood that spurts from his crushed body, and the stiffness of his unfeeling flesh are his death and his life, and in his devastation, he is made anew.
As the child holds his hand up to the sun, raving whispers burst into the air around him, mad and scathing, and they bring back the pain of his numerous wounds, and an inhuman scream rips itself from his throat. He claws at his face in agony, manically scratching red lines into his cheeks and down his face, his one eye clouded with terror, and the sunlight slowly fades into black.
His world is lightless, and tainted with pure darkness, and he sees a vague figure, with stretched limbs tipped with long claws, and a thin, devil-horned head. The mad whispers intensify as he stares at it, and even when he averts his gaze, trembling, a paralysing cold drips down his back, and his body stiffens. Bloodlust seeps through the air, and a faint roaring fills his ears. The silhouette begins to move towards him, covering impossible distances with every step, but all the broken child can do is fall to his knees, frozen with pain and unfiltered horror.
"Come closer..."
"I love you...!"
"Just a taste..."
"Feed us..."
"Please..."
"My sweet..."
The voices multiply, merging into each other in a mad cacophony of raving screaming, filling the boy's mind like a thick fog, and quashing his desperate thoughts. The figure stands before him, a pace away now, and tenderly lifts a slender claw to his chin, staring into the eye of the child, and his mind begins to fade, his identity unravelling, vision emptying. Unseen to his eye, his flesh corrodes and rots, festering in sickening green and black. The figure tilts its head, and lifts the boy's chin towards it, opening a gaping, abyssal mouth, releasing a word in a voice of foulness and corruption.
"Embrace."
In the wake of his death, the boy thinks of nothing, and he is truly nothing but a vessel; a doll of ravaged flesh. He remembers no-one, and there is only darkness.
But with the memory of the nothing, the memory of the cold and the light flood into stunning colour, dispelling the endless black.
The hazel of Torna's eye blazes into blue like crystals of ice, and howling winds drive away the raving whispers, and slice through the darkness of the silhouette, and in his mind, a blizzard explodes around his body. His flesh ripples, wounds smoothed over with ice as clear as the sea, the rotting of his body halting abruptly, and as he raises a hand, blood and jelly and the remnants of the dark flow into his eye socket with the ice, and are sealed into an orb of light, with black sclerae and pale grey irises. Unknown runes flash around his body, and the wind throws his cloak into a fluttering dance. Through the blizzard, he sees a staggering creature, humanoid and twisted, like a mutated vampire, its body naked and smooth and scarlet. It snarls as the runes bombard its body, burning themselves through its skin like acid. And as Torna remembers himself, he is awakened, and the magic returns in a flood of vigour and knowledge, countless runes cascading around him like the spirits of the wind.
And thus his soul speaks with his mind, and his mind draws forth the syllables of the ancient tongue of the elves, and his tongue sets them free into the open air in the voice of the old mystics.
"E'khan-draq-mohci-handra," he chants, many voices spilling from his bloody lips, "rre-ch'an'hi-soth."
The runes flow like a hurricane around his body, and Torna flicks his fingers towards the vampire, sending the symbols, glowing with an eerie grey light, slamming into its figure like hammers. It hisses in pain, and the runes interlock like chains, binding it in place. Its blood-red eyes flash in fury, and red light leaps from its claws like an arrow.
Bang!
The light blows a hole through Torna's torso, exposing a beating heart, but before his blood can leap from his body, ice and light fill the wound, sealing it tightly shut, and another flurry of gleaming runes brand themselves onto his flesh. The winds scream ever louder, the snow flying energetically with the storm, and a blizzard rises around the corpse and the monster, enveloping them both in its frigid embrace, and as the last symbol slams itself into the centre of the creature's chest, resembling the eye of a serpent with its coiling lines, Torna twists his hand with a sickening crack, snapping his thin wrist, and laughing madly with the bite of pain.
"Yas'ha, Rinsur, Nekh-et. O Almighty of Light and Creation, lend me your strength!"
The decomposed flesh on his torso and neck pulsate like a thumping heart, and the green of rot and decay shimmers into the chestnut brown of his determined face. The wounds scattered across his body, packed with clear ice, glow softly with pale blue light, and the sunlight pierces through the storm, a pillar of gold illuminating the child.
"Eksakh-nekh-mo'qh'ri. I give you everything!" Torna shouts, his ice-formed eye flashing with unreadable symbols, black sclerae clouding over with red.
The vampire rips open its mouth, shattering a rune emblazoned over its face, and lets loose an ear-shattering scream, piercing the protection of the winds and drawing bloody tears from Torna's magic-clad eyes, a deathly screech marking its destruction as the boy throws his arms towards the creature, completing the esoteric spell, his soul singing in the tongue of the mystic.
[The spell 'Memory of the Sky' (???) has been released.]
"The first light, dusk-clad, a god in the image of hope."
"Final creation; the requiem."
"Solace of the veil."
The blizzard explodes, snow and cutting wind embracing the two, and light fills the world and Torna closes his eyes, and in the death of his body, in the collapse of his flesh, in his bold enlightenment, he is completed, and he is free.
[Vessel potential exhausted.]
[Overriding...]