So I did a writing prompt on i09.com today. It's really kind of strange, since I don't usually do these exercises, as I am rarely without inspiration. But this time, it hit me, and I had to start writing. The prompt was just a simple picture: And the words just came out. Below is what I wrote. Let me know what you think! Happy reading!
The Wordless Call
by Brandon Hill
Tescadji had given him the phylactery in confidence.
Orisar, however, had been too much of an aficionado of history to let this merely sit in the protected coffers of Nibra’s museum of history. Alone in the cloister of his artifacts and curios, he felt the still-intact magic of the storerooms’ myriad devices of elf, dwarf, and dragon origin. But this device ... this was human-made! How could it even be? He pondered this as he took measurements and gauged its magical output before sealing it away. Tescadji had told him that it was perhaps a hundred thousand years old. But which kingdom of that age had birthed this curiosity was a mystery that thus far evaded him.
But still, how had humans made this? Humans were a race of low etheric affinity on the Ylrebmik scale; Orisar and his race could only use extant magic in an object. Humans were supposed to be incapable of casting spells of their own.
The thought haunted him ... possessed his thoughts for a solid week as he worked distractedly in his cluttered office. The magic of the artifacts in their neatly arranged drawers always thrummed in the back of his consciousness like so many faraway bees’ nests, but this was different. It seemed to somehow call to him. Though there were no words that he could discern in that distant tugging at his soul, he nevertheless felt it. And day after day, it seemed to grow louder, more distracting ... more irresistible.
On the seventh day, he broke.
He hovered over the device, its depiction of a withered human hand clutching the phial of glowing bluish green fluid in the enchanted, unbreakable glass. It gave off a dim, sinister light that pulsed in his Orisar’s soul like a heartbeat. Licking his dry lips, he turned the device over in his hands, studying every etching. A series of glyphs that he could not comprehend lined the sealed rim of the phial. It was some dialect of dwarvish, similar to Republic common in many ways, but different enough to where the words made no sense in root or pronunciation. Normally, they would activate on contact, but these were silent, perhaps even dead. But no, something was active. The glow of the fluid in the glass exuded powerful magic, and the seductive wordless voice hinted at mysteries unfathomable. There had to be a way to activate it.
Suddenly, a revelation hit him. He recognized a stark similarity on the phylactery to something he’d seen on Tescadji. On his infrequent visits, the man almost always wore elegant leather gloves. Only once, he had removed them to assist him in gauging the magic in an elvish device of dubious origin. And there, he could see the myriad of tattoos he kept hidden. They were runes of a sort, almost dwarvish, but not quite. And here on the phylactery, were two runes of the very same kind that adorned the back of mysterious man’s left and right hands!
Orisar rushed to a nearby cabinet to remove a stylus and ink jar. Normally, he used this to copy inscriptions or pictures on very old parchments. But today, his skin was the canvas. With slightly trembling hands, he etched perfect copies of the glyphs that matched those on the phylactery and Tescadji’s hands onto the backs of his own. Once finished, he allowed the ink a moment to dry. If there was indeed magic there, then he did not want to risk the power evaporating the still-drying medium. Spells broken in the midst of activation had been known to kill, after all. Finally, with skilled motions, he swept his fingers along the matching glyphs on the ancient device.
In less than an instant, as the memories and consciousness came to life and fired with shattering force through him, Orisar knew he’d made a terrible, deadly mistake. His ambition and blind recklessness had awoken a living curse: a blight that had lain vanquished for countless ages, the magic that it created forbidden and forgotten. And it was awakening in him, consuming his soul and ceding it to its own force.
He screamed, but in vain. These rooms were sealed. And no one would ever hear his last agonized cries as Orisar the librarian was erased from this universe, becoming the vessel of something else.
***
Tescadji knew what happened the moment he arrived at what was left of the library. The reaction of magic coursed through his deftly hidden runes with a cold warning of the darkest evil. There were, oddly enough, no bodies at the scene. And though this would not have normally concerned him, the Android Task force had been called in, due to eyewitness accounts describing a horrifying sight of the bodies that would have remained, human, elf, and android, rising, and with shambling movements, following a figure into the unbreathable smoky ruin: a figure that looked vaguely like human skeletal remains with a glowing green device hanging from its neck, but wearing the robes of a doctor Orisar of Nibra.
Even Tescadji, after nearly eighty years, did not understand the reactions of his runes. But they had given him this premonition. He knew that he had somehow wrought this.
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