The mage began to lower her sword slowly as Jon spoke, although she visibly stepped away from him when he spoke a single word.
Aberrant
Volker’s face flashed before the Element’s eyes and she visibly bristled. Aberrants were dangerous mages whose craft quickly ate away at their soul. Rupturing had a similar cost, but Aberration seemed to do far more damage in a shorter amount of time, all for the sake of power.
The man explained that this was a dream, and that she was not in the real world of Idalos. Sephira glanced warily around her, noticing the strange fog and the way the land around her seemed to vanish at the edge of her perception. Maybe she was dreaming, but then how did he seem so lucid? Was he simply something conjured up by her mind, or was he real? His image and the outlines of the creature beside him were crisper than everything else. Curious indeed.
Sephira finally lowered her saber with a wary look at the other mage, her eyes flashing through an array of colors as she tried to discern if he was a friend or a foe.
“Fine Jon. I’m Sephira.” She uttered firmly, steeling her nerves against the thought of fleeing through a portal.
“I’m going to presume you are telling the truth, because little else makes sense here.” The Rupturer quipped coldly.
When Jon gestured toward the scene behind her Sephira blinked as if she was seeing it for the first time. Memories came flooding back into her consciousness and she recalled the events that had happened earlier that trial.
“Yes.” She replied whilist looking distantly at the image of Volker pinned down on the pedestal by a slew of Elements.
“A memory...my memory.”
As Daeva spoke something seemed to change in the air and the mist began to swirly rapidly around the pedestal , fuller colors bloomed across the faces of the Elemenets as if the memory was being brought into focus now that Sephira knew where she was. Everything was made ever sharper and clear. Then the scene began to grow, like ink weeping down a canvas. Stands filled with the common folk who had been watching the trial appeared to the left and right of the pedestal and in front of it now stood a blue skinned mer judge with a gavel in hand. She and the newly rendered crowd were also frozen as if trapped in the same moment as the man on the pedestal and the guards holding him down.
“This man died to-trial.” Sephira said softly as the scene grew outwards to fully display the area where Volker’s trial had taken place. The guards, the judge, the crowd were all perfectly represented. There was also now a dark haired women at the base of the pedestal wrestling with him to clap strange manacles on his wrists.
“He was a mage, an...Aberrant.” The soldier said quietly, glancing up at Jon. There was a tinge of regret in her eyes, a sadness that she could not quite communicate with words.
“It shouldn’t have been this way, but it was. His path was long, and full of darkness but it ended here.”
At that moment the scene began to reverse, Sephira stepping back as the guards holding the old man down were pulled back to their starting position on the walls. The judge was brought back to her seat and her whip was stowed back at her hip. Volker was now standing rather than being held down as if the someone had reversed time five or six bits into the past, just before the moment of his death.
There, just beyond the now empty podium was a woman standing at the witness stand. It was Sephira, or at least an illusion that looked just like her from during the trial itself. She carried a box and a sheaf of papers that she set on the stand. The scene was playing forward in real time, with sounds and movements playing straight from her memory.
The illusion of Sephira opened her lips and began to speak, her voice echoing strangling, probably because her words were being drawn from the mage’s memory.
“I met the defendant first on the fifth of Cylus.” The illusion said.
The real Sephira was standing nearby, and she turned pale as she watched the phantom of herself begin reciting her witness testimony.
“I don’t want to see this again.” Sephira whispered. But it seemed that the dream had other plans as the scene continued to unfold, all before Jon and Daeva’s eyes.
Dialogue|Thoughts