Teiran is patrolling. There is nothing unusual about the path her hooves take her on through the desert, except at which time of the day it is. Night is falling, quickly, and it is hot and hot and hot, like the air is pressing in on her from all sides, like it is trying to drown her. Normally she would not move through the Mors at night, because that is when many of the more dangerous creatures come awake. But something doesn’t feel right, tonight.
Something is telling her that she needs to.
That is how she finds the half buried pedestal of what used to be some kind of statue. Nothing left but its hooves, nothing left but the stone base encircled with bright, sparkling stones. Teiran can hear the voices, like they are rising up out of the desert all around her.
The closer she gets, the more unbearable they become, grinding into her skull. Incomprehensible, mostly, but for a select few. Even those are buried beneath the whine and drone of the combined force of all the voices together. Oh, she can barely stand to be near the piece of ruins long enough to see the unreadable inscription and to see the bizarre swirling inside the gems.
Teiran retreats until the voices fade to nothing more than a mere whispering breeze, sage eyes narrowed as she watches the fading sunlight glint off the aged marble. It’s clear, if only from the few voices she could understand, that someone or something wanted to be freed. Many of them.
How many of them, she wonders?
Without being able to read whatever is written on the base it’s impossible to know why or how they’ve been trapped. The soldier is still looking at the statue from a distance when the angle of the sun begins to reflect light off the gemstones and into her eyes. She shifts her body slightly, and in the process catches sight of something strange in the gemstone at the forefront of the platform.
It looks slightly larger than the others, but more than that there almost appears to be a seam going through the middle of it. Teiran braves the buzzing of the voices again to get a little closer, and now she can see a very fine line spreading all around the base, connecting each of the gemstones.
The voices beg and beg and beg in her mind as she considers what it could be. Clearly there is some strange magic going on here, trapping these souls, or spirits, or whatever they happen to be. She can’t get close enough to strike one with her dagger and see what happens… but maybe she doesn’t have to.
Teiran looses the dagger from the sheath on her right side. In the late evening light, the gold of the snake handle is bright like a flame. The gemstone in its mouth seems to glow, the obsidian blade limned in golden light. The rose-hued woman locks her eyes on that slightly larger stone and lifts the dagger into the air, poised to throw. She whispers, “The seam,” and lets go.
The dagger flips through the air, and although she expects it to bounce off the gemstone, to barely fracture its surface, it slips into some space there almost like a key into a keyhole. The line she had noticed begins to fill with red, starting from that gemstone where her dagger is embedded. Each stone that red line reaches begins to glow, and Teiran can feel a strange vibration in the sand as it begins to shift underhoof.
The voices are crying, or screaming, or rejoicing now; she can’t quite tell. When the red leeches into that last stone, there is a sound like a thousand mirrors breaking, and a flash of bright, bright light. The soldier is forced to close her eyes and turn her head away until it subsides.
After a few silent moments she turns back to the plinth, which is now broken into several large pieces. The stones are scattered to the sand, no longer whole—nothing more than glimmering shards in the failing light. There are no more voices, but if she glances up she almost thinks she sees the shadows of strange shapes dissipating into the air.
She can’t be certain what she’s done, but that feeling of wrongness has vanished, much like those shadows. Teiran moves toward the destroyed marble, collects her dagger which has fallen to the sand, and turns back to the court. Somehow, the air almost feels lighter.
