A forest, apparently partly dead of some blight, lay to the south. Skeletons of trees still remained mostly vertical, though newer growth was thick beneath the dead canopy. An ocean of saplings reached up through old, dry underbrush. The man was surprised a wildfire hadn't cleared out the detritus already. Rain and lightning seemed particularly thick in that direction. He wondered if he would witness a lightning strike touch off a blaze even as he watched.
He returned his gaze to the strange outcrops nearer at hand. At first the man thought the extrusions must be quite old. He saw dozens of instances where greenish spires had cracked and collapsed. Other outcrops, like the one he'd just emerged from, had weathered and broken into fragments.
Of course, as brittle as the mass he had emerged from had proved, perhaps the extrusions were not actually that old, in the geological sense.
He stood in place and slowly rotated, looking for something or someone recognizable. His own name seemed just on the tip of his tongue… but he couldn't dredge it up.
He looked east to the line of the horizon. Something in the texture of the landscape, the color of the sky, a scent in the air seemed familiar…
Bumps prickled across his arms and back as if with a chill. Something terrible had happened there. A monstrous calamity-
The man suddenly remembered.
Raidon Kane remembered.
His breath came harsh. His eyes tried to spin in his skull. Nausea threatened to bend him over.
Raidon clapped his hands to his brow, the pain in his left elbow nothing in that moment.
The world had ended. How could he have forgotten?
The fire. The pillar of blue fire had reached up over the horizon.
He saw again the pillar's fat crown of molten sapphire, tumbling and boiling upward. Closing his eyes merely brought the memory into sharper focus.
And the blast! That awful, land-erasing storm front that had swept out from the burning spire.
He remembered horrors: His horse, stumbling and disappearing in the azure turbulence. The woman who'd grown wings of fire, only to be incinerated. The awful, twining hair pulling a goblin's head along the ground- His amulet! It had burned away.
The wind tousled his hair, bringing scents of spring flowers and grass.
"By the Ten Tenants, have I gone insane?" bellowed Raidon, his voice hoarse.
He closed his eyes. He calmed his breathing. A monk of Xiang Temple did not comport himself thusly. Raidon searched for his mental regimen. He was a master of meditation. Images of a pillar of blue fire could not haunt him if he did not wish it.
He visualized his legs, his arms, his head, and that immaterial part of himself that recognized itself as his working mind. He visualized his thoughts as lines of energy. Normally serene arcs, now they were tangled and disordered. His confusion was a vibrating knot, a nest of snakes, preventing him from achieving clarity. He imagined an unseen force smoothing those lines, untying the knot, releasing the hissing snakes. Slowly, his higher will overcame his body's adrenal turmoil.
Tension leaked from his shoulders, and an incipient headache faded.
Such was the training of Xiang Temple. Like all who graduated from that monastery in Telflamm, Raidon was a master of his own body. His techniques for visualization allowed him to control natural processes within himself normally beyond conscious control.
He looked deeper, and saw where other lines, the lines representing his wholeness of body, were strained and even broken in the vicinity of his left elbow. He applied his focused clarity to the severed lines. The snapped cords of visualized energy merged, fused, and relaxed.
The pain in his shoulder faded.
He could see all the lines representing himself, vibrating with vitality, forming a shape in three directions: breadth, width, and height.
Furrowing his brow, the monk began tracing his identity lines in the fourth direction, in time. Perhaps he could discover some clue as to what had happened to him.
An oddity in the wire-frame model of his own body snatched his complete attention. A pulse of a color he couldn't describe slowly glimmered across his upper torso. Something blue, like the ember of some slumbering fire.
Raidon opened his eyes and looked down at his chest. His shirt, silk jacket, and overcoat were mere tatters, burned away, revealing a broad tattoo etched into his flesh. Overlapping inscriptions in a lost language, tiny and crabbed, radiated outward from the symbol, like stylized flames drawn around the image of a tree.
It was the Cerulean Sign from his destroyed amulet-now scribed on him!
How could that be? He ran a hand across the tattoo. The image possessed a palpable texture on his skin. It was real.
The vision of his amulet consumed in blue fire assaulted him. He recalled in those final moments how the symbol itself had persisted, as if liberated, while the substance on which it was inscribed dissolved. He had reached toward the crumbling amulet, ached for it… and the Sign had flashed into him. That was the very last thing he recalled, try as he might.
A tracery of the Cerulean Sign decorated his flesh. Had the reality-smearing blue fire transferred it from his amulet to his body? Why… how? And then, having so marked him, sealed him within a pillar of brittle mineral? It made no sense.
"Too many unknowns vex me," he verbalized, then he coughed. His throat was sandpaper, unused to speech. He swallowed, shook his head. Spinning unsupported scenarios based on guesswork would avail him nothing except the creation of unwarranted assumptions. To comprehend what had happened, how he had survived, and how much time had passed since the blue fire storm, he would have to investigate.
He turned east toward Starmantle and fell into a light run. Unless he was misplaced in space too, it shouldn't take him too long to reach the port city, or what remained of it in the aftermath of the blue fire. As a monk initiate of Xiang Temple, and exemplar of its code, few things could long eclipse his extravagant martial prowess and conditioning, even long miles of travel. A false comfort? Perhaps.
The brittle extrusions grew thicker the farther he traveled. Once, he saw a humanoid shape silhouetted in a large, green mineral outcrop. He stopped, thinking perhaps he'd discovered some other prisoner held timeless within, just as he had been.
It was a woman, but one whose flesh was half burned away. An expression of pure agony made her face a demonic mask. She was completely encased in the extruded, greenish sap.
If the woman in the amber-like stuff was still alive, but held in a strange stasis, it would be cruel beyond words to release her to suffer the pain of her burnt flesh.
Raidon turned away, his expression tight. He resumed his eastward run.
He didn't investigate any other half-glimpsed shapes preserved in green.
The monk reached the edge of Starmantle, or at least the hints of its foundations. The city itself was no more.
Starmantle was gone, replaced with a madman's fancy. The emerald outcrops, akin to the one he'd emerged from, were thicker than ever as he approached the ruins. Perhaps the blasted city was their locus and origin? No longer brittle like the one that had trapped him, these were gemstone hard. Worse, this close to the city, each hummed a single, flutelike note. In sum, thousands of spires produced atonal melodies that clawed at Raidon's ears.
Between the spires gaped fissures that harbored a flickering blue glow, the same blue he recalled from the original firestorm. Raidon backpedaled a dozen yards.
Obsidian masses slowly drifted on the open ground between spires and ravines. In shape they were like irregular chunks of black stone. A palpable animosity emanated from them. Whether merely animate or actually alive, Raidon couldn't tell with the distance. Not that he particularly wanted to know. His eyes ached as they scanned the insane vista.