Karalena

Chapter 4

Kara shoved her way past the tent flaps and into the healing tent her mom had in the center of the city. As the only healing mage within the barriers of Raas, she spent most of her time in the large tent passing between the sick, the elderly, and newborns. Usually the tent was quite busy, but what Kara saw when she walked in made an average day look slow.

People were screaming, it seemed everywhere in the city people couldn't stop screaming. Some dragged family members across the sand floor, pleading for someone to help them, but the person they carted around was already dead. Others were frozen in shock, their eyes distant and lost.

Her eyes latched onto her mother across the tent, glowing much like she was, "Ma!" Kara shouted, launching herself through the frenzied crowd. She was leaning over a cot, her hand atop the dulled skin of a woman's forehead.

Kara knew the rules against interrupting her mother when she was healing, but she decided the circumstances would allow those rules to be broken, "Ma," She repeated, grabbing her mother's shoulder and spinning her around to face Karalena.

Her mother's eyes flew open, taking mere seconds to focus on Kara's face. Immediately, tension that Kara hadn't noticed before faded out of her mother's shoulders as she her daughter, "My Karalena," Her mother whispered, "You're okay." It was a statement, not a question. Her ability to heal people extended to being able to tell the current state of people's health, just by touching them. "What in the desert sun is going on out there?"

Kara explained to her the three men and the dark wave that spread among the city, "But why aren't we faded?" She motioned to the people around them, "Why are they so... dull?" Kara couldn't think of a better way to phrase it than that. Her clear eyes clung to her mother's soft brown ones.

They really looked nothing alike, those two. People often commented that Kara's mother, Greta's, plump form contrasted Karalena's thin, athletic build. While her mother's hair was a pale blonde color, Kara's was a chestnut red that flashed like fire in the sun. Even their skin colors were off from each other, Greta looking as though she had been sun-bleached while Kara looked sunbaked. They could not look more different; it was something Kara's mother never liked to discuss.

"I don't know," Greta's voice came out soft and steady, but her eyes cast themselves down. Kara knew how to tell when her mother was lying. Before she could push her mother any farther though, the screaming near the entrance of the tent got louder.

Kara spun to find the three men from earlier storm in, Joel in tow along with two others. Joel was being nearly dragged forward, his legs failing to find purchase underneath him. His skin was as golden as always, nothing about his color had been diluted or changed. Except for maybe the purple bruises already formed over the plains of his face. The other two dragged in with him looked just the same, colored and bruised. Kara recognized them as two illusionist mages, Lark and Lygh, a couple of blonde haired twins that were known for being troublemakers around the city.

Her hand throbbed seemingly in time with the footsteps of the three invaders, and she briefly debated the possibility that it was broken. Before she could bury herself in thought though, the large man with the glowing turquoise-green eyes spoke up, "Healer!" His voice boomed across the space of the healing tent, almost as if some phantom wind had pushed it towards Kara and her mother past all the screaming and pain, "Carn is in need of a mage such as yourself." The large man hefted Joel's arm into the air and Kara inhaled sharply at the painful shutter that visibly racked his body, "The sun mage is simply an added bonus," He chuckled, his eerie eyes pinned to Kara's mother.

Kara looked to her mother with horror in her eyes. Carn was a city of nightmares, where the Dark Mage's king, Dante Er Frar, lived and ruled from atop his throne of fire. The City of Raas might have been hidden, but mages always had their ways of hearing of the happenings in the world beyond them, and The City of Carn had such a reputation that it was impossible to feign ignorance to its existence. Kara knew if her mother disappeared to that city, it was unlikely she would ever see her mother again. Her hand shot out to grab her mother's, but the healer mage ripped her palm from her grasp.