16 | A Militant Witchling

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The spirit was in a place of never-ending night, a place of nowhere and nothing, a realm of bottomless, yawning dark. This abyss was fed by the fears born before creation, fears from that primordial age before the Burning King struck the first sparks, before the Ethereal King sewed stars to the sky, or before the Wild King lifted his voice and gave time its Song. 

Such fear, abstract and indefinable, bled into this place, into this unknowable realm of no one, nothing, no where. Into that untouchable void.

The spirit wandered where she willed, not knowing the way forward or the way back, or why she was there. So much of herself had vanished into the nothing, the bits of logic and knowhow that would've made sense of this delirium now gone, having moved on or dispersed, she didn't know. 

There were these brightly colored threads woven about her, and they kept what remained of the spirit together. She couldn't name most of the colors, had forgotten their names or had never known them at all—but there was one she still knew.

"Crimson." She rather liked that color, the boldness of it, the strength of the thread beneath her inquisitive fingertips. She liked it best of all. 

Sometimes, the threads unraveled and the spirit knew she was missing something else, but didn't know what had gone. The threads weakened as she wandered, even the crimson one, though it was stronger than the others and was tightly bound somewhere beneath her ribs. The spirit knew it was important, but didn't know why.

Onward, the spirit wandered, and time kept slowly eating away at her threads.

        	We drove through the morning and the afternoon, our passage marked only by the sun's skyward travels and the flow of evolving terrain

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We drove through the morning and the afternoon, our passage marked only by the sun's skyward travels and the flow of evolving terrain.

The sun crested the snowcapped mountain heights just as I broke free of the winding passes and emerged on the dull plains of the high desert. The winnowing of the wind was audible over the roar of countless tires racing upon the pale, aged asphalt and the heavy chugging of semi engines.

The scenery changed soon enough, the mountain ranges retreating to ever-increasing distances as the beige desert lowered and rolled out in a bland tapestry of spiky cacti and creosote bushes. The sun grew unseasonably sweltering when we crossed into the Sonoran Desert, and the car's air conditioning unit began to malfunction. The mage's spell had fried something integral, but I had no way of knowing how integral that part was.

The landscape was flat with red mountains looming in the distance, each jutting upward through the level earth like broken, jagged teeth from a parched mouth. The sky seemed to encompass more than its fair share of the world, laid out in a canvas of a million blue shades, though it was white where it touched the horizon and the wind kicked a dusty haze into the air.

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