Imber Befogged (Part 2 of 2)

#Wss366

Better forward than back, she thought, and passed through the arch, where she stopped. The fog had disappeared, replaced by an unrelenting whiteness that was neither close nor far away but at an undefined distance.

The road continued, but a line of waist-high pillars ran down the center. She couldn’t tell how far they stretched. Their alabaster shade blended into the surroundings.

On each pillar was a globe resembling a soap bubble. Rainbow colors danced on their surfaces, contrasting with the stark whiteness of everything else. Common sense urged her to leave them alone. Everything here was strange and potentially dangerous. But her curiosity prompted her to take a closer look. Which would it be?

The latter won out as she #ditched caution. “Why in the name of the twin gods was I brought here if not to look?” she said, excusing her recklessness.

The colors swirled hypnotically, drawing her closer and closer until she could make out dim shapes in the bubbles. Her light touch caused the colors to riot, then coalesce into a blue sheen. The surface was smooth and hard under her fingertips, but tingled like a healer’s touch.

When she drew her hand away, the globe cleared. An Inacar woman stood in the center of the sphere. She was holding a bundle wrapped in cloth. Her faded shawl of Shaw design and simple, unadorned gold jewelry marked her as a commoner. A wave of sadness, longing, and grief swept over “The Imber.” The feeling dwarfed any she had felt before. The only thing that came close was when she lost her kitten, but that had been a mere shadow compared to this. It ran deeper, much deeper.

The woman held out the bundle to another woman wearing cornflower-colored robes indicating a lowly priestess.

“My child, its name is…” The woman began.

The priestess cut her off. “Names are unimportant. She is just a runner, no more.”

The vision ended, and “The Imber” touched her damp face. She was crying. The woman’s heartbreak lingered. It was like the rain seeping through the roof of one of the Runner’s towers, pooling at the bottom, soaking into the ground.

Though humble, the scene touched her deeply.

When she looked up, she saw stairs where the road had been. The pillars and spheres were gone. Tales whispered in the dark about the stairs’ safety were divided. Some said they led to the burning lands of the ancients, from which no one returned. Others said they would take you back to wherever you’d gotten lost. She favored the latter stories. After all, if no one returned, there would be no one to say where the stairs led.

She’d chosen correctly and didn’t have far to climb before she was on the proper road. She hurried along it. If she were too late, people might suspect she’d explored too deeply into the Wandering-Worlds.

By the time she reached Vas, she had already begun burying the memory of what had happened. It was a dangerous memory to have.

#TootFic #MicroFiction #Serial #Fantasy #NMV366 #NMMP