Open The more I see, the less I know for sure.

There's always that voice in the back of her head.
It lived in the back of her skull, past the daylight of common sense.

It murmured to her.
Of things waiting to be unearthed.
Of knowledge older than books, older than prayer, older than the first piece of metal pulled from the mountain’s ribs.
Of possibilities that would bend the path of her life in new, strange, but wonderful directions.
Of limitations fallen away like bark from a dead tree.

That whispered to her that Astenvale was nothing but a cage of deep roots with chains of vines and rotten green.

You will burn yourself in this big knot of nettles....

---

The festival of lights had swollen the monastery with warm voices and wandering strangers, so she took to the forest-covered hills instead, letting the winding shadows swallow her. The forest crackled and creaked while Venla moved with swift steps through the wild grass and brambles, on the gnarled trails between large birches, pines, and oaks.

The sun was slipping toward the rim of the world when her feet finally stopped. She had come upon a glade deep in the old forest, wide as any town square she’d known, circled by trees that remembered more winters than some men ever would.

With her eyes closed, she sat down and focused on different sounds at different distances. The faint echoes of ting-ting of a blacksmith, the wind in the rustling leaves, the sounds of civilization trying to wrestle through the thick wall of vegetation and fog, her own calm breathing and heavy heartbeats... She thoughtfully ran her thumb over a chestnut she had picked up from the ground earlier. Gathering strength and seeking a foothold somewhere beyond everything in that gloomy monastery, seeking a foothold beyond the earth.

When she opened her eyes again, the Weave hung before her like a lattice of living threads, stretched through the air and the spaces between moments, humming with a sound she felt more in her soul than in her ears. Venla rose to her feet slowly as prayer, knowing without knowing that this was the hour the whispering things inside her had been waiting for.

She reached out, careful as a child touching a tombstone. Her fingers closed around one of the threads.

The first thing was the crackle, like glass cracking under sudden pressure. A sound that ran hungry up her arm and rattled her teeth. Then her hand burned bright, red as fresh-forged iron. A red bolt tore loose from her palm, enormous and ravenous, and it devoured the thread whole. It ripped across the glade in a quick, blazing lunge and struck a deer at the far edge. Blood and muscle exploded, painting the ferns and tree trunks in dark, glistening streaks. Heated, moist air rose upwards.

When the storm of gore cleared, nothing recognizable remained of the deer but four bloody leg stumps, planted stubbornly in the dirt. The same force had picked Venla up like a puppet and hurled her backward. She slammed against a tree, breath ripped from her chest.

She slid down into the ruin of moss and broken bark, stunned beneath the copper-colored sunset sky.

Haelyn fell to her knees, wheezing.

The festivities were going strong, as every celebration and holiday was enjoyed in Astenvale. She had clung to the fringes, not one to be in the center but close enough to sit by and watch every one else. She had her rapier at her side, one hand resting on the pommel as if ready to brandish it should trouble find it's way here to the merriment.

Her lynx, a Guardian of the Wyld, sat beside her and too watched the sworn and squires enjoy themselves.

The scrawny squire was about to take a swig of sweet wine when pain pulsed through her.

It came quickly, overthrowing every sense she had and filled her with pain. The young woman writhed as her knees hit the dirt, but no sound came from her. Agony, this was agony. Haelyn's vision went dark but her body did not let up it's contortions as her body responded to the relentless shock of pain.

Her eyes showed her differently.

Trees, grass... something about the way it was all formed struck familiarity within her, and she knew she had seen this place before. Then, she saw a young woman. Saw her reach out the moment Haelyn's head lifted and stopped, waiting to flee if something was to happen.

Only the pain struck true. Pain the deer did not get to live through, but passed onto the acolyte of the Wylds.

Haelyn screamed, her eyes shooting open and saw the fire lit surrounds of the Monastery.

She caught sight of her lynx, hissing at anyone that came too close.

Look again, little girl. Where did our friend expire? The voice of the lynx filled her thoughts, but as the pain began to recede, the squire forgot how to reply. How to answer her companion.

She staggered upright, chest heaving, lungs tasting of iron. The air smelled weirdly acrid, chemically, and off-putting. The kind of air you breathe in, and instinctively go, "oh, this isn't good at all."

The glade around her was changed. It was no longer just a clearing, but a scar in the old forest. Steam oozed from the crimson puddle, the forest breeze carrying the tang of raw meat and the strange scent of burnt hair. The earth blackened and smoking where the bolt had struck.

A flicker of fear clung to her. Her eyes fell to her trembling hands. The veins beneath her pale skin glowed with a furious, molten red. Each pulse of blood was a spark. The world felt different now, as if it had shifted on its old, hidden hinges.

And the voice in the hollow of her skull whispered.
She didn’t need to be afraid anymore. Nothing in the world could touch her.

Venla tilted her head back, watched the high pale sky. The threads of the Weave hanging there, waiting for her hands. She reached out, fingers wrapping around them, tugging at their trembling strands. No storm, no rumble, just a single, impossible strike. A bolt, black as the heart of the abyss, more shadow than fire and light. Twisting and bending, uncurling down from the sky.

When it slammed into the glade, the ground was torn open in a cataclysmic roar. The shockwave hit her like a battering ram, and she was thrown sideways across the open ground, tumbling and rolling over grass.

Earth writhed. Roots jerked from the soil, coiling like serpents. The nearby trees buckled, bark peeling away in ragged strips, leaves burning in black and purple flames. The puddle of the deer’s blood boiled and steamed as black tendrils of lightning twisted through it, reshaping the remnants into shapes that withered and twitched in impossible ways.

Venla rolled to a stop on the damp ground and lifted her head. Watched the bloody meat twisting into something obscene and impossible, a totem she had seen before.

“Oh… shit.”

From the woods, three eyes peered. Blue as distant stars. "Broken," the word rippled across the fabric of the world. And out from the shadows stepped the pale tressed child. Stepped to the totem, and the gore and saw not but something too familiar. Shroud, boiling about her, hissed and cooled and froze to black and jagged crystals of every color between the stars and all the darkness of space. She touched the totem. "It is broken,"

The smell of blood drew him in.

Vaaga had stuck out the merriment and noise and dancing and singing and music for a whole ten minutes, a personal best, before he up and left turning his back on Astenvale for what he hoped might be forever or until the place had been reduced to somewhere people no longer frequented, whichever happened first and it was not long into his journey through the trees that he became aware of ripples in the Shroud. Like a great stone dropped into an icy pond, the cracks in the invisible energy of the world arced this way and that.

Something eventful was happening and it tore him away from star gazing as he walked and took him into the trees, deep into the woods where the smell of blood was carried on the wind. Following the smell upwind he came across an utterly unexpected sight and had to laugh his dry wheezing laugh.

That was until he saw Venla use The Art and his one eye narrowed.

So he was right to ask of her.

There was no time for self reflection as the shockwave of her Weaving knocked him flat on his back on the cold ground. This was wrong, deeply so. Venla was using raw magic. Tugging at the Weave of the universe itself. Messing with the fabric of creation. He had to ignore how good it felt to be hurt again and sit up, he was a Sorcerer damn it. Sorcerers did not let this kind of thing happen.

As he began to stand he looked at Venla on the ground, like himself, blown away by the concussive force of the blast and managed to get up on all fours.

"VENLA!"
He called over the ringing in his ears and refusing to even look at the totem, instead focusing on Venla, she said something he did not hear.

"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?"

Teeth sank into her arm before readjusting and pulling at the sleeve of her woolen jumper. Haelyn watched the lynx for a moment before understanding that she needed to get up.

She knew the way.

What the deer had shown her was a glade not far from here, but Haelyn rarely came out this way. She knew she could rely on the link she had to the now dead creature, who had called upon a Guardian in it's moment of death. Haelyn was nowhere near becoming one, still training to safe guard the wylds in the surrounds of North Ilica.

Her lynx, however, began to guide her.

Pain began to fade from her, releasing back to her mobility of her own self, and the squire was up and moving. Ignoring the concerned stares and questions called in her wake, she rushed ahead. Something happened... something is happening? Her expression turned to a frown, deep enough to show her slight frustration at not having all the answers.

This way, little girl. The lynx encouraged, several feet in front of her.

The feline moved with grace, but the squire could be heard as the two approached the glade. She stumbled, tripping on a disturbed root. She expected to see just the woman, perhaps the carcass of a killed deer... but a totem looked so out of place, Haelyn felt a flash of fear that came with seeing the unknown.

It struck her as strange, that this lonely glade, the one she had spent a day’s march to reach, filled with these good hearted people. There was Mina, the odd three eyed girl, Vaaga the Ice Wizard, and there was another young girl with a spirit lynx just leaving the embrace of brambles.

Where did they all come from?

Her mind flicked back over the paths she had taken. Convinced that she hadn't passed any camps or bigger settlements since leaving the monastery this morning. This was why she had chosen the lonely glade, far from any others. Venla knew, in the marrow of her bones, that what she could do was a danger. Raw, it did not care for innocence or intent. The last thing she wanted was to hurt anyone.

Wearily she pushed herself up onto her knees.

"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?"

She didn’t know what she had done, or why.
But it was towering in front of her.
Something alive, and already aware of all of them.

"Mina!"

"It is broken."

Two eyes opened on the bloody totem pole. Both of them angled down, fixating on the bright little glint-girl. Then, like a huge centipede, the thing just folded. Around and over Mina. Dozens of mouths yawned open along its length, some completely toothless, some filled with the blunt deer teeth, some filled with splintered bone. All hungry. Sucking, nibbling, biting.

"No, no, nononono"
Panic overflowed, and Venla crawled forward, grass stains growing on her skirts before she managed to jump to her feet and rush forward.

The urge to become sick hit her more than once, but Haelyn and the lynx gave the slithering creature a wide berth. To find shelter was proving difficult, but the squire knew her instincts to survive would not fail her.

The wylds called to her upon the eastern gust of wind, guiding her towards a path that will girl and lynx to safety.

Do not look back, little girl.

I won't.

The exchange between squire and guardian was contained to their link. She regretted coming here, of heeding the call of the deer and the wylds as witness. She cursed her oath to be a protector. It was far too easy to wish for all that she was before all of this, to return to the hungered and still scrawny girl she had been before being taken in by the monastery.

The wylds would have found you even then, little girl. Now, to the rowan tree, seek it's protection.

"ITHACAE NABTHASS!"
Even from the ground with all that was going on Vaaga managed to summon the ice wall to surround Venla's creation. Isolating it from anyone else who may be fool enough to touch it.

Working on the assumption that this was a Shroud Fiend he stood and began to focus on what priorities could be met within reality.

The Fiend had to be destroyed or contained.
The person enveloped was as good as dead.
Venla must not touch it. For her to make contact could give it the power to take her form or absorb her abilities into itself and if she could manifest such a thing without meaning to then he was not going to let it gain such power, especially when it was so clearly hostile.
He did not notice the third, nor the animal companion.

"Get back, GET BACK. YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING!"
How could she? Even if she had awakened to The Art within moments of his leaving and had study from the finest in the world she would not be ready for this. He was barely confident he could contain this manifested wrongness.

Venla must not touch it!

"HOARVAST OSPREACE!"
The world around him froze, the moisture in the air became a half dozen distinct icicles as long as spears and just as sharp, they formed a floating mantle about his head and shoulders and were all pointed at the ice prison he had made for the monstrosity.

His false eye twitched and one of the long and deadly icicles motioned to point towards Venla before he corrected it as his keen and ruthless mind recognised there were always options to ones goals.

Venla must not touch it!!

The sight of Mina trapped behind that frozen wall, penned in with the crawling abomination. Fear did not flee her. It curdled, thickened, turned inward until it became pressure, heat, weight.

“Why would you do that!?” Venla's head snapped toward Vaaga. Power bled from her in colors that refused to settle, violets and blacks that bent the light away from themselves. The ground beneath her boots hissed and frosted and then burned, rime recoiled.

“Let her out,” Venla whispered, then screamed it. “LET HER OUT!” The Weave bent toward the ice, dragged there by her will like iron to a lodestone. Her veins burned beneath her skin, glowing an angry, malignant red.

Her fingers brushing the sharp spears of ice. Lightning jumped from her hands, tangling around her wrists and throat. Deep red, coiling over the ice like a spiky fire. It climbed along every sharp edge, sizzling and snapping, carrying a heat so intense that the ice began to melt and cry. Breaking into dead white fragments that hissed and steamed as they struck the earth.

Icicles exploded violently, some vaporized. Veins of impossible color spiderwebbed through the ice walls. Obscene pulses, hairline fractures of dark discoloration crawling through the ice, racing outward. The ice prison collapsed, pulverized into glittering dust that evaporated before it hit the ground.

The ice gave way, and the thing inside unfolded. It was larger than before. Chitin and sinew, segmented like a caterpillar. Limbs. too many to count at first glance, sprawled from its sides, ending in claws and hooks that scraped against each other. Its head was bulbous and looked wet, crowned with a cluster of eyestalks that blinked into existence and vanished again.

This was a mistake. What she had thought was a call, a plea for help, Haelyn now witnessed an abomination come to life. The squire thought she could do something, to be guided by the Wyld and help restore balance, but this... this was an insanity she was ill equipped for.

She watched on with wide, terrified eyes. The lynx pressed against her leg, ushering her towards the rowan tree, but Haelyn knew there was no safe shelter in this clearing, not when that eldritch thing was looking as if it were searching for it's next prey.

"What do we do?" She called out, as if to remind every one else she was there. It was foolish of her. Haelyn did not know how to combat something born of corruption. She had no magicks or tricks to be useful, and all she knew how to do was to listen to the Wylds speak to her. Running away, getting out of here, it was far too tempting but Haelyn did not come out all this way just to escape.

"Should I call for help?" Haelyn tried to cover the break in her voice, the momentary show manifestation of the fear that was beating away at her heart.

"I WALKED IT OF TO CONTAIN YOUR MISTAKE VENLA! THIS IS YOUR DOING, YOUR MEDDLING BROUGHT THIS THING FORTH. HER BLOOD IS ON YOU, NOT ME!"

But if it mattered so much then perhaps the squire could help.

"Get the injured fool out of here Squire. Do not let it touch you. If you know the Art protect yourself!"

An icicle almost as tall as he was flew and struck the abomination. Pinning it to a tree.

Wind howled as the monstrous totem screeched in struggling pain.

"I will hold it for as long as I can."

Another of his icicles struck it to keep it from noticing the ruined girl and the squire as well as stop it from fleeing. Who knows what it could do if it reached the town.

The Knights would stop it certainly but by then it could be something altogether different. His good eye flashed to Venla again.

"THIS IS YOUR MONSTER CHILD. YOUR CREATION. MASTER IT!"
There was no time to teach and Venla seemed to be running on instinct anyway so maybe, just maybe if she created the thing she could control it, perhaps even destroy it before it does worse that it had already.

So he adopted that most loathed of tactics.

Patience.
Before speaking again Vaaga took a deep breath.

"Calm yourself, reach out to the Shroud as you did before. It is the same now as it was then, a threat in the tapestry. Yours to fix. Weave it back where it belongs!"

The horrid totem freed itself from the first icicle and Vaaga sent another.
Already he only had three left.

@Venla Thiel @Mina @Haelyn

When the abomination ruptured, it came apart at arm’s length. Blood hit Venla before sound did. A rain of it. Hot. Sticky. Metallic. It filled her mouth and nose, blinded her, glued her lashes shut. Chunks followed. Blood slapped against her shoulders, her throat, her ribs. Something wet and heavy, a heart, still twitching, smashed against her chest and slid down. Teeth rained like hail. Chunks of meat followed, warm wet impacts against her hair. Something soft and fibrous stuck on her cheek.

Fine spray filled the air, a choking mist of atomized flesh and ice crystals that burned the lungs and tasted of iron and salt and bile. Venla staggered but stayed upright, boots skidding in the slurry in the grass. Red everywhere. White everywhere. Steam rising in plumes.

Then she saw Mina fall.

Venla splashed through blood and half-melted ice, slipping once. Went down on one knee and caught herself with a hand. The ground was pulsing warm in places.

“Mina!”

She dropped to her knees beside Mina, hands shaking so badly she couldn’t touch her right away. Venla didn’t turn when Vaaga screamed at her. She was on her knees in the churned ground and gore, one hand buried in Mina’s hair to keep her head still, the other pressed hard against torn flesh that would not stop bleeding. Blood running between her knuckles.

The sound of ligaments pulled too far, of mass resenting shape. An icicle as long as a spear tore through the air and punched clean through the thing’s mass, nailing it to an oak. The abomination convulsed, its many limbs tearing at the ice impaling it, claws shrieking as they scraped uselessly against frozen crystal. Blood, thick and clotted, ran down the icicle in slow ropes, freezing as it fell.

When Vaaga barked at her again, named the thing hers, ordered her to master it. She then turned her eyes to the winter sorcerer. She got a girl bleeding in her arms and a very loud wizard waving icicles around like that’s helping...

“Stop,” she said. Her face was smeared crimson, sprayed across her cheekbones and lips, streaked into her hairline. Bits of frozen slush and something darker clung to her brow. “Vaaga,” Venla went on, “are a sorcerer. A trained one. Learned words, clever spells, all that. Which means this is the part where you stop shouting at me!! And start earning the title.” She shifted Mina slightly, careful, then looked up again. "So. Heal her!! Use magic!!” Blood slicked her skirts, soaked her sleeves, ran warm over her hands as she pressed them to Mina’s wounds.

“You can scream at me when she’s breathing proper,” she said. “You can blame me when she’s standing. You can even try to kill me afterward if that makes you feel better.”

"Should I call for help?"

Venla looked up at Haelyn then, really looked at her, at the white-knuckled fear. For a heartbeat, Venla almost said something gentle.

Almost.

“There is no help,” she said instead, bluntly. “We’re a day out from anywhere that matters." Hands never leaving Mina. “What we do,” Venla went on, breath short but steadying, “is we stop her from bleeding to death right here."