Divination Lesson

[wrecking_yard]

Now that I've gotten to spend some time around the rebel base, the mage's workroom is the best kept and best repaired in the entire building - and the only one where ill repair and shabby conditions could cause more than discomfort. There's only a few little dark streaks in indents in the varnish on the floor, and from what's been said, there's decent odds the lingering bloodstains are mostly mine.

The runes engraved into the walls, floor, and ceiling are wards - glyphs to contain anything that starts to go out of control in the room, and to mask the energy from any outside senses or scrying. Everything else is chalk, easily cleaned and redone; the silver inlaid circle is bare of anything else for the moment, the hastily drawn resurrection array I'd woken up in cleaned and released.

It's oddly peaceful for a while, Minwu walking me through drawing the glyphs and circle to help stabilize and amplify attempts at reading and scrying, calmly explaining the meaning of the different symbols, how each affects power channeled through it, the structure of the entire diagram, lighting candles and setting talismans.

Once it's set, I settle on the ground in the middle of the circle, Minwu just outside it with a few tomes in easy reach. "You should have more than enough potential for this sort of work, so you shouldn't have too hard a time reaching out - but learning to maintain a vision and find what you're looking for is going to take fine tuning. Emotions can disrupt it as well, and the calm and focus is often the hardest part to learn."

"Right." I take a slow, deep breath, trying to not feel out of place in the workroom. He may have waved off the single multi-purpose room as nothing compared to what he learned from, but the most humble mage's workroom is a different world from a blacksmith's shop and practicing in the woods or fumbling through helping the village healer.

He tilts his head for a moment, and I know there's something going on that he isn't saying. "How about starting with something close by that would still have resonance in this room - when you were brought in."

Great. Wonderful way to dodge mashing high emotions, trying to scry on my own corpse.

Walking through the basic ritual work is easy enough, but there's a few hours where I'm getting random voices, half-sentences of conversations that happened in the room, and surrealist suggestions of the various magic done there before I manage to catch something solid.

Two of the scouts burst in the doors, Raxet flying ahead calling a constant coarse alarm - Guy's right behind them, carrying me as carefully as he can at a sprint, covered in blood with a red trail behind him on the ground. Maria's right behind him with the rest of the patrol. The scouts barely get some report about finding outriders before one of the doors bursts open with a slam, and Minwu's voice echoes down the hall - "WHERE'S THE RAVEN?!"

There's silence and confusion in the room, but the scouts shrug and wave Guy to make for where the white mage is - already pointing and giving hasty yelled commands toward the work room. There's bits of other voices, faint over the vision - I recognize the wolfen elder's voice, "stone to turn the streams of fate", but there's another, unfamiliar voice - "rekindle.... raven ere the ashes go cold". Once they're inside, he tugs Guy's sleeve to get him to the circle - already half-drawn. Guy isn't saying a word or letting go until Minwu nudges him quietly - "He may not be gone" - before he settles me in the middle of the circle, the axe wound a wide gash down the center of my chest with bits of bone points where it went through my ribcage visible, the armor I'd had thoroughly ruined. Minwu's already working on finishing the circle in a hurry; at first Guy is standing next to it, then he slumps to the ground on the far wall, curled up and not moving even when Minwu starts casting, Raxet's claws clicking gently as the raven sidles over closer next to him.

I shake out of the vision, blinking at the work room and the flickering candles.

"Well?"

I have no idea what's even expected here, and I'm still dazed from the trance. "...You were already drawing the circle before we got here?"

He sighs and nods. "I knew Asura had a champion, and there had been plenty of omens that our chances would go from 'almost none' to 'maybe' if we could find them. The night before, the signs changed, and when I tried to seek an answer, it didn't sound incredibly helpful - 'Hope dies and you have but one chance to rekindle - in the wake of the raven ere the ashes go cold'." He pauses. "I had no idea how literal it would be, but that array is complicated enough that it's better to have it prepared and not need it than need it and have to spend precious time drawing it from scratch. I definitely didn't expect the raven's wake to be that literal."

"Not the first time Raxet's saved us."

"You know they found you that fast because he stole a keepsake from one of them and played keep-away until he could drop it in your friend's hand."

Definitely setting aside extra treats for him, and any of his flock who haven't fled to seek hiding places from the monsters. "I heard - part of that omen you just mentioned. Something else too, but I think Guy'd know more about it."

"Hm?" He's looked up from checking something in one of the tomes.

"It was the elder that taught him - something about a stone to turn the streams of fate... I know when he first came to live with us, he said the elder had told him that he'd have the best chance to do something about some kind of ill omens they'd been seeing with us."

Minwu makes a quiet, almost resigned huff. "No wonder he was so shaken - he thought he'd lost not just a friend, but the hope his people had sent him to keep."

He's been slowly getting closer to his normal self, but he has been noticeably more rattled than Maria - and she's been wearing holes in the floor in agitation sometimes.

"I take it you were able to see what happened clearly?"

Right. Practice. "Enough to know what my own ribcage and lungs look like."

He rolls his eyes with a snort. "Do you feel like you could use another practice target, or do you want to try and find an answer?"

"I need to know what happened to Leon." Maria had seen him getting drug off by the riders that attacked us, and we still had no idea where they'd taken him.

He nods slowly. "You might be one of the only people who could - the magics the Empire uses to mask their actions makes it difficult to track anything, but a close enough connection might give you a way to get clues in spite of it." He's thinking something over, distant. "That said... don't get your hopes too high on that coming easily. You're trying to work around wards that will be trying to redirect you."

Silence, and he sighs, and starts more loosely talking me through.

At first it's like trying to catch mosquitoes bare handed - little bits and snippets from all over. "HEY FIRI - stop by the stream after this?" (ass) "DID YOU HAVE TO BE THAT LOUD?!", his sword buried in the giant coeurl just over my head holding it in place, bruised and battered in some kind of nightshirt on a ship (vanished before I could try to see what it was), blood pooling on gold runes engraved into a floor, perched up on a rooftop in the village out of festival traffic -

- looking back from the two black-armored riders he was between on hearing Maria scream my name -

A dark, dimly lit room, polished stone with ornate embellishments of precious stones and metals hidden in the gloom. The riders' dark beasts standing too still for any normal animal on either side of the door, two of them carrying Leon into the room, unconscious. Someone approaching them - gilt and brocade but oddly blurry, obscured somehow.

"We found him." A pause. "...We were sure we found him. He had the strongest aura of divine magic out of the group."

The blurred figure pausing. "Until the warding spell Asura's actual champion had cast faded, I'm sure." Restrained anger and frustration, the riders barely flinch. The gilt blur pausing, studying Leon.

"This may work out better than the original plan..."

My ward. The protection I'd cast when we got close to the riders - he was ahead of me, I could cast on myself faster than him so I always warded him first -

The vision falls apart; my mouth's gone dry, throat tight. "They were after me - they sensed the protection I'd put on him, they'd been sent to find me..."

Minwu hurries into the circle, kneeling next to me, a hand on my shoulder; they took him because of me. "If I hadn't cast on him -"

"They would've killed him to take you instead of the other way around."

I startle, freezing; I wasn't even sure when Guy had come in the room, but he's by the door, Raxet on his shoulder and Maria next to him.

"He's alive and they want you. That means we have time to save him." The raven punctuates his sentence with a feather ruffle and a musical clonk.

Minwu's shifted to be in front of me. "What did you see."

"I - they were carrying him, it - dark room, stone and gems, there was someone I couldn't really see - they were reporting, said he'd had the strongest divine aura, whoever it was told them it was a ward, but that it'd work out better this way..."

He squeezes my shoulder. "Breathe, Firion."

"I need to know what they're doing to him-" I do manage a couple gulping breaths, trying to scrabble at the beginning parts of the ritual, but nothing is coming into focus.

"You won't see anything like this - but I might be able to follow, just - try to breathe and focus on what you saw, alright?"

I nod after a moment to process, and try to focus as much as I can on the image through the knot of panic and worry.

I can feel the power shifting around him, even though it doesn't look like anything's happening for a few minutes -

Then the candles flare, flames going dim violet before going out, gold light flickers through all the warding runes on the room itself, and he falls back on his heels with a wobble. Guy and Maria hurry over so that we're all clustered around him, barely minding the circle.

"I hate being right," he finally grumbles. rubbing the bridge of his nose and settling sitting before he glances up at all of us staring at him.

"It was too easy. You're barely learning, if you had that strong of an instinct for it you would've been getting visions regularly before this; he wanted you to see that." He's quietly fuming, hunched into his robes and scarf. "I saw part of it, but it cut out not long after what you mentioned - just a voice. 'If you want him, Champion, come find him'."

Maria blanches, going more pale, and Guy sets his jaw with an uncomfortable nod. "Bait. They won't kill him - they need the bait."

Minwu winces and almost says something, but apparently decides against it.