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Echo

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The plains around Antliss, capital of the human kingdoms, were scattered with smaller towns and villages; this much was common knowledge.

Also common knowledge was the fact that many of these had been abandoned over the years as their occupants had one by one passed away, or else moved to Antliss to seek their fortunes.

Less common, however, was knowledge of the truth about one of these villages: Atsain, a miserable huddle of houses on the edge of the marshlands, abandoned for as long as anyone could remember.

Only Cofaint Rhith, archivist for the Historian's Guild of Antliss, knew the truth about this town. She had stumbled upon it purely by chance, in a manner typical of the Guild: Cofaint had been reading through a bundle of letters, bequeathed to them by an amateur historian from the distant town of Santyllia, when she had discovered reference to Atsain.

The letter had been otherwise ordinary; a hopeful note from father to daughter from during the great migration, when hundreds upon hundreds of families from the Townships-- Santyllia included-- had left their old lives behind and moved to within the borders of the Human Kingdoms. This had been untold centuries ago.

Literally untold, Cofaint smiled to herself; the ending of the Old Age was impossible to place, as it was more of a temporal reset than a natural progression from one era to another. Some called it divine intervention; she herself wasn't so sure.

But the father's letter, between tidings of fortune and suggestions that Febyd, his daughter, and Cheid, his husband, move soon to join him in the plains, had mentioned Atsain.

And if his words were anything to go by, it had been abandoned even then.

Cofaint, upon discovering this, had practically ransacked the Guild archives for anything and everything relating to the unassuming little town... and found nothing. It was as though it had been built precisely in the Guild's blind spot. Despite her relatively junior position, she had decided it was her duty as a Guild member to discover what secrets Atsain held. There were other settlements abandoned even when the letter had been written, but they were all long gone; marked on the Historian's Guild's maps of the region as walls and foundations, long since overgrown. And yet the brief description of Atsain matched up exactly with what now stood before her.

There were, at most, a dozen houses, all of them in severe disrepair. They were simply built: log frames, filled in with planks and propped up with cobbled stone. This is what they had once been; the frames had rotted, there were gaping holes in the walls, and they were surrounded by loose stone and rubble. In short, a dozen deathtraps. In the center of the town was something that could once have been a well; it was built at the intersection between Atsain's two roads. On the edge of town was a wooden stable, also rotten; it looked like it had once been large enough for two, perhaps three horses. The whole place was surrounded by a low stone wall, which was in turn surrounded by loose stones, suggesting it had once been higher.

Cofaint, ignoring what had once been a gate, stepped the walls and into the town.
'Okay,' she said quietly. 'Let's see what we see.'
She began to slowly make her way through the larger of the town's two streets, keeping her eyes open for any signs of life.

Walking through Atsain was an unnerving experience, and it took her some time to realise why. The dense treeline that marked the edge of the marshland was only a few feet away, and she should, by all means, have been able to hear the assorted sounds of local wildlife: chirping, clicking, perhaps the occasional growl. Atsain, however, was deathly silent: she heard only her own footsteps as she paced her way uneasily down the narrow, dusty road.

Dusty, she realised. It wasn't overgrown; the village should be filled with knee-high grass at the very least. Instead, it seemed to be well-kept; if it hadn't been for the decayed buildings, Cofaint would have sworn Atsain had been abandoned mere hours ago.

As she drew close to the well, Cofaint found herself wanting nothing more than to get out of this silent street: none of the ruined buildings around her looked inviting, and yet she felt she had to escape into one. She picked one at random, and her steady walk descended into a nervous sprint.

She reached the remains of a wooden door, long since given over to decay, and pulled it open, hoping the building would stay standing. It did, and she had her first glimpse of the interior.

It looked like it had once been a nice place to live; when exactly this was, Cofaint wasn't quite certain. A wooden table stood along one side of the room, rotten and collapsing, with some shards of pottery on the ground around it; a few empty frames hung crookedly on one wall, one of which contained a painting that had long since faded into oblivion; a few chairs, all with broken backs and missing legs, were scattered haphazardly around the room. There was another doorframe off to her left, and a staircase that looked in no way trustworthy along the back wall. This room had no windows.

Glancing over her shoulder, Cofaint realised none of the buildings did. True, when this place was first built-- presumably right at the beginning of the Old Age, perhaps further back than even the Historian's Guild knew of-- glass would have been hard to come by, at least this far from a reliable source of sand, although... most places at least had wooden shutters or bars, or even just empty frames, considering the temperate climate. Atsain must have been unbearable during the hot season, Cofaint decided; no wonder it was left behind like this.

Realising she was now stalling for time, not quite willing to step into a house that threatened to collapse around her, Cofaint passed through the doorway.

The room seemed to shift and distort as she stepped through. For a few brief moments, the world around her seemed to flicker, and she saw, superimposed over the decay and ruin, a neat-looking, intact house: the table set for a meal and decorated with somewhat plain-looking vases; the chairs intact and arranged neatly around it; the frames on the wall intricately carved, their paintings...

Still curiously faded.

As quickly as this other world had manifested, however, it faded away; the rotten building returned. Cofaint decided to retreat to the basement, in the hopes that there would be personal artefacts of some kind stored down there. The rotten floorboards creaked and groaned as she made her way across them, yet somehow this came as a relief after the unnerving silence of outside.

Halting to pick up a large chunk of what had once been a vase, Cofaint examined it closely. It was as plain as it had looked in the other world: smooth, glazed and devoid of any pattern. She discarded it and reached the stairs.

The basement was pitch black. Cofaint raised a hand and a ball of light materialised in the center of the room; she was, after all, a Sorcerer.

The basement, now illuminated, now turned out to be little more than a natural cave; grey rock walls, into which two shelves appeared to have been carved by unskilled hands. The lower one was lined with candles, long since burned down into blobs of yellowed wax; the upper held a statue flanked by a pair of paintings, as faded as the ones upstairs.

Strange, Cofaint realised; down here, they wouldn't have been exposed to sunlight, and the candles wouldn't have provided anywhere near enough light to fade them to this degree before they burned down. True, someone could have used a ball of Sorcerous light, as she had, but... that still seemed doubtful.

And then she realised something else: No windows. No way for the paintings upstairs to have become faded either. True, the house was well-lit now, but that was from sunlight filtering through the ruined walls; but back when the buildings were intact-- if they ever had been; Cofaint was beginning to doubt this town had ever been intact-- they wouldn't have received anywhere near enough light to fade to the degree they had.

Cofaint spent several minutes attempting to rebuild the statue from the fragments, but soon gave up: whatever it had once been was far from human. She examined the rest of the room instead.

There were a few wooden crates rotting away in a corner, and a doorway against the far wall, although it had been blocked off by rubble. Cofaint tried to move one of the crates, but the wood shattered into splinters in her hands: she pulled them away, hissing with pain.

There were too many to remove one by one, she decided. Instead, she held one hand out, palm up, and released a jet of water onto it with her fingertips, soaking the rotten wood: she then repeated this for the other one. Bracing herself, she held her hands apart, palms facing each other, and focused her mind.

She reached out for the water with her Sorcery-- the only element she'd been able to manipulate-- and pulled. Her hands were instantly dry, and the water formed into a neat ball between them, taking the soaked splinters along with it. Cofaint released her willpower, and the water splashed to the stone floor, soaking slowly into it.

She tried the crates again, this time wrapping her hands in the hem of her travelling cloak. She pulled the crate apart, finding it to be filled with journals, bound in leather.

Jackpot, she smiled.

It took her only a moment to realise there was something... wrong with them. They were all filled with a single word, repeated over and over, written in a variety of hands, in ink and charcoal and other things she tried very hard not to identify: 'Maglasoch', she whispered.

There was no indication of who or what Maglasoch was, but Cofaint's instincts told her they wouldn't exactly be good news, given the state of the village.

There was a faint rumbling sound behind her, and she stood up abruptly, her heart in her mouth, and whirled around: the doorway that had earlier been blocked by rubble had now crumbled away. She was terrified, but something deep inside her refused to back down: Atsain was challenging her, and she would rise to that challenge. Boldly, Cofaint stepped through.

Only to find herself in the exact same basement, struggling to keep her footing. She momentarily wondered whether it was merely one that looked the same, but then she realised the globe of light she had summoned was still there, as was the broken crate filled with journals.

And then Cofaint had a flash of the... other town, for want of a better term; the intact world she had briefly glimpsed upon first entering the house. Once more, it was overlaid over the ruined basement, but this time it seemed more prominent; it lasted for a few seconds longer before vanishing.

The row of candles had burned low, but they were still so bright they hurt Cofaint's eyes. The wooden crates were intact and empty, piled neatly against the wall. She squinted to block out the worst of the glare from the candles, and had a brief glimpse of the altar before it flickered away: the statue was still broken, but in front of it was...

A journal. Identical to the ones that filled the crates. It was open, and although Cofaint didn't have a chance to read what was written there, she could certainly guess.

This brief, second glimpse of another world (was it the past, or another present?) was too much for her: she fled up the stairs, and--

And staggered into a wholly different room. The stairs had brought her up to another living room, of sorts: it was smaller, for a start. The walls were broken in different places, and there were two doors leading off into siderooms, instead of one; the stairs over her head were carved stone. Cofaint was amazed they hadn't collapsed and taken the rest of the building with them. Her eyes fell on the way out, and she paced across to it, careful to avoid the debris. There were fewer chairs than the other room, and only faded painting, although it was larger; the table held no vases, but at each end was the base of another broken statue.

She tried the door to discover it locked. It took her a moment to realise something about this was very wrong: houses never lock from the outside.
'This lock is to keep someone.... in,' she realised.

Cofaint attempted them to break down the door, but to no avail: she'd found perhaps the only thing in the entire village that hadn't rotted away to nearly nothing. She soon discovered this was also true of the wall around it; she didn't try the back wall, realising that if it did break there was a good chance it would take the stairs-- and with them the entire upper floor-- along with it.

Realising she had no choice if she wanted to escape, Cofaint stepped through into one of the side rooms, and--

Found herself standing at the top of the wooden stairs of the first house she had entered, struggling not to fall forwards. The upper floor appeared to be all one room: several somethings that could once have been beds were arranged in a half circle around the far wall, facing a ruined statue, larger than any so far: it may well have stretched from floor to ceiling.

'Before the first mind was, I was.' The voice reached Cofaint's ears as if from a great distance, and yet it seemed to be everywhere at once, rebounding around the room over and over. Steadily, the noise seemed to fade out... and then Cofaint realised it hadn't faded at all. It had merely... withdrawn; withdrawn to inside her own head. It had fallen to a whisper, but it refused to vanish entirely; she started down the stairs with the steady, constant murmuring still in her ears, rising and falling softly, but never ceasing.

Cofaint tripped at the bottom of the stairs and stumbled forwards the last few steps: she found herself in a room that looked and felt like the side room from the first (the only? It seemed to connect to both houses, after all) basement; her theory was confirmed as she glanced through the doorway and saw her ball of light, floating near to the floor now and shining brightly. She turned around and regarded the room around her.

It appeared to have been carved out sometime after the basement proper; a theory confirmed by the presence of a blunted pickaxe leaning against the far wall. Excavation had seemingly been abandoned at some time, along with the room itself, although the occupants had left behind a message. Cofaint had expected it to be Maglasoch, repeated over and over, once again, but was surprised-- albeit not entirely pleasantly-- to discover it was something more substantial.

Several somethings, in fact. Written on the wall in were dozens upon dozens of messages. Some, larger and more central, were written in a relatively neat hand, proclaiming such things as 'They've taken the village as Their own' and 'They can't find me here'. This latter had since been amended with 'not yet, at least' and then crossed out entirely, to be replaced with three words, written larger than anything else, in a roughness that suggested they had been written in some haste: 'They found me'.

From there, things only got worse. Messages, each more bleak than the last, were carved haphazardly, ranging from 'I hear Them now' to 'the voices never stop' to 'They echo' and 'They have no image', and eventually 'I don't remember silence' and 'my mind is Their mind'. The last few legible ones, crammed into corners and written vertically between the words of other messages, were bleaker still: they asked questions such as 'who am I' and 'is there a place without Them' and, in several places, simply 'why?' There were more, but they had been written in such haste, such sheer terror, that they were entirely unreadable.

And then Cofaint glanced down at the floor. She noticed something appeared to have... dripped down from above her; craning her head upwards, she read one final message, scrawled elegantly. Whoever had left it had taken the time and effort to leave it in perfect cursive. 'Fear always finds you in the end. Maglasoch always finds you in the end.'

Cofaint turned to run, and stepped back out into the main room of the basement, knowing full well this time what would happen.

Sure enough, she found herself stumbling into in what seemed to be the ground floor once again; a glance back through the doorway confirmed that she was back in the second house. The room she was in was ruined, and appeared to be some kind of... improvised chapel; half a dozen broken chairs were arranged around another large statue, and the rotting walls were lined with faded paintings. There was a heap of something against the far wall, and she realised with a start that it was a small pile of corpses.

The other room then faded in. The paintings were still faded, and the statue still destroyed, but the chairs were intact, and the corpses...

The corpses were alive, she realised, huddled in a corner gazing enraptured at the broken statue. As she watched, one ran for the door.
'Don't!' another cried. 'You know what They'll do if we try to--'

Their words were drowned out by the screams of the runner. Their legs buckled under them, and they began swatting and slapping at themselves. 'Get them off me!' they shrieked, over and over, 'get them off me!'

The scene abruptly faded, and Cofaint looked down, stifling a scream as she realised her foot was inches from their skull.
'They are an example,' the voice in her head whispered. 'Their actions brought punishment.'

Cofaint whirled around, trying to leave the room, and found herself falling forwards down the basement stairs once again. Ignoring the flicker of the other room-- the past, she now knew-- she ran through into the excavated side room, doubled back into the upstairs bedroom, sprinted downstairs into the chapel, turned back and cut a path through both front rooms, one after the other, and found herself upstairs in another bedroom, smaller than the first. Throughout all this, the voice at the back of her mind began to grow louder and louder: its mysterious whispers grew into hissing threats. 'You'll never escape,' the echoing voice proclaimed. 'You seek me out. You seek that which has no true form; that which takes on many forms for many beings.'

The floorboards gave way beneath her feet as she stepped forwards, and she fell through a cloud of splinters, landing dazed and hurting on the floor of the excavated side room again.

Rather than continuing her pointless attempt at flight from the houses, Cofaint sat down, pushed the voice to the back of her mind as best she could, and tried to work out exactly what she was dealing with.

Maglasoch was clearly a name; that much she could be fairly certain of. Who or what they were had thus far eluded her, however; they appeared to have the entire village under their control, and yet... they'd made no attempts to branch out. They had such an easy time taking control of this place; surely they could do the same to other villages, or perhaps even Antliss, if they tried?
'No,' the voice in her head whispered softly. 'It must be here and here alone.'

Her thoughts already weren't her own, Cofaint realised. Maglasoch had already invaded her mind.

If anything, this only made her more determined to free herself; to escape. She decided first to focus on what, exactly, they were: the answer came to her as she stared at the scrawlings across the walls. In each and every one, 'They' was capitalised whether it was at the start of the sentence or not. Maglasoch was--
'A God,' the voice finished, smugly. 'Your kind call me a mere abstraction, but my domain reaches far, far beyond those of my kin.'

It was now a question of working out just what they were a God--

The ceiling above her began to crack around the edges, and began slowly but surely sliding smoothly downwards to crush her. She scrambled out of the way, and--

And found herself outside once more. She turned around to realise she'd just stepped out of the ruined stables on the edge of town. She realised night had fallen, and began to wonder just how long she'd been in the houses that seemed to loop back on themselves.

And then day broke instantly: it took her a moment to realise she was seeing the past again. Several figures were standing around the well, and none of them appeared to be cowering in terror, like the ones she had seen earlier.

As she drew nearer, Cofaint realised they were performing some kind of... ritual, around the well. This kind of thing still happened regularly on the plateau; villages called up Abstractions, minor Gods of things like weather and harvests and hunting and good health, all the time. Usually, the ritual required something of their domain to be laid out in some form of regular shape. A triangle with a basin of rainwater at one corner, a mirror to reflect sunlight on another, and a small cloth sail to catch the wind on the third, for example, would potentially call up Tywydd, Abstraction of weather.

She drew closer, examining what was on the points of the shape. A vicious-looking dog was staked to one, and another held a spider in a cage. A third was marked by a whip, and a fourth by a painting-- this one of a pale, stern-looking figure with cruel eyes and a thick moustache, and on a fourth was a bucket of what appeared to be water. The fifth, sixth and seventh held other such oddities: a small wooden box, a branding iron, and what appeared to be a human skull. A small box of long needles sat on the final point, completing the curiously unnerving octagon.

Cofaint crept forwards carefully, wondering what exactly any of this meant: it was reasonable to assume they were trying to summon Maglasoch, but the inexplicable assortment of focal points for the ritual gave no indication of what exactly They were the Abstraction of.
'I'm telling you,' one figure on the edge of the circle said, 'this is a bad idea. We don't want to summon Them.'
'We voted,' a second figure said. 'It's this, or submit to Tanwyr's rule.'
'Tanwyr?' Cofaint murmured to herself. She knew this name from somewhere, although it didn't ring a bell.

And then the sky grew dark, and Cofaint realised where she knew it from. There was an old legend, shared between the Elves and the Orcs, of the time the champions of their races persuaded their warring peoples to join forces and kill a dragon. Legends said the beast was imprisoned underground, and their bucking and thrashing attempts at escape raised the Wyrm's Spine, the range of mountains between the Elven Territories and the Dark Lands.

Cofaint only had a brief glimpse of it, but she knew, terrified, what it was. Its wingspan seemed to stretch for miles, and its great head gazed down at the village, mouth the size of a barn filled with lethally sharp teeth and brimming over with blue-white flames: Tanwyr.

The vision faded, but she'd seen all she needed to see this time.
'They looked to me for salvation,' the whispers in her mind hissed. 'I gave them so much more.'

Cofaint had seen enough to know Atsain was a village best left forgotten. She ran for the edge, the whispers in her head growing louder and louder, taunting her, tormenting her as she broke into a terrified sprint, reaching the gate, and--

Stumbling forwards into a new room entirely. She turned back in time to see the door behind her slam shut.

The room was the largest so far; Cofaint realised that this was simply because the floor above had collapsed, taking the flimsy inside walls with it, and leaving behind a shell of a building. Decimated furniture sat here and there among the rubble, utterly unrecognisable, aside from the face of a kiln against the far wall; loose bricks were scattered around it, and the fire inside had long ago burned down.

And then the past faded in once again. This room had once been an artist's studio: an easel sat against the far wall, and several sculptures were scattered about. There was a rack of shelves against one wall, covered in small ceramic pots and loose lumps of clay. This was where the paintings and sculptures had originated, Cofaint realised.

And then the artist behind them all entered the room. They didn't so much step into it as they were hurled in: it was though an unseen hand had picked them up and dropped them down outside before shoving them through the doorway. Their eyes opened, and they gazed around in terror before whirling around and running back out the door. The moment they set foot outside, however, they collapsed forwards, landing face first on the dirt road. The unseen hands hoisted them roughly up by the shoulders, turned around, and shoved them through.

'No escape,' they murmured. The whispering in Cofaint's mind echoed them. 'Maglasoch. Maglasoch. Maglasoch...' they paced over to the kiln. 'Can't look,' they murmured. 'Can't look...'

They reached inside and removed something; their body blocked Cofaint's view.

And abruptly, they hurled it at the floor, shattering it. They swept up the shards into a cloth sack, and paced over to the door. 'Maglasoch,' they said, under their breath. 'Maglasoch. Maglasoch Maglasoch...'

The sculptor walked through Cofaint. As they reached the door, they were hoisted up again. Cofaint had a brief glimpse of them being dragged through the village, the sack trailing along the ground behind them, before door slammed shut of its own accord. Abruptly, the present returned.

'The statues were smashed when they were made,' Cofaint realised.
'No image,' whispered the voice in her mind. 'No image to hold. No image; none to hold...'

Taking one last look at the rotting shell of the studio, Cofaint turned back towards the edge of village. She still wanted nothing more to leave, and broke out into a run again, this time for a low point in the cobblestone wall; doorways and gates didn't work as they should in this place.

She broke into a sprint as she drew near, convinced she heard footsteps behind her: as she reached the rubble around the wall, however, she realised it was only the sound of her own feet. She stepped up onto the knee-high wall, and--

And fell through darkness. Cofaint had a moment to register the damp smell around her; long enough to realise where she had been taken this time.

The well, or what was left of it.

Cofaint fully expected to die once she struck the ground, but at the last possible moment she slowed suddenly, whiplash tearing at her spine, and landed softly.

She sat up as best she could, fighting for consciousness with the pain of her whiplash, and fought to conjure up a ball of light. The whispers were with her the whole way, telling her she'd never escape, that her air supply was limited, that there were a dozen ways for her to die down there, forgotten completely.

Finally, a pitiful flickering glow manifested over her head, barely illuminating the walls of her circular prison. They were covered in scratch marks.

Cofaint realised, as she glanced down, that she wasn't alone in her grim fate: a few fingers reached up out of the hard mud beneath her, clutching a journal. It had been written, as best she could tell, by someone who had struggled against Maglasoch, at least for a time; they had tried to document the downfall of the town.

'They're everywhere,' it stated, over and over, sometimes neatly, sometimes roughly scrawled in letters that took up an entire page. Around a third of the way through, the writer at last grew coherent again: 'They take away our minds and toy with our bodies.' Several pages covered entirely in charcoal scribblings, blocking out whatever had once been written there. 'And toy with our bodies and They fill our minds with visions and sounds and take it all away and take away everything else nothing nothing nothing--' this went on for a dozen pages; the writer had lost coherent thought again, lost once more to Maglasoch's tyrannical grip.

Cofaint reached the middle two pages of the journal to find four words written across them, scrawled over and over: the charcoal used to write them had gone through to the pages behind in several places. 'Never any physical form'.

She turned the next page to find a coherent message, written in shaking hand: 'I must leave this place and warn the world. I have tried the gate, but it did not work. I must scale the wall; it is the only way. Atsain--' she turned the page to read the rest-- 'must at all costs be forgMAGLASOCH MAGLASOCH MAGLASOCH MAGLASOCH MAGLASOCH MAGLASOCH MAGLASOCH MAGLASOCH...' the word repeated for the rest of the journal, written over and over.

And what was more, the word caught itself in Cofaint's mind as she flicked through the second half of the journal, picked up by the steady whispering voice. 'Maglasoch,' it echoed softly. 'Maglasoch. Maglasoch. Maglasoch. Maglasoch. Maglasoch. Maglasoch...'

Cofaint realised her own lips were moving. 'Maglasoch,' she found herself murmuring. Her voice joined at last with the whispering in her mind. 'Maglasoch.' The world around her, the mud and the well and the light, began to fade away. 'Maglasoch.' The word began to soothe her, to unite at last the frayed edges of her mind. 'Maglasoch. Maglasoch. Maglasoch...'

All too late, the realisation came to her: as the last traces of her mind drifted away to be replaced by the word and the word alone, Cofaint Rhith knew what Maglasoch was the Abstraction of: Fear.

She was in no position to use this information, however. She curled up into a ball and whispered to herself quietly, her voice echoing up the narrow walls of the well. 'Maglasoch... Maglasoch... Maglasoch...'
It's been a while since I wrote any outright horror!

This one was written as a gift for teddileah, who's both a talented writer and a talented artist; I recommend taking a look at her work, if you haven't done so already (it's also worth noting that her commission prices are really great).

So, this story. It serves a few purposes: establish that there's always been a sizeable POC population across basically the entire setting through a mass migration event during the early Old Age (one of the earliest events in the whole setting-- I'm planning a story going into exactly why the migration occurred eventually, and it'll actually be shown in brief in an upcoming short story), it adds another figure to the old human Pantheon, and finally it introduces a major historical figure who'll be more important elsewhere.

All in all, I'm pretty pleased with how it came out!

I feel like Maglasoch is one of the more interesting gods in the setting. They're obsessed with Their image, but They also happen to be the only god who outright refuses to manifest any kind of physical form, to the point where Their worshippers use broken statues and faded paintings as images of Them.
© 2014 - 2024 venort
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