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The man sighed, bringing his cartoonishly large hands to his temple, where they smeared some white makeup around.
<< I’m not being a grump, Sal. You know better than I what the penalty for breaking the veil is, especially for a guild like ours. And while I’m not mad at Maeal, we are two arms away from the integration! We are going to be stuck here for ages, AGES! OF COURSE I’M NOT HAPPY, BUT MAD?? WHY WOULD I! >>
A young woman in a black plumed leotard standing behind him patted his back and shushed him at the same time.
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Another voice cut through the large tent's noise.
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Puddles the Neurotic, Ringmaster of the Sol A Mar troupe, talking with his subordinates while stranded on an unintegrated world.
After some initial banter, the pair of castaways got down to business, Omri’s retelling of his time in the village punctuated by the occasional bird cries of the older man, who was visibly delighted with both the gifts and the young man’s presence.
Although you couldn’t argue for Herbert still having all his marbles in place, the boy’s presence seemed to ground the hermit, and in his now longer bouts of clarity, he had asked himself a question.
What interest a lad in the prime of his youth could possibly have in spending his existence isolated in this remote corner of the world?
And now with the prime suspect standing right beside him, freely sharing stories about his little adventure in Olfsand, the question arose again.
"Kid, if you don't mind me asking, but what is your reason for coming back? I understand that the settlement people were kind to you, and even if the archipelago isn’t the right place, finding a spot on a passing merchant ship shouldn’t be too difficult," said Herbert with a now serious face.
Omri paused, a thoughtful expression dawning on his smiling visage.
He understood how odd his actions would seem from someone else's perspective.
In his travels, he had a lot of time to think, and while his answer wasn’t as…substantial as he would have wanted, it still showed what drove him on his path.
“It wasn't that bad… the village routine, with all its little snags, the few people all knowing each other and supporting the community. I can see how someone would settle in, and quietly build a life. But I don't think I'm cut out for that. Despite everything, I liked my time here more. The thrill of the hunt, feeling myself improve each day, it’s not something I could leave behind. Besides, I still have some loose ends to tie here on the island.”
An excited grin had unknowingly made its way into the young hunter's features.
“I still can't quite wrap my head around it, but since I've been back, the call I told you about has become even clearer. Something strange is hidden in the basin.”
The young man kept going, seeing Herbert also absorbed in his speculations.
"I'm pretty sure, the oversized fauna is directly related to the island's water weird properties, same as my tug, and on the other landmasses, there is nothing like this. The locals don't seem to know anything about strange beasts. I want to know. I want to know what makes this place so special.”
A gruff grunt of assent was his answer.
“Well, I’ve always wondered why my feathered friends were so… peculiar. We never really knew why we were sent here, you know? I was just there to catalog some animals, but now with everyone else dead, I doubt I’ll get any closure from that side.”
“And call me crazy, but I believe in you, lad. I’m sure you’ll find your answer, and when you do, maybe you’ll remember about little old me, yeah? My diary could use some variety, and what is more exciting than a good mystery solved?”
Weirdly touched by the little display of trust, Omri sheepishly nodded.
“Don’t worry, you’ll be the first to know. That said, I have a tiny request. I’ll need to check out this area as well, and the trip from my home will eat away too much time. If you could give me a place to sleep, things would be much quicker."
Herbert, initially confused by the boy’s seriousness, widely smiled, mirth showing from his aged eyes.
"Sure sure, Chaw! Stay as long as you want, I don't mind the company, and maybe I’ll also have the chance to show you something wonderful," the hermit concluded, waving his hands.
After a few more pleasantries, including a brief teatime pause with some fruity concoction borne out of Herbert's knowledge, reality asserted itself, and they both went their way, one to care for “his” birds, the other to scour the surrounding jungle.
Night came in the wake of a day of fruitless searching, and their somber dinner was warmed by more of the fermented drinks his host seemingly brewed out of nowhere.
A week blended together in this new routine, before the boy, now sitting in front of a rudimentary sketch of the basin, decided he had had enough.
He could accept some form of slow progress, but he was getting nowhere.
The ever-present pull had brought him here, but now it wasn’t helping in the slightest.
It was coming from everything and everywhere, and simply scouring the jungle palm by palm looking for a place where the call was strongest seemed to be a failing proposition, the uniformity of the tug adding insult to injury as Omri failed to locate its source.
This led to his current proposition, sitting on one of the tree branches that served as Herbert's nest, sourly looking at the hastily engraved hide stretched on the wood.
“No matter where I go, it's all the same around here, it's like I hear a voice coming from afar, and once I get closer, it's too loud to tell where exactly it's coming from. And every time is the same shit, I’ve seen every corner of this place a dozen times and nothing showed up”.
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No matter how hard he tried, the answers didn’t seem to come. In his defense, he was following an imaginary trail, a theory that made sense due to what he had seen, but sounded farfetched even to his ears.
And he was not yet ready to give up.
So, he was sitting, and pondering, refusing to return to his original plan, his tired legs thanking him for the rest, when a thought tickled the back of his mind.
“I felt it for the first time from miles away, at sea. I feel it stronger now that I’ve left the island and come back. I feel it stronger while I’m fully submerged, and there’s no doubt it's more concentrated in this basin. Everything points to the epicenter being here. But there isn’t a large water source anywhere on the surface, so my target is bound to be somewhere below ground.”
The outline of an idea kept shaping up, until he had what could very charitably be called a plan.
He walked toward the small stream that cut straight through the middle of the basin, and a few hours spent shoveling away at the muddy bedside were enough for his needs.
Praising himself for his foresight, Omri stuck the steel tool on the nearby ground and sat down, the water just deep enough to fully cover him after his landscaping session.
Holding his breath, he found a comfortable position, closed his eyes, and focused on the strange sensation that had been his steady companion for the last few years.
Initially, he didn’t feel any difference from the tug; the presence still permeated his surroundings like a thick, viscous fog, amplified by the cold water buffeting him, but slowly, something began to change.
The fog started to pulse, following the slow, rhythmic beat of his heart, and with each deep thump, it became more overbearing, until it clicked inside the boy, a sharp snap in his head, a dissonant note from his chest.
Vague silhouettes began taking shape behind his still closed eyes, the fog in his mind filling up the spaces between each figure.
He could feel the small fish orbiting around him with perfect clarity, and at the edges of his perception, the long-lasting giants of the forest, looming above him as he became one with nature.
Omri opened his eyes wide in astonishment and surfaced, taking a deep breath as if his body suddenly remembered he needed air to breathe.
The onslaught of new sensations was met with wonder: his masters had told him of people following the martial way that became something more; warriors without equal, their senses perfectly honed to perceive their surroundings during battle.
But this was different. This was even more.
Not a sensation, not a feeling, but sight, blurry and weak at a distance, but still sight.
Images of the nearby teeming life were vivid in his head.
He could have drawn them; every object had its color, the plants, the rocks, the small azure forms darting around him, and even the earthworms in the ground.
Galvanized by the new discovery, Omri dove again into the shallow waters, and after a few minutes of tries, he regained his composure and resumed the exercise, this time knowing what to expect.
Once his perception opened up, he continued to observe his surroundings, taking his time adjusting to his improved field of sight.
His excitement was an inexhaustible stimulus, and minutes turned into hours, as the boy's determination did not waver.
Dive into the stream, follow your heartbeat, fall into a trance, perceive reality in all its glory, surface for air, rinse, and repeat.
It was sundown when something changed.
Something different hit Omri in all of its glory.
In truth, he had been aware of the mounting pressure for most of the day, but as dark began to creep in, with it came the most massive headache known to mankind, like scraping nails mimicking chalk on a board inside the young hunter's brain.
And so, carrying the weight of the world inside his head, he made his way back to the hermit’s nest, grumbled a couple of greeting words to the worried man, and went straight to bed, not willing to strain his mind even a minute more.
The next day went much the same way, barring the minute improvements to his “sight” while in the pool.
The longer he kept watching the world from this new perspective, the more details he could grasp.
Now, the further outlines began to take clearer form, and he could see both living lifeforms and inanimate objects near him better than he could with his own eyes.
A faint shimmering aura also seemed to appear around some of the bigger creatures, something he confirmed when a large foxlike bobcat came to drink from his stream, a distinctive green glow following it as it sated its thirst.
Days turned into weeks, his headaches striking him with less and less force each time he came back from his training sessions, and every time, he went to sleep with a contented smile on his visage, feeling his improvements.
That small pond, hollowed out in the middle of nowhere, in a nondescript stream two feet wide, burned at the forefront of his mind.
His routine was interrupted on a beautiful morning when a new breakthrough struck him harder than the first.
He was already halfway out of the water when he realized he could still see everything around him, with the same clarity he had just a few seconds before, submerged in the cool river lifestream.
From that moment on, he kept testing his new sight, and his crawl back home that night was one of his proudest moments, even as Herbert had to help him into bed, the newly minted headache clouding his mind like a blanket of thorns.
At dawn the next day, he was already in the waters, digging deeper and deeper into the fog, when he saw a stream swirling at the barest edges of his perception.
An azure wire, dancing in the fog, leading to something else, something…more.
Omri focused on the sight, latching onto the sensation like a drowning man, and the weaving blue limb touched him, and finally, he saw what he was searching for.
Down, deep below the bowels of the valley, a pulsing blue mass of interlacing sapphire strings wove into the island waters, each strand carrying faint azure light into the thousand streams emerging from the jugged peaks.
And behind the aquamarine depths, a yellow-golden orb of light, streaked with dark green strokes, waited, almost hidden, pulsing rhythmically as faint azure energy surrounded it.
The young hunter's mind's eye trailed on the smaller orb, an ominous feeling rising from his back, before he looked back at the mesmerizing weave.
“That must be it. The source of all of this.The thing that saved me. That brought me here.”
This time, he felt the pressure rising in his temples, his focus unbreakable as he took in the sight of the gargantuan swirl.
His heart, beating slowly, thundered in his ears, and a faint light began to shine in the whirlwind eye, taunting him with its song.
A melodious symphony, a raging chorus.
That pulled at him, fiercer than ever before.
Suddenly, a dazzling gleam rose from that small azure star, and he was back inside himself, in the pond, looking a little frazzled by the experience.
His head was not pounding, he didn’t feel anything different, but he knew, Omri knew that inside something was changed.
The crystallization of his short life brought him there, a ballad of harsh experiences and little freedom, but now he was something more.
He knew.
What he did not know was that at the furthest edges of his vision, below the blue tendrils and behind the swirling mass, the yellow-golden orb, filled with malice and greed, moved.
And so, the next day, after a month and more of training and headaches, the boy ate a small breakfast of fruits and set off to finally put an end to his obsession.
At the edges of his mind, the new symphony of the call was pulling at him, neatly nested just a few hundred feet of rock below.
Digging that deep was entirely out of the question.
Finding a tunnel that would bring him close enough was a more realistic, if a bit hopeful, idea.
It would probably take some time, but the rocky outcrops couldn’t be larger than the forest, and so, Omri set off exploring once more.
As he moved through the vegetation and tried to figure out the most efficient way to reach the epicenter of this strange phenomenon, his attention was drawn to something almost as weird as his spiritual journey.
A hole in the ground, seven feet in diameter, slanting slightly into depths, carved down at the feet of the peak, its walls peculiarly similar to the tunnels where he had found the bear, with small hollowed-out crevices running through their entire length.
This hole was no different, except even more regular in its shape and irregular in its location, simply popping out of the mountainside with no rhyme or reason.
Continuing to scour the area, Omri found a few burrows like the first but with differently sloped pathways, some directly horizontal, and one that was just a hollow drop ending in darkness.
He was a bit unnerved by the discovery, but the tugging melody in his chest reared its head, and predictably pulled him toward that last tunnel.
Omri looked at the hole in the ground with a displeased gaze, before shrugging his shoulders and sighing a bit.
Tying one of the long ropes he brought back from Olfsand to a nearby tree, he shook his various sheaths, making sure they were all firmly secured, lit up a torch, and began his climb.
Down, hidden deep in the uncaring crevices, lay the answer to his questions.
“On a positive note, I did not have to dig a single hole, and I found a way almost immediately. On the other side, I hope that whatever dug those tunnels stays the fuck away from me.”