Whilst diving through an archive, Wraithvine comes upon a volume chronicling hir own adventures. A nostalgic read turns bizarre when ze comes upon a tale which ze does not recall experiencing. Surely its an exaggeration, a conflation with another's myth.
Only, it weighs on Wraithvine, the language and details making it uncanny. Only investigating this fully will let hir know the truth of this lost memory… -- Deathshead419
It's not often that an immortal looks up their own stories. This one, like so many, purported to be An True and Accurat Accountyng of the Adventuref of Wraithvine the Yternal. It was obviously old, predating the invention of standardised spelling. Either well preserved or accurately copied with magic.
Ze had been looking for traces of ancient magic in the local legends or lore. Just in case there was something ze needed to clean up.
Wraithvine opened the book, scanning through the stories. Wandering down memory lane, which had since become a long and lengthy labyrinth. Full of potholes. Such as Chapter seventy-three.
That story was supposed to be happening during the century that ze was in an oubliette. Wasn't it? Was it an entire century? The years in isolation did kind of blend into each other. Most of hir time had been attempting to figure out how to leave it without the use of magic. Hir captor had warded the entire place against magic, and it was quite troublesome getting hirself out again.
At least, that was how ze remembered it.
The story had a year, and a location of a kingdom that definitely deserved to have Wraithvine happen to it. There were mentions of a few landmarks that could have lasted long enough for hir to find the place again. Wraithvine made a copy of the book, bookmarked the chapter, and went to find out if ze really did all that or if it was some mummer pretending to be hir who had merely become incredibly lucky.
There were more than a few millennia between the adventures in the book and the current day. Nevertheless, mountains were slow to change and various landmarks could be made to last.
Wraithvine found some landmarks half-buried and one of the mountains long since blown apart by an eruption. Nevertheless, ze also found the ruins of the kingdom in the story. Not the ghosts of the roads nor the remains of the walls sparked any kind of memory. Ze had to unearth the buried floors under the ground to find a means of reaching some kind of recall.
That seal in the mosaics. The movement of the land had warped and bent it like a sleeper bent a blanket, but the seal itself...
It was a spell.
Something to obscure the memory of the god-touched. Ze must have trod on it at some point, activating the magic. Now ze found it, ze could unriddle it. How in the world had ze gone from the oubliette to here and back again?
First revelation... they were two different oubliettes. Two different rulers had thrown hir into them, but they used the same tactic to obfuscate hir magic.
Second, Mistress Dark had aided hir in escaping the first oubliette. Directing Wraithvine to the kingdom and its heinous acts. Getting hir there swiftly, because some things could not be allowed to persist for a moment longer.
Third, the mountain's vulcanism was Wraithvine's direct action. The innocent were aided in escape. The guilty were ended in the resulting cataclysm. And one stumble had put hir left foot on the very rim of the seal.
The goddess who welcomed all had saved hir. She had further use for Wraithvine, and ze had an oath to her to keep. She put hir in hir portable tower, which ze kept inside hir hat... and the wind of the pyroclastic flow blew the hat far away.
Onto a lake, where it drifted onto the shore. Once safe on land, Wraithvine was permitted to emerge. Still unconscious and shaken by the work of the seal. Where, alas, ze offended the king by existing on his shores, and wound up in another oubliette before ze recovered.
Mistress Dark had further plans for hir, but ze would have to wait for them. Ze would have to wait three hundred years.
[Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash]
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