Blight of the Maleficium

Shalia’s body froze the moment she was touched, lips pausing and parted in a sharp gasp. Her gaze fell from Voah to the ground, eyes going wider and more afraid by the second. Everything she had conjured in that brief time before along with the strong feelings of unease were gone. Instead, in its place there sat nothing. No magik coursing through her veins, filling up the body’s space. Everything but her heartbeat was still, no continuous flow of the mountain’s lifeforce within. Her breaths quickened and heart began to thunder in her chest. Shalia’s hands shook violently at her side.

The blood in her mouth tasted stronger, the cool air of the night felt twice as cold suddenly, the sounds of the world faded. Every injury she sustained carried the dullest ache, color still dancing behind her eyes from all the hits. Blood dripped from her nose all over her face and areas had started to swell and discolor. The touch of Gonyaul's skin hadn’t felt like Tamazzalt’s or Islana’s. There was no threatening, vigorous heat from it. No stranger’s hesitation as though her body were still cold. It felt bizarrely pure. Like normal human warmth giving itself to another. Time slowed.

Shalia felt overwhelmingly mortal. Vulnerable, helpless, empty. She could no longer control her breathing and it became rapid and short.

Her head turned to gaze at the person touching her now. As she met his eyes, she was horrified. The bloody and beaten, disheveled mass of a half-naked man at her feet, a firm grip on her leg and a jarringly different experience upon looking in his eyes. They were black, starry pools and a non-violent tone, but it felt so wrong with the rest of his appearance. Painful, haunting flashes of the corpses she saw piled up that winter, the slow-burning gore as friend and family fed on the fallen with remorse. The nightmarish interpretations of Torkaus that plagued her sometimes in the midst of sleep.

He looked like deception. A demon trying to devour her whole. One of her many nightmares come to life.

Her entire body trembling, Shalia desperately tried to jerk her leg free, kicking weakly at the man's chest to get him away, and when she finally got free the witch collapsed onto her knees. A wail sounding into the night as she crawled away a foot or two and fought the urge to collapse right there and sob. To cry so hard she vomited or lost consciousness or vanish from this unending hellscape.
The ground beneath her now pulsated with frost, retracting and extending out again with no sense of order, twinkling and surrounding her chaotically. The strange symbols on her chest glowed faintly and flickered.

He had taken everything from her in an instant. All those years of suffering and learning for him to command it all away with a single touch. Tears flooded her vision as she cried out, magik returned to her but still fluctuating terribly at their closeness, but she knew exactly what Gonyaul had done. He, too, was a thief.

Rolling over onto her backside, she began to move herself away desperately, shaking her head in a frantic, terrified manner when she looked at the monstrous man. The witch was completely unable to speak at the horror of what she just experienced, unable to comprehend anything he said or did.
She continued to cry, tears mixing with the blood on her face as her mind abstracted his form into a starved and emaciated one, bones popping out where he had objects sticking from his back, skin icy blue. A bloodied, dripping mouth growling and inching toward her ready to feast on her flesh like an animal. Then, it twisted into a figure with a crown of horns and the cape of a king, closing in on his final victim for the ritual.

She called out unintelligibly as she lost the grip on her surroundings, small gasps of air in her panic turning her pleas to a whimper. Then her back connected with one of the standing walls and the tears flowed harder.

For the first time in years, she had felt genuine fear--so intense that she imagined herself laying in the deepest pit in the bowels of the world, silenced and completely alone.

The spark of a battlewitch's fury and the duty of a leader faded from her green eyes.

Shalia Nix feared death again.