The Scaring

You probably expect this to be a normal story about K, and it sort of is in a way. I should probably introduce myself. I am Suluco, a bit of a noobish Oracle. Don’t comment that I’m also a low level oracle. I nurtured the talent since I was little. But enough about me. Let me tell you how this whole thing started. . .

The coasts of Ioae were frozen, and the wind was not making the travel easier. I had advised against this journey however K would not listen to basic reason from me. To him I was simply just “an NPC” who he met on a quest in central Dawnsbloom. While I didn’t quite understand what he meant by that I knew that he was going to get in trouble eventually.

I gripped the sleeves of my Direwolf fur jacket and tried to keep up with K in the snowstorm. I had no idea where we were going, yet K seemed to know where we were going even half blinded by snow. It was the second day from the ruins of the Dusk Elf stronghold Ioae, which the island shared its name with, and I was beginning to wonder something. “K? What exactly are you looking for?”

K stopped. His elegant red robes streaming past him on the wind, his red face seeming to be more angry than cold. He replied, “As I have told you before, I used to have great power from numerous places. Where we are going is one of those places, a place where I can regain my full strength.”

I just nodded, knowing that that was the best I was going to get out of him.

Not long after that we came across ruined stone foundations, the remnants of some long forgotten city, complete with a tower overlooking the bay and the city. We set up a sort of camp in the ruins of one house overlooked by the tower. It wasn’t much, just a small fire that K had to leave his hand in just to keep alive, and that was really it.

K was beginning to relax and I had to ask him something that had been nagging me ever since we started walking through blizzards: “Do you even feel the cold?”

K looked up with a slightly annoyed look on his face. He answered, “I find that in places like this, only two things are constant no matter where you go. Heat and Cold. Fire and Ice. I am fire, I don’t feel the cold like you do.”

I shuffled closer to the fire, sort of understanding what he meant. He was a Nethermancer afterall, a wizard with a focus on fire magic. For all I knew he could literally set himself on fire to keep warm.

I could barely sleep that night as the wind blew right through the cracks in the little shelter we had, and K kept shifting in his sleep so the fire we had setup was out.

When I woke up K was gone, the few footsteps I could find suggested that he had gone to the tower early, for what exactly I could not say. He returned that night, but just for a bite to eat before going to sleep.And he went on that same routine of waking early, coming down late for the next two weeks.

And then I saw the Icebreaking ships.

Be sure to check out the May Issue of The Raven's Call for the next installment of.... "The Scaring"