THE BLACKLIGHT FISSURE
"have you ever traveled through the sunportal the wrong way?
not direction-wise or anything, just REALLY hit the portal in the wrong spot?
maybe your head popped out and you saw some vague semblance of a place.
maybe you went in with somebody and they didn't come out the other end.
ever wondered about it?
you haven't?
keep it that way."
A small Fae dragon panickedly whistled through the haphazardly angular trees, brush and other obstacles littering the outskirts of the Tangled Wood. That dragon was Maddox, and she maaaaay not have made the best ever life choices up to that point. Unfortunately, her particularly awful life choices had led to the very particularly annoying situation she currently resided in. After all, who WOULD enjoy being chased through their former homeland by a cryptic and widely renowned bounty hunter with a tendency toward the "dead" in "dead or alive"?
The tiny dragon ducked into a now visible clearing and stopped to breathe and think while she had the chance. "Won't this guy EVER let up??", she muttered under her breath. "It's not like I did anything to warrant this much of a chase."
"I heard that," spoke the shadowed figure that Maddox had almost CERTAINLY not seen enter the clearing mere seconds after her, "and the next thing I hear had BETTER be you renouncing your study of the arcane, lest I have to end it personally."
"Think about this! Is anything that I've been doing deserving of all this threatening and chasing??" jeered Maddox, very obviously feigning honesty. She opened and then bluntly shut her yap as the figure, who she knew as Kooli, started up once more.
"You know in EXACT specificity what you are doing wrong. Selen is NOT going to be happy, you know, when he finds out that his dissident child is actually performing arcane studies, instead of just yabbering on vaguely about stars and planets. Or, rather, he isn't going to be happy when he finds out that he was right," Kooli interjected.
"What do you mean, 'that he was right'? Was he chatting with you about familial woes? Does he know you on a personal level or something?"
"I'm a bounty hunter. I do not have personal little chats with people. I do, however, talk about business with clients.", spoke the imposingly large and steadily advancing Guardian. "The deal was very simple. No Arcane studies? Bring the child home. Arcane studies? Pursue and dispose of."
Maddox was disturbed and caught off guard by the new information, but ultimately not surprised. She needed time to think. Not so much about the unfatherly betrayal, of course, as the immediate situation and, namely, how to get out of it as quickly and cleanly as possible. Her eyes roamed around the clearing (which she was beginning to recognize as one of the more central clearings in Shadow territory) and landed on several possible exit points. Same way I came in? No. Sky? He can fly harder. Run screaming into nearby civilization? Die anyway, she mentally uttered, as if learning her lesson from speaking out loud earlier was any help at this point.
Even as a hatchling, Maddox had a cold, unfeeling and heavily unbalanced relationship with her family. Selen, her flight-prestigious "father", despised her at any point in which she wasn't showing an active interest in exactly the same topics and plans that he himself was. The issue wasn't made any better by the fact that that almost never happened. Young Maddox had an almost alien interest in the stars above her, the magic that seemingly made the world go round, and
particularly the Arcane flight, much to Selen's disgust and chagrin.
All of the bitterness in the world culminated as Maddox neared adulthood with a master plan to escape from her "father", her "friends", and the "home" she had grown up in. The cruel, unsympathetic flight that gawked in silent acceptance as her father tortured her for not being the child he wanted her to be was not one she wished to see ever again. Until now, she had managed to slip out and fully under their radar, but all of that came crashing down when
this freak, who her father had
apparently actually paid to hunt her was tipped off about her location by one particularly angry "business partner".
Realizing that she had ended up thinking
even harder about the unfatherly betrayal than her escape, she realigned her priorities just in time to realize that something was
new about this area, which she finally identified as the Thorndark Altar. The formerly disgusting pool had dissipated to reveal a stone arch—no, wait—a stone
portal sitting at the end of the fixture.
Of course, she thought,
here's a much better way out! This must be the other half of that old portal out by the ruins! Maddox, grateful to see the bright, flowy grass and Light territory on the other side, started quickly towards the portal.
Which, of course, is what she
would have done if not for the Guardian, who had cast varied curses and insults—and a 12-foot-long javelin formed from viscous shadow—at the Fae, shocking and incapacitating her and utterly destroying her only remaining escape plan. She cried out in agony and fell to the floor as the world around her got just a little bit fuzzier, and the bounty hunter began to approach her, seemingly to claim his reward and complete his mission.
"Step back."
The source of the voice didn't seem to wait very long after the first instruction before lunging from a previously unseen spot within the portal to strike down the completely unprepared Guardian, harshly throwing him from his spot above Maddox and to a new spot about 10 of his wingspans away. The very, very strong—and loud, and bright, and frankly beautiful—entity, a relatively colossal Gaoler, made its next move by sweeping Maddox onto its back and lunging back toward the portal.
"Wait, please wait...! He can just follow us t-through the portal!!", she managed to whisper to the beast with what little energy she had left.
"He can try," boomed the beast back to the little Fae. The two stepped through the gateway, emerging from the sun-bathed Moonportal on the other s—
Wait, what?
They left the Shadow side of the portal for sure, but they stopped just short of the Light side. Was there really this much space between the two portals? Maddox's eyes darted around in a panic as, instead of moving towards the bright ruins in front of them, they simply stopped, seemingly defying everything she knew about portals, physics AND magic. The complete halt continued, and Maddox gazed back just in time to see the flustered assassin dart directly past them, only to end up—as expected—in the Sunbeam Ruins instead. They then quickly began to move
sideways, into what seemed like the 'wall' of the portal, emerging from the third end of a two-way gate.
Maddox tried to focus her eyes for a few seconds, adjusting from the rapid transition from shadow to magical light and into what felt like real sunlight. However, she made the observation that it wasn't coming from a sky that she was used to, but rather a sky filled with even more light, color and stars than she thought possible. The towering Gaoler's paws reached the grassy ground, and the beast finally laid Maddox down on the new land. She wearily looked around in an attempt to regain her bearings after they had been fully upended by the last 2 minutes of her life.
The small dragon's visual research concluded a few things: this was a large, rounded plot of grassy land, spanning at least several hundred yards in any direction from the center. A small, shacky—though not uninhabited—town stood several paces away from the two, bustling with low-to-moderate activity and noise. The sky (she had already noticed that it wasn't her own, but now she
really started to take in the beauty and the oddity of it) had what looked like thin boundary lines reaching around into the sky at the center of the plot from several of the land's edges. This gave the appearance of a giant "bubble" laid against a backdrop of marbled black and purple skies and a generous spattering of stars. Lastly, she took the time to think about the plot itself; this place was
not a part of the Sornieth she knew, as far as she was aware. Was all of this contained within that space between the two portals?
A whole town nobody knew about?
She was content with the amount of looking around that she had just completed, and she looked up to the Gaoler, who looked right back down at her. She felt like it was time to start talking again.
"What is this place? How does it work, is this all within those portals?? Who are you? How did we-"
"Welcome. This is the Blacklight Fissure. That town is Delphis. My name is Moment. You may rest now," spoke the Gaoler. She wondered how someone could be so audibly loud while being so soft-spoken at the same time. She wondered a lot of things, but she was content with three answers for the time being, so she decided to follow the advice of the larger dragon. Maddox laid her head down in the soft grass and, despite her injury, slowly managed to drift to sleep.
"I will keep you safe."
