Lenore
I had been dreaming of many things. The past, the present, and the future filtered through my sleeping consciousness. I was dreaming of the past, so that meant I was dreaming about humiliation. Ayda, my fellow priestess, sat beside me, taking up my whole field of vision. She leaned in, looking like she was going to say something mean to me.
--except in my dream she was only being nice to me. Very unusual. She was telling me to find her for..something. She was being very specific, that I needed to find her immediately, but as she talked, her voice turned into annoying gibberish. I asked her why, and she stopped blabbering and leaned in for a kiss. If I was awake, I would have been outraged at her presumptuousness.
In my dream, I tried to move, so I could kiss her back, but I couldn’t move my limbs. Physical sensation returned, becoming tangled into the dream’s fabric.
Oh, yeah, that reminded me. I wasn’t even supposed to be dreaming right now. I wasn’t asleep; I had been sealed away.
My body was cocooned in what felt like thick, smothering fibers, wrapped around me so tightly it dug into my skin, and clamped my limbs to my body. It clung to my face, and gagged my mouth so that I couldn’t see or hear anything. Half asleep, and half awake, I struggled, and tried to call out, but I couldn’t make a sound. There was no way for me to see my surroundings. I could barely breath. It felt like there was something stuck in my chest. This was all wrong. Being sealed away was supposed to put me in a death-like, dreamless sleep. I wasn’t supposed to wake up, at any point.
All I could do was wait.
The next sensation was pain. I had been stabbed! I could feel the blade scrape against my lower ribs as it was pulled out of me. I wasn’t just stabbed, I had been impaled. Then I heard the extremely muffled clang of metal hitting the floor.
And then I was awake.
The open wound in my chest burned, but the seal was broken, and I could move again. Barely, but as I wriggled my body, I could feel the fibers tearing apart, starting at the point where the I had been impaled.
I don’t know how long it took for me to free myself. Once I was able to stick my arm through the gap, it went a lot faster. I didn’t step out of the cocoon so much as I fell out of it. I realized that I was fully naked when the cold air hit my body.
It felt like I’d been born again. I was weak, naked, and covered in my own blood and also some kind of mystery fluid. The effort it took to sit up left me gasping for breath, and wondering why my mother would do this to me.
I was alone, luckily, sprawled out on cold stone. I was in a room that was rather reminiscent of an underground sewer, with vaulted stone ceilings and a small grate set in the center. I was lying on a circular stone plinth directly under the grate. The remnants of the seal I had been resting inside of was suspended above it. It was already disintegrating before my eyes, flaking apart into long strings.
The hole in my chest hurt with every movement I made. I was still bleeding. It was a testament to my divine heritage that I hadn’t died yet.
I was surrounded on all sides by a lake of dark water. No, not water-- blood. Was all of it my blood? I shuddered at the thought. The sword had been thrust through my heart, and I must have been bleeding the entire time-- however long that had been. A hundred years? A thousand, maybe?
I reached for my magic, so that I could heal my own wound. Nothing.
Quietly panicking, I mentally reached out into the arcane realm and pulled up my tome. It read:
Name: Lenore
Race: Divinite
Class: None
Level 1
Spells: [Reveal] -- take a limited view of another’s tome.
I reread the words in disbelief. What had happened to me? When I had been sealed away, I was a Priestess, leveled beyond my years, yet now all I had was a single non-combat spell. My class? Gone. My master spells? Gone, as well.
I had thought about starting over before. It was only natural to wonder what other classes were like. And, I had never enjoyed priestess work, and my mother’s constant intrusions had ruined the leveling process for me. But I hadn’t imagined starting over like this.
I couldn’t really blame my mother for my rude awakening, though. She had told me that I could be waking up to anything. I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep. Could be hundreds of years. Could be thousands. I wouldn’t see my sister priestesses, the women I’d been raised alongside, ever again.
My arcane ruminations were cut short by the noise of a door scraping open. Given the way my seal had been... modified, the person entering was likely my enemy. And now I didn’t even have magic.
Next to me lay the blade that must have impaled me. My only weapon. It was an iron blade. Simple, but well-made. I was so weakened by my long confinement that I couldn’t even lift it up properly. All I could really do was drag it along the floor.
It turns out I shouldn’t have bothered, because the face that appeared was familiar to me.
“Sister Lydia?” I asked, utterly confused.
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