User blog:Agaruasil/3rd of Vision, 4167

Anataril's bare feet made no sound on the ancient marble floor as he slipped along the shadowed edge of the Meridian Hall, his curved knife in his hand. He was painted head to toe in disruptive patterning, a veritable palette of pigments, rendering the elf nigh invisible in the shadowed passage.

He'd seen the young woman come this way, he was sure he had, running fearfully as she clutched something to her chest, looking this way and that as her long hooded red shawl, marking her as one of the Gandrayid, Anataril's sworn enemies. She had nearly looked right at him but he had been crouched, unmoving, in a small reliquary off the gigantic hall and she had not noticed him.

Then he spotted it, the faintest blue glow of magic light eminating from an open doorway, but fading fast. He hastened his step and came around into the passageway ready to give pursuit, but it was too late.

All at once the room he had believed a passage was surrounded by a wall of blood red flame and he found he could not move. Stiffly, his clenched fist opened and dropped the knife to the stone floor with a clatter. He noticed her then, his would-be quarry.

With the exception of her shawl and the silk sash and loincloth about her hips, she was, like him, entirely naked. Great loops of bone and turquoise beads were draped about her neck and silver bands wound their way up her lithe arms. Every centimeter of her exposed flesh was marked with a single tiny crimson dot of pigment and cruelly barbed fish hook-like piercings adorned the nipples of her petite breasts.

She smiled at him a demonic smile and he saw that her teeth were filed to points. Fear gripped him, a fear beyond any he had experienced before.

"Caught you now, little fish," she whispered, already in the process of casting a spell. Then oblivion.

Uradaia jerked back, her hand falling from the black soulgem that held the soul and memories of Anataril, now centuries dead. Somewhere, she knew, in the vast and ever expanding tomb complex beyond the Memory Index, the foolish scout was entombed. It would be in the Ledger. Her mind now done integrating Anataril's memories with her own, she, the Keeper of Memories, turned about.

Where was that apprentice?

"Agaruasil?" she called out into the darkened Index, "Agaruasil?"

"Agaruasil?" a different, younger voice cried, "Keeper?" Agaruasil slowly opened his eyes, the memories of his old mentor fading to the back of his mind. Being a Keeper of Memories, it was easy to get lost in Other Memory, the memories within memories of all those who had come before. How long he had been sitting, remembering, he could not say. Perhaps days.

But duty called, and so he arose stiffly and began making his way to the entrance of the Index.