Antareon slowly settled down next to Emray, sucking in a sharp breath as he bent at the waist. His bouzouki was cradled in his arms, the firelight glinting off of its polished body and steel strings.
“Apologies for not being more talkative over dinner,” Antareon began, “but I didn’t want you to have my story filtered through their perception of me.”
“Why not?” Emray asked. “They seem forthright enough, and they hold a decent enough opinion of you.”
“They are not Rundir, and while I’ve told them a bit about my culture, they only have the barest idea of what it entails.”
Carefully Antareon plucked at a few of his strings, and another hollow tone echoed forth from it. This one was softer, more refined, and deeper in pitch, and as it sounded out the world around the pair of them grew silent. The crackling of the fire died, Gregor’s ungodly snoring was muffled, and even the breeze blowing through the trees made no sound.
“There, now we can speak freely,” Antareon commented. He carefully set his bouzouki on the ground, rubbing his stomach and shoulder where it had been resting.
“They say you aren’t a wizard, but you cast spells like it’s second nature,” Emray said. “You must have studied somewhere, learned this skill from someone.”
“They’re right, I’m no learned scholar the way that you are, or your Professors were,” Antareon answered. “My magic is more subtle, more insidious in form and comes from a deeper time and place than the arcane, the primal, or even the divine.”
Emray bristled at his use of the past tense in reference to her Professors. They had to still be alive; Luxom was right, they were too skilled to let a burning building do them in.
“My magic,” Antareon continued, “comes from the very fabric of reality itself. It is a practice passed down among Rundir for as long as they have existed.”
“All magic comes from reality,” Emray countered, turning to face him. “If nothing was real then their would be no interactions of arcane energy, no land and sky for animists to manipulate, no gods to bless clerics with their power. Reality is a precursor to magic.”
“Is it?” Antareon asked, turning to face her. “The arcane is founded upon physical principles of energy, action and reaction, this much is true. What if I told you that those interactions were only a single cog turning in a machine far grander than you can comprehend? That reality itself is only a building block to be used like any other?”
Emray scrutinized Antareon’s face as the pair stared at each other in silence. She tried to find any hint of irony, any betrayal of his inner thoughts, but found that he was as impenetrable as a statue. His face held no secrets, at least none that Emray could read.
“Then I’d tell you you were insane,” Emray answered, turning away to face the fire. “Reality is as it is, there’s no changing how it works.”
Antareon said nothing in response, only picked up his bouzouki and began to strum out a song. The melody was simple and sweet, softly dancing across Emray’s ears as he played. She was so mesmerized that she didn’t notice a hard pattering sound in their little bubble of sound until something thwacked her in her wounded shoulder.
After letting out a cry of pain and a few choice expletives she looked into her lap to find an acorn about the size of her fist sitting there. It was smooth and brown, and as she looked up she saw hundreds of similar acorns falling all around. They came down like hailstones, and all of them were pointedly not hitting any of their companions or their belongings.
“So you can make it rain acorns? I’ve read of animists making lightning come up from the grou—”
As Emray looked over to Antareon he was nowhere to be seen. Panicking slightly she stood up, looking all around to find that Susanna, Gregor, and Xeerya had vanished as soon as she looked away. She turned around to see the wagon gone as well, followed by the fire on her next revolution.
“This isn’t funny!” Emray protested. “Make this stop at once!”
“Can’t stop what’s already been started, you just have to let it run its course,” Antareon’s voice said, coming from Emray’s palm. She slowly looked down to find that an Antareon roughly the size of her wind-up bird was laying down on her palm, still strumming his bouzouki.
Emray tried to shake him off but found that he was stuck to her hand and profoundly undisturbed by her flailing. When she tried to pull him off he vanished into a puff of silver smoke and glitter, and all the acorns laying on the ground grew into individual, minuscule Antareons.
“How are you doing this?!” Emray pleaded as the army of toy-sized dark elves marched towards her. None of them spoke, but all of them played, turning the sweet song into a maddening dirge that was deafening in the arcane silence he had erected.
Emray turned to run, the landscape now perilously flat and covered in ice. A solitary doorframe stood up in the nothingness, and she ran for it as fast as her jellied legs would carry her.
She had barely turned the knob when a flood of images spilled into her mind, more than she could possibly attempt to collate or organize into any sense of meaning. Her headache worsened and worsened until she felt that her head would crack apart under the onslaught of sensory information, and just when it all seemed too much she awoke.
Antareon still played softly, the song coming to an end as Emray struggled her way up to a sitting position and away from him. The wagon was there, as were Susanna, Gregor, Xeerya, the fire, and everything in the world that had fallen away.
“So, what did you see?” Antareon asked as if the world hadn’t just been ripped asunder by his music.
“What did you do to me?!” Emray demanded, keeping a good five feet between them.
“I plucked at your reality, and your reality snapped back,” Antareon answered casually. “Reality is a fickle thing to mess with, and it tends to create different effects in different people depending on their interpretations of how it should work.”
Emray stared at Antareon, eyes wide and heart pounding as she tried to wrap her mind around what had just happened. What he did with that one song flew in the face of everything she had ever been taught about magic and how it worked, and the prospect of not knowing terrified her.
“Must’ve been quite the experience if you’re being this mum about it,” Antareon continued.
“There was a lot to take in,” Emray replied. “There were raining acorns, then everything disappeared, then an army of toy-sized yous, and then a door that flooded my mind with thoughts.”
“Fascinating,” Antareon commented, slinging his instrument back over his shoulder. “Simply fascinating. You should sleep.”
“Why?” Emray asked, put off by his change in demeanor.
“Having the kind of experience that I just put you through can be… taxing, on both the mind and the body, and your mind and body have taken enough of a hammering as of late. Get some sleep, I’ll be fine.”
Emray was going to protest further but felt the wave of drowsiness overtake her just as Antareon finished talking. With a wide stretch and a yawn she got up and shuffled over to the fire, settling down onto her bedroll and drifting away to the sound of the winter winds.
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