Aetherdrawn

The aether stood, a billowing wall of blur bounding the whole of the very small world. 

Mepka stormed alongside it, taking miles of the swamp with spiteful steps. Where she could, she pounced from patch to patch of packed dirt using felled trees and moss-eaten boulders as stepping stones. In each of those places where the waters had been so gluttonous as to have taken any possible path beneath their murky surface, she jabbed her staff like a knife until they gave up a passable shallowness.

She used the aether as a guide, following its curve northwards. When it seethed too close, she swiped at it just the same as she did the water. It took an eddying retreat from the hiss that the quarterstaff cut through it. Mepka glared into its depths as it rolled continually past.

"You’re getting awfully close there, aren’t you?" A voice burbled across the air.

Mepka’s head slid around, searching for the source. "It’s not going to hurt me."

"Not unless you want it to." The words dripped from directly below her. A mired face birthed itself out of the swamp floor near her foot. Spindly arms slopped their way out to follow, pushing up a stubby winged form. 

"Have you ever thought about it?" The mephit spat a globule of mud down its chest. "Walking out into the mists?"

Mepka kept her aggravated tread, trying not to let the swamp slow her. "So what if I had?"

"Things get lost in the aether," Her new companion wallowed, "It might kill you."

It reached up to place a hand on her calf as they walked, which she uneasily kicked away. "Is that what the swamp would want?" Mepka asked hesitantly.

"Never," the mephit hissed out spittle. "The swamp marked you with its stain when you were born into it. You belong to it, just like everything else."

Mepka became acutely aware way her boots stuck in the mud, each step a struggle. "Going into the mists would break that hold, then?"

"It would break you." The mephit weaved around the side of a wide tree-base, its voice echoing from out of sight. "The swamp is solid, and so you are solid in it. The aether is nothing, and so you would be nothing in it."

"How would you know? Like you’ve ever been." Resentment flooded into Mepka’s words. "You muddy fuck, you don’t have any hold on me. Screw you and screw this whole blasted swamp." 

There was no response. When Mepka came round the other side of the tree the swamp had lost its face.

She looked around, confused, just before being pelted with a deluge of muck from below. Her eyes were sodden, gaze black as it slammed bruising into her side and stiffened around her leg in restraint. She swung her quarterstaff in a panicked sweep, wincing at the reverberation of it cracking into an unseen stone. Pulling her leg free in a jolt, she stumbled back and over a collapsed log, feeling small fists slamming into her again.

She wiped her eyes to find the mephit clawing up her prone stomach. Meeting its voracious leer, she struck a sharp jab of the staff through the creature’s neck. It hung there for a moment, seeping and struggling and spiteful, before bursting into a sludge of mud. What little remained sloughed off of the quarterstaff and reconstituted with the bog’s element.

Breathing heavy, her eyes sat wide to pull in the fullness of her surroundings. No movement caught her attention save for the warble of the landscape beyond the aetherline. Left with her thoughts, now muddled against the swamp’s foul motives, she pushed herself back up to her feet and walked on.

Late in the afternoon the trees began to fall behind her, opening into a clearing of sorts. The way ahead was a field of thin, stone obelisks gasping up from beneath the swamp. Mepka situated herself amongst the Crop of Myarsa, that once-great borough now subsumed such that only it’s highest masts remained in view. 

She leapt up onto the rounded head of the pillar nearest to her, wobbling slightly. She breathed deep and felt the world balance around her. She had found herself in a quiet place, one abandoned by the people of Peyr and thus lain to rest.

Mepka started a vault across, her feet brushing from one weathered column to the next. The Crop flew beneath her. She released control over her direction as she circled across it, reveling in the clarity of her momentum.

The aether came back into her peripheral, cutting across the Crop in a warped mirror. She danced close to it, and when she did a foreign thrill came to her chest. The pattern of her feet pulled her closer still. When face to face, it parted for her. With a sharp intake of breath, Mepka slipped past and into the aether for the first time.

A ripple through her core set her balance off, sending her tumbling onto an elastic ground. Propping up from the obelisk she had fallen from, she felt its concretion give ever so slightly under her touch. The world around and ahead of her had gone suddenly indistinct. Feeling that feeling in her chest spread and underpin itself, she began to stumble forwards. 

The further she moved, the more that the ground bled into the sky bled into the void bled into her. Form fled into a wash of color, and then color into tones of gray. She escaped from sense of time, sense of space, sense of self, in that silvery indetermination. 

Her heart slowed, and the moment before it ceased to be she felt a word of power whisper around her.

"Ahtr’ul"

The word echoed through her consciousness and across her lips, and at her next steps she could see the vague forms of trees and stone pillars. The aether here at the border to the Crop felt bare by comparison to what she had just experienced, mere wisps. She held her daze, unsure of herself. Faint tendrils of the aether clung at her as she crossed the threshold back into corporeality.

She managed a few steps on unsteady legs. Air filled her lungs again, acrid, drawing her back to herself. She blinked out of her rapture and looked around. It was dark by then, deep into night. 

She stumbled back and away, seeking distance from the great unending void. She charted a direction back towards the Last of Myarsa, towards the familiarity of the cabins. She held off on looking back over her shoulder until miles had passed between them. When she did, she did so in apprehension.

She called out that word that had been called to her, "Ahtr’ul", and she felt within her chest the resonance of an aetherdrawn heart.