Haemoskhio

“You’re from my dream, aren’t you? I come from the Tangled Wood, guided here by visions from the Plaguebringer, Herself. Will you help take me to the Wyrmwound for the Necromancer Trials?"

The young Mirror had crossed into the Plaguelands and to his surprise, not long after, had caught sight of a red Skydancer. He had approached him posthaste, yet something about the creature's mannerisms unnerved him. He couldn't ascertain the reason until the dragon opened its mouth. No sound came out, though he gestured as if speaking.

“What’s that? I didn’t hear you? Did you say something?” The Mirror tried. The Skydancer shook his head, his face split in a silent laugh. He stepped over the young dragon and strode through the tendrils with a wobbling gate. Despite the erratic movement of his limbs, he seemed to glide. The Mirror sprinted to catch up, and they trod on, yet more than once, his quiet chaperone froze mid-step. He would stare off into the horizon for terribly boring spans of time, fixated on something the Mirror could not glean. It was not a blank stare, however, his eyes were so full as if something were alive all on its own behind his bloodshot gawp. In these moments, the Mirror would try to engage him once more, inquiring doggedly about the Necromancer Trials, but outside of his dancing eyes, the Skydancer was as a pillar. Until he was not. Abruptly, without fanfare, he would begin walking as swiftly as he had stopped.

As the day began to darken, the Skydancer slackened his pace. He sat on his haunches and then collapsed to the ground, asleep. They continued like this for another two days. The Mirror had never once seen him eat. The young dragon would spend his evenings hunting the smaller fauna of the land before lying down to rest himself. On the first night he kept a wide berth between himself and the Skydancer, yet by the third day, weary from exhaustion and lonely from the absence of dragon interaction, he curled up next to his travelling companion, warmed by his body heat. In the morning, he found the Skydancer staring down at him, unmoving, but grinning, his eyes gleaming as when he would gaze off at the skyline. The Mirror said nothing. After a handful of minutes the Skydancer finally blinked and pressed his rail-like form from the earth. He did not walk onward though, but stretched out one of his bony limbs and pointed— again at the horizon.

“We’re almost there.” The Mirror concluded aloud. He realized by now that there would be no response; he did not predict the sudden weight at his back. The Skydancer had placed his claws tightly around the little Mirror’s shoulders. With a whimper, the young one looked up to see the Skydancer’s mouth moving rapidly as if engaged in the most entertaining of discussions. Before the Mirror could sputter a sentence in return, a searing pain gripped him and his knees buckled. He felt his flesh expand with disease, a nauseating torture that eroded him from his shoulders and down his back to the tip of his tail. And then he glimpsed the soles of the Skydancer’s feet as he stepped over him and walked onward.

The Mirror forced himself up. His clan’s elder had warned him that the trials were not to be taken lightly, not passed without great ardor. Perhaps they weren’t going to his Necromancer trials, perhaps the trials had already begun the moment he stepped foot into the Plaguelands. He dragged himself forward, and the Skydancer did something the Mirror had not witnessed before, he looked back at him. His body did not turn, yet his head craned his way, his face frozen in a laugh as if stuck that way. A terrible thought overwhelmed the Mirror. What if all of his dreams, his visions of the trials, and of meeting the Skydancer were not his own foresight, nor the beckoning of the Plaguebringer, but a snare laid by this beast? And he had lapped up the bait. The Mirror discarded the thought, blocking his mind from spiraling into despair. He must only focus on survival.

It may have been minutes or hours later. The Mirror could no longer sense time through the pounding of his head and rawness of his body. He could barely make out his surroundings, yet he could see the Skydancer as if a torch in the darkness, and before them all was blistering orange.
“The Wyrmwound,” the Mirror uttered weakly, “The Necromancer Trials, I’ve made it,” but his voice faded and his vision slipped into blackness. He heard a dreadful cackle that undulated between an electric hiss, the sound of rain, and a discordant shriek.



When he awoke again the Skydancer was gone. His head was still pounding, and he knew his chances at passing the trials were as good as over if he attempted them now. Instead he searched for shelter among the harsh terrain. The ground was sharp and littered with pocks that were filled with pale liquid. He discovered an overhang in the face of a red boulder just as it began to rain. His first instinct was to tip his head back and take a drink, but the droplets fell on his back as needles, and he doubted the water's potability. He questioned how any being survived here.

For fourteen days he camped under the cliff. Leaving before the bustle of dawn to hunt for sustenance, and his mind had begun to recover from the Skydancer's malady, though his body still felt as if it had been pushed through a fine sieve. That evening he glimpsed the Plaguebringer land at Her cauldron, a heaping pit in the center of the Wyrmwound that ebbed with diseases both new and terrible. A touch from Her claw would initiate the challenge that he had worked so hard to meet. He pushed the Skydancer and his misfortune from his mind and burst forth from his hiding spot to initiate the Necromancer Trials.

He hadn't lasted the night. As his vision faded, he let his limbs buckle, his head finally resting on the porous earth, his snout barely above the dubious pooled fluid leftover from the rains. He let out a sigh, half expecting to see the Skydancer appear before him again, though saw nothing and the world fell silent.

He did not expect to wake again, so it was just as surprising as it was a relief when he felt himself regain consciousness. That relief suddenly turned to dread when he opened his eyes and glimpsed his body. His skin, not cured but laden with the Plaguebringer's disease was a bright red. It was the same color as the Skydancer's, and it was marred by lines of infection and ruptured blood cells. The effects of adrenaline that had accompanied his rousing and given him clarity was brief. A new feeling overcame him. A seething scarlet anger. No new thoughts. No angst or desires of survival, just a powerful hatred that forced him up from the ground. There was no ache in his limbs left, but the hunger to walk. A ringing static clung to the air.