Random stories

# Soulmage

**I flared up with a spell of light, illuminating the bizarre, angular field of spikes.** The flurry of hail obscured our little adventuring party's vision, and I felt very, *very* small against the backdrop of the strange structure.

"Hold on." Sansen held up a hand, one eye darting left and right as he scanned possible futures. Having an oracle on the team paid off time and time again, and now was no exception. "You know the pinnacle of light magic? Those bizarre invisible light spells that elves like to use?"

"The ones that make you nauseated, start losing all your hair, and die a horrible, lingering death of cancer?" I shuddered. "How the hell could I forget?"

"It's called deathlight," Meloai helpfully added.

"Yeah. Deathlight." Sansen frowned, peering at a future timeline only he could see. "There's... something similar to deathlight surrounding this place. In most of the futures after we explore this place, we... die. In ways *very* similar to a deathlight attack."

Instinctively, the four of us took a step back. We'd fought against elves before, and nobody deserved the horrid illnesses their deathlight spells wrought.

"Well... standard precautions against light magic should work, right?" I asked. "Cloaks of darkness for everyone?"

"Mm." Possible futures whirred around Sansen's head as he reconfigured his spell. "Yeah. Darkness spells apparently work just as well on deathlight as they do on normal light."

"Understood." I reached into my soul and swept one hand through the air, tearing a rift open to the Plane of Elemental Darkness. The dome of shadow closed around us, and the already-dim sunlight flickered and died.

Hopefully we wouldn't suffer the same fate.

"Hey." Lucet frowned. "Do we know if the deathlight is coming from... above us? Or could it be underground, too?"

"No idea," Sansen said.

"If we don't know... it might be a good idea to make a full shroud. Just in case the source of the deathlight is beneath us." I could tell from her shy expression that she was halfway to apologizing for the suggestion, so I gave her arm a reassuring squeeze.

"Yeah. Good idea. One second—gather closer, I can't maintain a complete shroud without shrinking the sphere a little."

The four of us squished together as I crafted a full shield of darkness. It was a bizarre experience, proceeding—the only light source was the orb of radiance in my palm, and the shroud of darkness gave the illusion that we were standing in an infinite void. As we walked forwards, the only warning we'd get before nearly bumping into a towering, almost organic thorn was its sudden appearance from beyond the edge of the shroud, as if it were surfacing from a deep and murky ocean.

Altogether, I was relieved when we reached the door at the center of the spike field.

"It's a dungeon entrance," I said, at the same time as Lucet said, "Doesn't look like any dungeon entrance I've seen."

We looked at each other, and Lucet blushed again, but I gestured for her to speak. Nervously, she said, "Well, uh... these doors... the writing on them doesn't match any language I know. And... I... I'm not sure they even *are* doors. I don't see a handle or a hinge or a spell trigger or anything."

"Alright, brute force time." Sansen's eyes gleamed as lens-shaped discs of oracular power swirled into existence around his eyes. "I'll look into a couple hundred futures where we try different ways to open this door, and if I don't find anything, we're breaking through."

I sat down, biting my lip, as Sansen's gaze unfocused, tracking dozens of futures simultaneously. Lucet whispered, "You okay?"

I shook my head. "If this place is filled with deathlight... do you really think anyone could've survived in here for that long? I'm just... I'm just worried that we've come all this way, and we're going to find him dead and rotting in the corridors of whatever this dungeon is. Or not-dungeon. I don't know."

Lucet opened her mouth, but before she could speak, Sansen said, "Alright, good news and bad news."

"Go for it," Meloai said.

"Good news is, I figured out how to open the door. Bad news: it involves not thinking of it as a door, and just blowing the darn thing down. Or in this case, shattering it. Lucet?" Sansen nodded towards the slim, frail girl.

Lucet took in a deep breath and nodded. "Right. You... you all might want to shield your eyes."

I did so, closing them and turning away. In my soulsight, I sensed power gather around Lucet's soul, and the witch of frost flicked her wrist—

Metal shrieked and snapped as Lucet plunged the temperature of the door down to as cold as could possibly be, rendering the structure as brittle as a dry leaf. It collapsed over its own weight, chunks of frosty, unidentifiable material shattering and cascading before us, leaving a massive hole into the complex's interior.

For a moment, nobody spoke.

Then I stood up. "Come on. No point in hanging around."

Bits of what used to be metal crunched beneath my boots as we entered the chamber. It was unknowable how vast the hall was from inside our bubble of protective darkness, but the air tasted stale and dusty, and the ground looked as though no feet had trod it for a long, long time.

"I... I don't think anyone's here, Cienne." Meloai swallowed heavily. "How... are you sure our intel was right? How would Jiaola even have gotten in here?"

"Wait." Sansen stopped. Then he swore. "Back up. *Back up.* Out, out, *out*!"

On the list of things you didn't want your party oracle doing, freaking out and trying to run upon looking into the future was one of them. "What? What is it?" I started backpedaling, but Sansen swore and a humanoid figure in a odd, full-body suit and reflective helmet charged into the shroud of darkness—

And we all fell down in a tangle of limbs.

A.N.

Sorry to leave it here, but I'm sick and typing with only nine fingers. Have to take a break.

This story is part of Soulmage, a frequently updated serial in progress. Want to know what happens next? Check out [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/bubblewriters/comments/uxmwe4/soulmage_masterpost/) to be notified whenever a new part comes out! There's already thirty-five other chapters before this one, so there's plenty to catch up on. And if you want more stories, check out r/bubblewriters!

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Submitted by meowcats734 on Sat, Jun 18, 2022 to /r/WritingPrompts/

The prompt

“This place is not a place of honor,” reads the text. “No highly esteemed dead is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.”