Chapter Text
urZah awoke that morning with an already plaguing anxiousness inside him and sweat dampening his skin. His dreams had left him confused rather than enlightened; where he normally saw harmonious patterns of cool earthen tones and spiral figures, his subconscious self was instead met with harsh, crackling lights and vertigo. The final crash of lightning was not backed by thunder, but a shrieking that shook him from his dreamscape and into consciousness. He found his lips parted and a shrill note whining through his vocal chords, as if his sleeping form had joined the cacophonous melody in his vision.
It was an ill omen, certainly, but as to what it warned him of he did not know.
He rushed, about as quick as a Mystic could, out from his sleeping chambers and dressed in his ritual garments. Whatever this vision suggested, it was imperative that he find out fast.
It was an unfamiliar but distressing sight to see urZah so frightened. His face typically showed little outward emotion, as he was often so deep in thought he could not afford to expend any energy on anything other than meditation. When urAmaj passed him on the spiral path and reminded him that he had not come to breakfast, the Ritual Guardian’s face displayed nothing but a growing panic. urZah was one of the slowest Mystics, but urUtt remarked from his loom that he seemed to almost tumble and roll down the spiral path from his chambers to the ritual sand bank.
When urZah finally reached the canvas of his sand painting one of his rear arms was delegated to holding his staff while the remaining three hands darted through his supplies, searching for and mixing the assorted colored sands and collecting the required stones. This process of constructing a sand spiral typically took days, but he had already smothered his last painting and he needed to ground himself in a new one. This one would be shoddy and makeshift, but it would work for his purposes. His anterior hands began to shake sand onto the ground before him in jagged spirals, not nearly as neat as his normally sturdy hands would allow; at this moment, his whole body was still trembling from his nightmare. He began to murmur small mantras as he worked, which drew the attention of a few of his neighboring Mystics who began to chant alongside him, which further alerted the rest of the Valley and soon it was alive with song.
After what felt like hours of painting and singing, urZah finally finished the sand base and began to place the gemstones in their proper positions. One forehand clasped a satchel of crystals while the other retrieved them; ten jewels, one placed in the center of each of the ten conjoining central spirals of the painting.
urZah sat a moment and stared at his work, a haphazard altar crafted in desperation for answers, but found no altered message in its form. Had his dreams been a fluke, or perhaps it was his callous desperation for the spiral that blighted his vision?
It was only when urZah began to close the satchel of that he received his response, for a single polished onyx fell from the bag, landed upon the large central amethyst point, cracked in two, perfectly even halves each left and right onto the painting, smearing the sand in its wake.
In shock, urZah released the satchel from his hand, the purse landing on the edge of the spiral and causing a small cloud of dust to come up from the ground. His rear hand did the same with his staff, though it clattered behind him. A small gasp escaped his mouth.
The stopping of the mantras led to the rest of the Mystics ceasing their singing, their attention being drawn to the source of the ruckus. A few of them even left their stations and came over to see what was bothering urZah so, which resulted in the rest following suit to slowly gather around the fractured sand spiral.
“What is it?” One asked, “Are you alright, urZah?”
The scene fell into a small commotion, each asking each other what the message meant, but urZah’s eyes remained lower, trying to decipher the meaning of this augury.
A fallen stone, broken in half, it’s pieces laid to the left and right of the central spiral.
A single crystal, cracked into two pieces — the left, the evil; the right, the good — and split.
urZah looked up to the sky as the Greater Sun rose to its peak and found that the Rose Sun crept closer into its field— a Lesser Conjunction was coming today.
“I am, myself… alright,” he spoke slowly, looking up to greet his fellow Mystics. “It is simply that… I fear… we have a visitor… and their entrance shall be… less so….”