A circle of candles surrounded Elisdrasil, arrayed on the cold wood floor. They, along with the sticks of incense filling the room with the soft scent of wormwood, weren’t exactly necessary for divination, but the y certainly helped set the mood. That was the thing about divination; getting into the right mindset was the most important thing about tracing the pathways of the future. Then again, Elisdrasil thought, the people who had taught him that lesson had all died at the hands of the one their divinations had been wrong about. That was the other thing about divination; the pathways of the future were incredibly murky and very easy to misinterpret.
That is, until recently.
The water of time had grown calmer in recent months, clearer and more defined. Events were becoming so stable, that even a novice of Elisdrasil’s power was able to see along the path of what would be, not what may be. It had its benefits, to be sure, but more so it was worrying to the Raiaeran. And so he sat, surrounded only by candles and incense, preparing to cast his mind as far as it would go. To see whatever it was that his Future Sight could see. Elisdrasil closed his eyes and relaxed, allowing his mind to slip free from his body and settle upon the rolling waves of the future.
He drifted along the currents of time for a while, seeing flashes of faces and locations that he didn’t know, and would likely never see again. But instead of reaching the rapids in the river where he had always encountered them, the point where there were too many choices, too many paths, Elisdrasil’s mind began to pick up speed. The shores closed in upon him, a certainty rather than a supposition. Everything around him moved by faster and faster, possibilities dissipating the second he turned his attention towards them. In time he was moving too fast to stop, carried by a single thought, a single idea towards the end place. He was in a future where there was no probability, only fact.
The midday sun was swollen to bursting, bloated with the sickly red light which poured out of it. There were holes in the world, not tunnels or openings carved with pick and shovel, but vile, unhealthy tears in the fabric of reality. And pouring from those holes was a horde of awful, shapeless masses, creatures without any shape or form and completely inimical to existence as Elisdrasil knew it. Everything they touched dissolved. The living, the dead, the land and sea, even the very fabric of magic dissipated as the creatures poured from the blasphemous environment that had birthed them.
And then the vision faded as Elisdrasil was pulled back through the river of time. He watched the possibilities reconvene and the shores expand as he moved backwards. But always, drifting at the end of the river’s relentless progress, was that horrible scene which had unfolded in Elisdrasil’s future sight.
The Raiaeran gasped as his thoughts returned to his mind. He had never seen so much, been so far, and it had left him weak and disoriented. But though the journey left his body frail, his mind retained the full weight of the sights he had seen. He had seen it, and everything leading up to it. There was a chain of events stretching unbroken from now towards that one horrible point in time. Destiny, he knew, was like anything else in that the more momentum it built up the harder it was to stop.
The Phoenix had foreseen the return of Xem’Xund but had failed to take action in time and had perished. Now, he realized, if he failed to take action in time everything on Althanas would perish. Destiny needed to be derailed, needed someone to fight against the binding chains which pulled all of time unerringly towards it. But to fight against something so established, something with so much momentum would require more than just one lone elf. Elisdrasil would have to assemble heroes. And if there were no heroes to be found, Elisdrasil would create them.
Closing his eyes, Elisdrasil skimmed the surface of the stream around him. There was a man, a mystic, Sei Orlouge. He had declared war on Corone’s rulers in an attempt to fulfill a prophecy, and in doing so bring Althanas one step closer to a cruel and grisly fate. Elisdrasil would gather others to his cause under the guise of stopping a would-be tyrant. But destiny was a difficult thing to change, and there was a very real possibility that Elisdrasil wouldn’t be able to stop the mystic. He only hoped that if that was the case, he could at least set others up on the hero’s path to saving Althanas.
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Originally Posted by Letho
