Put Your Faith In The Light

Author Recommendation: Listen to this music as you read. I thought it fit quite well, and synced up to the pacing.

 

The light was the first thing to come back to her, that imperceptible veneer of sensation. She sensed it, illumination seeping through her eyelids, prompting her groggy faculties to slowly reassert themselves.

A groan escaped her as she blinked her eyes drowsily. She lifted her head off of her shoulder where it had been resting since she’d passed out.

Everything hurt.

Even just blinking ached, just lifting her head sent a wave of shooting pain down her back, the weakening feeling branching outwards from her spine to every limb. She felt something more than just exhausted, something beyond tired. She could barely keep her eyes open as it was.

“Little paladin’s waking up now is she?”

Kesi nearly jumped out of her skin, despite the pain it brought. She bolted upright in her chair, sitting as still as a statue. Her eyes frantically darted around the room, searching for the source of the voice echoing out from the darkness that surrounded her.

Her voice.

“Don’t bother struggling, you’re too weak to do much of anything now. Just relax.”

Her visual sweep of the room came up short, and she grew more anxious by the second. The gripping pain ripping through her, even in her weakened state was unable to tear her attention away from the voice in the shadows. Indeed, the darkness around her began to creep ever closer. Her breathing spiked; sweat rolled down her brow; she blinked hard.

There had been nothing but darkness, an empty void in front of her before she blinked. The space had been filled when her vision refocused.

A wall of white fabric stood less than an inch away from her, and she attempted to jump backwards in surprise, only to be held back by her metal restraints. Another surge of pain assaulted her, and she grimaced through her teeth as the wall of white silk shifted. The figure before her knelt down so that she was eye level with it.

Kesi froze. Her veins frosted over, her sweat turning cold. Her blood refused to flow, flash frozen erratically in jagged crystalline patterns. The razor sharp points of her crystallized blood sliced the insides of her veins.

She stared into soft, brown eyes. Her eyes. It was like staring into a mirror.

“Seems this is the end of the road for you, lassie,” it whispered into her face in her own voice.

As soon as Kesi heard that last word, she knew what was going on.

“You’re a sick bastard David!” Kesi spat out with as much venom tipped vitriol as she could, attempting to rattle the ground with her forceful voice, only to find that her commanding aura had left her. She was too weak.

David smirked, made all the worse by the fact that Kesi was forced to look at herself mocking … herself.

“Perhaps, but like I said, sometimes you just have to make do,” David replied, turning away from Kesi for a moment as golden light surrounded his hand, lifting something from the shadowy corners of the room. A purple glimmer floated out of the darkness, and as it came into view, Kesi’s heart sunk.

“I heard of this thing a while back. Sunsoul Warmaul, if I’m not mistaken. Prized artifact and holy weapon, thought lost during the assault on Icecrown Citadel,” David taunted Kesi, willing the weapon into his waiting hand and forcing Kesi to observe as he continued.

“Tell me, how do you think people would react if you were to return this priceless piece of sacred weaponry? Now, this is just  a guess, but I think that whoever were to recover this long lost artifact in the name of Stormwind would be celebrated,” David said, taking a step away from Kesi, twirling the heavy warmaul in his hand. The yellow glow of holy magic encasing it made it as weightless as a feather.

“Maybe a commendation from the League of Explorers.”

David’s form flickered, deep magetna and golden energies swirling around him in a helix from his feet up. The tendrils of crackling energy were sheathed in something – currents of visible air. He was sucking the room of the air.

“Maybe a parade.”

Kesi struggled in her restraints as the light in the room dimmed noticeably.

“Maybe even a meeting with the king of Stormwind.”

The light in the room died entirely, the only illumination coming from the malevolent, arcing energies crackling off of David’s fading silhouette.

“Y-You … you can’t do this … you won’t … won’t pull it off …” Kesi sputtered out between ragged breaths. It was getting harder to breathe, the air thinning, the life leaving her.

David just smiled, staring into Kesi with her own eyes.

“Come now, don’t be so negative. Act like the paladin you are, be optimistic and hopeful. What was that saying you lot are so fond of?”

Kesi’s world began to spin. Shooting pain intertwined with a lack of oxygen, and black spots marred the edges of her vision.

“Ah yes!” David exclaimed as the energy swirling around him came t0 a violent crescendo. He looked at Kesi dead on through the veil of meshed shadow and holy magic.

“Put your faith in the Light, and all is possible,” David said, holding up his free hand to reveal a gentle orb of holy light held within. The orb lingered there for a moment, before bursting outwards in an explosion of light and sound. Kesi’s vision reeled, unable to cope. She tried to breathe, but found no air to inhale in the now pitch black room.

She desperately attempted to break out of her restraints, thrashing with the last of her strength as she suffocated. Her eyes dimmed and began to close as her movements became more sluggish, before finally ceasing altogether.

David’s words echoed in her hazy mind in the final moments of clarity before her faculties left her to wither in the black void.

Put your faith in the Light, and all is possible.

But the moment was short lived, and before long it too left her.

Reality faded, and the blackened void of the room soon found itself without company.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This has been quite the ride, seeing this story through from it’s first babysteps near the beginning, all the way to completion with this final chapter in the story.

It wasn’t amazing, it wasn’t the greatest story ever told, but that doesn’t matter, at least to me. I learned from it, I grew as a writer, and I developed a better work ethic, found more motivation to write.

This was my story; I thought of it, I wrote it, I finished it, and that’s enough for me.

I wanted to tell a story, and I did. Whoever reads this, whoever has read this story in it’s entirety, thank you. Thank you for sticking around to the end, and thank you for feeling my story worthy of your time.

To Mrs. Gounis, all I can say is thank you for being a constant advocate for me. Thank you for taking a chance on a student you previously knew nothing about, and letting him try his hand at a narrative blog. Thank you for reading and following this prototype tale.

Thank you for believing in me.

It’s been an experience,

                      Gabriel Toromoreno