Isabel, her long legs propped up on a library table, reclined in her chair, spreading the stained map over her pale legs. Razor thin eyebrows, thin like a spider’s leg, kinked upward. “I’ll be damned,” she muttered, only half-conscious that her voice carried in the silence of the library. She ignored the glance from a browsing ghoul and muttered on.
The map was tucked inside a book back in the thaumaturgy section. She had been in a mood, a mood to punish herself for forgetting to care about anything as long as she remained imprisoned in Limbo. Limbo had it’s pluses, it had its big fat minuses, and one perk–a near infinite library authored by an eternity of magi, magi that rarely wrote in the same language.
Bored, she’d made a game of closing her eyes, counting the times her boot heels clicked on the old dusty floor. 5…6…7….and she’d put her long fingers on the spine of a book to her right, just at knee level, and pulled it out carefully, only allowing her eyes to open once the tome was in hand.
“Sure,” she chuckled, “I’m all about thaumaturgy.” Curious, she opened the old leather book, allowed its pages to breeze open, and that’s exactly when the map, the map of Sylvan, fell out.
She remembered.
It had only been yesterday. Maybe longer. A year? A decade? It was the last time she rallied her strength with the warrior Gabriel; the last time she had toured the lands with the alchemist known as Alkazar; the last time she had met Vinsfeld, the leader of the Dark Sun, and matched wits with him.
What were the odds?
The map brought her full circle.
Her last memories of walking Sylvan came flooding back. She remembered it all: the dungeons, the people, the air itself, air raw with sunlight. She remembered stalking Doom for artifacts, artifacts she hoped would give her an edge against Vinsfeld…that son of a bitch! She toured with Alkazar, invading the halls of the mechanical gods, killing their cart-bound lords, and confronting the serpent men….yet again.
And then, then the gray filled in from behind her eyes. It crept in with long arms, arms that grasped and choked, arms that whisked her away. Had Alkazar not warned her about meddling with poisons? Poor Alkazar. Wise enough to be heard, right enough to be ignored. Yes, it was her study of poisons that finally took her from Sylvan, and dumped her unceremoniously on the doorstep of Death himself.
Death took one look at her, his beetled brows knitting his pale gray face together into a sour stare, and with a swift motion of his invisible scythe, removed her from mortality.
Due to her unanswered sins, she was not allowed Heaven.
Due to her weak morals and weaker vanities, she was deemed not worthy of Hell, but only good enough to remain in Limbo…forever.
What’s to be done with memories?
Yes, she was punishing herself again. The questions and their memories stung her like ice daggers.
What’s to be done when you must wait out Time itself? Time the Unending; Time the Eternal?
Placing the book back on the shelf, Isabel turned swiftly to make her way to the library’s necromancy section. Surely, she heard herself hoping, surely there was an answer to be had in those grim stacks?
