#Alim can taint anything living

[husband-steve-cortez]

"Don't you know? A warden is already dead."

[sanguinifex]

(Don’t worry--there will be more chapters! One’ll go on Patreon in a few hours, once I'm done writing the chapter draft. Decided to post to AO3 and tumblr, at least, while it was still a sensible hour.)

It was simple and wordless, and it echoed around the cavern. With three output glyphs, it was as if there were four of Alim singing.

Of course, the magic only came from one. Even the heights of ancient Tevene graphomancy had never figured out how to transmit the casting of an independent spell from one place to another, or how to map anything remotely like what Alim was casting in lyrium ink, and that was probably for the best. Even the sound was not really being transmitted per se. Sound was nothing more than vibrations, and the glyphs merely registered those tiny movements and pressures and replicated them artificially with magic.

Sound alone was not magic, at least not the kind of magic that any corporeal being could reproduce. Sound has its own powers, but they are not the same thing as magic, even if occasionally mistaken for such, or vice versa. The hum of lyrium or the strident Calling of an Old God, as they are described, are the mind’s efforts to make sense of magical sensation, with the part of every thing’s being that is made of Fade, or Void. Audible sound is a mirror to some magic, and a warped one. But, mirroring magic or on its own, sound is a great distraction, and both its simple distraction and reflection of magic increases the mind’s susceptibility to that magic. The sound now pouring down startled the darkspawn, clearly recognizable as imitation of its real counterpart, as one can recognize from someone’s whistling the first bars of a fully orchestral iconic symphony.

And

That was a dragon. That was a very large dragon. It—she—slept, filling most of the gigantic cavern, her stomach taking more than a minute to rise and fall with each breath. It took five whole breaths before the Wardens could tear themselves away from the sight. How was the air in here kept fresh? Magic. Magic beyond what any mortal or Tainted being living still knew. Its scales glinted like metal; they might have been gold in sunlight—but they were streaked with dirt and filth. The dragon wore no visible chains, but it was obvious that she was a prisoner. Elgara felt a strange sense of shared experience…no, she would not think about that. Dragons like this were imprisoned for good reason, and it was only for a better reason that she was doing this at all. A creature with this much power and control over others’ minds even when hibernating could only ever be a danger. (People say that about mages too, a thought whispered in her mind, but even the stories of ancient Dreamers were not on this scale.)

Get early access to chapter updates and other rewards by supporting my Patreon!