#enchantress

pain

Did a picture of Emmy running her stall, “The Raven’s Nest”

I’d say it turned out great! Really fits the whole “Magic Shop” look.

The mage’s doors slammed open with a noisy crash as they impacted the stone of her tower walls.

She knew it! She knew something was up! The world doesn’t just go quiet for no reason. The spirit realm even less so. Something was happening. Something big.

Papers and vials went clattering off of her desk, and onto the stone floor beneath them. Her enchanted books fluttered and rustled in protest, flocking off to their respective bookshelves lining the floors up above. Ignoring the minor papercuts down her forearms resulting from their decent, Emmy searched through every remaining parchment she had layed out months prior.

“Come on… where are they?” her cosmic blue eyes frantically darted around, looking for the records. The symbols she’s seen recently and drew onto paper. The notes from her personal journal on how she’s been feeling. Signs, omens… ANYTHING that could indicate what she was looking for.

One roll of parchment flew off behind her. Two… three. It wasn’t long before a newly disorganized mess of paper, crystals, dust and ink were scattered all over her bedroom floor. None of these were it!

With a frustrated hiss, she glanced off behind her, to her bedside cabinet. One of it’s dark, heavy, alderwood drawers slightly ajar…

“Come on, I didn’t put them there did I?” But yes, she remembered now! She left her sketchbook there last night after coming home because she took a moment to remake the bed. Though she never actually slept in it, her day to day habits often did rustle the sheets just a tiny bit. Especially during her… Experiments with Vidri. With a slight chuckle, she hoisted the drawer open and yanked out her sketchbook! The shear momentum from the force she exerted to do so almost forcing it to nail her in the face! But she caught it just in time. Just before it would have broken her nose.

She was beaming now, every neuron in her body firing at once, forcing her to shiver with anticipation.

Slap! Whap! The hard leather-bound cover of her sketchbook filled the room with such sounds. The rapid flitting of turning pages blew wind into her face, and filled her nose with the distinctive earthy smell of old leather and papyrus. Her fingers stopped just towards the middle of the chronicle. There she saw them. 

The skull like silhouette she saw in the fog as it passed the upper-left side of her doorframe this past hallow’s end. 

The brown and shriveled leaf that passed the exact same spot a few weeks later as it fell from the canopy of trees above. The sunlight hit it in such a manor that she could make out every single detail on it.

The way the way the clouds rolled and broke apart the moonlit rainbow that ringed White Lady during the first snowy night of the winter season. There was a short note on the side of this page: It looked like the cosmology map… until they bleed into each other.

She glanced over the next page of her sketchbook briefly, her mind drawing a blank as to why she was going this far. She was still looking for something, why wasn’t i- wait!

Abruptly she darted out of her beedroom and into her lab just a floor lower. Her enchanting table still littered with glowing dusts and smoke from incense. In it’s center was a cracked leycrystal. It’s fracture uncharacteristically uniform to what these breaks normally looked like. Dim lavender energy seeped out from the seam, Emmy’s keen eyes noticing that the light within it had dulled significantly sense she’d last seen it. The more she looked at it, the more she realized the resemblance it bore to a torn piece of cloth. 

When it cracked this morning, she was imbuing a shimmering silvery cloak with latent arcane power. She almost payed no mind to it. Duds were common in the world of enchanting reagents. That is why she always ordered extras… but for a brief moment, this particular crack stood out to her. She just figured she was running late to work today, and decided she’d look into it later. But now, she understood why.

The spirit of her twin brother Andrew didn’t make his presence known to her this past Hallows End. And while she was saddened by the event, she was more confused as to why. To her knowledge, spirits often left behind a sign for the people they were watching over when they decided to move on to the next stage of their afterlife. It was often in the form of an item that was related, and very special to them. One you could never find before, but somehow, by shear luck or a miracle, could now. Or it was in the form of a dream, a memory long suppressed of them leaving you. But not a bad memory. More… bittersweet. Or perhaps, it was something as simple as a warm embrace you felt suddenly that brought you comfort, then faded away. 

No matter how they did it, you always got a loving sense that they believed you were ready to be on your own. And they would leave you with something to remember them by.

When Emmy reflected upon it though, she’d never felt anything like that in recent months. No, instead this sense of dread had always pressed upon the back of her mind, in it’s farthest, most suppressed reaches. It was almost like… he was distant. In danger, but never able to be contacted.

For a long while though, she dismissed it as the healthy dose of paranoia she always carried around with herself to keep herself cautious. She believed she was just overthinking things, and imagining the worse case scenario when none existed. As she looked back through the journal entry’s she’d written these last few months, this theme became painfully obvious to her. This whole time, her gut was telling her something was wrong. And fuck! She was right! Of all the times she had to of been… it was now? She wished it wasn’t so. But alas! The evidence was starring her right in the face this whole time!

Andrew’s ghost didn’t move on. It was in trouble! He was trying to tell her this whole time, but her logical mind prevented her from seeing it! Why did she never listen to old superstitions as a whelpling? Why!?

Why did it have to take the words of a mysterious Kaldorei she’d never met before to make her realize this!? She remembered the conversation so vividly now…

“Do you know what her end goal is?”

“Only some… what is the word? Abstract? …Balance is her goal. The balance between life and death. Between the elements.”

“… Has she noticed anything odd with the veil of late?”

“We have. And we seek an answer to what must be done about it.”

These words echoed in her mind dozens… if not hundreds of times.

“The balance is shifted. Death holds more domain than it should. The war is likely the culprit, but… something tickles at the edge of my senses that we can’t quite place.”

Emmy’s form went still, her muscles limp. But the shuddering did not cease. Slowly, she turned her head towards the scattered drawings and broken enchanting reagents, and began to arrange them in the form of a cosmology map. The moon picture with the note in the center. The skull to the upper left, the leaf to the bottom right. And the cracked crystal? Placed directly in the center, on top of the moon. What she saw shocked her.

The lines she drew to indicate the direction of the wind, the way she drew the fog… and the clouds around the moon, it all lined up. What she saw now, was the cloudy, silhouetted form of a small elven woman, and a large… humanoid titanic creature. The woman below the cracked crystal, the titan above. The crystal, a depiction of the veil. It was going to be torn apart. The dull, now purple, light of the leycrystal briefly illuminated the shape of the elven woman, and she realized then who it was. Sylvanas Windrunner.

Her mouth agape, she turned her head towards her journal to peer at her notes once more. She had to be missing something right!? She hasto be drawing conclusions from nothing! Yes! her eyes flitted to the words within the pages. But the first words she saw: “Congratulations Emmy, you figured it out.” It was an old entry, but it was about a study her brother did. The quote she pulled directly from her bother when she wrote it…

✨the variant✨ (loki or maybe enchantress, who tf knows)

*click on a picture for better quality*

Day 5 prompt was Moon Witch.

The Enchantress from Suicide squad was what came to mind.

Funny thing, I’m not even a fan of the movie, but I liked her design.