Chapter 6 - part 3: "Haze"

After those last words from Keira, we got out of the river and never discussed the same subject again. The remaining period of the war I spent between struggles, efforts, strategic discussions and above all tormenting myself with those questions that my war adviser had asked. At night I imagined having Alex by my side and discovering her absence was what hurt me the most: I didn't want to accept him, but maybe Keira was right and the feelings I felt for the witch had become stronger than expected.

If she had abandoned me, maybe I would not be able to bear it.

***

"What does it mean that there aren't traces of her?! Am I surrounded by incompetents?! I can't believe you've lost Alex for the second time!" I yelled at the guards.

They should have defended the borders and recorded every guests' entry or exit, but apparently it was too difficult to keep track of everyone's movements.

I was furious when I reached Alex's room. I opened the doors and found complete chaos: unmade bed, papers on the floor, furniture moved or slammed on the floor; a storm seemed to have come into her room to demolish everything and left only ruin behind.

Breathing heavily, I looked around, and then stared at the sheets thrown on the floor and took a couple in a gesture of annoyance; they were totally useless, they wouldn't help me find the witch, nobody would!

Then it was like a flash, an instinct that told me what to do, a mysterious revelation. While the building workers took care of tidying the room, hoping to find a clue or something that would lead to Alex, I found a book with a red cover, pushed to the legs of the bed. That vivid red, reminded me of the color of blood and of the same wine I drank in solitude or only in her company.

Leafing through a few pages I realized that it was a diary and reading the words written in black ink, it wasn't difficult to understand that it belonged to Alex. I stopped on one page in particular, the last one, even though it was evident that she had torn the next one: there was only one word left from the tear, it was "Finally".

That word chilled my blood, my body shook with anger and the purest worry. I read, holding my breath, looking for a control that immediately proved unstable: I lost it within seconds.

"Now is the time to act. As long as Zeyana is absent, I will have the opportunity to carry out the ritual smoothly... perhaps I am too optimistic to believe it will allow me to live. The sacrifice of a witch, as my grandmother said, is definitive: I don't know what it means, actually even the ritual will be an experiment for me, something unknown, but I have to do it for their good, for the good of all. I'm afraid, I don't deny it, but my fear only concerns my family, I don't care about my life.

If there's a divinity in the sky watching us from above, I hope you can hear my prayers and accept my sacrifice. Everything will return to her place, I will no longer have to suffer for my sins, for the agony of continuing to live while my mother, my brothers, my grandmother ... are all dead. My uncles probably fled in time ... who knows if they will have overcome the pain or if like me, they still think about it every day, every night, and never find peace. No, probably only I feel like that, because I don't deserve to live, not after letting Them all kill and survive."

I continued reading, wiping away a lonely tear that was running down my cheek:

"Now all that remains is to find the right place. Fiamma has taken care of this, I just have to think about the rest. Will my blood open a door? How much will I have to pour? How long will I have to cross that opening? Finally "

I closed the book, holding it tightly in my hands and ordered the guards in the room to follow me. Perhaps it was already too late but I would not have let my fear stop me: I took my horse and started running through the streets of Riviera, not worrying what the people would think of my impulsive and unreasonable behavior.

I yelled at some men who were carrying a large board to stop and managed to avoid them at the last minute, then continued my journey to reach the outskirts and the "House of Mead" inn. When I reached the farthest area from the building, I became aware of the presence of an unnatural haze and an inexplicable darkness.

In the district there should have been lanterns always on, but at that moment they were all off.

I got off the horse, hearing the rest of the guards coming, and walked quickly into the alley where I had found Fiamma and Alex months before. Fortunately the inn had remained in the same place: I entered quickly and as I suspected, no one showed up to greet me. The even more frustrating thing was that I didn't understand why there was no one on the streets of the suburbs: the houses were shrouded in shadow and I could hear nothing but the grunts of the animals, the footsteps of the soldiers and my heavy breathing.

"Fiamma! Where are you? Show yourself!"It had to be that woman… she had been playing with me from the start!

"Fiamma!" I checked the dusty tavern one last time, then ran out of her, looking for a sign of her passing or something that would lead me to her. I didn't know what to do, I had to find Alex before she committed some madness, before she killed herself for the ritual.

In the end I had gotten a result from the careful research I had done.

I discovered that the Eye of Time was that ancient artifact that had belonged to the Voklanden for generations. No one had ever been able to use it, because no one knew how to use magic. Alex apparently had traced its position, hiding the theft from me and figured out what could activate its powers.

If what she said in her diary about the Eye was true, it explained why she hurt herself during her research, but I couldn't know whether the sacrifice was blood or the whole body.

In one of the ancient books that I had found thanks to Malik's help, there was a passage that spoke of arcane tools able to dominate nature and life, changing the order of things, distorting the sense of reality itself. The Eye of Time was supposed to be one of the arcane tools.

Alex would surely have used it to attempt to bring her family back and even though I didn't know the details, I felt that a disaster, worse, hell was about to come between us. I was experiencing a terror that I did not know, visceral, petrifying and this fear was leading me to the root of those evils that I had begun to notice for months... finally it all made sense.

The change I had noticed in Alex from that vision of the burning tree, the slow and sudden death of the oak itself, the increasing winds in the northern areas, the harsh cold that had gripped the southern realms and the fires who had torn thousands of trees from my empire, sporadic and unstoppable.

The Nature that had always supported Alex, as she had claimed, was now rebelling against her.

I stopped in the middle of a road ignoring the cries of my soldiers who were looking for me after having lost sight of me; panting, I picked up the diary I had tucked in my heavy jacket and searched the pages for any reference that would lead me to Fiamma. A gust of wind, however, tore the diary from my hand and I tried to take it back, screaming in frustration: the book fell into another silent alley, just like all the previous ones, but this one led to the walls of Riviera, not leaving escape to anyone who took this direction.

I picked up the diary holding it tight and stared at the wall, feeling a freezing wind scratch my skin and it seemed to come from the end of the alley. Confused, I walked up to the large stone surface and only then I saw a crack stand out in front of my eyes. The wind came from there, ran through the crack and collided with my face.

I tightened my jacket around my body, trying to shield myself from the gusts of air, and gritted my teeth to keep them from chattering because of the sudden cold, then I reached a hand to the surface, passing it over the crack. Immediately afterwards my vision blurred.

I closed my eyes by rubbing them and when I opened them again I was petrified.

"What's going on?!"