The Wordless Mage
Chapter 35: Past Echoes in The Void

Chapter 35: Past Echoes in The Void

Liora blinked, her body still weightless, but the space around her had changed--less void, more memory, as if the darkness itself was watching to see where she’d land.

Slowly, the momentum behind her swing stalled, leaving her floating off into the endless void once more.

"What is this," she muttered, reaching her hand down for her grimoire but finding nothing in return, "I don’t have access to arcana, and I can’t move freely. How am I supposed to do anything?"

She felt the air vibrating along her skin, reacting to something in the distance.

Reactively, she looked up to sense for wherever the disturbance originated, panic settling into her mind once again.

There were three more streaks of white, all with the same deafening velocity as before. As they slowly tilted in the air, it became clear what they were.

A trio of massive pages sliced through the void, their smooth white surfaces groaning against each other like colliding silk.

The sound of ruffling had filled the air at their beckon, ruffling against each other as if to race for first contact to Liora.

Understanding that motion was futile, she did the one thing that worsened her panic--flailing her arms out of desperation.

"Wait," she yelled, trying to make her way through the black.

To no avail.

The papers moved sluggishly, their own mass tugging on any potential movements.

Frwrssh, frsrrsh!

They were softer than they appeared, wrapping around Liora like a thin blanket.

Her arms pushed against them, bulging but not quite bursting out.

As if the panic from the futility of her movements wasn’t already enough, her chest began to expand far more than it was built for, the papers suffocating her to unsettle her heart past its breaking point.

She cried out--real tears welling in her eyes and immediately sucking into the paper. It wasn’t enough, at least, to save her from suffocation.

"Wait," she looked down, taking one more look at her form, "I shouldn’t need air."

She closed her mouth and plugged her nose for just a second, inspecting herself for any pains in her throat or lungs, but there were none. In fact, she could hardly feel at all.

Closing her eyes, she imagined her form adhering to her will, incorporeal to all things physical.

With the essence of whatever constituted her current form being left behind in small slimy deposits, she phased through the papers surrounding her, her body even more transparent than before.

She looked down once more, this time at her legs, closing her eyes to imagine changes to her physical state yet again.

The solidity of her legs were lost, slowly drooping into tendrils of sludge as they dripped into each other.

Like the combining of two ice cream cones, they became one, wispy tail that waved in the air, really selling her ghost appearance.

"Hm, lets see if that helps," she said, tilting her torso down just a little so that she could point herself in the direction she was looking.

Her body zoomed off into the void after her single tail whirred in the air to propel her, granting her movement through wherever she was--although she didn’t feel quite as ecstatic as she thought she should’ve.

Instead, only the sense of disorientation filled her mind as her flight didn’t stop, the velocity only increasing the further she sprinted.

It was due to the gravity-less, even physics-less nature of the void, inertia carrying you off into infinity without so much as a single fleck of air to push back against you.

"W-wait!"

She screamed as she lost control of her flight, the velocity turning her over into a violent spin that knew nothing of deacceleration.

It wasn’t dizziness that afflicted her mind, although she did feel unease at the prospect of being flung into the void endlessly--no, it was the idea that she hadn’t a clue where to go.

Readying the tail on the bottom half, she sent a counter-force to carefully counteract both the spin and the velocity, eventually slowing into a grinding halt.

Calm finally washing over her, she looked around for any semblance of Rowan or whatever it was that filled his mind, but there was nothing. Just black.

"I can’t take too long," she said, entering a full spirit of flight to where she’d originally encountered the papers. She could generally get a knack from where they’d flung based off of the direction of their drift when she passed through them, although their path would’ve taken them quite a bit away.

After a couple minutes of single-mindedly floating through the void and scouting for any white, she ran into them, crumpled from their wrapping around her.

She didn’t fully understand what it was that she hoped to find in encountering them, but she’d at least hoped that what they held might help lead her to Rowan.

Gliding over them, she grabbed a random one, having to hold it by its side from the sheer size.

Tugging on its end and flying up to reveal its lower half, she let go to drift down just in front of it.

"What is this," she muttered, her limbs taut in both confusion and frustration.

The characters were jumbled beyond belief, displaying images and symbols not dissimilar to the same writings in her grimoire.

It was nothing like the poems that Rowan had written when she entered his rooms both times, although there was an interesting sense of understanding hidden beneath her confusion.

Yes, she couldn’t tell the characters for what they were, but she could feel for their meanings, grabbing onto them the same way she would the insights in her grimoire.

It was only thanks to the combination of her time in the new world and her incredible intuition that the resultant flash began to fly out from the page, enveloping part of the void in white and forcing her to cover her eyes with both arms.

After a few moments, it died down, leaving just her and the void again, although, this time, the writings on the paper were gone.

No, they’d been replaced by something else: Her grimoire.

Its white glow from teleportation dimming, it floated to her side, happily holstering itself to her despite her voluntary incorporeality.

"Hey, buddy," she said, smiling at its warm presence, "with you by my side, I feel a lot more at ease."