The Unfurling

Caraliya looked ahead as the young servant girl moved with the presence of one entranced. Closing her eyes, Caraliya felt the touch of dark power seeping from behind the closed door aheada. She could feel it touch all of her senses now. Quick flashes of fire shot along her veins from the warning of danger, creating sparks at her fingertips, awakening the magic within. The earth beneath her feet began to tremble, the stones on the floor rattling. She couldn’t tell if it was her or the magic emanating from the room ahead that was responsible. But her magic bubbled, her veins itching from her constraint on her power.

“What is this place?” She asked the girl. The servant continued walking forward, as though she hadn’t heard, so Caraliya asked again. “What is this place? And what significance do these images bear?”

The girl turned back to look at Caraliya, her eyes now stone grey and lifeless. Caraliya paused and held her distance, wondering how or what was possessing the servant girl. She was not used to seeing this kind of dark magic. This kind of sorcery. A shiver ran down her body, filling her with an aching coldness. Even before the girl stopped in front of the huge oak door and grasped the two mighty shiny door handles, Caraliya knew this was the room where the greatest concentration of magic resided throughout the temple. As the doors cracked open, a murky red light surged forth, rushing at Caraliya with a force that almost threw her across the passageway. Caraliya’s powers rose in response. Yet all the essentials of water, earth, fire, and air that fused together eddying within her aura field were barely able to withstand the force of dark magic spiralling around her with something otherworldly. Caraliya concentrated her defence into a small, green ethereal light that sparked atop her fingertips. Caraliya clamped her hands together to shut down the portal of energy that threatened to encompass her own powers. She knew to give in to the temptation of the rising dark blood magic would threaten her sanity and stain her sacred vows.

The tentacles of dark magic were persistent though. In this visiting priestess, they found a rare and equal power and swarmed to embrace her. To control a pure servant of the goddess of light would give the Blood Priesthood an untold source to power never before achieved. Caraliya tried what little she could to fight the taste of the blood magic flooding her senses. Like ambrosia, the power was a divine taste, but deep down Caraliya knew this magic was wrong. And yet she was finding it harder to resist the primal pull on her senses as she was drawn to step over the threshold and into the chamber filled with priestesses. Closing her eyes to focus, Caraliya called out to her goddess for assistance but her voice was drowned out by the noise of the dark magic filling her ears. Even her goddess did not have the power to override the darkness to reach her in this dark underground place. In her struggle, Caraliya was oblivious to the servant girl who had already turned to leave, having completed her mission of delivering the priestess to the gathering. If she had, Caraliya would have seen the young girl’s eyes slowly regained colour as she moved away from the room.

As the mighty wooden doors to the prayer chamber swung shut with a terrifying thud behind her, Caraliya was faced with a room full of High Priestesses. The kind of priestesses other Quadrants regarded as servants of the blood moon - crazed by the elixir of dark sacrificial blood magic and death or so Caraliya had been told. Being here now, it seemed the teachings were right and her own High Priestess had warned her to protect herself from the influential flux of the blood priestesses. Caraliya felt fear fill her stomach, stopping the free flow of air through her lungs. She felt also a deep ancient power... in its rarest, unrefined form. Caraliya had not know what was meant when the servant girl had mentioned the “Prayer Room.” But she could now guess. This place was... wrong, and it bothered her as she tried to resist the touch of the red energy orbiting around her to find its origins, but each time she tried, it proved futile. All she knew was that it wanted to possess her totally.

The Blood High Priestesses lined around a table, each wearing their red robes, but the ceremonial blood red shade. Placed in front of them was a long white table, draped in a red and white table cover, and placed on it were silver and gold chalices, placed in alternation. There were unreadable markings engraved on the body of the chalices, which were filled with a red frizzly liquid. Blood. These were the true blood priestesses. The ones who bent their powers to fit good and evil purposes as the situations presented themselves.

“Enter, fellow priestess of the high council,” said the priestess who had rescued Caraliya from the forest, from the wrath of the Iron Wolves Clan. It was evident this woman was the chief high priestess of this realm. Her red robe streaked hemmed in virgin white.

Caraliya knew what red streaked white meant; it meant the sacrifice of a soul as pure as freshly fallen snow, yet to be exposed to the evils of the world. Caraliya fought the desire to walk deeper into the dark room and tame her place at the only empty spot behind the table. She looked at the chalice before her filled with blood and knew the sacrifices had already begun, albeit unlawfully. She felt a pang of sorrow; she couldn’t stomach this ceremony that took place every year. Caraliya nad her fellow priestesses from Ventria were only ever in attendance because it was compulsory that priestesses representing every realm, every Quadrant, be there. To thwart such long held traditions, regardless of how callous or crude they were, was an invitation seen by certain political powers across the kingdom as an attempt to overthrow their positions and thus throw the Quadrants back into unnecessary chaos and war.

Caraliya and the high priestesses of Ventria avoided ever having to use their powers in the name of evil, unlike this place. More keenly, Caraliya’s kingdom avoided violence and bloodshed at all cost. Which was why when the time for the ceremony came, the Ventria priestesses only made a quick appearance before leaving Helios' mammoth capital city in the Heartland, where the ceremony of blood and celebration was held. Deep down, Caraliya knew it was this place. It was giving life to the evil side within her that a lifelong devotion to the light magic usually suppressed with ease. Yet, being present here in this room, she found it difficult to resist the pull, the seductiveness of magic.

“O priestesses of the Great Valor Quadrant, I welcome you all to this great gathering,” the chief high priestess called out.

There was nothing Caraliya wanted more in this moment than to return to Ventria and be with magic that was pure and kind, but she knew, staring at the boiling red liquid inside the chalice before her, that was not going to happen anytime soon. Fear rose up.

‘It’s this place, dear goddess of light, please help me!’

“As is our tradition in the Great Valor quadrant and as we have done every year since the inception of the ceremony of celebration and sacrifice by our predecessors, this gathering is to beseech the kindness and mercy of the gods and goddesses and sip from the well of their wisdom. This gathering is for power and protection should any harm befall us prior to the ceremony, which will strengthen us for another year. This gathering is for oneness. May the gods and goddesses and the spirits of our predecessors be with us.”

The chief priestess began to make an utterance which the other priestesses responded to. Caraliya’s ears burned at the words. The more they chanted, the more the liquid in the chalices bubbled. An eerie tune pierced the air as their voices grew all in one accord. The images on the glass walls were beginning to come alive, or her eyes were playing cheap tricks on her. The liquid frothed more and more, till suddenly the chanting stopped and all fell into a state of tranquil.

“Drink!” the chief priestess commanded.

Caraliya watched the other priestesses reached for their chalices and drink hungrily. Unbidden, Caraliya’s hand rose the cold chalice touching her lips. Caraliya felt the power immediately; the fizz in her nostrils, the liquid on her tongue. It was like nothing she’d ever tasted before. She started shaking vehemently tried to reject the intusion of her body as it began to ricochet her through different realms, through time, through orbits. Power zapped through her, threatening to burst her mind into a million pieces, it was a totally alien power, greater than anything she had ever felt before. Two priestesses were suddenly at her side holding her body, which was now brimming with magic of a different kind.

Caraliya was seeing the light and dark sacrifical images on the glass walls come to life, then become mere artwork again, and she felt her body cave. With a violent shaking, she was surrounded with darkness, seeping into her skin and through her mind, trying to possess her. Everything was a total blankness. A void. A spiralling world of black. There was a beacon of green light stretching across from a far distance, but the more she tried to open her eyes to convey the light of her goddess, and from what direction it came from, the more the light seemed to pierce her eyes. Like the poisoned blade that had shot through the eye of the man, the blood priestess had killed in the forest that saved Caraliya’s life. With a loud howl, Caraliya gave out to the darkness Which grew into a blessed green light that enveloped Caraliya. She sighed with untold relief. Once her eyes adjusted and her senses returned Caraliya looked upon the shimmering beacon that was her goddess who had retrieved her from the blood ceremony at the last possible moment.

’My sacred child. Blessed that you called out to me in the nick of time. The alternative would have been a disaster.’

Caraliya smiled her gratitude before collapsing into a deep sleep.