Episode 3 Part 3 Sneak Peak #2

The flavour text of this passage uses the version for high romance or high friendship with Aeran. 

Beyond the wall, the air is unnaturally still.

Gone is the lakeside breeze and the pleasant summer day. The sky turns to an acrid haze, casting a orange-yellow tint over everything. You inhale sharply, the scent of smoke and ash on your tongue, and hold your breath as you enter a garden. It is small, built to fill the space between two sprawling buildings. Where it once would have been a quiet place to read and relax, it is now all but ravaged. Flowerbeds sparkle with shards of glass from blasted-out windows. Stone benches are cracked in half, the broken pieces scattered across the path. A bronze statue decapitated by falling debris stands tall in a ring of shattered stone, its head nowhere in sight. A fountain pumps weakly in the central square, water trickling over the cracked rim and seeping into the ground. An oily substance oozes over everything, thick and viscous as it ripples off the surfaces.

Sweat rolls down your spine. You’ve witnessed something like this before, albeit in a very different time and a very different place. But it doesn’t take much to vividly recall the wanton destruction of the Vestran Civil War and the ravaged cities it left behind.

Aeran slows to a stop beside you. “It’s a lot to take in, isn’t it,” he says quietly.

You nod, your mouth too parched for a response. He watches you for a moment, concern in his eyes, and reaches for his flask, proffering it to you. You take it and gulp down mouthfuls of cool, fresh water as you search for a place to sit down. You leans against the lip of the broken fountain and close your eyes, drinking slowly and deeply.

It is stifling here—the kind of sticky, humid heat that sears the way a fever would. You pause your furious drinking and rest Aeran’s flask against your lips, casting an eye at the burnt sky. You can spot the outline of the wards through the haze, a thin bubble encasing the complex and everything inside. They flicker in the orange-yellow light, sending sporadic cracks like lightning flashing across the dome.

You hadn’t expected this. For whatever reasons, you assumed the explosion’s aftermath would have dispersed by now, save for the shroud and whatever forces are keeping those shattered pieces afloat. There was no sign from outside the tower that the very air itself would still be alive with the aftershocks of destruction. Whatever forces are at play here are far beyond you.

Just another reminder that whatever the hell happened here is as much a mystery to the Guild as it is to everyone else.