Library of Rain

[Warning: You are in an antiskill barrier. You cannot use any active skills until the barrier is disabled or you leave the area of the barrier.]

With that simple message, all Rain's plans were crushed. No active skills meant no ‘door to the Library’ or ‘Path of Wealth.’ She needed to think fast before armed men with a key to the door came to capture her or Ariana broke her promise and lifted her blindfold. 

Looking around the room, Rain found an oil lamp and a spark flicker. Using the spark flicker, she lit the lamp. There was noise outside the door as heavy footsteps approached, and a commanding voice told the servants to back away from the door.

Rain wasn’t sure if her plan would work, but for the girl's sake, she would have to make it. Her goal was the room she had seen at the end of the hall with the fancy decor and large windows overlooking the Low Ring. 

When she heard a key in the lock, she cocked her arm back, ready to throw her lamp. The moment a gap large enough to fit the lamp appeared, she threw it, shattering it on the wall outside. The armored man who had been opening the door yelped as burning oil splashed him.

The wall the lamp broke on was made of stone and didn’t light up when the burning oil hit it, but the pine floor and fancy rug in the hallway, along with the drapes and paintings, those all caught fire quite nicely.

Rain used the distraction to bolt past the three armed men towards her escape. However, one of the armored men had the presence of mind to grab her by the arm as she tried to pass him.

“Got him.” the man said, coughing from the smoke. “Rog, Nath, put that out before the whole place burns down.”

The man's grip on her arm hurt; any harder might break something. Rain thrashed, trying to break away. She needed to get out of here before something happened to Ariana. Rain didn’t care what happened to herself; she deserved every bad thing that happened to her for what she had done, but Ariana wasn’t a monster. Rain didn’t think the man would be willing to touch her if he knew what she had done. She would have been able to escape then.

All she had on her were some coins; her skills were blocked, and the man was far stronger than her and wearing armor. There was no way she was escaping through force. 

Why was it that one of the few times someone will touch me is also one of the few times I wish they wouldn’t?

Rain felt an idea begin to take form. She needed the man to let her go; her active skills were blocked, but her passive skills were not. For as long as she could remember, people had avoided her. Ever since she learned of her ‘Aura of the Unnatural’ skill, she knew that it must be warning people to stay away from her. But if so, then it wasn’t warning them nearly enough. If it had done its job right, Lon would never have befriended her, and she wouldn’t have been able to hurt him.

Taking all the bad things she had done, all the self-hate she fostered, Rain pushed it into her aura, trying to force the people around her to understand that she was vile and unnatural. Her aura responded. 

The shadows cast by the raging flames seemed to stop flickering and dancing and instead began to curl independently of the flame that cast them. Behind Rain, her shadow shifted and grew. Five more arms sprouted from it. Each hand had nine fingers. The first arm had one joint at the elbow, the second had two joints at unequal distances; the pattern continued until the seventh arm with its seven skewed joints. Where the shadow of her head would be was a mass of darkness with two glowing eyes and a mouth of jagged teeth.

Whispers started to seep up from the floor; the words and voices were just barely incomprehensible. But the meaning still made its way through. They spoke of the abandoned and lost, of knowledge forsaken and things that could have been. But most of all, they spoke of sorrow.

Rain could use this. Reaching up, she caressed the man's face under the open-faced bronze helmet he wore. Fortunately, he was bent over slightly so he could grab her arm. Otherwise, she never would have been able to reach his face. As she touched him, the man flinched back, eyes wide at the things happening around him. The other two men looked equally frightened.

Seeing that it wasn’t enough, Rain spoke; her voice sounded strange and unnatural, not something that should exist in this world.

“Will you come with me to the Garden of Arkit?” 

The curress, the voice, and the invitation to Arkit convinced the man that she was some kind of servant of a Prince of Darkness. Which, in a way, she might be. The man let go of her and stumbled away.

The moment he let go, Rain turned away from the men and slowly walked to her target room. She had to work hard not to run and ruin the image of a powerful denizen of Arkit. Once she reached the room, she walked up to the large window. Out the window, she could see a straight drop down the three stories of the manor and then another seven or so stories down a sheer cliff to the Low Ring. Turning around, she saw the men frozen in place, watching her as the hall behind them burned. 

Rain spread her arms in a dramatic pose and threw herself backward through the window and into a freefall. Rain pivoted her body around as she fell and threw a coin at the ground. As she plummeted past the manor, she could feel the restrictive barrier disappear, and her skills react to her. She could feel the coin she had just thrown and warped to it when it hit the ground.

Rain appeared belly down on the ground right above the coin she had thrown. Somehow, she hadn’t killed herself. Looking around, she saw a regular Low Ring street covered in ash with its colorless buildings. Her aura had returned to normal; no strange sounds or shadows were present.

Getting to her feet, Rain ran as fast as she could to get somewhere out of sight of the Manor above, fire lighting up its windows like angry eyes. 

The moment she felt safe to do so, Rain opened a door to the library, worried about what she would find. To her great relief, she saw Ariana sitting where she had left her, blindfold still on.

“Is that you?” 

Ariana sounded a little worried. It was probably a bit frightening to sit in a strange place like this. Rain hadn’t realized that the whispering from the books was audible from here before.

“Yes, you’re almost home.”

With that, Rain led Ariana outside. She had done it. She had saved one person. With this one act, Rain could see. She was a monster, but she could become something better.