Time slipped by. Aralim entered the Eye of Maga every other day, carrying his wounded subordinate into the famed water. After the fifth unsuccessful attempt, he grew anxious to move on. He was quite certain that the mages in Rema would be capable of healing the poor guardswoman, so there was little point in wasting week after week in King Eilar’s cursed lake. At last, Aralim told his guards to begin their preparations for departure. Rel, notified by the servants, hurriedly pleaded with Aralim. He told Aralim that often the Lake took this long to work, and it was too soon to know if the gift from their Goddess was truly gone.
Aralim decided to try three more times before departing the city. He told Grendar to make the preparations. He told Rel that this would be the case. And then, the next day he dunked Lerela, yet again, into mundane lake water.
The second—and his second last—attempt was much like the others. They sailed into the waters on their comfortable raft. Nilless continued to accompany them. Her faith in… seemingly all things was unshakeable. As they navigated the wide lake, Nill asked Aralim why they could not stay longer. “There must be a way to convince Maga to return her gift,” Nill said. “We need perseverance.”
“That may be,” Aralim replied. “But we can get Lerela what she needs elsewhere if this does not work.”
They listened to the Senior Priestess invoke her Goddess, and then the ambassador waded down the wooden steps. He accepted the motionless guardswoman as a familiar burden. The raft was out between islands of golden grass in a particularly deep trough of the lake. Aralim paddled his feet away from the raft for a moment, Esrie’s repeated prayer ringing dully in his eardrums. He felt cool water shifting past his legs and felt an urge to sink a little deeper into it. And then everything changed.
For just a moment, Aralim’s face went under the water. The world was stolen away by a gleam of white light. He was looking at the surface of a desert plane. He saw rocks scattered across the sand, and then he saw skulls, as many as the rocks or more. The bright gleam overtook his view and he was staring into an artist’s rendering of a green eye. Disoriented, Aralim pulled away from the eye, but he wasn’t in the lake. He wasn’t even in his body. Another flash—and Aralim saw a statue of a man, made all of iron, standing at the prow of a ship.
Then Aralim was looking at himself. He was in a dark space, an eerie cone of muted light. He was watching himself writing with an old white quill. He stepped closer to the apparition, attempting to see what he was writing. When he saw it, Aralim grew colder still. The other version of himself was writing on a stone tablet—a grave marker. Instantly, Aralim knew that the writing on the gravestone were instructions. They were instructions to Miresh. But as he watched himself writing them, the words grew fuzzy. Aralim still knew what they meant, but he couldn’t pick out the details. The strange scene was fading in clarity. Miresh needed to go to the city of flames to speak with the lesser master. The strange likeness of himself urged Miresh to stop the young old one.
But now the rest had lost all its clarity. Aralim was rising out of the scene, gasping and trying to find himself. He inhaled deeply and breathed air again—at last.
Aralim floundered on the surface of the Eye of Maga once more, gasping and splashing water about as he yanked Lerela’s unclothed body out of the water. Disoriented, he blinked water out of his eyes and turned toward the raft. Nilless was pointing.
Lerela pushed herself free of Aralim. Her trembling was visible even in the midst of the splashing waves. She nearly went under, but kicked her feet with a pained expression on her face and kept above water. She paddled toward the raft, with a confused Aralim close behind.
Their second last foray into the healing waters had gone much differently.
The healed woman pulled herself up onto the first step, then managed a second step. When the priestesses offered their support to pull her higher, she covered herself with her hands. They wrapped their silken sheet around her once more. With one hand holding it, Lerela reached up to cradle her head.
Aralim pulled himself out of the water quickly, splashing lake water all over the end of the raft. “Lerela,” he gasped. “You’re back.”
“What happened to my hair…?” she asked dazed. She pulled at dripping clumps of her hair from the portion of her head that was not shaved.
“There’s only a little scar!” Nill exclaimed. Before, fractured fragments of skull had caused unevenness to her temple, in addition to thick scars and scabs.
Lerela leaned forward and heaved deeply for her breath. She looked like she would be sick. The priestesses gathered around her, while Aralim stared at his hand. The scarring had greatly reduced. There was still a faint red marbling, but no aggressive markings of damage. He lowered his hand, and no one noticed.
“My head rings,” Lerela said. “I feel so weak and everything shimmers when I look around, like it might be in two or three different places. And… I had the strangest dreams….”
“The healers might be able to assess your head,” Esrie said. “But I think we ought to thank the Goddess.” She turned toward the lake to call out a prayer of thanks. Lerela slowly laid down on the stretcher once more, while Nill patted her shoulder reassuringly.
Aralim looked at the Aura, still stuck in a daze from what he had seen in the lake. “I—” Aralim stopped. In the midst of all these priestesses and Nill, he could only say that he also had the strangest dreams. So, he kept his tongue quiet and turned to look into the lake once more. Whatever power had overtaken him was content to hide beneath the surface this time. He didn’t have any clue what it all meant, but knew only one thing: he had made the healing waters work for the first time in a year.
The iron figure on the boat could have been anyone: the Emperor, Grand Mage Rattar, Aralim himself… they were all men of the “iron empire.” The green eye—had that been the Eye of Maga itself? It was too much to piece together. It reminded Aralim of Miresh’s visions, full of chaotic imagery and lack of clarity. But Rattar had insisted Aralim was not capable of any such magic. Had he broken the limits of mortals today? Or had a great spirit reached out to him directly? What could such convoluted visions accomplish for something so powerful?
By this point, Lerela had fallen asleep and Nill was praying with the Priestesses. They soon docked; the news of their success was delivered to the applause of a few servants and guards.
As Aralim walked down the dock, he paused and turned around. The Aura, tailing him like always, stopped and looked at him. Behind those blank eyes was one of the Argots. And in reach of the Argots was Tag’na himself, listening to what the Aura saw or heard—listening to Aralim. Aralim stepped closer to the orange-robed man. “I saw a vision in the water,” he said. “Listen closely….”